The Angry Spider

This, admittedly, is not really a book. It's a single-page-worth of internet fanfic ('fan fiction' for those among you with better things to read, which is hopefully all of you, and is usually also me), based on a single line from episode 8 of season 3 of BBC political-satirical comedy The Thick of It.* It is, however, quite funny, and if you're a fan of the show, I'd strongly recommend giving it a read,** especially since it'll take you five minutes tops. Anyway, even though this isn't really a book, I felt compelled to do a post about it, lest the whole month of September 2016 lie empty upon my blog's archives - an increasingly likely prospect, as I just haven't been doing much reading over summer. Well, other than that huge week-long splurge while I was on holiday. This is because I've been working on a big personal writing project, and my summers, while generally happily filled with recreational reading, have this year become much more word-output than word-input heavy. So, apologies to any post-starved readers - but fret not, I've not stopped reading entirely, nor have I given up on this blog. It might just be a bit sparse, especially since uni starts again soon.

* MILD EXPLANATORY SPOILER ALERT: Malcolm Tucker, the sweary Scottish hyper-connected hyper-angry spin doctor extraordinaire at the heart of the British government as portrayed in the show and at the heart of the show itself, temporarily finds himself jobless. Someone reads a list of increasingly absurd-sounding little jobs he could take on to fill his time post-political-career, one of which is "write a children's book called The Angry Spider". Malcolm mutters "for fuck's sake" and stands to leave. I found the line quite funny upon rewatching, and from somewhere the notion popped into my head that TTOI does have quite a cult following, and like anything with a cult following, probably inspires occasional online fan-fiction, and this was almost asking for it. So I gave it a quick google, and was not displeased. Hence this post.

** If you've not seen the show, there's probably no point, but you should also watch the show, because it's one of the finest satire series ever committed to television.

How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

This book, a novel by Mohsin Hamid, was not at all what I expected. I included it on/in my holiday reading-pile as a bit of light relief from the non-fiction otherwise comprising the pile, assuming from the blurb-quotes and title that it would be a very well-written exciting funny satirical romp of a rags-to-riches romance story. And, to be fair, it is. But I was unprepared for the sheer brilliance of Hamid as a writer - this is a novel that sucks you into the life of its protagonist with all the raw power of a momentarily-startled goose getting sucked through a jet turbine. I would've finished it all in one go did circumstances not conspire against me.* Before I even start discussing the plot, style, themes, character and setting, various other general brilliances, in any detail - I fully exhort anyone who likes a good novel to bump this one up to near the top of your To-Read List** as it's one of the most original, powerful, and downright gorgeously life-affirming things I've ever read. Maybe don't even bother reading this post - I don't have any particularly interesting reflections on it, I'm just going to talk about why I think it's such a great novel, in considerable detail.

   So.

   [Having just finished writing this post I feel obliged to add - SPOILER ALERT.]

   Basically, the novel is about a man from Asia who is born in poverty and becomes extremely wealthy. We never learn his name - the book is written in second person, as if you, the reader, are this character - and far from disorienting or gimmicky, this serves to hit home the interminable squalour or dizzying privilege experienced throughout. The novel spans this man's entire life; starting out as a sickly rural toddler teetering on the cusp of possibility and prospects seeming minimal (even survival only down as a maybe), before your father moves the family to the city, you enrol in school and do well, you get a job and put in the effort to learn business smarts as well as a bank of global cultural reference-points, you make it into higher education and navigate the ideologues and religious-political activism that dominate there, you gain further work experience paying close attention to the modes of a man who knows what he's doing, you turn an entrepreneurial hand and start producing and selling bottled water (a much-needed good) which, following a few of the standard hiccups and ladders (violent clashes with more established business rivals, greasing the right palms, striking back-room deals with political figures, you know) blossoms into a hugely successful corporate entity - well, for a while - and finally, you take stock of what's been worthwhile in your life, and you die. Somewhere along the way you marry a wife*** whom you go on to neglect, but more importantly (to the novel), as a teenager you strike up a friendship with a girl, fall for her, only for her (following a youth-shattering pleasurable encounter) to leave and pursue a career in modelling, which you follow closely for the next decade or so, semi-accidentally running into her later in life, and then slowly fading from each other's memory (until, spoilers).

   The narration does occasionally lay off from being purely second person recount of your life to take flights of descriptive detail about other characters' lives, situations, struggles; and similarly to describe the frenetic dynamic surroundings enabling the events of the story - that of massive rapid socioeconomic development in Asia.**** These latter passages help place 'your' story in context (one poor kid who made all the right moves and got lucky out of an enormous continent of poor kids who, largely, don't make the right moves and/or don't get lucky - the former passages about other characters help flesh this out, often twisting a dagger of bleak realism through your gut with a single deft sentence).

   Awareness of making these right moves forms a large part of the basis of the structure and style of the novel - it's written (very loosely) as a parody of a self-help book.***** Chapter one, where you begin as a child on the brink of serious illness in the helpless deserts of opportunity that are the underdeveloped countryside, is titled 'Move to the city' - which, in that chapter, thanks to your father's family spirit, you do, and you have taken the right first step in becoming filthy rich in rising Asia. In subsequent steps the narrator (i.e. the writer of the self-help book) walks you through the successes of the protagonist (i.e. you) in becoming filthy rich, 'Learn from a master', 'Be prepared to use violence', 'Befriend a bureaucrat', and so on - with the exception of the chapter in which you fall in love with the girl, which is titled 'Don't fall in love' on account of infatuation's (especially with a girl who soon after your first encounter runs off and becomes a famous model while you're still struggling through entry-level business experience) being a hindrance rather than a help in your striving to become filthy rich. However, this element takes on a new vigour in the book's later chapters, when you are old and losing control of the empire you have built, when you are verging on being forgotten and dead: the narrator (who to be fair is playfully insightful throughout, in short bursts at the fore of each chapter) takes stock of the fact that you, though having become filthy rich, seem to have lost steam.

