Dethroning Mammon

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

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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

   I should probably talk about the book.

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

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

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

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

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

the Boy Who Built a Wall Around Himself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the Little Prince

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

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

** Well okay, today.***

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

Where Cats Meditate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

This book, a play by Tom Stoppard which I acquired a secondhand copy of years ago after seeing it on-stage (at the Lantern Theatre in Nether Edge with my mum) and being so blown away by the sheer inventive ridiculousness of its utterly droll, meandering, angsty script - to be honest, I probably shouldn't have read it today, having just finished it in one sitting despite having the bulk of packing and cleaning to do as I'm moving out of my student house on Friday - but whatever - anyway. The play.

   If you're not familiar with William Shakespeare's (possibly?) best-known work, Hamlet,* this play would just be basically two guys chatting drivel about them not knowing what's going on. But even if you are familiar with Hamlet, that's kind of all it is. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's roles in Shakespeare's opus are so negligibly small, so devoid of agency and history and identity and context, that we can only speculate as to what those characters are like, how they reacted to the bizarre improbable circumstances in which they found themselves, and what, if anything, they could have tried to do to make things happen any other way. Of course, the unstoppable narrative train of Shakespearean tragedy rolls the plot inexorably onward and our two protagonists never really have a say in directing or even muchwise understanding it - they are simply happened to - all the way up to, as the title of the play (and the events of Hamlet) dictates, their unexpected, undeserved, and more or less meaningless deaths.

   The genius of this play lies in Stoppard's constant looping around this aimlessness of both its protagonists, their complete lack of individual decision-making (and even small occasions where they do try, their efforts yield little fruit or are foiled by other characters just confusing them) and even distinct identities (they don't remember their personal histories or trajectories, because Shakespeare never wrote them one - they for all intents and purposes exist to play a tiny role in the drama of their friend who was the heir to the Danish throne); buffeted about on the winds of chance, not knowing what is worth caring about or why or how they would even determine that, questioning whatever they see and hear and say and remember but having so little to go on in terms of determining what's going on around them that they have to just take everyone else's word for stuff anyway - they are bound to an objective deterministic fate, almost by chance and effectively out of their control, and all they can do is play their parts. Other than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern**** the only character from Hamlet who plays a largish role is the head of the troupe of players - allowing for some pretty meta and thoroughly amusing explorations of the existential quandaries which R & G find themselves in and how it in many ways reflects the condition of the actor generally.

   Dunno. I don't want to say too much - I just think this play adds so much extra brilliant depth to a pair of otherwise entirely unremarkable characters in what is probably one of the best plays of all time. If you know Hamlet already, read this; you will be bemused and enthused and most certainly amused. If you don't, well, they do say it's not for everyone, but who's they? Not whoever's writing this blog. I say, it's a flipping classic, so get it down you and then give this a go because it's incredibly funny, and to my mind the most unusually (almost lazily) thought-provokingly incisively little banger of a stageplay I've ever had the privilege of seeing. It was also a hoot to read.

* I don't want to do spoilers because it's great and you should read/watch** it and then also read/watch*** this, because it's so much grander in context.

** There are so many excellent screen adaptations of Hamlet that it doesn't even bear to list a handful of good ones. Google it or something.

*** There's a really good film adaptation starring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman.

**** Years ago I got a pair of fishtank shrimps named this, because they were impossible to tell apart, and a recurring joke in the play is that nobody can tell the difference between R & G (they often fail to even properly differentiate between each other).

the Lexus and the Olive Tree

This book by Thomas Friedman, despite my having been working my way through it for literally nineteen months,* will not be treated with a long post, because it really annoyed me.
   It is a book seeking to provide a clear, objective, accessible overview of globalisation - but anyone reading it with a modicum of awareness of the actualities of neoliberal capitalism or America's hegemonic distortion of political-economic foreign policy to its own ends will be struck by how utterly blinkered it is. Bordering on propaganda for the corporate empire; it is full of oversimplification, ham-fisted analysis disguised in colourful (and often quite apt) metaphors that nonetheless wash over the true complexity and nuances of the issues he discusses,** highly reliant on anecdotal and conversational stuff to support his points instead of actual assessments of reality,*** resorting with alarming regularity to even making his case by walking us through entirely hypothetical imaginary scenarios,**** barely any hard data or robust models of how any of this actually works, and all of this sickery in buckets. It wouldn't be so bad if he were merely spouting the glories of American-hegemony-led global capitalism - he does also take care to point out some of the shortfalls and flaws in its current mode and pace - only to shortly after, each time he brings these up, discard them as "we'll be alright the market will soon adjust" or "this is something people are starting to notice and so there'll probably be a political solution soon." His picture of the global political economy is one of resigned delight in the grand impenetrable inevitability of American consumer capitalism spreading itself ever further and entrenching itself ever deeper.
   Please, for the sake of your own self-respect as a thinking individual,***** do not read this book - and I ask this not because I don't see the value of reading viewpoints with which you disagree, that was literally the reason why I read it - but there must be better advocates for global neoliberal capitalism than this shoddy compendium of travel-writing extracts peppered with weird clunky metaphors and made-up situations all blended together with relatively reasonable explanations of how global capitalism works. One simply cannot, in this book, easily separate fact from sort-of-fact from ideological propaganda from outright fiction.

