On Fairy-Stories

This book (available free online from that link) is a long essay, well - originally lecture, by J.R.R. Tolkien, regarding the fairy story and fantastical fiction in general. It is widely known as a key touchstone for thinkers in and around the genre on how to do it well, and as I am currently working on my own series of fantasy novels (as well as being generally interested in how the father of the modern genre approached it) I thought it would be well worth a read* - and I was not disappointed. Tolkien begins with a broad attempt to define the fairy story, before delving into the historical and cultural origins of the genre; he then considers the stereotypical association of the fairy story as being intended for and only enjoyable by children (a proposition he roundly rejects) and then goes on to develop a definitional theory of what precisely "fantasy" is - this is the meatiest part of the whole essay - as being a genre that should ideally provide recovery, escape, and consolation (it is in this part that he coins the term "eucatastrophe" to describe the inexplicable, unpredictable, yet inevitable happy ending of all true fairy stories***), and finally concluding with a statement about art's essential nature to human flourishing under God in consideration of our relationship to truth and imagination. This is a deeply stimulating essay, and whether you're active in writing fantasy yourself or you're simply an enjoyer of the genre who wants to take a thorough stare at the nuts and bolts of what makes it so vibrant and long-enduring as a form of human expression, you will find a great deal of food for thought here. Well worth a read - especially if you're a fan of Tolkien's fictional works, as this essentially provides the manifesto statement of how he approached all of his writings of the fantastical ilk.

* Although if you're interested in the ideas talked about in this post but don't have the attention span to read a forty-page essay,** assuming you still have the attention span to watch a forty-minute video essay, Jess of the Shire has you covered.

** In which case, what the heck are you doing on this blog?

*** Key example in point - at the culmination of The Lord of the Rings (spoiler alert), the ring is destroyed not by intent but by accident: Frodo caves to its power at the very last step of his journey, and Middle-earth is saved only by Gollum slipping into the lava having bitten off poor Mr. Baggins's finger to reclaim his precious. Textbook eucatastrophe.

Chapter & Verse: 1000 Years of English Literature

This book, which I can't find for sale anywhere on the internet so good luck clarifying the veracity of the text should you wish to track it down in real life... is a visually striking ramble through the history of the literary pinnacles of our great Albion's loremasters and bards... from Keats to Shakespeare, Beowulf to Liz Barrett Browning, Margaery Kempe to Kubla Khan - snippets of the original handwritten manuscripts are included to flag up the sheer beauty and tenacity of what writers had to do before keyboards came along. I know, right? Also, I will mention here out of gratitude that this book was gifted to me some years ago by Yunzhou, or Eve, a good friend of mine from university days - if she's reading this, which I doubt, but I want to thank you for the present anyway, and sorry it took me so long to get around to reading it!

Realist Manifesto

This text by Naum Gabo is as it says on the tin; a potently concise and polemically clear statement of the philosophy of a school of artistic performance/criticism - that of realism. Certainly a thought-provoking read should anyone be interested in that kind of thing; I read the text initially live at the Tate in St Ives.

Letters to a Young Poet

This book, a collection of letters written from Rainer Maria Rilke in response to one Franz Kappus, who was studying* at the same military academy Rilke had, and wanting to become a poet, reached out to his school's most famous-thus alumni: you can guess who. It is not super easy reading - Rilke was a master wordsmith as well as a pretty mentally troubled and emotionally complicated man, and while the overall tone of his letters is of an immense generosity of spirit and optimistic view of man, nature, art etc; the tortuous route he makes it sound like to truly go into and get to know oneself in objective truth at all enough to make a halfway interesting poet - it is, he repeatedly states, a role one can only take up by committing oneself endlessly to purity of perspective, to unlearning and relearning and revising and revolting, to solitude so deep that one's own thoughts burst out of you and onto a page with such urgent strength that to suppress them would be suicide. These letters are a potential goldmine for those who want to devoutly follow the classic (and dumb) trope of the 'tortured artist'; who prioritises their inner struggle above all else as it feeds their work; but however much he could've benefited and probably lived longer with a bit of therapy the general views offered here by Rilke are not, I don't think, supportive in themselves of this view, but are provocative, spiritual even, in ways that are challenging & ambiguous - and as a poet should know, Results on Readers May Vary.