   The 'How To' intentionality lends a dogged single-mindedness to the protagonist's pursuit of wealth (one that, given his abject poverty faced in early chapters, can be entirely appreciated) that leaves by the wayside relationships with parents, siblings, wife, son - not ignored, but not prioritised: through the bulk of the book, you are following the self-help guide to getting filthy rich, and your mislaid attention is of course attended to by the narrator and it hits home superbly. Only when your energy is spent and your business in the hands of another do you reassess your priorities, regret the marriage you allowed to crumble, and by a chance meeting with the girl (also now very old) stumble into a more-or-less happy ending. I don't think by losing the bulk of his wealth and re-encountering his first love the protagonist's plight is meant to show us that young love is what really matters, or even in a skewed way to show us the opposite (classic novel trajectory): I think Hamid is doing something far more fundamental - to make us attentive to real life as it is lived, in the moment, shared with people one loves. The protagonist's pursuit of wealth tears him away from his birth family when they need his help (and he does help out financially but his relationships with them stultify until they, having not become filthy rich to escape the oppressive conditions of rising Asia, succumb to various ills long before he does) and even when he starts his own family his prominent position occupies all his concerns - so that while his wife and son are provided for far above the majority of the population or the protagonist when he was young, they are starved for him relationally. Hamid is not saying 'oh but then he meets the girl again so it's a happy ending' - he is saying DO NOT FORGET WHAT IS IMPORTANT: PEOPLE - especially across the span of a whole life, mislaid priorities can leave us empty even when we achieve great things in one particular field, and when these achievements are stripped away, what are we left with? The protagonist and the girl meeting again in old age is not a solution, it is a consolation, where you, with all your friends and family dead, your wife moved on, your son busy with work as you were at his age, and you not even filthy rich anymore - find some comfort in finding someone to share the last few lonely years with, and appreciate properly, living in them as they are, loving who you are with.

   The whole style and structure and story is a magnificent testament to the fundamental importance of empathy: of it being part of how we are as human persons that we constantly seek to know and care how those around us are feeling, and respond rightly to that, rather than assuming people to be ticking along aright and continuing following whatever self-help guide to a less important goal is playing itself out in our heads. Reading and stories are part of this learning process, as the narrator sometimes discusses - indeed, getting emotionally involved in a good novel is probably about as empathetic an experience as one can possibly have on your own. And this novel does so like very few others (no doubt, literally making 'you' the protagonist helps). I rarely quote passages from books I'm blogging about, but here's a relevant passage from the final chapter:

"As you create this story and I create this story, I would like to ask you how things were. I would like to ask you about the person who held your hand when dust went in your eye or ran with you from the rain. I would like to tarry here awhile with you, or if tarrying is impossible, to transcend my here, with your permission, in your creation, so tantalizing to me and so unknown. That I can't do this doesn't stop me from imagining it. And how strange that when I imagine, I feel. The capacity for empathy is a funny thing."

   Truly, Mohsin Hamid is one of the greatest novelists I have read, and this paragraph I hope serves to show that he genuinely understands the raw power that stories have, and is using the medium of the written word for its greatest possible use - to inspire and empower us to do what we know is fundamental: empathise.

   I'm done. Read this book.

* I started it during the Megabus journey from Barcelona to Paris to Amsterdam (a 25-hour crawl but I hate flying on eco-principle and this was super cheap for such a long drive), hopping from a family holiday to a techno festival, and was engrossed after about three pages, but eventually had to sleep. And then I couldn't read it when I got to Amsterdam because there was a bloody festival going on, and my engrossment passed during all the Quality Music - so I had to wait a few days for a truly spare moment (the Megabus back to London) to dive back in. I think this might be the only novel I've completed having read exclusively during international bus journeys.

** Do people other than me have To-Read Lists? Dunno. You should. To start you off, here's three novels with a life-spanning emotional heft similar to this one: 1, 2, 3.

*** None of the characters have names - they are all referred to either in immediate situational context or via their relationship to you (e.g. 'your wife', 'your father', 'the girl'), a touch which lends the reader's walkthrough of the protagonist's life an earthy, human, memory-like quality. You have to picture the scene, because there aren't specific verbal labels to latch onto in your head.

**** It doesn't really matter where in Asia - the cultural references are so generic that it could be anywhere from Afghanistan to China to India to Myanmar - what is important is the enormity of globalisation's impact on the societies and economies on the continent where this is happening, which has been by no means uniform, but the events of the novel are characterised so much by this process above country-specific culture that the vagueness probably helps the reader get sucked in, fleshing out the look and feel of the protagonist's environment with whatever Asian culture we're most familiar with. Nifty trick to grab a global readership - 'How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Pakistan' (cited as that's where Mohsin Hamid is from but I haven't a clue if he wrote it with a specific nation in mind as setting) just doesn't smack of the same seismic shift, which is a key ingredient in the book's punch. 

***** Hence the title.

the Economy of Grace

This book by Kathryn Tanner is a veritable nuclear submarine of well-argued scholarship. I won't say much about it, partly because the content of the book is more the fruitful-and-thorough cross-pollination of ideas I've already read other books about and so can easily just dump loads of relevant links (see final paragraph) into this post, partly because I'm rushing so as to join my brother for a game of giant backyard chess (yes I'm still on holiday), and partly because if this post piques your interest even in the slightest I think you should just read this book.

   Tanner seeks to explore 'theological economy' - how religious truth might yield any implications for systems of material resource distribution. She argues that such a link is undeniable if we look at Christian theology with any degree of serious application, especially when regarding worldly structures such as capitalism which literally thrive on collective selfishness - the opposite of the rightly-aligned heart-motives called to by Christianity - in competition that inevitably leaves winners and losers, and more often than not the former feel exempt from any responsibility to extensively care for the latter. She goes on to explore philosophical and theological conceptions of property, of ownership, of gift-giving, of interdependence; and chiefly asks where grace, the central component of Christian ethical reality, fits into our understanding of economic systems - she concludes the grace sits at considerable odds to the atomised individualistic competitiveness that characterises capitalism. An 'economy of grace' is not one of everyone-for-themselves-competition nor one of purely-reciprocal gift-giving - it is one of plenty and prosperity, because people understanding the nature (in a Christian worldview) of their existence as an individual human among the wider human society/community have a radically different attitude to other beings, to resources, to their own time, to their own needs and wants and those of others; one that completely upturns basic presumptions about how markets work, how welfare works, and more. Toward the end of the book she tentatively explores some structural changes that could take place to bring us toward this model of economy, alongside a hefty prayerful caveat about how lost and broken the world is and the need for such economic change to be known to be unsustainable unless supported by genuine heart change.

   It is an extremely interesting and thought-provoking book, and I would challenge any Christian who takes social justice seriously and has an interest in critical understanding of our global economic system so as to work for what is good and right to read it.

