the Monsters and the Critics

This essay (available for free online from that link) by J.R.R. Tolkien* is arguably the landmark work in scholarship on Beowulf, the most famous surviving example of Old English poetic diction and potentially fragment of insight into pre-Christian English mythology. As such, it has been poked & picked at by academics for centuries, digging for clues into this large blank space in our historical memory - but, argues the Professor, in doing so, we have neglected, to our loss, to consider how to & why should we approach & appreciate Beowulf as what it is - a poem, to be enjoyed. I won't provide a summary of his arguments here or give much reflection on it as everything I would be likely to say has been articulated excellently by Gavin the medievalist on YouTube, so check that out - but if you're interested in seeing how Tolkien's mind worked on an academic** rather than creative level, this essay is essential reading; if you're interested in Old English culture and literature & somehow haven't read this essay where the heck have you been - and in any case it will certainly give you much food for thought in how we are to understand (and enjoy!) texts from distant times. For an academic essay it's incredibly readable*** and rather short (I finished the whole thing in a ninety-minute sitting) so go have a look.

* People remember him for his hobby, which was writing his own mythology, but often fail to remember him for his job, which was teaching about the history of language and literature - his essay on fairy-stories is another great example of his powerful scholarship, and is just as readable as this one.

** The appendix is much more linguistics-focused and digs into technical specifics rather than more readably making a broader argument, but I loved them for the depth of rigour Tolkien showed in his passion for the scholarship.

*** Not surprising for a writer of Tolkien's calibre: I particularly loved his early allegory (and yes, while he cordially disliked the form didn't mean he couldn't write a damn good one when called to) of the man who built a tower out of old stones.

Seeing Beauty & Saying Beautifully

This book by John Piper is an exploration of how poetic effort can be utilized in devotion to God; as evangelism, as exhortation, as edification, etc. Drawing on the lives & work of three great Christian communicators (each of whom is afforded a relevant-facts-only potted biography to place their works into their proper contexts, alongside a rough examination of the linguistic arts each employed in their vocation), Piper develops a cogent & compelling discourse on how "putting things into your own words" is a mighty fine tool in the finite individual's spiritual formation & missional impact.

   The contents proceed as follows:

1. a brief introduction theologically justifying the poetic use of language by Christians in the communication of their faith, hope, & love - despite the common assertions in the New Testament that "lofty speech" is NOT the way to best present the gospel
2. George Herbert - the 16th-century rural pastor who posthumously became known as one of the greatest devotional writers this world has seen. Herbert's pastoral career responsibilities & magisterial poetic gifting are both given due examination, with his spiritual humility & technical grandeur given similar weight in discussion
3. George Whitefield - the 18th-century trans-Atlantic preacher (with, if we're being honest, a borderline unbelievable virtually superhuman* capacity for bringing to gospel to people far & wide**) whose modes of dramatic eloquent enunciation brought many thousands to Christ & laid the foundations for the Great Awakenings that followed in the years after his tour of America
4. C.S. Lewis - the 20th-century atheist-turned-Anglican who, alongside his career as a scholar of ancient literature, became the foremost apologist for the Christian faith (despite several decidedly heterodox positions that he held compared to most evangelicals of his & our era) via combination of romantic & rationalistic apprehension of Christianity's truth claims; as expressed in both imaginative & logical means
5. a final concluding chapter which briefly restates everything learned from these three great disciples of Christ & challenges us to follow them in their following of & expression of such - we may not all be poets but we all have the capacity for poetic effort, and handedly manifesting such is a tried & true means of deepening our own grasp of the divine just as much as it does communicate such encountered truth to our audiences

   After the concluding section on how each of these very different dudes drew upon the fountain of inspiration that is God*** to make more of their faith, and how each has lessons to teach us about ongoing contemporary ministry in ways fruitful both to writer & reader (or speaker & hearer, as in Whitefield's case) - well, that's the book. I found this a hugely edifying & instructive read as a poet myself, so would highly recommend it to Christians curious about the more daring aspects of expression as a fantastic source of real-life Example in How-To-Do... I dare say even non-Christians who already have a creative bent will find much in here to make them think deeply & feel seenly about Truth.

* Dude preached roughly a thousand sermons a year for thirty years. Which, even given his barely-existent social life outside of itinerant gospel proclamation, must have left him with minimal time for the actual preparation of said sermons - I choose thus to believe that even two centuries before Red Bull was available he must have been largely, especially, winging it.