Just to feel more constructive, I'm also now going to include a list of books that deal well with many topics relevant to the book's content that Thomas Friedman entirely neglected:

• the entirety of practical economic theory
• the co-opting of mainstream economic theory by plutocratic interests
• common misconceptions about capitalism
• the fact that American hegemony isn't actually 100%
• how the global north messes up development in the global south
• the role played by gender in political economy
• the fact that aiming for infinite growth on a finite planet is dumb/dangerous
• any properly contextualised discussion of anti-capitalist movements

Remember, kids - they'll always tell you it's just the way things are and always will be if they have vested interests in it remaining so.

* Two of the chapters in it were key readings on liberalism for my core module last year, and I decided for the sake of understanding more in-depth the case for a view of the global political economy much at odds with my own it was worth reading the whole thing. Boy was I wrong (see above). Anyway, I'd got about three quarters of the way through, but have just finished it in a don't-really-care-anymore speed-reading spurt, because I need to get loads of books out of the university library for my dissertation but apparently I've hit my maximum amount of loaned items - so this one's going back to the returns bin after a year and a half in my 'currently reading, sort of' pile.

** For example, the 'electronic herd' being the global flow of money to wherever financial and investment opportunities seem liable to spring up; or the 'golden straitjacket' as the set of deregulatory allowances a society much make for free market operations so as to not get left in the dust-wake of our rapidly globalising world economy.

*** The most damning criticism of this book, I think, is that it is 475 pages long, purports to be a well-researched highly reliable account of the way the world ticks, and has not got a bibliography or any references. This isn't academic snobbery - this is the simple principle that arguments, especially about large highly-contested convoluted things like, oh I don't know, the world economy, should be supported by evidence that the person arguing has tried to get to grips with the subject in a way somewhat more accountable than just flying round the world asking people what they think and cherry-picking quotes and stories to suit the paragraph's topic. There isn't even an index! Of course, this doesn't matter to his target market, which is presumably Americans who just know that capitalism is all fine and America is awesome and who needs to understand what's going on in critical depth, this guy's talked to lots of important people, he clearly knows what he's on about (and I believe he does, he's just very dedicated to his role as Laymans'-Intellectual Defender of Pure American Neoliberal Hegemony).

**** I shit you not, chapter twelve concludes with a full four pages of entirely fabricated conversation between Warren Christopher and Hafez al-Assad... in what school of writing robust non-fiction has he been told this is acceptable!? The man has a Pulitzer Prize for goodness sake!

***** I mean, I assume you are, if you're reading this blog. Who are you people? Please leave an indignant comment if you think I'm a ridiculous nutter whose concerns about global capitalism are entirely overblown. I've never had an indignant comment before but would love one, in part to feel like I'm provoking debate, but mostly just to confirm that actual human people are reading these posts. Pfft.

On Being Nice

This book, from the School of Life (of Alain de Botton's work), is a really nice little turquoise hardback filled with short readable chapters about the various aspects of how to conduct oneself nicely* - a quality that is, apparently, lacking in modern society. Humans are social creatures, geared towards friendship and cooperation within communities - a trait that all genuine clear thinking supports the endeavour of and which even alien visitors feel compelled to partake in.**