   I promised a final paragraph full of link-dumpage, so here you are: for excellent explorations of how non-competitiveness in global systems can complement and accelerate many aspects of social, political, economic, and environmental justice, from a non-theological approach, check out Tim Jackson and several scholars from the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. For a general further reading on Christian views on social justice, check out Tim Keller - but for a much more in-depth nuanced reading on grace, God's love, and the nature of rightly-oriented human preference in ethical decision-making, check out Robert Adams. Finally, if you're up for something quite dense but incredibly encouraging, challenging, and enlightening on the topic of 'love' as something that God does and that we should do, I cannot recommend better than Søren Kierkegaard (obviously ties directly into Kathryn Tanner's discussions of grace).

Consensus Handbook

This book, the handbook for consensus decision-making published by Seeds for Change, the group who run training workshops about all that jazz, is literally what it says on the tin. I don't really have any substantive thoughts of my own on it - it's just a really helpful book for anyone engaged in community-level organisation or activism, or any group that could potentially benefit from making decisions using consensus (could be interesting for groups of church leaders/elders - whole congregations even maybe). As such, if you're currently involved in a group that makes decisions and you feel that that group's method of making decisions often doesn't take full account of everyone's viewpoints or concerns, and would be open to investigating a super-democratic super-inclusive surprisingly-streamlined method of decision-making that is great for effective solutions and group cohesion (speaking from experience as someone who's been part of a couple of groups that use consensus decision-making for over two years), check consensus out. The whole book is available for free as a .pdf from the link at the head of this post.

   It walks through, in helpful terms and constantly setting its principles in the context of its values, how to do consensus decision-making, how to facilitate meetings using it, techniques and activities that can be helpful in consensus-facilitated meetings, and common troubleshooting problems that may arise when trying to make decisions or run meetings by consensus. (if you've got this far through the paragraph and you don't know what consensus decision-making is, I'm not going to bother to explain it, click here.) There's a fairly thought-provoking chapter at the end too about some of the problems we have in the lack of democratic decision-making in wider society, and how community organisers starting to favour consensus plays a role in slowly changing that.

Moby Dick

This book, an indisputable classic and oft-touted 'Great American Novel' by Herman Melville, is basically about whales and the men who hunted them, more specifically one big white whale nicknamed Moby Dick and one big white male human named Captain Ahab who becomes obsessed with the pursuit of the eponymous cetacean. Notably (to my blog, not to general discourse on this book) this book is second to Frank Herbert's Dune as the book that has taken me the longest to finish ever.* I've just finished it in a mad day-long splurge because the last hundred pages or so start ramping up a little bit (and the last sixtyish were actually gripping) and, well, I'm on holiday in Spain with my family, and everyone else has gone to the beach (regular readers will know that 'holiday', to me, in large part consists of setting aside Time For Reading, i.e. eschewing more sociable activities for a four-to-ten-hour chunk, perhaps every other day) which means it was a Nearly Get Sunburnt Back At The House While Finishing A Book Day for me.

   I did not enjoy and do not personally recommend this book.
   At the same time, it is an immensely deep, complex, and powerful work of genuine literature, and I'm sure many people would find a lot in it to make it worth reading. Certainly I didn't hate it; I'll try to talk first about bits I liked. The overall style of the prose was probably my favourite aspect - Melville writes with an eloquent ruggedness that carries the novel, a balance of pragmatic jargon and poetic flights; as such the text's atmosphere feels both hyper-endowed-with-meaning and like a cross between a classical library and an actual whaling-ship. Then there genuinely are many good parts, truly excellent parts that one cannot help reading without feeling the recognition of a fantastic writer: occasional brilliant turns of dialogue, or extended reflections** from the narrator (Ishmael***), or descriptive passages that paint such gorgeously atmospheric scenes of whaling that I found myself looking at harpoons on eBay.
   Now, onto things about it that I didn't like so much. Firstly, while this is admittedly more of a hippy's whinge than an actual complaint against the novel (but what kind of hippy would I be did I not make one); the romanticised masculinised glory of man's conquest over nature, as portrayed in one of the most enduring grudges in literature (Ahab & the whale), has, given the novel's culturally ubiquitous suffusion in the West, undoubtedly contributed to the development of an anthropocentric social normality which at this point a century and a half since its publication has all but severed humanity's felt and known relationships with nature, to our peril and to the peril of many animals we now unthinkingly steamroller in the name of progress. Less hunting, more saving - and forget about the dogged hunting-down of one single specific whale, that's actually bonkers.****
   Secondly, while this is probably more excusable for an 1851 Nantucketer than a 2014 Swede, it's still unpleasant and uncomfortable to read and almost just feels clumsy - the non-white characters, of whom there are several, are portrayed within the narrowest array of affectionate caricatured stereotypes of 'the exotic'. Though that said, literally none of the characters except Ahab***** (unless you count Ishmael on account of his endless paragraphs of reflection) display any emotional depth - they're rough-and-ready experienced whale-catchers whose actions and words betray nothing of even a hinted-at internal life, instead dutifully fulfilling the slow-burning chain of events that constitutes the plots or spouting the author's thoughts in clunky dialogue. This leads me to my final and main thing - either there has been a genuine lapse in constructing interesting and believable characters, or it's all part of the plan...
   Finally, the main thing that annoys me about the novel is the fact that it might actually be, in ways I suspected during the reading of it, genius; all the things I found most infuriating and tedious about the book are (quite probably) in there for very good reason, to create a text that further illumines both the narrator's inner life during the plot's events and the author's inner life during the book's writing, and to thus create a readers' experience that amplifies the very core themes of the book. This core theme is the meaninglessness of obsession, the futility of straining to assert oneself against the void; obviously explored via long dragged-out metaphor in Captain Ahab's vengeful pursuit of Moby Dick, a whale that, while it may have wronged him, bears him no ill, and has no frameworks for comprehending the vindictive nature of its being hunted - Ahab, throughout the course of the novel, descends into madness and pushes his crew out of sensible patterns of activity as this obsession takes hold, only for both encounters with the white whale to be completely devoid of any reciprocated sense of poignancy, the beast merely doing what whales-avoiding-capture-by-whalers do.
   Back to infuriating and tedious - the bits of the book that rendered my enjoyment of it so difficult. Primarily, an enormous proportion of it (like, seriously, between a third and two fifths) is huge dumps of non-fictional information about whales, whale anatomy, whale-catching as an economic activity and its history and techniques, cultural or anthropological or philosophical reflections on whales or whaling, various tools and processes using by whalers when whaling, and so on - in painfully exacting and extensive detail. Some of these chapters were among the most boring passages of novels I think I have ever read (but they are still written beautifully, however far that goes). Secondarily, it's strewn, especially in Ishmael's 'inner monologue' parts, with extensive and obscure references to 'classics', to such a degree that it genuinely feels like Melville was insecure and thought he'd chuck in as much of these as he could, even when adding barely anything to the flow or stock of the prose, to come across as a Legit Man Of Words.
   Here's the really annoying bit: these aspects actually complement the theme of obsession perfectly. Ishmael draws us into this story about Ahab keenly chasing a whale. We are slowly introduced to the crew and the world of whaling, and before long, we are plunged into chapters and chapters of Just Stuff About Whales/Whaling - reflecting Ishmael as he is forced by necessity to learn, extremely in-depth, more of his trade and its objects (whales). Likewise, Herman himself must have accrued an immense amount of knowledge about whales and whaling to have been able to write this novel - I quite enjoy the speculation that once his research hit a certain point he might've just thought "allow this, I'm basically a genius on whales and whaling now, I'm gonna paraphrase this into atmosphere-enhancing prose and stick it all in there to make it seem like the character's getting sucked in"; and once at that stage, he may have further thought "if obsessiveness itself is an aspect of how I'm choosing what to put in, I may as well decorate and flourish it with literary and historical and sociocultural references that would seem ostentatious in any other context!" Who knows what Herman thought? This theory would also explain why all the non-Ahab characters are so flat (they're only there to help display obsessive whaling!), including Ishmael himself (he's only there as a viewpoint for watching Ahab's obsession but also to vent his own meta-obsessive stuff about whales!). Regardless, I am more inclined now to think that some degree of deliberation went into the novel as a whole and Herman Melville wasn't just some cetacean-mad writer with a grand vision and literally no skill at self-editing. Even so, the sheer amount of these bits just makes the whole experience of reading the novel a frustrating and sometimes seemingly endless one - remember, I only finished it at all out of persistent refusal to let Moby Dick beat me.
   Wait a minute, that sounds familiar.
   So maybe the reader's experience is meant to mirror that same grudge-building patience-testing dogged-pushing-onward-to-the-finish of Captain Ahab and Ishmael and Herman Melville himself? Maybe it is. Whatever the case, my gut feeling when thinking back over this book is "I'm glad I read it but I am more glad that I don't have to read it anymore." Annoyance, mainly.