** An interesting knot of historical biography is that Whitefield was a slave-owner who also dedicated huge amounts of effort in evangelising slaves, who he saw as >potentially< spiritually equal to whites. While there were no doubt abolitionists who pre-dated him, and he was it's fair to say never even one of these, it is also true that he was chiefly mourned by the Blacks in America following his death, given his commitment to & massive success in bringing them the gospel.

*** Having learned much more about George Herbert from this book that I didn't from reading him directly, I do have to confess that I still find William Blake a more compelling Christian voice in poetry's form; were I the staff manager of the Historical Church, yes I may well happily let Herbert write liturgy, and Lewis would have free rein on producing apologetic tracts for non-believers, and obviously Whitefield would be among those on the regular pulpit roster - but it would be Blake's outrageously inclusive imagination that I would most like to lead Sunday school.

Isaac and I

This book is the autobiography of Chris Searle, who more or less dedicated his life to the promotion* of poetry - the eponymous Isaac being his greatest artistic influence, Isaac Rosenberg, an East London Jewish poet & painter who was killed at 27 in World War One, and according to Searle deserves to be much more widely known & read. Searle grew up with a hunger for the poetic, and carried this passion with him throughout quite a travelled life - he taught in Canada & the Caribbean for a stint before returning to the familiar East End, where he almost immediately got fired from his role as a secondary school English teacher because he published a collection of his students' work. It all worked out sooner or later thanks to a combination of union pressure & his outraged students going on strike, making headlines as they did so. Political consciousness & activist struggle are wrapped closely up with his understanding of the functional social power of spoken word, as we see throughout - as he brilliantly puts it, "the further dimension of true poetry is also the power to become others in the constant provocation and 'penetration' of revolutionary human empathy". Poetry is intrinsically democratic, egalitarian, progressive, and Searle's own ethics on socialism & anti-racism demonstrate that he fully comprehends this & follows the path of speakable truth; I was mildly alarmed on a few occasions at the sheer backwardness of the surrounding culture he found himself in, especially regarding race, but I suppose that goes to show how far we've come since the mid/late 20th century. Overall this is a very readable book & a solid testament to the liberatory power of creative expression, be that through individual influence & inspiration as with Chris & Isaac** or with grander collective acts of embodied imagination shown in the activist tendencies running throughout. A final thing I will say is that for an autobiography Chris is remarkably uninterested in talking about himself - it's always "this kid or colleague or acquaintance inspired me in such & such a way" and the text is littered with quotes or the entireties of poems by people who he's had in his life, which adds an erratic but edifying diversity to the reading experience. I doubt you've heard of Chris Searle*** so this is not a book to read out of celebrity curiosity - but if you're looking for a grounded, relatable, inspiring story about the active power of art, community, and hope, this is a good book.

* He is clearly very passionate about poetry, but from how he talks about it in the course of this book it seems he cares less for the aesthetic form of how it is written or performed & more with ways in which it can empower people to express & celebrate themselves together. Quite inspiring stuff to me given my ongoing role as host of a monthly spoken word evening (which yes is still going really well thanks for asking)

** Yes, I did buy this book because it has my name in the title. My copy's signed by Chris even - albeit to Paul... whoever you are Paul, I hope Chris doesn't find out you dumped his signed autobiography off to Oxfam.

*** Or case in point Isaac Rosenberg, sadly.

the Present Age

This book (available for free online from that link) by Søren Kierkegaard is a short but hella punchy treatise about the political and psychogical malaise that European modernism has left us in. The passion & activity of antiquity is gone, replaced by a blandly "democratic"* equilibrium roiling about in the seas of reflective intersubjectivity - the boons of education and understanding and the free press have left us all deeply well-informed, yet the sheer glut herein has left us existentially paralyzed when it comes to actually putting those informed understandings into action. He writes, "every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move." Rebellion in such a culture is essentially unthinkable. Readers familiar with old Søren won't be surprised to hear that he concludes that the only way for individuality and society to healthily balance each other out in any meaningful sense is the rediscovery of true religion.

   This is by far and away the most accessible Kierkegaard text I've read to date - it's not technical philosophy and should be easily readable by anyone with an above-your-average-American vocabulary. A final thought - though written in the seemingly alien atmosphere of mid-19th-century Copenhagen, this prophetic text speaks to the cultural, political and psychological snafus of 2025's dim/bright crazy/inevitable future presents with sparklingly uncanny accuracy & profundity. And did I mention it's very short and is online for free? Go read it.

* Kierkegaard's polemic here has left me considerably more favourable in my view of C. S. Lewis's takes on democratic equality, which as I've said left a lot to be desired when I read them in their own context.

the Roots of Civilisation

This book by Abdullah Öcalan is an incredibly ambitious* attempt to sketch a holistic picture of the history of civilisation originating from, driven by, and leading to future questions/plausibilities for the Middle East specifically.