   However, 'niceness' is only partly derived from this intrinsic bio-psychological drive in people to seek belonging and reciprocity with other people, and partly derived from a string of complex historical normative legacies. Our current western model of niceness has, according to this book's first section, been shaped considerably by Christianity (which emphasised other-centred action but also dampens vividness of character and ambition), romanticism (which emphasised spontaneous individuality as more valuable than predictable boring normal niceness), capitalism (which depends on people more or less getting along so they can operate as amoral cogs in its ever-growing empire of profit) and eroticism (which sort of built on the romantic spontaneity to characterise niceness as unsexy). The second section of the book deals with kindness - the importance of charitability in how we react to things, the importance of being reasonably open about our shortcomings and vulnerabilities (neither be a strong man or a tragic hero), taking motivation in consideration, responding gracefully to suffering, and cracking the delicate and multifaceted art of politeness. The third section launches into how we can use niceness to improve our own social lives and enrich the lives of others in it: being clear about the value of friendship, not being weirdly over-friendly, overcoming our own and others' shyness, teasing appropriately and affectionately, telling white lies, flirting to boost self-esteem, being warm and open-minded, being able to talk about yourself honestly and endearingly (without burying weaknesses, or ranting, or being needlessly boring), and listening properly to others when talking to them. The final chapter presents us with a challenge - the ultimate test of one's social skills: maintaining an interaction with a young (old enough to speak, and walk off if you bore or annoy it) child whom you haven't met before.

   There are parts of this book that I feel don't adequately map out the actualities of how to be properly adaptably nice,*** but the groundwork definitely seems to be present, and it's laid out in a friendly readable manner which makes the whole a rewarding and life-affirming reminder of the importance of being nice.

* I would like to offer a disclaimer that I didn't really learn much from this book that I wasn't already more or less putting into practice; as a friendly but still fairly culturally-typical Englishperson I'm quite good at being nice - though this stems more from my aim to live in a constant mindset of Christlike love and empathy than from the abstract wishy-washy humanism of the School of Life and such. Whatever. The reason for my reading this then is 'research' - one of the main characters in a big writing project I'm working on the plans for at the moment is just very nice, and what I wanted from this book was a systematic well-phrased exposition of the contours and nuances of Being Nice with which to pepper some of her deeds and comments. To this end, the book served me very well. However I imagine it would also be quite effective as a rough manual to the practice for people who are much better at deriving practical information from books than they are at empathetically and genuinely engaging in interpersonal relations. Probably don't give it as a present to people who need it though. Ironically, that would be quite rude.

** Four links in one sentence! I'm on a mad'un!

*** I mean, as a radically inclusive left-wing Christian with little respect for the charades of the bourgois echelons of British culture that the liberal humanists who wrote this probably inhabit, this should be no surprise, but still, this is a decent overview. It's not like I'm going to bother to dissect all the small nuances where I thought it should have said more than it did or where it made assertions that actually seem questionable under scrutiny in different contextual light - mainly because I can't be arsed, but also because it would be a petty pedantic scrabbling against a book which overall I think laid out a good picture of what modern secular niceness is.

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 Road

This book by Cormac McCarthy will (calling it, yup) go down in history as one of the best and most poignant novels to emerge from the United States of America - ever.*

   A non-specific apocalypse has ravaged everything. All plants and animals are dead, and human civilisation has collapsed, over several years descending into a horror beyond misery, where simply meeting other people can be life or death as you don't know if they'll kill you to take your stuff or rape and eat you. Against this backdrop, utterly bereft of hope and beauty and goodness, a father and his young son follow the road south to the coast, trying to scavenge food (anything but other humans) and survival supplies and avoid raiders and cannibals on the way.**

   The story is extremely simple - so the father/son relationship is given space to become the main character, with heartwrenchingly direct dialogue, illuminating the main theme of the book: that even when all else is seemingly lost, if we have others whom we can trust and love and be loved by, there is hope, and we can carry that fire within us to persist in facing the challenges that may arise in the hope of finding others who are holding onto the same hope and still believing in goodness, the human capacity for helping each other. The omnipresent threat of slow (starvation) and sudden (cannibal-thieves) death looms over this relationship founded on a hope that the boy has little experience of other than through assurance from the man that it exists; several brief encounters with kind people widen this, though several brief encounters with horrifically threatening people narrow it, and ultimately it is ambiguous (until the end but spoilers) whether the boy who has grown up in this bleak world genuinely grasps what the man has been trying to pass down.

   It is also exquisitely well-crafted - everything from description of surroundings to conversation to carefully-warily methodical actions evoke the sense of utter desolation, of a grandly poetic lack of anything grand or poetic, of a constant urgency and dread and fear and slow rasping unworldly decay. The world is as vividly drawn as it needs to be, the atmosphere hanging low and heavy everywhere so even simple details are pervaded with an imagined visualisation of things burned, twisted, broken, lost, dead and gone. McCarthy's construction of such a real-feeling world lends an immense tenderness to the central relationship; we are drawn into the lives and the man and the boy so as to be constantly enraptured by their devotion to each other and constantly terrified for their survival. They are living in a world without nature or civilisation, where the only life is human, and the only life that can be trusted to be good is each other.