* Arguably longest, depending on whether you count Genuinely Giving Up as a factor. I started Dune when I was 13 and then had it more or less on-the-go very slowly before finishing it in a spurt of realising it was actually excellent when I was 22. Moby Dick on the other hand, I ill-advisedly embarked upon as a 7-year-old, having just seen Matilda (she reads it in that), only to bail out after a chapter or two, understandably spooked by the dense prose and scary exotic characters (though for whom upon more recent reading, my 'wow this character is a bit much' had matured into 'wow this portrayal is very racist'), and then re-attempting the novel in my second year of A-levels. I'd planned to do some kind of comparative coursework thing about narrators using Ishmael alongside Pi Patel and Holden Caulfield and Christopher Boone, but ended up just using the other three, as Ishmael's story was an epic one horribly told, and it took me the next five years to finish reading it. The only things that kept me going were a grim (almost Ahab-like) determination to not be defeated by the infamous Moby Dick, itself the white whale of classic novels (by which I mean fatty, not elusive or supreme), and the creeping hope that the ending would be epic, which it sort of almost was. There were a fair few good bits - read above.

** One part that springs particularly to mind, for me at least, is the first paragraph of chapter forty-nine - Melville's capacity for sweeping-yet-accurate philosophical musings couched in well-textured writing shows well. There are many other bits like that but this is the only one I can summon from the top of my head, as it resonated with me.

*** Narrators are (complete the sentence) [vessels for the conveyance of story] AND/OR [vessels for the conveyance of reflective musing] AND/OR [vessels for the conveyance of factual information relevant to events in the story] AND/OR [characters].
   When I asked Herman Melville to complete that sentence, he excluded characters! That does explain why despite Ishmael's inner monologue comprising probably way over 70% of the book, we finish Moby Dick knowing nothing tangible about him - except that he knows a lot about whaling - which is something I vaguely expect of a narrator. See the paragraph above about obsession being a theme of the novel having an influence on its content choices - it may excuse Ishmael somewhat.

**** Suggestion for a sequel: Ishmael, some years after the [SPOILER ALERT] death of Captain Ahab during a misjudged attempt to bring a certain white whale to justice, goes full circle. His insane obsession with whales (see above) brings him to value them above their economic instrumentality, and he gathers a ragtag troupe of whatever the equivalent of PETA activists was in mid-19th-century America, and they row about all over the world forcibly but peacefully disrupting whale hunts. It ends with Moby Dick showing up and trashing their boat - Ishmael is holding his harpoon when it swallows him, and at the last moment he thinks "you don't deserve to be saved you evil whale!" and stabs it through the roof of the mouth. They both die, the end.

***** And to an extent Pip, a black kid who nearly drowns and dies on the inside.

the Prophet

This book, an exquisite masterpiece by Kahlil Gibran, is ostensibly poetry,* but reads like some variety of holy scripture - which is sort of the point. It opens with (you guessed it) a prophet, Almustafa, who has been living in the city of Orphalese for twelve years - but it is his time to leave, a ship is coming to return him to his birthplace. He dithers slightly on the way to the harbour, reflecting upon the time he has spent here and the pain of departure, and as he does so, the people of the town see him going and rush out to both say farewell and implore him to stay.

   Of course, he cannot stay, but the crowds stir Almustafa's heart to allow him to linger long enough to impart some of the wisdom he has (found? realised? built?) while living among them. Thus lays out the bulk of the book, two-or-three-page chapters in which a citizen of Orphalese asks him to speak on a particular topic,** which he then does - expounding in concisely enormous, universally everyday, ambiguously particular, incisively encouragingly challengingly wise terms upon that topic. Gibran's writing here is sublime - the choice of words, structure of phrasing, even layout of the whole book, emulates something akin to the Q'ran (at least English translations of it which I have read parts of) or the Judeo-Christian wisdom books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes - and yet the content of this wisdom does not seem clearly derived from any one specific religion, but seems to draw on all of their overlaps, as well as their overlaps with earthly wisdom and the highest orders of philosophy and ethics, to develop a point of view for the prophet that reads like something truly transcendent and fundamental. And yet, beautifully, it is not difficult to read! His poetic imagery is at times dense, and as I said earlier, regularly ambiguous - but far from impenetrable, as the actual text is grounded very much in common social experience. Anyway, the prophet does a shortish super-deep spiel about the twenty-six topics listed (see **) below, then gives a longer farewell speech which digs up some stirring reminders to both his crowd and the reader of the importance of wisdom, of heeding it, of remembering it, of the ease with which it is forgotten and the brokenness that often ensues when it is; he then gets on his boat and goes home.