* There is appended another longer essay, which may Rilke wrote to one 'Mr V.', entitled Letter from a Young Worker - which delves into much more sociopolitical critiques of the hegemonic repressive Christian ethics and expectations, especially around sexuality and personal expression; he rails against the hypocrisy and cultural stagnation he sees as being symptomatic of this deeper religio-philosophical malaise.

Encounters on the Edge: A Short Intermission

This booklet (online as pdf here) by George Lings (see also) is a practical, example-rich, missionally-minded consideration of how churches can engage with the arts better in a variety of ways, be that to reach new people, develop relations or deepen faith journeys among older ones, or whatever - it takes a much broader tack than just Messy Church, and for anyone in church leadership who'd like to think of ways of bringing creativity into your ecclesial life (which, trust me, is worth doing but bloody difficult oftentimes) I'd recommend checking out this as it's a fab little primer.

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.

Confabulations

This book, by the brilliant John Berger (who, as one of the blurb-comments here attests, handles thoughts the way an artist handles paints), is composed of a series of short not-quite-essays more-than-reflective-passages poetic prosaic perfectly constructed  - now, how to describe these? assemblages of words and punctuation, interspersed with occasional images, designed to gently peel back onionskin layers of everyday taken-for-granted real and normal and prod through the porous membranes of pond-rippled personal and collective memories to feel the conceptual textures by which these just-about-communicable nuggets of human experience become slanted or skewed as they disperse in social and cultural forms most varied and beautiful and mysterious. Their topics range from Rosa Luxemburg and songbirds to orphan mentality and Charlie Chaplin to eels, clouds, and many many many things far too importantly deep-and-wide that single words particular to the expressed label of them simply do not exist, and these things can (insofar as language or art can grasp them at all) only be seen in peripheral vision, only be known by intuition, only be heard with imagination; if this all just sounds like guff, it's because this is a far easier book to read than it is to explain what it's about, as Berger's pages echo with profundity and clarity of intellectual heart as they take us to confront some urgent and essential basic, yet utterly mysterious, truths.

the Cultural Impact of Kanye West

This book, a collection of essays about [you should be able to guess what from the title] edited by Julius Bailey, was, far from the vacuous pop-culture-dissection pseudo-academia that people seemed to expect of it when I mentioned that it was on my currently-being-read-shelf, actually one of the most interesting books I've read so far this year.

   I acquired it in February, following an evening in which I had my eyes (ears) opened to Kanye properly for the first time, having never properly listened to his music, when my housemate Adam (a longtime fan of Mr West) proposed that we watch the livestream of his new album (The Life of Pablo) launch from Madison Square Garden. So we did: in a flurry of egoism and the launch of not only his seventh solo album but his new fashion range (more or less loads of people dressed as [refugees?] stood unsmiling unmoving on a series of platforms throughout the launch), Mr West proceeded to press 'play' on a laptop and so commence the world's first public hearing of an album that he'd changed the name of four times, still hadn't decided on the final tracklist for, even months after this launch hadn't made publicly available except on Jay-Z's failing-small-fish-in-a-heavily-monopolised-pond streaming service Tidal, and had described as 'the best album of all time' - so, expectations were high. And to be fair, while we'll allow his ego to gloss over his hyperbolic hype, it actually was a really good album. So over the next two days I decided to give his other music a try, listening to all six of his previous solo albums with Adam (yeh, February was not a busy month for our house) at least once (I think I listened to Yeezus and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy thrice each), and it suffices to say that I became an unshakeable admirer of Kanye West as an artist. Which left me in something of a quandary. Having never properly listened to his music before, I'd always presumed* he was 'just an alright rapper' with a penchant for ridiculous egotistical outbursts, aggressive outspoken narcissism, a god complex, whatever you want to call it - a bit delusional and a bit of a dickhead. But there was a deep creativity to his music and intellectual weight to his lyrics, even if they did so often dip into the stereotypical 'misogyny and materialistic boasting' tropes of rap, it did so with a self-awareness and political consciousness that signifies a lot more thought behind the craft than I suspect is the case with much stereotypical rap.** Whatever the case, I was curious how he maintained such a controversial and seemingly high-risk public character at the same time as not being an out-and-out loon but a fully-fledged genius. So I bought this. And then couldn't read it until about two months ago because my housemate Chris was writing a dissertation about hiphop (yes, actually) so he borrowed it.

   Anyway.