   Ultimately it is a novel that shows us how much we have to lose, in a social-economic-ecological context, but reminds us alongside this of what we can never lose if only we are determined to hold onto it - and that is our own decision to try to be good. Even when surrounded by unimaginable hardship and evil. As the man teaches the boy, so the fire is passed onward. We persist.

   Anyway. It is incredible. Read it.

* Instant classic. Yes. The film adaptation of it is also by a pretty long margin the best post-apocalyptic movie (except Wall-E maybe) ever; the bleak visual style echoes the flavour of the book's prose brilliantly and Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee bring the man and the boy to life perfectly. But is it as good as the book? I'm not going to answer this as I hate this question.

** Reading or watching stories set in this kind of world, I am growingly aware that were such a civilisational breakdown to occur, I would struggle a great deal to survive. Our socioeconomic systems of convenience have not prepared me for such a life. My best hope would probably be hiding underground somewhere with loads of bottled water and tinned beans and stuff to read until it all blows over or everyone who might eat me is dead from mad cow disease or whatever you get from eating people... man, I need to start digging and stockpiling

Occupy

This book, an edited selection* of material by Noam Chomsky concerning the movement Occupy Wall Street (which soon sprawled to many major cities across the world** and ended up seeping into the general global left-activist consciousness), is an insightful and heartening peek inside what was probably the most important popular movement in the west this millennium so far.

   The general thrust of Occupy was extremely broad - people taking part cited concerns ranging from climate change to mental healthcare to western foreign policy to institutionalised racism - but at the core of it was the classic Marxian struggle: the disempowered working masses against an entrenched established elite.*** Neoliberalism has accelerated this inegalitarian conflict to enormous levels; our whole societies are increasingly structured so as to benefit economic growth, which disproportionately benefits a tiny clique of investment-holders and financiers at the top, whose control and influence over economy, media, policymaking, and more, is high enough to pretty much maintain their position so long as the people don't realise what's happening, remember they live in a democratic society, and kick off. The first rule of Anarchist Club is you don't talk about Anarchist Club always question power structures to determine whether their authority can be legitimately purported to be for the public good and can be held accountable to be so. Democratic societies, in principle, make this easy; but neoliberalism knows this, and has spent several decades feeding the idols of careerism and consumerism that make people feel autonomous while they're being exploited, without them clocking onto the system that is funneling power that should ostensibly be democratised upwards as wealth concentrates it in ever smaller pockets of control. Unless primary political decision-making power is in the hands of the general public, then issues like institutionalised racism and climate change and everything else will only be tackled when it is either cheap, easy, or politically unavoidable to do so - unfortunately, solving these kinds of issues is rarely cheap or easy, but given the sheer capitalism-induced apathy of much of the western public and the outright irrelevant spectacle of the actual political system, these things are often extremely politically avoidable to boot. Which is why Occupy scared the shit out of the establishment - and of course, the police were sent in, and peaceful groups of people congregating in public spaces to hold constructive discussions about tackling our societies' biggest problems were arrested in large numbers. The 2008 crisis was the beginning of the end for neoliberalism: it became clear that it was a highly unstable system, and one that people are starting more and more to wake up to as having not served the public interest at all. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are now serious prominent political figures, showing that the public has rediscovered its capacity to think past the establishment-preferred disgust/hate/fear reaction to 'socialism' and are seeing how thoroughly congruent with the ideals of democratic society these notions are - not to mention that higher equality helps support progress in a wide range of other socioeconomic issues.

   Occupy, while only really supported by leftish activists at the time, was big enough and loud enough to propel the idea of the 99% and the 1% into wider awareness - and that has had enormous sociopolitical repercussions and hopefully will continue to do so. Things change. Often for the worse, often surprisingly, sometimes for the better - more often if large numbers of people group together, organise, mobilise, and make themselves heard. That is the essence of democracy, and of progressive activism. I am proud to have been a participant (an extremely minor one - see **) this historic movement, and this book by the inimitable indefatigable Noam Chomsky was like an adrenalin-boost to my gusto for activisting**** - and if you're of similar ilk to me it would probably work for you too. So yeh, I'd recommend this book chiefly to lefties, as a potent encouraging reminder of what movements can achieve by bringing people together - even if tangible change is not immediately achieved, it always has longer-term deeper impacts by setting off ripple effects that start provoking conversation that can help to change the general consciousness.

* The selected bits include transcripts of a lecture, a Q&A, an interview, another interview, and a short passage in remembrance of Noam's late fellow radical Howard Zinn, and how the values he espoused in academia and activism were being rekindled.