   This is a book I wager almost anyone could read and feel both deeply affirmed and challenged by - and is that not the point of wisdom?*** All in all, this is an utterly astounding little book: the pages become papyrus as you turn them, such is its ancient sagacity - all the more incredible when you realise it was written in New York in the early 20th century. (Whatever floats your own boat, but if you're going to read this I'd strongly recommend doing so in a single sitting under a tree in nice weather - I mean, that's a great way to read most things, but particularly this.)

* Weirdly, I acquired this in the same manner, and from the same person, albeit from a different bookshop and about a year later, as the last poetry book I read. I've asked them to stop doing this as it's becoming a bizarre habit, as amusing and meaningless a symbolic gesture as it may be.

** In order: love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.

*** [Christian-blogger-footnote]: well... no. "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom", and while quests in search of a universal truth may well often take us there, it is not the same thing from a human perspective. If fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, not its conclusion or outcome, that implies that any genuine wisdom cannot be attained or anchored without first fearing the Lord - certainly the wisdom of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Jesus take us to this point. (It is interesting to note that Kahlil Gibran was himself a Christian.) But human wisdoms have developed in the surrounding social, cultural and historical spaces as Lord-wisdom, and because Lord-wisdom, being the God-defined nature of life and reality, holds its water as wisdom, we tend to find that many human derivatives of wisdom, from Buddhist philosophy to complex secular constructivist ethics, share a fair amount of surface content. This is unsurprising, if God exists then he defines what is good, and obviously people prefer what is good, so he forms a gravitational centre to those ideas (see Robert M. Adams on this) - but a human seeking of 'goodness' in an abstracted form that does not have an intentional and humble pursuit of God at its core seems, frankly, flimsy. Yes, it may well make people wiser, happier, more moral, but without a personal God of love as its foundation and centre (alongside a worked-out understanding of theology surrounding one's relationship to that God and to a reasonable degree the nature of that God's love), this wisdom, however much it may seem to be approaching universal truth, is like an incredibly beautiful chair that you can never sit it because it can't hold the weight of a person.

the Jesus Comic

This book by Jason Ramasami (this guy) is a graphic illustrated retelling of the biography of Jesus, based on selected extracts from the four biblical gospels. Ramasami does a stellar job of communicating the life and character of Christ and his contemporaries in engaging and likeable drawings, using a small set of simple recurring symbols to convey grand theological truths in simplified-but-that's-exactly-appropriate-in-a-comic forms. These drawings are striking, often amusing, and once you get the gist of the semantics of his pictures, very easy to follow - lubricated nicely by a small amount of text explaining the theological, historical, or social events depicted in each panel, page, or spread. There are twelve sections to the comic, following a particular chunk of Jesus's life (e.g. his birth, his temptations, one or two healings, angering the Pharisees, his trial, his crucifixion, his resurrection and its implications, etc), by no means comprehensively covering the contents of the gospels - Jason prefaces the comic with a short note explaining that it is not a replacement presentation of the gospel, rather a supplement to aid the flow of understanding for people who engage better with comics than with tomes of systematic theology or YouTube videos. It's extremely readable - I breezed through it while lazily half-watching the tennis after a family picnic (indoors, it rained, #England) earlier this afternoon. Jason Ramasami also does a really good job throughout of showing how the theological truth's he's conveying tied into the story of Jesus have implications for the beliefs of the reader - obviously a comic isn't the place for robust apologetics, but the appeal and cohesiveness of it will no doubt help embellish and give graphic life to readers' understanding of Jesus's story and significance. A pretty great little resource for anyone who's keen to explore scripture and the gospel in a fresh way, and it might even work as an evangelical prompt for visual learners (provided the prompter is willing to discuss the theology and biblical narrative padding behind the graphic system in considerable depth, as despite how accessible this book is, there's still a great deal I'm not sure the average non-Christian reader would grasp).