   I wasn't exactly sure what kind of questions I wanted answered or which ones this book would answer, but needless to say, each of the essays contained in here was deeply engaging, relatively readable (though some of them are pretty steeped in liberal-academia-babble and/or cultural studies jargon), and highly educational about something I didn't know that much about. Kanye as a person, a male, a black person, a constructed persona, an artist, an ego, and a philosopher-by-implication is discussed in-depth, as is his work, all placed and explored carefully in a range of contexts - hiphop culture in wider American music, issues of race and gender, media responses to celebrity actions, and so on. I've not really got many major personal reflections on this book, I just found the essays really stimulating and educational, but since a far-too-large chunk of this post hasn't been about the book at all, I'll flesh it out with a bullet-pointed list of the essays and try to give a rough description [not summary] of their content/gist.

• 'Now I Ain't Sayin' He's a Crate Digger': Kanye West, 'Community Theatres', and the Soul Archive
• Mark Anthony Neal explores Kanye's prolific habit of sampling classic soul tracks, and how this has deepened and developed racial-cultural links to the history of African-American music.
• Kanye West: Asterisk Genius?
• Akil Houston examines what constitutes a 'genius' in a creative sense, and tries to determine whether, by placing his work in its artistic context, Kanye is one, as Kanye himself certainly seems to think.
• Afrofuturism: the Digital Turn and the Visual Art of Kanye West
• Reynaldo Anderson and John Jennings look at how Kanye's music videos, album artwork, fashion designs, and other visual media convey a distinctly 'black' interpretation of futuristic post-modern forms.
• You Got Kanyed: Seen But Not Heard
• David J. Leonard examines how Kanye's occasional 'public outbursts' (e.g. "Taylor I'ma let you finish" or that time he slammed George W. Bush for failing after Katrina) have their generally not-too-well-put but politically salient points ignored by the media, which instead reduces his actions to those of a [rich and famous but still] black man stepping out of line.
• An Examination of Kanye West's Higher Education Trilogy
• Heidi R. Lewis looks at the sociopolitical implications, of which there are myriad, embedded in the artistic choices and lyrical content of his first three albums.
• 'By Any Means Necessary': Kanye West and the Hypermasculine Construct
• Sha'Dawn Battle discusses how hiphop culture's misogyny may be a socio-politico-cultural vent in response to the systemic dehumanisation of black men in a racist society (i.e. oppressed black males seek to affirm their personhood by affirming their manhood, and so heterosexual conquest becomes a demographic keystone of status).
• Kanye West's Sonic [Hip-Hop] Cosmopolitanism
• Regina N. Bradley examines how the musical stylistic choices Kanye makes may reflect his aims to transcend and break down certain social boundaries.
• 'Hard to Get Straight': Kanye West, Masculine Anxiety, Dis-identification
• Tim'm West looks at a similar issue to Sha'Dawn Battle's above essay, though here examining hiphop's attitudes to homosexuality, and how Kanye has rocked the boat in this regard by not voicing prevalent prejudices.
• 'You Can't Stand the Nigger I See!': Kanye West's Analysis of Anti-Black Death
• Tommy Curry explores very similar issues to Sha'Dawn Battle's above essay, with an emphasis on the racist oppression and sexualisation of black men, and how Kanye both embraces and shatters these prejudices in his lyrics and constructed persona.
• When Apollo and Dionysus Clash: a Nietzschean Perspective on the Work of Kanye West
• Julius Bailey (the book's editor), in what I feel is the best-titled but one of the least rewarding essays of the lot, explores Nietzsche's concept structures of aesthetics, and how aspects of Apollo (ordered rationalism) and Dionysus (embodied emotivism) are blended together by Kanye to generate art that provokes interested thought and raw base feeling from very closely-bound aspects of his work.
• God of the New Slaves or Slave to the Ideas of Religion and God?
• Monica R. Miller examines the religious concepts that recur in Kanye's work, particularly focusing on his adoption of the name/persona 'Yeezus' as a means of making points about his socioeconomic status as a black man framed in terminology and imagery derived from Christian traditions, whether this could be considered blasphemous, and whether Kanye's own beliefs are relevant.
• Trimalchio from Chicago: Flashing Lights and the Great Kanye in West Egg
• A. D. Carson sketches the parallels between Kanye's pursuit of true hiphop and the core character drive of Jay Gatsby in what is frankly a pretty weird essay.
• Confidently [Non]cognizant of Neoliberalism: Kanye West and the Interruption of Taylor Swift
• Nicholas D. Krebs outlines neoliberalism's propensity for upholding certain inequalities while simultaneously co-opting other socio-politico-cultural movements or trends, in this case hiphop, a music derived from black people's experience (the oppressive nature of which is unchallenged by neoliberal order) which has become highly profitable in neoliberal consumer societies so long as it doesn't seek to call out the messed-up racist structures underpinning the whole spectacle. Kanye however will persistently rap about structural racism, make loads of money from it, and then feel empowered enough as an influential artist to speak out against Taylor Swift's trumping Beyoncé on the grounds that her whiteness had validated her as the winner even if she was otherwise less deserving. The racist neoliberal system did not respond kindly (see also David J. Leonard's above essay on similar topic).
• Kanye Omari West: Visions of Modernity
• Dawn Boeck tracks three phases in Kanye's artistic development, and the implications within each phase for his vision of modernity and his place within it as an influential rich famous black creative genius. Chock-full of excellent thought-provoking stuff, this one.