** Including, at the peak of its spread, a small gathering outside Sheffield Cathedral, which I (only eighteen at the time, and nowhere near as actively political as I am today) tentatively visited for half an hour and had a really interesting conversation with a guy who looked like a cartoon punk brought to life about co-operatives (he recommended Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread to me and I read it on a family holiday - my first anarchist book!) and another with a friendly hippy-type about windfarms. 

*** Occupy's biggest achievement, other than rebooting western leftist activism with a massive surge of cross-pollinating ideas and methods for organisation, and (arguably) spawning anarcho-hacker collective Anonymous, was reframing this class conflict in terminology that made the reality of inequality far more accessible to the generally depoliticised (and often highly suspicious of people who talk like Marxists) public; out with the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, in with the 99% and the 1% - and then presumably out with the 1% as their obscenely excessive privileges are curbed and redistributed.

**** Which admittedly is why I read it - as you're probably aware, there is a general election coming up soon, and the Tories are probably going to win big, and it's hard to cling to constructive optimism in the face of all the present's turbulent perversions of systematic social and political reasonableness.

[edit - June 9th: ahahahahahahahahahaha! Oh, what a night to be the underdog. Jeremy, go and have yourself a well-deserved day off at the allotment.]

Persepolis: the Story of a Childhood

This book, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, is one that I will not discuss at length but I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm currently halfway through a several-day essay splurge and am reading pretty much everything about historical processes of democratisation in Turkey and Iran that I could easily find - this book, being as it is a more or less autobiographical account of the author's life from ages six to fourteen in Tehran during the years leading up to the 1979 revolution, the subsequent establishment of the repressive Islamic Republic, and the ruinous war with Iraq, was on the same shelves as many of my required sources and so I borrowed it from the library as a sort of pudding* and have just blasted it in one sitting and I'm hoping to comb through several more academic chapters after this blog post so sorry if you don't like mad run-on sentences. (I love them.)

   Persepolis is gripping, heartwarming, full of as much vivacious humour and character as it is incisive political consciousness - the relatively simple black-and-white illustrations convey a huge amount of emotional context and carry the story really well. Ultimately it's an education in historical empathy: western audiences are rarely exposed to narratives told in the Middle East unless it's a story about war, oil, politics, or all three, in which the main character is a western soldier, businessman, politician, or something, probably fighting cartoonish terrorists. Marjane Satrapi's work in Persepolis (including the sequel which I have not yet read) is the kind of story we need to see, hear, read, whatever, more of - as it helps better show the personal and social realities of what it was like to live in Iran through one of the most turbulent times in its modern history, and bridges the sense of our simply not knowing - though conveyed in the format of a comic, there is a deep and profound humanity in this book, and I would enthusiastically recommend it to anyone, whether or not you know much about the Middle East, whether or not you like graphic novels - it is a powerful and well-told story that will make you laugh and be sad and know more about Iranian history and what it's like to be a teenage girl with ambitions of punkdom living under an autocratic religious regime.**

   Anyway, that's the post. I'm going to drop this book in the returns bin in the library.

   Fin

* When you've been reading heavy academic non-fiction all week and you need something lighter, or at the very least more aesthetically pleasing.

** I mean, if that last bit doesn't hook you I don't know what will.

the Old Man and the Sea

This book by Ernest Hemingway is an indisputable masterpiece.* This was the third time I'd read it, and the second time I've read it in a single sitting (it's very short). Before I talk about the book I'd like to mention the actual physical copy - because (not wanting to rub it in if you end up tracking down a bog-standard modern reprint paperback) mine is beautiful; it's a pocketsize hardback from 1966, with faintly yellow-browned pages that smell of sitting on a beanbag in a sunlit attic with a full teapot and nothing to do but enjoy a good book, and a dust jacket with an excitingly expressionistic colourful painted illustration of a big fish on the front and a man in a small boat on the back. It was a Christmas present from my brother a few years ago, so cheers Seth.

   Anyway, the book (this next paragraph will contain plot spoilers, but the true worth of the book is poetic rather than 'oh wow That Happened' so decide for yourself if that matters).

   It is, very simply, about an elderly Cuban fisherman. He has not caught a fish for eighty-four days, and a young boy who he sometimes fishes with is concerned for him. One the eighty-fifth day, he sails out, and ends up hooking a big fish - too big to pull up, so he leaves it hooked and lets it pull his boat far away over the sea hoping it will tire itself out, which eventually it does, rising to the surface to reveal itself as a magnificent marlin, the biggest he has ever seen (and he's seen a lot - this is one experienced fisherman, as the narration shows). So when the opportunity arises, he harpoons it, and straps it to the side of his boat because it's too big to fit inside. But then, during the journey back to land, what should happen but sharks (flipping sharks!) eat his entire fish. By the time he hits the beach, exhausted from the three days spent with little food and water sat under the baking tropical sun clutching with desperate hunterly vigour onto a fishing line, there is nothing strapped to his boat but a tooth-scratched backbone with an enormous nose-sworded skull attached to one end and a giant crescent-moon tailfin to the other. The boy is distraught but proud, the other fishermen are cowed with respect and sympathy, and the old man, knackered and feeling both victorious and defeated, goes to sleep. That's it - I told you plot wasn't the main point.