Corbyn: the Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics

This book, a study of Jeremy Corbyn's unexpected landslide victory of the Labour Party's leadership race and its implications by Richard Seymour, is a riveting and challenging read. I bought it as a Fathers' Day present for my dad, whose interest in politics has been stirred by the resurgence of the meaningful alternative to neoliberal hegemony that Corbyn provides and that is increasingly becoming a powerful force in British politics: I took it to a festival he was lined up to speak at but given certain events this week (BREXIT) he's been facing even stronger than usual criticisms, culminating in Labour MPs calling for this democratically-elected suppported-by-majority-of-party-members highly-principled man to step down, and so he pulled out.
   To be honest I'm too disgusted with the British public at the current news to bother writing much reflection about this book. I'm just going to briefly say what it's about then rant a lot.
   Seymour is a keen historian and commentator, and while his left-wing bias does show through it's clear that he's not an unthinking Corbynista - the book delves into some deep scrutiny of problems with Labour and with British politics in general that have been developing for decades, and which Jeremy Corbyn is uniquely poised to try to change (or, as currently looks more likely, to fall victim to). There are incredibly complex and well-rooted defence mechanisms of the conservative establishment in British society, supported by the anti-intellectual culture and non-proportionally-representative structure of our 'democracy': Richard Seymour does an excellent job of walking us through the last few decades of the Labour Party, its slow and deliberate killing-off of grassroots working-class support through New Labour, its desperation for electability-at-all-costs dragging it relentlessly to the right, these two factors robbing Labour leaders of the possibility of countering the status quo and promoting social justice by establishing clear narratives about what is wrong with our societies and economies. Corbyn has been hounded, ridiculed, aggressively targeted by the government, by corportate powers, by the mainstream media, by vast swathes of Middle Englanders, and by his own party. I fully recognise that his leadership style is not the slick presidential one of Blair or Cameron, his voting record is led so consistently by principle above the whip and so many in Parliament distrust his capacity for uniting the party, his ideology is distinctively one of democratic socialism which (given neoliberal hegemony) it is fashionable to say is dead these days. He doesn't wear expensive suits or show adequate respect to monarchs whom, to be fair, he doesn't believe should exist in the privileged aristocratic vacuum that they do. But the Labour Party has been dying slowly for years (hence why self-indulgent liberal lefties like me often lend support elsewhere) - maybe our current state of affairs is so royally messed up that the advocation of peace and equality truly is 'completely unelectable'; nevertheless he has the mandate of Labour's members, and for the party to have spent the year since his election trying their best to oust him one way or another is a disgrace and makes a shambolic mockery of the British political left. How can we have enough solidarity to make meaningful gains against the conservative establishment if we can't accept an (admittedly quite boring but by pretty much everyone's account very nice) imperfect leader and make the best of having him in that position? Corbyn's leadership should prompt opportunities to completely challenge and change the way we do politics: both reframing narratives about social and economic issues to re-engage working-class voters with the political system and help them understand policies that will actually benefit them, as well as reforming the manner in which political conversation is held in the public eye to make it kinder, less grounded in tribal rhetoric, appealing to reason and people's propensity for goodness rather than stimulating fear and division. We somehow find ourselves in a Britain in which people trust Eton-Oxbridge-educated professional defenders of the privileged elite telling them that what's best for them are policy sets that anyone with a scrap of economic literacy should be able to tell are thinly-disguised entrenchments of that very same elite privilege. Yet on that same austerity-swallowing Brexit-voting island, a gentle bearded man, who wears cardigans knitted by him mum to the House of Commons, who has spent his entire adult life campaigning for social justice, for the poor, against war and racism and discrimination of all kinds, is reviled as a national traitor because of the angle at which he bowed at a memorial.
   Anyway. My own furiously bubbling intent to emigrate aside, this book is an excellent insight into the problems facing our contemporary democratic system and the Labour Party's place in it, putting Jeremy Corbyn into a context in which he is shown for what he is: an opportunity for real tangible change. Maybe he won't win a general election, maybe he will - but with the support of the Party and its members he is the perfect leader to reshape the way in which British politics occurs, and shift its parameters to the left. This is something definitely achievable, and of urgent importance in our political climate, where the gap between rich and poor continues to grow and far-right sentiments boil into personifications like Nigel Farage who have contributed to a normalisation of xenophobia. Richard Seymour writes well and clearly, and at no point slips into either the empty utopian vision-spouting nor the empty dystopian scaremongering that books on party politics often do. He maintains balance and objectivity, showing Corbyn as a genuine figure of possibility and hope.

[If you're interested in these problems but can't be arsed to read a whole book, check out this, this, and this Guardian opinion pieces, or even better this and this blog post from Another Angry Voice.]

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.

Prosperity Without Growth

This book, an explosive and compelling case for the possibility, nay, necessity, of post-growth economic development by Tim Jackson, should be compulsory reading for every Western economic policymaker. Along with this book on de-growth, it was one of my core texts for an incredibly bleak essay I just finished writing yesterday. My last essay of the year, probably the best and also the most depressing thing I've ever written. In light of this, disproportionately to how excellent this book is, this post will be really short (actually, this time).
   Tim argues that global capitalism has been historically given free rein by an economics that's sorely out-of-touch with real life on a physical planet to the extent that our world economy now threatens natural boundaries and limits. Some of these are obvious depletion issues - we're using up non-renewable resources without establishing sustainable replacements for when they run out, and we're exploiting renewable flows of energy and resources at a pace that far outweighs nature's capacity to regenerate them. In short, a crunch is coming, and the best hope we have of meeting this challenge is to abandon our structural enslavement to consumerism, which only perpetuates inequality and injustice and doesn't even substantively improve subjective human wellbeing in these prosperity-by-growth societies. Instead, we must look to localism, environmentalism, egalitarianism, and contentment with a life less dependent on material attainments, as pillars of a new direction for the world's political and economic systems. Obviously this is an enormous shift, but Tim outlines along with the arguments in favour of such a huge redirection various policies that could help accelerate changes toward such a transition being possible.
   Overall - an absolutely superb and essential book, if you're interested in or have even a scrap of influence in the realms of politics, economics, ecology, human society's future stability, and individual wellbeing, (and especially the tight nexus where all these topics overlap at ideas about post-growth development), give this a read.

Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era

This book, a collection of fifty-one short essays (written by fifty-six different people) edited by Giacomo D'Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis (who as a threesome also wrote a longish introduction and shortish epilogue), is way overdue at the library and I've just finished it in a mad reading-rush and am going to bash out this post as quickly as my conscience will allow before returning it. 'Degrowth' as an idea is a radical response to the fact that our economies have, in the richer nations at least, attained a state of affluence far beyond what is necessary to sustain human wellbeing at an equitable and sustainable and satisfactory level, but persist in pursuing growth, further widening social inequalities, deepening structural problems, and putting enormous strain on the global ecosystem (which fortunately our economy has nothing to do with).* Economic growth, despite the obviousness of its posing a serious range of problems to global human/natural welfare, is simply not questioned by the vast majority of thinkers and policymakers! However, some people do question it, and these ideas are rapidly gaining traction in the left, as the explanatory frameworks employed by 'degrowthers' are nicely congruent with several others on the left, so issues and policy solutions broadly supported in a plethora of progressive groups are represented where they all converge - upon the need for degrowth.

   The essays are split into four chunks, and in lieu of wanting to go through properly summarising themes I'm basically just going to list them.** The first section looks at lines of thought by which arguments for degrowth can be made: anti-utilitarianism, bioeconomics (a.k.a. ecological economics), critiques of development, social-environmental justice, currents of environmentalism, societal metabolism, political ecology, and steady-state economics.

   The second section looks at core concepts needed to be understood widely in a degrown society (or, more pressingly, in order to transition to one): autonomy, capitalism, care, commodification, commodity frontiers, the commons, conviviality, dematerialisation, dépense, depoliticisation, pedagogy of disaster, entropy, emergy, GDP, growth, happiness, decolonisation of the imaginary, Jevons' paradox, neo-Malthusianism, peak oil (etc), social limits to growth, and simplicity.

   The third section looks at grassroots- and policy-level actions (or spheres of action) that may help spur degrowth and hence the transition to a sustainable economy: going back-to-the-land, eco-communities, urban gardening, 'nowtopianism', basic income & maximum income, job guarantees, work-sharing, unions, co-operatives, community currencies, debt audits, the digital commons, public money creation, post-normal science, and civil disobedience (with another chapter specifically looking at how Spanish indignados and the Occupy movement were good in this respect). Also in this section is a frankly disappointingly vague chapter by Tim Jackson about the 'New Economy', but given how specific and well-aimed all the other chapters were, and given that Tim Jackson's book Prosperity Without Growth is a landmark work in this field (which I'm also reading for the same essay for which I devoured this one, so -) it's only fair that his chapter could be a general-summary-kind-of-useless one.