   So, that's the book. Anyone just expecting a low-key easy-read book about Kanye will be taken aback by how riotously scholarly the bulk of these essays are. That said, anyone interested in Kanye, to any extent, will probably find themselves learning a lot from this - and anyone interested in race, music, culture, and celebrities in the media, will probably gain a lot from reading it too. My one gripe with the book isn't a legitimate gripe, I'm just slightly annoyed that it came out in 2014, two years before The Life of Pablo, and having relistened to his full discography a few times since February (especially his seventh album which is a strong contender for my favourite), I feel like Pablo's attitude, content, and style develop certain threads explored in this book further in extremely interesting ways (especially the essays of Monica R. Miller, Akil Houston, and Dawn Boeck), and I'd have loved to read about that. But alas. Maybe I could write my own thoughts and reflections?

   Nah. Now, where are my damn croissants?

* This implies that I was completely ignorant of him, but even before having listened to his music, for several years I've had a weird fascination with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, simply for how powerfully they seem to exemplify something about individualism and fame in modern Western society. They both flaunt deep-rooted egoism alongside extremely adept control of their own personas in the public eye, Kim through empowered-patriarchal-female use of and complete reclamation of her sexualised image, Kanye through empowered-patriarchal-male use of his work and words, even [especially?] when it grates people.

** I have never felt like such a White Boy, writing that sentence.

[Edit - May 2018: in light of Kanye's quasi-racist-apologetic stunt of what I'd like to think is a risky but (obviously ego-spotlight-flauntatious regardless) calculatedly subversive bomb of outlandishly controversial performance art mixed with an actually-quite-constructive way of gaining influence on those in power without alienating them from the off - although any such not-really-that-unreasonable-in-the-development-of-West-as-a-creative/-celebrity-personality suggestions hitherto are taken kindly by the assembled masses of the online commentariat, which is not known for its general capacity to handle nuance or feel a whiff of cognitive dissonance on a good day, let alone be expected to respond aright to a deliberately-obtuse political about-turn from a figure increasingly regarded as having transmorphed from benign self-obsessed maniac genius into an ever-further obtuse and evasive figure as to whose real inner life it has become utterly fatuous to speculate about, so far has he himself deliberatedly deconstructed the lines between his frictional frontline celebrity life and the artwork that keeps him in it? I get the vague impression that most of his audience have given up trying to know what to think, as also I should probably apologise herewith for the previous sentence. (And I'm not even sure why it ends with a question mark but there we go.) Well, and especially, when out of the tumult of this media/social-media cacophony of outrage, apologistic speculations, further outrage at the apologistic speculations, which prompted polite responses which after a few more million back-and-forths of this across the internet eventually, obviously, was to descend into what always happens in these situations which is that every echo chamber involved hastily cobbles an ad hoc 'line' and everyone rapidly (unless already having said something about it, in which case they're either an influencer (vague strokes of common opinion between them determining the line), a tentative follower (who may then edit what they said if the line comes out different later on), or an opinionated outcast without enough followers to care about in this birds-eye view anyway) adheres to it. It is fair to say that arguments about Kanye West were happening. Then he dropped a pair of new songs, the latter of which is a lyrically-potent dialogue about his new political stance and his relationship with Donald Trump called Ye vs. the People (with the people here being represented in rap form by T.I.), and the former a two-minute old-skool-brick-phone-ringtone-kinda-vibe moonburst called Lift Yourself, the extremely-pre-hyped final verse to which comprised Kanye saying the absolute most he possibly could have packed into a single verse at this exact moment in his drift across the public gaze: gibberish. (Okay it was more like an extended scat-like thing more-or-less just rejiggling the components of the profound syllables "woop diddy scoop, poopty de doop" - the point is, now people are still just as, if not more confused, by the whole debacle, which has maintained a high degree of online discussion about it, including this now that I'm looking back at it extremely long addition to a blogpost almost two years old which might not ever be read by anyone but me as this is quite an old one and who reads this anyway? so but only goes further to show how effective a self-perpetuating incorrigible unfathomable character of celebrity and controversy and creativity Kanye West is, such that he's been all over my feeds that much I felt compelled to wonder what the authors of the above essays would make of it, and, well, then, I can't think of any dignifed way to end this horrendous post-script.]