    Obviously a holistic history of civilisation is going to cover a lot of ground & I won't pretend that I'm going to be able to summarise satisfactorily every general thrust of argument & evidence in the book - but this blog is what it is, so I suppose I should at least give a rough outline of the contents. We start in what is typically considered the birthplace of civilisation - Mesopotamia: a new innovation in human relations, hierarchy, emerged & thus supercharged the development of complex societies out of prehistory. Gender norms calcified into patriarchy, class systems cemented themselves as cities became centres of activity, slavery boomed, & religious ideology developed to justify all of this as a new natural. These norms spread - in part organically, in part violently - across the ancient Mediterranean as other hubs of society matured. As states gradually shifted away from slave-owning to feudal systems, monotheisms like Christianity & Islam helped to ideologically & economically support & promote the status quo. These monotheisms had the side-effect of promulgating individualistic & humanistic modes of thinking & being, such that eventually feudalism gave way to capitalism: societies demanded a new relationship to the powers over them - and achieved a great deal thus, with democratic nations emerging as a new normal. However, capitalism being rooted in perpetual expansion & extraction, this trajectory could not be considered perfect in the long-term, ultimately being doomed to crisis & collapse. Öcalan argues that the concept of a democratic nation is poised to fill the void & provide the next step in humanity's civilisational journey. Finally, he takes up the implications of the history he's just walked us through to consider the ideological & socio-political challenges facing us in the 21st century - people must agitate & organise toward a democratic civilisation if we want whatever follows capitalism to be true progress rather than a deterioration: he obliterates the possible objection that "this is all simply theory" by applying these ideas to current situations facing the Kurds, Anatolia, Iran & Palestine (and makes a pretty solid case for his democratic ideology being a workable solution, imho).

   Without committing several years of research into ancient&since history, I admit it's impossible for me to properly assess how accurate the pictures presented in this book are. However the general shape of civilisational development as shown here rings true in its overlaps with what I do know, and I don't know how much access to resources Öcalan was given throughout the writing process** (as Imrali, the Turkish island where he's imprisoned, isn't renowned for its library facilities) but if this book is even half-true it represents a momentous achievement of synthesised interdisciplinary reflection. Postcolonial history done to the highest degree. Absolutely recommended reading for anyone interested in world history, especially from a non-Western angle.

* Especially since it was written entirely from a solitary prison cell. This is the first and most scholarly such book, since being followed by a second about the PKK informed by Öcalan's personal experience & a third proposing a path forward between Turkey & the Kurds. This first volume provides historical context for the theoretical & practical concerns for the contemporary Kurdish movement as attested in his other writings.

** I mean, he must've had some access, because there's 12 pages of endnotes & a smallish but significant bibliography, and though I believe him to be a pretty smart dude I doubt he had all those precise references squirrelled away in mere memory.

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 finally reclaim his precious. Textbook eucatastrophe.

Life in the Garden

This book by Penelope Lively is a relatively short but topically wide-ranging survey of the common contemporary garden. Drawing on historical developments, cultural trends, socioeconomic possibilities, and the human relationships with natural plant-life that makes the rest of it all possible, she weaves an interesting path across the subject and makes the humble* garden come to life in a new, invigorating way. Her prose is agreeable enough, and I learnt quite a lot from this book, but didn't particularly feel too compelled to finish it, which is why I've been reading it on-and-off several months before finally completing it. A niche book to recommend, though if you're into gardens or gardening, and want to know more about the rich and storied context of the contemporary "yard", I reckon this would probably be a good place to start.

* Or not so humble in the cases where she's discussing the huge grounds of stately homes, etc. But you get the drift.

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!

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.

Notes on 'Camp'

This book is a Penguin Modern re-publication of two essays by Susan Sontag, the titular Notes on 'Camp' and One Culture and the New Sensibility; both are densely thought-provoking but quite readable and very short (I read both in one go while babysitting for my younger brothers). It's difficult to summarise what she's talking about without being grossly reductive: both are very broad and deep essays, and though their main focus is the nature of consumed creative-cultural content, the ways in which this has notably changed through history is discussed with a deftness and nuance that is hugely enriching given the wealth of social, political, economic, technological and psychological trends and concepts which she brings to bear on this infuriatingly intangibly unanswerable question - that of, what is art for? And therefore what constitutes good taste?