   The fourth section looks at socio-cultural, philosophical and political ideas that have arisen around the world that overlap considerably with the aims of degrowthers: from feminist economics, to South America's buen vivir, to Gandhi-inspired economics of permanence, to the Bantu peoples' traditional worldview of Ubuntu.

   Anyway. I'm dropping this book in the Returns tub and leaving the library. This book is extremely interesting: anyone concerned about economic and/or environmental justice would find a lot of thought-provoking stuff in here, presented in an easily accessible bitesize chapter format, which is actually a really nice way of navigating through a large pile of smaller issues gathered around a holistic polemic.

   Reduce, reuse, recycle! And break neoliberal hegemony's stranglehold on economic institutions and political society, where it is redirecting all social efforts to the maximisation of productivity which in turn perpetuates gross inequalities and injustices and perilous damage to ecological systems - break it, and restructure almost everything about our world in a way that promotes sustainability, equity, community, and human flourishing!***

* Irony. Everything that happens in the global economy is 100% dependent, in so many ways that I couldn't even start listing them because I'm not a scientist but you can probably think of a few yourself, on the biosphere functioning healthily.

** Some of these concepts are extremely interesting, but there are fifty-one of them and no way am I going to try to briefly describe each, so if your curiosity has been piqued... you're a citizen of the internet, you should know what to do.

*** This is the problem with progressivism; the more holistic and system-based your analysis of problems gets, yes, the more you can claim to see the bigger picture and thus you can more accurately propose individual-, community-, and government-level solutions, but past a certain stage it gets very hard to reduce to a catchy mantra. Perhaps the best I've ever heard was at the COP21 protests in Paris last December, where there was a crowd of over fifty Spaniards carrying huge red banners shouting "¡AAA- AH! ANTI! ¡ANTICAPITALISTA!" over & over again, as we marched down the main streets from the Arc de Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower - where a procession of several thousand peaceful protesters formed a Spoon Chain under a giant long red carpetcloth/rope. (Needless sentimental fact - I had this in my jacket pocket at the time).

Drugs Without the Hot Air

This book, by David Nutt (one of Britain's leading guru of hard-science verdicts on psychoactive drug usage and their harms - he also used to be* a top policy advisor on the topic), is one of those rare kind of non-fiction book, the exquisite and almost impenetrable presentation of brute fact. I love reading these kinds of book about complex and controversial topics - like whether gender is psychologically innate or what the value of socioeconomic equality is - it takes a certain breed of author to systematically pen down logical overviews of enormous depths of evidence, organised into coherent explanatory frameworks, remaining a robust case without descending to polemics, and still somehow being pretty easy to read.

   The core point of the book is that drug use, being essentially a personal health risk, should be treated as such by policymakers. Obviously this entails extensive analysis of said personal health risks, which are surprisingly high for legal drugs** like alcohol and tobacco and public-perception-defyingly low for certain heavily stigmatised drugs like LSD or MDMA. (I've just written a huge fat chunk of fact, in summary from the book, in the second asterisk bit below, so read that now if you didn't at the **). I've clearly had a fair bit of fun embellishing that last lump of argument with colourful detail, but the crux of the point is in the statistics and the science and the policy results, all of which you should check out for yourself - but you'll struggle to find a more reputable source on the matter than David Nutt, so I'd wager. These aggregations of fact force one to question the norms surrounding drug use, both legal and illegal - prohibition of alcohol failed spectacularly in Depression-era America, and the modern-day 'War on Drugs' has failed on a multitude of fronts (which I can't be bothered to go into detail about but is basically a huge waste of money that has among other things: overlapped systemic racism to fuel mass-incarceration of black African-American men on a horrific scale for minor crimes such as possession of weed; consolidated huge power in criminal gangs in the global South; prevented pharmacological access to substances that have shown enormous benefits in treating certain psychological problems; perpetuated societal trends of wasteful decay through the 'greenlighting' of alcohol and tobacco as legal and thus endorsed for irresponsible use; and so on). The community of socio-medical experts on the matter is almost unanimous in calling for policy-making emphasis on drug use to shift from criminality to public health.
   A government's job (imho) is to strike a balance between protecting liberties and protecting wellbeing - the 'War on Drugs' has quite blatantly failed to do this: the harms of highly-problematic substances like alcohol and tobacco are not minimised (the same can be said of crack cocaine and heroin, as the state more instinctively treats such crippling addictions as moral failures rather than behavioural health problems in desparate need of rehabilitation); the liberties to experience certain states of mind is stripped back to ones unlikely to shake up social norms (imagine if social weed-smoking was as prevalent as pint-drinking - how many more interesting conversations and thoughts would we have instead of just-another-night-down-pub, going for a wee every half-hour past about eleven p.m. and feeling unnatural urges for doner kebabs?); I feel like throughout the spread of this post I've already fleshed out some of my key points in support here; to regather - the policy structures in place are nowhere near adequate or accurate to the reality of risks of harms and benefits for these kinds of activity, being as they are governed by the normative dregs of late-20th-century scaremongering rather than by rational presentations or interpretations of fact.
   Anyway. If you feel strongly opposed to everything I'm saying - good, at least you've read this far through the post, now if you want to be reasonable instead of reactionary, I'd recommend you read the whole of David Nutt's book. And if you're really skeptical, check out his scientific and statistical sources.**** On the flipside, if you're a heartily critical liberal like me, you'll probably enjoy this book and find it massively enrich your opinions and informedness about an interesting yet generally poorly-publicly-debated issues facing British/world society today.
   To cap off this post a bit I'd like to offer a bit of personal reflection on the issue of using illegal substances for recreational purposes. For me the clincher here is their [il]legality - I absolutely do not condone such activities, not because their being legislatively prohibited renders them immoral, but because the risks of prosecution are massive, and hippies like me probably wouldn't cope well in the criminal justice system, even just brushing up against it slightly. Also, as a Christian, I must cite the biblical exhortation to in clear conscience obey worldly rulers' laws, as these are people God has put in authority over us, whether I find their exercise of such authority agreeable or not (this is why I'm such a keeno for getting Christians into counter-hegemonic activism, as resignation to political order is often lived out as acceptance of preventable injustice) - since recreational drug use is, in my view, in and of itself a morally neutral activity, I feel abstinence is probably best practice in societies where it's illegal. Despite this, given the weight of evidence about these policies' failures (discussed literally everywhere in this post) in promoting liberties and minimising harms, I do strongly advocate for the decriminalisation of many***** currently illegal psychoactive substances, and for such drugs' availability to be couched in heavy regulation and education for public health. From the sounds of it, there is much communal-emotional and artistic and transcendental-experiential benefit to be had from responsible use of some of these substances, particularly several for which the associated risks of harms are astoundingly low. (See final asterisk bit below.) Needlessly restricting well-informed responsible individuals' access to potentially good things is, in my view, a plain abuse of legislative power - especially when done so through a campaign that fuels and perpetuates so much injustice, not to mention comprehensively failing to minimise harms, or even reduce usage by notable figures.
   This was meant to be a relatively short post. Ah well. I always find it's better to run into fullish explanations of one's own perspective when writing about controversial issues, as putting forth your case with more detail and structure helps prevent angry confused commenters arguing against a straw man of your own creation because you couldn't be arsed to do a proper man. Or it would, if I ever got angry confused commenters. I don't tend to get any commenters at all, because nobody reads this blog, which is fine by me.

