We Go to the Gallery

This book, from the Dung Beetle reading scheme,* perfectly encapsulates the roaring depths of alienation, ennui, spiralling existential dread and general sociocultural anxiety with which one's consciousness, upon introduction to their subjective-conceptual limits of artistic and philosophical meaning, becomes afloat with a taste of the transcendent, develops metaphysical and aesthetic and spiritual curiousity, only to be caught up in the westerly winds of modernist and postmodernist and all-the-other-too-manyisms-in-between airs of creative thinking blown across history and so left stranded in the vast stormclouds of the absurd which roll across our contemporary global attention span, shrinking as it is.

In it, Susan and John go to an art gallery with their Mummy, who explains the art to them.

* In the way that those Ladybird spoofs took off, this is the next level of spoof: the Dung Beetle learning books are "designed to make scary subjects approachable for the under 5s. Printed in bold colours and written in clear, simple English, each book will drag families into the dark recesses of the collective unconscious, for their broader cultural benefit," as their incover-page-blurbage attests, and even if this book is the only one they have thus far published it certainly more-or-less achieves this stoic promise. I can only apologise for the lack of accessibility employed in the verbiage of this post, it being a purely accidental side-product of my efforts to write quickly and concisely (which I then undo whatever relative efficiency that that may have allowed by farting off down pointless corners of discourse like this, but nevertheless -) but basically I think this book is as clever and funny as it is bleak and ridiculous, and could make a great present for the right person. Bearing in mind it is really not a children's book in the classical content sense.

Liberating Life: Women's Revolution

This book is the first that I've reread since already having read it originally since January 2014 and thus done a blogpost about, and therefore now has two blogposts about it - for some degree of non-replication-efforts the link there just leads to my previous post about it. I recommended it as the reading for the New Roots Radical Library's reading group, which if you're a Sheffield-based lefty looking to self-educate further among friendly conversational local peers I cannot recommend highly enough, but perhaps underestimated how much readers of this would have to sort of understand Kurdish sociocultural and geopolitical context in order to the points to fully stick. As such, I found myself somewhat awkwardly in a sort of seminar-facilitator role to the discussion (and as the reading group is meant to be a non-hierarchical open knowledge-sharing space rather than didactic learning, this both was and wasn't problematic).

Readers may have heard of Anna Campbell, who was killed by Turkish forces earlier this year fighting in solidarity alongside the YPJ in Afrin; she used to study at Sheffield and volunteered at New Roots, so this discussion in its up-to-date context was quite close to home for those who knew her, but also a deeper surge for the prompting of anyone who in these turbulent times we live in sides with freedom and justice, feminism, socialism and ecological consciousness - if she believed in these ideals enough to die for them, the least we can do from our deskchairs is openly support them. Please donate!

the Presence of the Kingdom

This book by Jacques Ellul needs very little said about it because it quite completely blew my mind, not by introducing me to new ideas but essentially because it represents a total synthesis of all of what I thought were my most radical systems of ideas I'd encountered and grouped into some kind of holistic critique of modernity but expressed more succintly (not to mention logically) than I would ever have been capable of, and grounded fully and richly in a rigorous exposition of the dynamics of God-headed Spirit-led discipleship rightly understood in opposition to the worldly powers of the twentieth century. No single book* has quite so entirely both affirmed and challenged my personal state of thinking and living. If every church leader read this and digested its truths, there would be an utterly unprecedented surge of repentance from congregations who have conformed too far to comfortably stand against sin; a return to Scripture to listen to Jesus' cry of forgiveness for those lost in the condemned pits of modernity. One of our greatest western prophetic thinkers, to be sure. Partly why I'm writing such a short post about it - it's one of his earliest books and is described as laying out his general systemic viewpoint, and so I will certainly be digging into further detail of his perspectives through others of the many books he wrote.


* As ever with these hyperbolic statements about Christian literature; except the Bible.