   'Camp' may be rudely described as that which is 'so bad it's good', but only raises more questions about what good meant in the first place, and therefore how something might be perceived as bad, and ways in which ironic or detached (yet still wholehearted, more-or-less) enjoyment of such a bad thing might make it be perceived as a sort-of-good thing, but when others then try to emulate what makes these bad/(good?) things bad/(good?) it either comes across as pretentious or it lowers the bar. Either way, for all the surgical meditations on the user's aesthetic experience which Sontag lays out here, the questions underpinning both essays are far from settled philosophically - and given the rapidity with which culture and our technological means of consuming or engaging with it continue to change,* I'm not sure there is much more than a few grains of truth about these painfully convoluted realms of intersubjectivity to be found throughout this essay. That's not to say it isn't a thoroughly interesting springboard into the basic outlines of these as things to think about though.

   Anyway, the second essay is much more objective - instead of trying to lay out clear guidelines for what constitutes 'camp' taste, she here explores the shifting role that art plays in affluent post-industrial societies with mass communication technology. The brute accessibility of pretty much everything has broken down the barriers between 'high' and 'low' culture, argues Sontag, leading to a frenzy of experimentation with forms and media that see art increasingly calling itself into question through its very self, in a combination of content, style, and context; things are no longer created as timeless artifacts for the proven taste of aristocratic norm-wranglers, but are fluid, self-aware, daring - in ways which mirror the development of science as a continual force progressing by learning from and building upon itself, so art is increasingly created not only as singular entities but as ongoing collective ruminations on meaning, ever being deconstructed and reconstructed afresh for new audiences or in response to new events or to take opportunity of a new means of creating a particular thing...

   I will end here, as this is a topic I could probably spool on about almost indefinitely, and at the very least I don't want to write a post longer than the book it's about.

* An amusing testament to this is that most of the pop-culture references she makes, being from the early sixties at the latest, went straight over my head. Which, in fairness, is likely part of why I didn't find her range of points as comprehensively convincing as I might have.

Recreate Your World

This book by Ron and Charity Luce is designed to turn teenagers who are over-obsessed with pop culture into discerning social critics who reduce their unthinking consumption of goods, services, entertainment and whatnot, and start proactively constructively coming up with ways of being and defining themselves as people in God's good world. Now, the actual value judgments underpinning a lot of the argument in this book in my opinion seem to come from a place of dogmatic adherence to traditional norms and ideals - i.e. it is very puritanical, and insofar as it challenges status quo culture it only challenges it in superficial ways and nowhere in the book does it encourage teenagers to critically or proactively think about applying the same radical scrutiny of the values embedded in pop culture to political society at large - but hey, most book-writing American Christian pastors all run megachurches that depend for religio-economic survival on a deformed version of the gospel which neuters its critique of worldly wealth and power, because, duh doy, monotheistic organised religion and liberal-nationalist economics proved to be an incredibly good hegemonic combo - basically it's unreasonable of me to expect this book to be anything less than a philosophically shallow and spiritually half-hearted nudge in the general right direction of becoming skeptical of worldly culture. Anyway, I reread it* because it's really short and, despite my many complaints about it, I'm now pretty sure it's close to exactly the sort of book my fifteen-year-old brother needs to read to puncture his adolescent faith in the Popular - all the niggles and nuances we can try to work out when he doesn't laugh at me for trying to talk about non-fictional non-pop-culturey stuff. Make of this post what you will. I don't really recommend this book, but I am literally bequeathing it to my sibling in the hope it will help him. It may serve a purpose, and its many inadequacies are probably forgivable in that it's meant to be read by teenagers who are unlikely to retain most of it for long anyway.

* Having read it once before as a fifteen-year-old and retained literally Nothing from it, apart from remembering the phrase 'culture zombie' which still sometimes vaguely pops up in the unreliable-haunting-guilt part of my conscience when I'm thinking/talking/doing summat about the kind of pop culture that Ron Luce dislikes.**

** They represent an ilk (sadly not, I fear, a minority) of the contemporary Western post-Christendom church who would genuinely be less offended by a story with persistent and damagingly insidious sexist undertones than by one which uses the word 'fuck'.

the Kurds of Iraq

This book by Mahir Aziz is a really interesting (and helpful for me academically) in-depth study of ethnonationalism in the semi-autonomous* Kurdish region of Iraq, exploring it in both geopolitical and historical contexts as well as going through a massive amount of data from a survey of university students on their views toward Kurdishness, Iraq, the predominant political parties, tribal culture, and so on.