   Hemingway's prose aches with a purity, a simplicity and elegance, that lends to this straightforward little story a depth and grandeur that puts the reader right there in the scene; man and boy and sea and fish all observed, described, but remaining something of an enigma, known truly only to themselves, even when memories of the man's earlier adventures are recalled in narration, these help provide insight into some of what he thinks he is but we are kept outsiders to him, seeing him chiefly through his actions, which are mostly about being a really good fisherman. He is precise, efficient, attentive, strong, patient, resourceful, and persistent, and in him we see reflected the height of human capability in using ones faculties to conquer the natural world for our own needs; in this case, a fish. But unlike another (much longer) story about a rivalry between man and sea creature in which man's pride and sea creature's ambivalence rendered the whole affair meaningless and tragic, it is clear that Hemingway's old man has a deeply profound respect for the fish (even calling it 'brother' at one point), which may not make moral sense to any vegetarian readers but lends his conversations with himself amid the narration of his fishing trip an air of ecological consciousness - this man sees and takes in the splendour of the natural world surrounding him, only conquering what he must to eat and sell. His reaction when the sharks rob him of his catch is (after doing all he can to fend them off, in improbable-badass-fashion killing several of them with a knife tied to an oar) one of resignation - an 'oh well, I didn't really deserve him, I cheated by using human trickery like fishing equipment, so it's only fair enough that sharks cheat me back'. It's a cyclical story then, and though it has elements of tragedy the attitude the man seems to carry throughout is one of profound acceptance of the unpredictability of nature and yet our dependence on it - and this robs it of being ultimately tragic, as the old man has had such a long life with many adventures that he is happily able to eke out a simple existence doing what he does best and taking humble pride in it.

   But really I don't think it's so much a story about human relationships with nature as it is a story about being a Good Man (in Hemingway's eyes); the old man's lifestyle and mindset are completely cohesive, and though he is past his prime he is still an excellent practitioner of a trade that blends the practical-primal peaks of everyday human endeavours well - good enough to catch the largest fish Havana had ever seen, but not good enough to save it from sharks; and therein lies the rub, try as he might, man will never conquer nature's indifference, and accepting this, knowing where we truly sit in the world and accepting it with stoic graceful willpower, is the kernel of energy that keeps the old man keen in his respect for nature even as he strives to defeat individual fish. Similar parallels about this sense of perspective being an importance mediating force in men's mindsets to pure masculine activities are revealed in conversations the old man and the boy have about baseball - the stardom of Joe DiMaggio is puzzled over when they read in the newspaper that he has a bone spur in his heel, and the old man wonders (when his hand cramps up after a day of being towed by the fish) whether Joe's minor pain would be a comparable hindrance in his field, or whether he'd just man up and get on with it and hit a home run. Basically the Hemingwayan view of masculinity is one of direct simplicity and purpose, strength of body, of mind, skill and will, but one that knows its place and its limits - chief among which is the sheer indifference of much of the world around us, including the natural world, to us. What do real men do faced with that? They persist.

   Enough of my eco-feminist ramblings. This is a really good book and nowhere near as thematically convoluted as I've probably made it sound. It is a book about nothing necessarily more than an old man catching a fish, and yet there are unfathomable oceanic depths to its simplicity. It is one of the most perfectly executed long short stories (or maybe short novels) to grace the many stacks of my bookshelf, and you'd probably like it.

