wishing you a merry christmas; thanks for reading

A Merry Christmas to you if you celebrate it; may it bring you what you’re hoping for books-wise (Aphra Behn, Catullus… Yevtushenko, Zamyatin, that Mark Adlard Omnibus you’re hoping someone’ll buy you) and also spiritually. This festival which, in literal terms, celebrates the birth of the Christ child could also be said to celebrate a more inward, spiritual and/or cosmic process of bringing to birth (Romans 8: 18-25).

Favourite Christmas movie: High Hopes, dir. Mike Leigh (1988). Does that count? Only watch it if you’re enjoying the company you’re with; if you’re not, it’ll make you want to run away to North London in the 1980s to be a cynical bedsit-dwelling Marxist with a heart of gold… and we know the paradoxes that time travel can create, just look at Jacob Rees-Mogg’s efforts to take Britain back to the 1950s or, to be even-handed about this, Momentum activists with their 'Arm John McDonnell' t-shirts.

Favourite Christmas song: ‘Just Like Christmas’ by Low; with very few lyrics, it manages to be about ‘Christmas’ as the ultimate floating signifier and about how, phenomenologically, an experience can be both ‘like Christmas’ and ‘not like Christmas’. It also – like ‘Tiny Children’ by Teardrop Explodes – has sleighbells on, which (as with some of David Foster Wallace’s best writing) rather ironises irony itself (see also DFW on ‘the redemptive power of cliché’; let's be sincere with one another, even if we're using secondhand words to do it). Also 'Jesus Christ the Apple Tree' (not this version obviously, the dubstep remix).

 

Favourite Christmas story: *the* Christmas story, of course, ‘A Christmas Carol’, also Grace Paley’s ‘The Loudest Voice’ – you could say that it’s about ‘interfaith’ or ‘the second/ third generation American-Jewish experience’ or you could say it’s a tender, funny story about childhood and the school Christmas play. You can here Grace Paley read this to you at this Vermont Public Radio link – thirteen minutes long and well worth twenty-six minutes of your time (because you’ll want to hear it at least twice).

  

Thanks for reading; I may tell you more about Isaac Deutscher on Trotsky plus Andrei Tarkovksy’s ‘Nostalgia’ and other reading and viewing on January 1^st.

Photographs taken in Bookbarn International, Farringdon Gurney BS39 6EX

 

Index of Possibilities

chestnuts boasting on an open fire