* I'm writing this before September 25th, so the referendum on Kexit hasn't happened yet.

the Kurds & the State: Evolving National Identity in Iraq, Turkey & Iran

This book by Denise Natali was incredibly helpful to me academically and would probably be interesting to people super-keen on Kurdishness and deconstructions of nationalism. It traces the Kurds' nascent national identity from subordination under the Persian and Ottoman empires to how the colonial powers' establishment of Arab puppet states Iraq and Syria impacted them as a regional ethnic group, fragmenting their nationalism across borders, and thereafter she traces the development of Kurdish nationalism in Iran, Iraq and Turkey, couched in interested discussion of Kurdistan as an inherently transnational space and thereby contextualising the identity of Kurdishness as something that, even as a relatively straightforward ethno-nationalist movement, defies pre-existing nation-states.

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.

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.]

How to Read Buildings

This book, a graphic crash-course in architecture by Carol Davidson Cragoe, more or less did what it said on the tin - which was to walk me through various facets of buildings and how and why they vary depending on historical styles. Each double-page spread is filled with five helpful images (ranging from utterly unhelpful line sketch to hyper-realistic high-detail drawings) of examples. Following an introductory trio of chapters about types of building, the 'grammar of style', and common building materials, Carol Cragoe then walks us through columns, capitals, arches, roofs, gables, vaults, domes, towers, doors, porches, windows, stairways, chimneys, fireplaces, and ornamentation. The sheer variety of architectural features out there is something I've never systematically looked into, despite my being an avid-yet-casual enjoyer of looking at buildings: from the gorgeous vaulted roofs and intimidating spires of medieval Gothic buildings to the friendly curvatures of Rococo or the harsh efficiency of modernism, the cultural and technological contexts of building styles has yielded enormous breadth in how buildings can come to look and function. I certainly learned a lot. (A glossary of architectural jargon at the back helps one retain all this knowledge for all those [never] times in the future that you'll not only look appreciatively at a building but point out a given feature.) I also found this book almost unspeakably dull, finishing it only because

1. It belongs to my housemate Chris, and he's leaving Sheffield soon. He doesn't even know I've got it I don't think, I borrowed it ages ago and got so bored of it that it's just been sat in my room since about November.
2. It's quite short, so I may as well have squeezed an extra blog post out of it.
3. Knowing vague flurries of details about architecture isn't a bad thing, but I'm struggling to envisage a practical use for the non-systematic non-comprehensive mass of information I've ingested, other than deliberately irritating (by talking at length about boring stuff) my younger brother when we see cool buildings on holiday. This may be just enough of a warrant.

Anyway. If you like buildings, culture, history, pictures of buildings, whatever, you might well enjoy this little book. Go for it.

The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k

This book, a lifestyle/mindset/worldview/self-help/whatever book by Sarah Knight, is much less counter-cultural and irreverent than it pretends to be. I bought it literally because I'd had a weird day and the title made me laugh, but then once I started reading it, I realised there was more subtlety to her lifestyle/mindset/worldview/whatever (let's just call this a 'mode') of Not Giving A Fuck* [NGAF] than I'd presumed.

   Rather than completely sacking off everything that you don't unquestionably want to do (I call this amoral extreme-end of NGAF the Zero Fucks Given [ZFG] mode), successful NGAF is about 'budgeting' the fucks you give to maximise personal happiness - it's more of a form of mental decluttering.** This budget operates by scrutinising demands, real or perceived, on your time, energy and money, and assessing which of these are actually worthwhile given their impact on your happiness. Things which genuinely do improve your life, or upon which you're dependent in some reasonable way, it's worth giving a fuck about: things which you simply do out of social/cultural/economic obligation, if reasonably avoidable, go ahead and cease giving that fuck. A big part of this is detaching yourself from caring too much what other people think of you and your choices. She is careful to stress that adopting NGAF as a mode shouldn't turn you into an asshole - determining whether it is someone's feelings or someone's opinion 'obligating' you to give a particular fuck is a good way of negotiating situations where you can legitimately give fewer fucks without hurting someone (even if you might upset them a little bit, but that's their fault for thinking something they give a fuck about is of universal value). I'm not entirely convinced that she's solved this Not Being An Asshole problem, as I'll discuss shortly, but she's definitely worked out a fairly reliable model for organising fuck-giving decisions (there's even a fucking flowchart).

   Having established this framework, Sarah then walks us through Things, Work, Friends, Acquaintances & Strangers, and Family, to help us determine which fucks to decide if we give or not - these sections are accompanied by listing exercises (which I've not done yet as I gave more of a fuck about finishing the book*** than actually performing NGAF-style decluttering). Once we've decided what we give a fuck about, she then provides some helpful pointers about how we actively stop giving particular fucks (without being a dick about it); these methods revolve around honestly and politely explaining yourself, and actually she gives some really helpful pointers. The whole book is littered with examples as well. Finally, she revisits our NGAF-enlightened life, decluttered of unwanted fucks, and shows us how much better for body, mind and soul it can be. Great.

