Project Öcalan

This (available on my Google Drive from that link) is my Masters dissertation on Kurdistan; I decided to give it a re-read given recent events in Iran. Some day, when there's more to say & I regain access to academic libraries & journals, I'd like to be able to update & expand it, but for now I still think it holds up as a portrait of a highly-complex geopolitical issue.

Project Öcalan

This isn't really a book, it was my Masters dissertation. But it's as long as some books! And more scholarly, if I may say so myself, than many others! And I've reread it, so it gets a post! Not a long one though as I've already done one (see previous link).

If you'd be interested in reading an examination of whether & how post-nationalist ideologies are reshaping the Kurdish question in the contemporary Middle-East, then I've left a .pdf of it open to all on my Google Docs folder. So click here. By the way, the reason it's called Project Öcalan on here is that the founder of the PKK and key thinker behind the recent ideological shifts I talk about is that very same Abdullah.

the Improbable Interplanetary Revolutions of Naomi Moss

This book is one I have written myself - though it has not yet found publication. As such, I hope you don't mind there not being a link to where you can get a copy of it yet - nor will I talk much about what I think about it, as it's kind of the point of a piece of art to speak of itself for itself. Watch this space.

THIS ISN'T MECHANICAL & DOESN'T REALLY KILL ANYTHING PROPERLY

This book is not one I am going to say very much about at all, apart from that I wrote it. A full pdf of the first edition (of which one hundred printed paperback copies have been procured from that wondrous old thing The Internets) is available through that link, and in years to come I will probably look into developing and unleashing expanded versions of the book aforementioned. If you think the title is silly by the way, you're damn right.

Project Öcalan & beyond

Okay, so this post isn't about one specific book.
   (This is my blog, I'm allowed to transcend its self-imposed boundaries.)

   Basically, as devoted readers will know (who are you?), this summer I've been completing my last and biggest piece of uni work ever, my dissertation [for a Masters of Arts in Global Political Economy], and it's involved reading tons of stuff about the Kurdish Question, and truth be told I've built up something of a backlog - there are currently nineteen draft posts with only the title and date I finished each sat in the backstage-area of Thoughts on Books, sixteen of which were dissertation reading and three which because well I had to read something else recreationally right? Anyway, I'm not confident at this stage that I would be able to do full justice to each book were I to attempt giving them a full-on standard-issue reflective post, but since the bulk of these were dissertation reading, I would like to hazard the suggestion that my dissertation itself comprises a synthesis of my thoughts on not only these sixteen books but the three I've already done posts about as well, not to mention the couple of dozen other books that I only read a chapter or six from and so didn't warrant a post at all, further not to mention the forty or so academic journal articles I also read - in short, if I were to do justice to my thoughts on books about the Kurdish Question etcetera, it would probably be best just to read the actual finished dissertation that I wrote having read them for.

   So here's the deal: I have uploaded it as a pdf to my Google Drive and there is a universal access link below, and the sad backlog of sixteen posts will be dealt with in a relatively minimalistic manner (there is quite a lot that I would like to say about some of Abdullah Öcalan's writings, but since his most theoretically-comprehensive book is also the one that I didn't read [The Roots of Civilisation] as it wasn't as directly useful to the dissertation but I am still definitely going to read it at some point, I'll air these thoughts then). The three non-dissertation books I read over the backlog-accrual period will however receive full and proper attention, post-wise.

   Sound alright?

   Good.

Project Öcalan [or, Is post-nationalist ideology reshaping the Kurdish Question?]

You may, astutely, be wondering what I mean by the addition of "& beyond" in this post's title - well, that brings me onto what I am doing now that, dissertation submitted as of yesterday, I am free from postgraduate academic bondage.
   In previous posts I've occasionally mentioned that I'm developing plans for a big creative writing project - this, I may as well (since I've already embarked upon a post that's not of the typical ilk) now confirm, is a sprawling eight-book series called Selected Earthlings - it's partly dark-but-sincere post-ironic comedy, partly haphazard thought-provoking millennial drama, and partly science fiction; and follows the lives of Naomi Harmony Moss, Amina Nadir, and John Ezekiel "Zeke" Smith across a span of about sixteen years, apart from the books themselves won't be in chronological order. If this tickles your pickle, let me know, as I will probably need feedback from the kind of people who would read that kind of thing.
   Anyway.
   That's what I'll be doing now that I've finished being a Masters student of Global Political Economy.