* He won a Nobel Prize in Literature for it, which is kind of as indisputable as masterpieces get.

the Year of Living Danishly

This book by Helen Russell is a journalistic diary charting her experience of living for a year in rural Denmark, a country which has in many surveys and studies on general happiness in different countries come out on top - and so she seeks to delve into their lifestyle, culture, and social systems and stuff to work out whether this is robustly true, and, moreso, she and her husband* put into practice as many of the Danish quirks and habits as possible to see if they have an impact on their happiness. From hygge to communities coming together at the start of spring to watch how excited cows get when they get let out of the barns to joining clubs to having an excellent work-life balance to pastries to bizarrely-specific traditions to excellent state support for parents empowering women to  - there seems to be a great many of these quirks and habits that constitute what it means to live 'Danishly', but Russell places them deftly within a straightforward and cohesive view of roughly what kind of society it's like to be in, leaving it up to the reader to decide whether such a life seems enticing. It certainly seems so - there are aspects that strike me as slightly bonkers, but I'd probably say the same about any culture (especially Englishness), though also warmly endearing and conducive to carefree and well-grounded lifestyles that I imagine would make one pretty happy once you found your feet in it. Happiness is something I write about quite a lot on this blog (cos I read quite a lot of books about it I suppose) - it's the essence of what I think everyone is on some pragmatic everyday level pursuing with their lives, and yet our sociocultural climate is one that sends us incredibly mixed signals about how to get there.** So it's nice to have something not abstracted out of statistical research or philosophising or psychological theory, but reported first-hand from a befuddled self-deprecating Englishwoman trying her best to experiment with the happiness homegrown in Denmark - she interviews quite a few relevant people to flesh out these insights, and honestly from reading this book I am more or less convinced that Denmark has pretty much cracked (not completed by a long shot but got enough of the gist to be currently leading and probably continue making strong progress) the socio-politico-cultural-economic recipe for making a country full of people happy. I learnt a lot from this book, and also enjoyed it a lot - Russell writes with an adroitly wry humour that pervades everything, and the largely anecdotal format makes her and the Lego Man's joint pursuit of Danish-style happiness read like a holiday memoir that turns out to be highly informative. And, if you're anything like me, makes you want to visit Denmark as soon as plausible.

* Whose getting a job at the Lego factory was the prompting reason for their moving to Denmark - he is referred to throughout the book as 'the Lego Man' and seems pretty happy all the time, which I imagine you would be if you worked at the Lego factory.

** Is the pursuit of happiness a quest for finding true spiritual meaning? Or the reasonable development of social and relational perspective so we feel at ease with our place in the world? A delicate neo-utilitarian balancing act between finding purpose and deriving pleasure from our lives? Or is it just a matter of just not caring about stuff that isn't helping us feel like things are swell? Even after Helen Russell's move to Denmark, the objective jury is still out on this one, because happiness is, first and foremost, subjective, and so studies of specifically-happy mindsets (such as Danish) are probably the best way to further develop insights into how we can make societies happier. A big part of the Danish case seems to be highly effective public services - with great work protections, social care, welfare, education, healthcare; basically just having well-oiled effective apparatus for dealing with the kinds of problems that commonly make people's lives worse and for improving the kinds of potentials for people to make their and others' lives better. Personally I think true (as in solid dependable unshakeable joy) happiness is an introspective metaphysical state to be reached by insight and mindset, one which cannot be replicated or brought upon people en masse - but the basic steps for providing good systems for people to live their whole lives in with as little worry as possible can be observed empirically and so give clear indications as to the effects of such investment in society. Secular liberalism's primary quest is to provide good free lives for people, and Denmark is (as are the other Scandinavians) literally doing that better than other countries by operating a political economy that is pretty much a democratic semi-socialist model. Capitalism doesn't make people happy as equitably or reliably.

Fahrenheit 451

This book, a dystopian masterpiece by Ray Bradbury, is probably one of my all-time favourite novels (this is my third reading of it), being as it is largely about books, which astute readers of this blog will be aware I am quite fond of.

   In a futurised America where they're at war all the time but nobody really knows what for, where nobody talks to other people except shallow exaggerations of people beamed onto omnipresent screens, where sadness and anxiety and distrust permeate everyone's social consciousness too deeply to ignore such that all anyone can do to stay sane is distract oneself with meaningless jingles, entertainment, racing cars, self-medicating drugs; where (and this is where I am definitely talking about the novel and not hyperbolically describing the actual state of modern western society - oosh) totalitarian propaganda has persuaded everyone that freedom of thought and the existential quandaries one may think oneself into is the truest and deepest evil, and so to minimise sadness, items that prompt this kind of constructive, introspective, philosophical thinking - i.e. books - are to be disposed of. This is where our main character comes in. Guy Montag is a fireman; it is his job to go to locations where members of the public have notified him and the other firemen that there are books present, and upon arrival, burn them. (Point of trivia - the title is what it is because apparently 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the exact temperature at which paper catches fire.) Anyway, Guy encounters a weird* girl called Clarisse who doesn't care about the typical conformist norms entombing their society - and through conversation with her (plus probably some other things but SPOILERS) he finds inklings in himself awakening that plunge him into a thrilling and thought-provoking conflict with the culture he plays a part in upholding.