   For all the efficacy of NGAF as a mode, I had two main problems with this book. Firstly, it's a mode very much tailored to highly-autonomous individuals - people without social, cultural, or economic disadvantages holding them back from deciding exactly what they want to give fucks about. The book's target market is almost definitely American middle-class misanthropes (every single example given reeks of this: oh no, an acquaintance's weekend wedding in Europe! oh no, a skiing holiday with the inlaws! oh no, a colleague's poetry recital!), but something as generalistic as a mode should be one that at least works for people with varying degrees of privilege. People who are constrained by social, cultural, economic, or any other kind of disadvantage often simply don't have the freedom to not give fucks about certain things that someone with more autonomy in how they allocate their time, energy and money would readily stop giving a fuck about. That's not to say I expect a mode to completely solve all inequalities of individual capabilities - that's fucking absurd. However, NGAF does clearly work better the more privileged you are, but unfortunately so does life in general in many ways (like, that is the nature of privilege), so maybe this isn't a problem with the book at all and I'm just upset about injustice. Probably. I often am. Who gives a fuck.

   Secondly, I had a bigger and more substantive objection to NGAF as a mode. I think it lies at too much risk of turning into ZFG - i.e. a mode where no fucks are given about anything that is not of direct self-determined desirability to an agent. Although Sarah Knight has tried build a consistent safeguard against this into her methods, I'm not convinced they'd stand the test of real people. Let's use Rick as an example. Rick's catchphrase is literally "I don't give a fuck"**** - he's narcissistic, nihilistic, basically just a nobhead. Now, he's also fictional, but he represents the selfish core of all human agency, which is especially strong in highly-individualistic neoliberal societies like modern Britain and America. Empowering neoliberal nihilistic narcissistic nobheads with the sense that their happiness is the top priority of any exercise of their agency isn't spiritually healthy for society - you don't have to think too hard once you start NGAF to realise that the constraints of not hurting other people or their feelings aren't objective boundaries, and you may as well just maximise your own happiness-oriented agency and give zero fucks. If part of NGAF's foundation is detaching yourself from what other people think, where does the requirement to not be a dick come from? If you can live with yourself being a dick, surely other people's opinion doesn't matter, and the only reason you'd need to mitigate your dickishness in any ways to any people is because you've worked out you get more from maintaining a relationship in a particular way than you would by letting your ZFGness taint it. Basically, I believe that people are naturally inclined to be as selfish as they can reasonably get away with unless hooked onto a positive love-oriented mode,***** but NGAF is the opposite of love-oriented - it's self-fulfilment-oriented, and so will naturally tend towards decaying into ZFG - people will become Ricks (apart from not elderly alcoholic genius scientist terrorist inventors: at least not in all cases. Lots of people might just not be very smooth at the ZFG method and become this guy).

   So, this book makes some interesting recommendations about how to mentally declutter, but I think given our sociocultural context of rampant individualism, we should be wary in accepting modes of life like NGAF - it will only further fragment communities, widen inequalities, perpetuate injustices, and loads of other things that I give lots of fucks about.

* I was going to censor this post but I decided that since nobody reads this blog anyway it would be a waste of a fuck if I worried about offending someone. I censored the 'fuck' in the post's title because she censors the 'fuck' in the actual title of the book - I guess you can't have the word 'fuck' proudly displayed on public bookshop shelves or something. Also, it's 2016 - how are you not completely desensitised to the word 'fuck' yet? I have been since the age of twelve or so (unless around particularly sheltered company, where conformity instincts kick in and I feign a little flinch if Rude Words are said). If you have a problem with this word, Sarah Knight's book is probably not for you. I didn't count but I'm pretty sure there's over a thousand fucks included in its wordcount - simply because the 'fuck' is the key concept to her system of ideas and practices, so why the fuck wouldn't she fucking mention fucks a lot? (I've used 42 in this post. Just did a search.)

** Sarah Knight does in fact attribute the book's inspiration (and title) to a Japanese bestseller, Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up - this book is basically an extension of those principles into what you give fucks about.

*** I'd planned on breezing through it and then writing a one-sentence blog post about it, simply stating that in the spirit of the book I wasn't giving a fuck about this particular post, but I actually had some pretty interesting thoughts about this book and the NGAF method, so here you fucking go.