* As in, isn't anymore, because in a stunningly ironic demonstration of some of this book's key points, the government 'disagreed' with his scientifically and statistically sound findings and sacked him in 2009.

** Take issue with this phrasing? Think referring to alcohol and tobacco, or even things like caffeine and paracetamol, in the same category as powerful hallucinogenics and the likes of meth, ket, and crack, is ridiculous? It's probably because your definitions of what a 'drug' is have been shaped by a mixture of extreme cultural examples of drug use and public information programmes exaggerating probable harms of drug use to encourage abstinence, rather than the scientific definition of 'drug', which is basically a chemical taken into the body to produce an effect (other than sustenance - we call that 'food'). These effects can be but are not always psychoactive - magic mushrooms, whiskey, and cannabis are examples of drugs that alter one's mental state. Drugs can be used medically (e.g. aspirin, morphine) or recreationally (e.g. most psychoactive drugs, as are the focus of drug policy and this book), and of these psychoactive substances there is no clear or consistent pattern of correlation between their potential harmfulness, experiential intensity, and legal availability.
   For example, let's briefly compare ecstasy to alcohol. The former is linked to between ten and fifty deaths in the UK per year (though looking closer at case-by-case almost all of these result from combinations of poor provision of public education about how to rave responsibly and the risk of dealers fobbing people off with sometimes-dangerously impure substances, which would be an entirely avoidable problem in a legally regulated market) while the latter is linked to the deaths of around 40,000 Brits annually (also linked to 7,000 traffic incidents and 1,200,000 violent incidents per year, not to mention that it has 3,500,000 British addicts (alcoholism being a drug addiction so common to the UK that it seems to have been co-opted and justified as a reasonably widespread sociocultural quirk), is a significant contributing factor in 40% of domestic abuse and 50% of child protection cases, and overall is estimated to cause between £30 and £55 billion [yep] of damage to global societies and economies worldwide every year). Ecstasy is also almost universally described as a more intrinsically pleasant subjective experience than alcohol when taken responsibly (given that rather than slowing down your whole physiology and merely lowering inhibitions, it gives one's brain a bath in seratonin, leading to an energy spurt, also functioning effectively as a chemical flood of happiness and love***). More - whereas booze has been indisputably linked to depression and similar mental health issues on a major scale, experimental treatments using ecstasy have yielded incredibly promising results for otherwise extremely difficult-to-treat disorders (such as PTSD). 
   And yet in the UK, being as it is Class A under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, possession of ecstasy for personal use can (if you're unlucky and get caught by lairy police officers on your way to a warehouse full of banging techno and well-hydrated and surprisingly huggy strangers who automatically feel like friends) slap you in for a seven year sentence, while anyone over the age of 18 can waltz into the nearest Wetherspoons and sit quaffing an enormous range of well-regulated and high-tax-generating and generally-quite-nice-in-moderation [and legal] products until they get into an aggressive stumbling argument with someone because they shouted "BREXIT" ironically and were misinterpreted by that local regular who's an avid xenophobe (perhaps because decades of alcoholism has made it hard to take in any cohesive opinions about the contemporary world more cosmopolitan than, say, those of Nigel Farage).

*** If you have video proof of people on MDMA being anywhere near as aggressive as a standard drunken Englishman, I will buy you a pint. And then fight you.

**** Of course it's fully and extensively referenced! We're not barbarians, are we?

***** Based on David Nutt's book, my own research through reputable portals, and having had some good insightful conversations with friends and acquaintances about their experiences with drugs (one does not simply [do a philosophy degree & be part of an environmental activist group & whatever else - student life is rife with these people and they're largely lovely] without meeting some pretty 'open-minded' folk), I have settled on a short list of some of the most common and widely-known illegal psychoactive substances that I feel should probably be largely legal, at least to the same extent as alcohol, based on their effects and health risks.
   So, in no particular order: common-or-garden weed/hash, LSD, magic mushrooms, nitrous oxide; also skunk and MDMA though possibly in a more highly-regulated category, and ketamine and cocaine in a yet higher one.
   Obviously, given the health and wellbeing foundations of my opinion here, I would only condone the use of such substances if legalised and properly regulated, and with users being fully aware of the physiological risks they're putting themselves at by taking a given drug, including systems for working out and sticking to responsible dosages to avoid social dysfunctionality and physical risk. Acting based upon the best available scientific and statistical information is crucial - you can't be responsible without being aware. I envisage such an endpoint to resemble current markets for alcohol and tobacco: you might buy a gram of coke in branded packaging decorated only by perfunctory information about safe usage and a big cigarette-packet-style picture of some coke-diseased organ or something accompanied by words to the effect of "LOOK AT THIS DISEASE THAT COKE OFTEN CAUSES": you might buy a pre-rolled spliff (if Netherlands-type coffee-shop culture were to filter over as an alternative to English pub culture) that must legally disclose at the point of sale what strength it is, in units, or some kind of measure of tetrahydrocannabinol-(the active chemical in marijuana)-per-joint, much like alcoholic beverages divulge their alcohol-per-drink as a percentage: you might buy a flap of LSD-soaked paper in a well-packaged envelope also containing a small but detailed booklet explaining how to arrange your environment and circumstances optimally.
   Who knows what the future holds?