   This book is just jam-packed with beauty and horror and wisdom and humanity; it is superbly written,** with concise descriptions of nuanced emotional and psychological angles sometimes just twisting knives into the reader - I've enjoyed this more each time I've read it. Its sci-fi world (which technology-wise could feasibly be 2005 had America become a totalitarian state when this was first published) is drawn sparingly, but broadly, and with enough tantalising detail to give a clear impression of what it is like - and boy is it bleak. Guy Montag's world scares me more in many ways than that of 1984, because there is such a veneer of superficial saccharine positivity draped over the hollow habit of its citizens' lives. Dystopian fiction has always been an incisive means of worming out the most insidious, most harrowing, most potentially-ruinous characteristics of the societies that produce them - and in Fahrenheit 451 we have a staunchly-liberalistic poetic defense of intellectual freedom that cuts to the heart of many of the cultural tensions in the modern west, especially now in the era where the lines between Black Mirror episodes and actual possible implementations and implications of technologies are blurring.

   Basically, books are important but what's more important is what's in them - and this is something that can be in many things,*** but it is also something that can be suppressed. Free-thinking individuals should seek to resist and oppose such suppression wherever and whenever it may occur, even if that means memorising chunks of scripture and going to live with a gang of well-read meandering tramps in the woods to stay off the radar of the thought police. Even if that means, more plausibly, thinking for oneself and questioning and challenging commonly-held views, never fearing reasonable discussion. The reign of such dangers as ignorance and closed-mindedness are far more commonly down to individuals just not being bothered about the truth than authoritarian suppression or censorship of it. There's been a lot of use of the term 'post-truth' about our current political climate - we live in an age of social media echo chambers and 'fake news' mainstream propaganda machines. Dystopian states of affairs don't spring up overnight - they develop out of political exploitation of exigent sociocultural trends, and currently it feels like western society has walked straight off the cliff-edge of postmodernism and is plunging toward the rocks of utter anti-intellectual anarchy. If you are a reader, a thinker, join me and Ray Bradbury and Guy Montag and Stewart Lee in resisting these trends - or else who knows, we might end up with the democratically-elected President being an orange neo-fascist demagogue who people have only heard of because he used to fire ambitious businessnoobs on television.
   Oh, wait

* Weirdness is always relative. Clarisse is probably one of the most normal people in the book's whole world by our standards, but what a world.

** During a nine-day rush of creative effort on 10-cent-for-30-minute typewriters in the basement of a library. There's a great little epilogue by Ray Bradbury discussing the conception and construction of the novel.

*** The conversation Guy has with Faber about this has more solid-gold truth nuggets in it than some entire books I've read.

YOGA [teach yourself]

This book (okay not exactly that one, I got an edition from 1960 that I can't even find on Amazon, having found it in the 50p second-hand bargain bin of a bookshop near the park) by James Hewitt is pretty much what you'd expect from a fifty-seven year-old introductory guide to yoga: full of extremely deep New-Agey guff about mind over matter and expanding your consciousness (there's a chapter entitled 'Psychic Powers'), a few dashes of pseudo-scientific-sounding health benefits of meditation (which admittedly I've googled and there's a lot of science backing up the benefits), some good quotes selected from a variety of scriptures,* several highly-dubious claims about what masters of yoga can do (e.g. drink poison, bury themselves alive for two weeks, go a year without water); and FAR from the best thing for anyone who wants to start practicing yoga to turn to. I mean, seriously - the prose is clunky and inaccessible, especially when giving directions; there are a few sparse illustrations but they just made me laugh. The sections of this book about yoga in general seem overstated but also do definitely connect with the appeal of it; however, the chapters about meditation, breathing, stretches and postures, even dietary and lifestyle aspects, all smell far too academic for this to qualify as a 'teach yourself' book in the 21st-century. I mean, for something I picked up out of a bargain bin, this has definitely swayed me with my prior inclinations of trying to start practicing yoga once I've got my own place (currently living in a student house where my room isn't big enough to do much without banging into stuff, which is never very zen) - but as far as learning yoga goes, I guarantee you'll be able to find resources more helpful than this on the internet for free.** This might've been a good book for it in 1960, but times change, dude.

* I appreciated this - this book made it very clear that yoga, despite traditionally helping facilitate aspects of self-knowledge, self-control and meditation for many faiths, is not intrinsically spiritual but physiological: simply physical and mental exercises that help one develop physical and mental faculties and therefore congruent with pretty much any belief system.

** If your googling fails herein, simply pop down to a nearby wholefood shop and check the windows for flyers from self-employed yoga teachers.