**** Okay, so he has several. Wubba-lubba-dub-dub, whatever, I don't give a fuck.

***** Yeh, five is definitely too many asterisks. I've already opened tabs for the links I was going to use to expand on this point though, so I'll type up the fucking footnote anyway. Humans are social animals by nature, highly community-dependent and enmeshed in complex layers of obligations: I believe this is due to our being made in the image of a God who is primarily relational and exists as love. This means social systems of obligation, i.e. things we're made to give a fuck about, can't be reduced to individual decisions - some things are required for communal cohesion, for effective societies, for justice - and responding to these complex structures of obligation in a way that truly reflects our nature as beings made to love and be loved is bigger than simply giving moral fucks, as all fucks which we do or don't give reflect part of our volition to work for collective good or for our own. And that means non-individualism should be fundamental at the individual level. (Didn't know which words to use as the link for this but it's also somewhat relevant.)

The Way We Are

This book, one I picked up out of vague random interest from the bargain bin at a charity shop, was, I'm sorry to say, Margaret Visser, the least memorable reading experience I've had in years. It wasn't quite boring but it was by no means interesting either. It was like reading an enormous compilation of those inane little thinkpieces written by contributors to the Readers' Digest. It's the kind of book that retired accountants probably keep in the toilet for a colourful treat - albeit under the book of crossword puzzles, which they do prefer as at least then they get to engage their brain somewhat.

   I'm being harsh. (I think part of my not-entirely-warranted disparagement of this book stems from the absurd foreword, in which John Fraser coins the term 'visserism'*.) Margaret Visser's collection of sixty four(ish)-page mini-essays on a range of topics did actually make me say "hmm" in a passively interested way at least two dozen times, but then, it did also make me say "this book is so dull oh my goodness" in an amusedly stupefied way at least seven times. She claims to be an 'anthropologist of everyday life', taking relatively benign topics (of a some-horribly-vague yet some-horribly-specific width of variety) and dissecting them, historically, sociologically, psychologically, economically, through culture and tradition and observation and mostly just facts that she's read about something somewhere, to reveal something unusual or interesting about their origin and practice. Apart from she largely doesn't. To be fair to her it looks like a lot of thought and reading went into each one, but in the way that it goes into a year 8 assignment for which one is aiming for a B at best. There are no overarching themes, no profoundly interesting or insightful points (she comes tantalisingly close to making some, then leaves off to spew out another random nugget of thought or information on topic X), and although there are plenty, a great deal in fact, of moments where she strikes upon something in such a way or with such a fact as to mildly realign one's perspective on it, she does so with so little aplomb, and the topics are so random anyway, as to have little effect on the reader. I still quite enjoyed reading it, and will be keeping it for a future next-to-lavatory-bookcase. It amused me in much the same way that watching Qi occasionally amuses me, through sheer persistent banality.

   With basically nothing left to say about this book, I will proceed to list the topics of her short essays; after an introduction (on the general unnoticed interestingness of everyday objects, practices, or concepts, which she promises to explore), Margaret Visser discusses:

• air hostesses
• initiations
• offal
• sunbathing
• conspicuous competence
• Thanksgiving turkey
• Santa
• high heels
• baked beans
• lobster blushing
• Spoonerisms
• greetings
• beards
• avocados
• tipping
• vacations
• English spelling
• umbrellas
• street parades
• physical reactions to embarassment
• bells
• Valentines
• caviar
• professionals
• the left hand
• wedding cake
• showering
• crossword puzzles
• sitting down on things
• gloves
• fireplaces
• spitting
• wigs
• knitting
• the unpopularity of wine in America
• swimsuits
• menus
• wearing blue
• pumpkins
• Christmas trees
• stripes
• the Easter Bunny
• filler words
• vinegar
• mahogany
• jelly
• synaesthesia
• stockings
• Christmas pudding
• hearts
• fasting
• looking emotionless
• eating squirrels
• tap-dancing
• broad beans
• chewing gum
• forgetting people's names
• uses of the colour red
• Eskimo words for snow
• soup

* I jest not. "n. 1. a concise socio-anthropological insight arrived at by comparing current human behaviour with various alternative models... 2. an entertainment in which points are made by identifying and skewering absurdities. 3. any observation, esp. on contemporary manners, that provokes shocked laughter; a sly dig. 4. Archaic or literary. the doctrine that all scholarship, e.g., food chemistry, etymology, particle physics, etc., exists to prove that life is rich, funny, and meaningful." Like, making up a verb to describe the decidedly not unique activities of a writer is bad enough, but four!? I don't know. Having now finished the book I remember it quite fondly. I gained several partially-interesting vaguely-insightful tidbits from it, and didn't actually die of boredom, so maybe it's an alright book after all.