Why Cats Paint

This book is a fantastic (though somewhat dated as my edition was from 1994) introduction to the fascinating world of cat art, with a specific focus on questioning the root motivational causes for feline aesthetic inclinations. The authors are among the best people to have written such a book; Heather Busch has been on the International Council for the Curation of Feline Art since its inception, and Burton Silver was a founder of the Australasian League of Feline Art Critics - and needless to say both are widely-recognised authorities on critiquing and exhibiting top-standard artworks by cats of all nations.

   The book firstly provides an historical overview of recorded cat art; from ancient Egypt where the revered felines' wall daubings were seen as messages of the gods to Victorian England where a cat skilled at painting became famous as Mrs Broadmoore's show cat Mattisa, where live "pawtraits" were painted of audience members, much to their delighted surprise. The next chapter examines various theories of why exactly cats do paint; and from psychic energy fields to aesthetic rebuttals to dullard biologists' notions of behaviourism, this chapter provides a superb overview of the current theories. The final chapter demonstrates the variety of non-painted cat art currently in experimental circulation.
   However, the highlight of the book is of course the central chapter, which in turn spotlights twelve of the most influentially groundbreaking cat artists in the world, showcasing their work and describing their methods, with quality commentary on the character of the artists and how this affects their work. I was deeply struck by the technical skill and poignant insights of the art by Tiger, a spontaneous reductionist and a middle-aged tabby - his 1991 mural Breakfast stirred things in me unfelt since I visited the Stedelijk modern art gallery. Undoubtedly though the height of artistic credit in contemporary feline circles must go to the collaborative works of Wong Wong and Lu Lu, who despite being so different (a young black female and old white male respectively) have so well-adjusted to duo painting that their 1993 work best exemplifying joint efforts was titled WongLu and auctioned for a record-breaking (in cat art) $19000.

   Okay, I'll be honest - this book is a joke. Not in a bad way; the book was intended as a satirical jibe* at both the helicopter-parenting-esque culture of ambitious cat owners and the pretentious pomp of art criticism. I was made aware of its existence during a boredom-induced inane Buzzfeed ramble, googled it out of curiousity and realised it was an actual book, was intrigued enough to read the Amazon description, had £3 left of a giftcard anyway and there was a second-hand one for that so I plumped for "why not this looks like an interesting laugh" and it arrived six days later and I read it immediately in one sitting while my tea went cold and my entire leg was replaced with pins and/or needles.
   During that sitting, whilst reading, I was half laughing intermittently at how bizarre the whole thing was, and half desperately wondering whether the book was genuinely seriously actually real. Turned out it wasn't, but it's still hilarious. Would make a great gift for someone whose opinions of cats, art, or especially both, are a tad high. Though read it yourself too, because it's properly funny.

* I only just found this out. While reading the book I was in a constant state of bafflement as to whether it was actually serious or not, and the more I read the more convinced I was that it was in fact seriously a book about a genuine thing that actually happens in the real world (i.e. cat art) but nay, having finished it and sat upon the internet to write this post, my curiousity took hold and I googled it, and it is in fact a hoax book. The whole thing about psychic energy fields should've tipped me off, but at the time I just put that down to the authors probably being typically weird cat people**. It genuinely really upset me that the book was a hoax. It's still hilarious, so big props to the authors, for being committed to superlative comedy instead of brilliantly obscure animal art academia.

** I am a cat person, sort of, so no offence intended. Cats are great. I just have residual connotations in my mind with people who obsess over cats and people who probably don't find "psychic energy fields" an unlikely explanation for impromptu pet-paintings.