In Praise of Messy Lives

This book, a collection of bitingly insightful essays from journalist Katie Roiphe, has been my lifeline of leisure-reading while I've been skim-ploughing through a large stack of books and papers on metaethics and theology (many of which have been excellent reads, but they still count as work so I get to emphatically sigh upon reading something else). Being a collection of social and cultural insights from an articulate cynic, I was pleased by how easy to read they were, and still thoroughly stimulating*.

   Irrelevantly, but I want to mention; the copy I've got was discarded by the public library in Phoenix, Arizona. The fact that it's ended up on a windowsill in Sheffield amid several other miscellaneous non-fiction books supporting a dying-for-want-of-sunlight houseplant seems an excellent ending to its journey. One of those quirky little nicenesses that occasionally make me half-smile. Almost a tribute in itself to the values of anticlimax and haphazardness that Roiphe extols in her book.

   What are her essays about? Well, all sorts. They're gathered into four rough sections:

• Life and Times - mostly extended prosaic portraits and memoirs, warm and cold snapshots and reflections on some aspects of her own life.
• Books - technically literary criticism, though maybe better described as discourses on the character, style, and variable merits of authors and trends in authorship.
• The Way We Live Now - dissecting current social and cultural norms to expose the dark tides beneath them before biting bloody chunks out of their necks and leaving readers feelings relatively uncomfortable about things they had before considered normal for want of not considering them much.
• The Internet, Etc. - same as above but specifically digital norms and trends. Includes the last chapter which is, in contrast, and extended and very human portrait study of a young New York woman who works as a bespoke sadomasochistic fetish-fulfiller.

   Yeh, there's quite the variety of topics. Recurring topics (because they're so readily relevant to so much about what one has to say about present culture once examining it critically) include feminism, the exclusion of people living outside an idealised middle-class existence, the bizarre twists of communication that occur in the press and online, the vindication of our own standards and values by the indignant capacity of other people to live without them (and vice versa). There's insight into the wholesale incorporation of Joan Didion's unique journaling style into contemporary feature-writing; musings on why angry commenters do what they do; a story about how a close friendship was deliberately but unthinkingly severed; damning appraisals of how the use of sex in male novelists' works has changed from aggresively patriarchal a few decades ago to only embarassedly patriarchal now.

   The common theme underlying each essay is, as the title suggests, mess. Katie Roiphe is, assuming no change of status since she wrote the various pieces in which she proudly describes herself as such, a woman in full-time employment with two children from two different men neither of whom she is married to. Like giant swathes of modern westerners then, she is marooned in social "messiness" - sustaining a lifestyle that defies both tradition and prudential convention, and having an excellent and valuable life despite it, thank you very much. She implies that the expectations of normality and tidiness in modern middle-class lives are unrealistic, unhealthy, even oppressive. So much of "surviving" nowadays is to be coddled and to coddle; to take far too seriously the prospects of perfection in all we do, with sour erosions in our friendships, careers, passions and even familial affections when the reality of flawed humanity sinks in despite our refusals to scrub it better; we'd be far happier to shrug off the imperfectible nature of our acquaintances, our homes, our work, our families, and to get on with enjoying them in the midst of the mess. Though a large part of what she discusses will be alien to someone who is not a middle-class American parent** I'm sure anyone vaguely familiar with a certain western-middle-class culture of paranoid perfectionism will get the gist of her gripes enough to see the truth in them and be made to squirm or frown slightly.

   I don't know who I'd recommend this book to, if anyone. The content is so broadly variable that it would make more sense to track down individual articles online and send links to people who are interested in that topic. To read the book entails several pieces that one would almost never read online simply because they are so irrelevant to most interests - however there is a value in reading the book rather that just disparate components to get a wider thoughtscape of her conception of messiness and a deeper insight into the pervasiveness of what opposes it. If you like reading and you're not fussy what as long as it's good; if the modern compulsion to derive the absolute best out of everything in denial of future disappointment also unsettles you as it does me and Katie Roiphe, then yeh you'd probably enjoy this.

* I use this word rather than "interesting" or "thought-provoking" because the topics of most of the essays were not things which I would typically be interested in reading, nor did I spend much time after reading each one thinking about it very much at all. However while reading each I was stimulated with vague grips of engagement with new ideas and perspectives that were either new to me or that I had not heard put in such terms before.

** Including me. As a poor (ish, I'm a student, that kinda counts as poor) childless Yorkshireman I was able to only superficially grasp most of the conventions she was skewering, through their incessant seepage into TV and film, even here across the pond.