twenty twenty all over again, yeah like you even wanted that

This year, I attended Punctunation (an online science fiction convention).

This is what attendees said they’d been doing during this pandemic year. (There was a 'Staying Sane in the Apocalypse' panel). I guess it’s okay to share this, it’s anonymised:

Watching ‘The Walking Dead’ was me. Yep, all ten seasons. (Why watch a zombie apocalypse series during a pandemic? Aristotle's 'pity and fear', I guess. Hershel Greene's one of the more strikingly sympathetic portrayals of Christian faith in recent film or TV: this interested me. And, y'know, Michonne, blood, death, zombies and that). This year I again signally failed to learn either Polish or Bulgarian (пепелник = ashtray though), or to learn more French. Perhaps as chances to travel open up again, I’ll feel more motivated to do it (“do or not do, there is no try”). 

Long walks with a short dog was me as well; lucky/blessed to live in such beautiful, relatively uncrowded surroundings; got to know them better.

Okay, I did order the Bulgarian language course, began it, watched a couple of Bulgarian-language movies (subtitled) to begin to get the gist. One was ‘The Boy Who Was A King’, which tells the story of Simeon Saxe-Coburg Gotha, who ascended the Bulgarian throne at the age of six during World War Two, only to be deposed and forced into exile by Communists three years later. There’s some lovely archive footage of both the royal household and the wider social and political context in this, plus it’s an affectionate observational film about both the country and the pleasant-seeming, almost nondescript elderly chap who was once its King (and, later, subsequently, its elected Premier, a turn of events unique in the post-Soviet world; he's also the only living person to have borne the title ‘Tsar’). So, talking of learning the language, I now know that the Bulgarian transliteration ‘Saxe-Coburg Gotha’ is ‘Saxe-Coburg Gotski’ – just as the English transliteration is, of course, ‘Windsor’.  

This year, I watched some other films.

I’m not going to write twenty-seven word reviews for each of them because, well, that water's flowed under the bridge. Also, some I watched in connection with a virtual film club I started at work during lockdown, where we watch ‘coming of age’ movies together and reflect on them as adults who work educationally or therapeutically with teenagers. Others I watched in order to have covered the same cinematic ground as Thomas Wolman, author of The Erotic Screen: Desire, Addiction and Perversity in Cinema: I’ve reviewed his book (under my real name) for one of the UK’s counselling/ psychotherapy journals – and book reviewing for therapy journals is a new angle, a way to encounter new thinking within one’s professional field and to have to order one’s thoughts about that new thinking, plus I enjoy receiving Free Stuff by post

Other films I’ve watched run thematically. There were the feel-good, heart-in-the-right-place-politically films – Brassed Off, Pride. There were films of which my daughter might say to a friend, "yeah it was great, all the middle-aged British actresses were in it", like Calendar Girls. There are the films watched during First Lockdown, which also affirm the importance of family, or community – Good Bye Lenin! (I’d remembered this as a sort of Ostalgie-flavoured counterweight to The Lives of Others - actually, it was made first; my memory's rubbish - but on a second watch it's more clearsighted, less celebratory about the DDR than that; national lies beget family lies), About Time, The Straight Story, Heavy Load. (Do obtain and watch Heavy Load - meaning the 2008 film of that name about a punk band whose members have learning difficulties, not the short 1975 Danish feature film about the truck driver whose enthusiastic sexual appetite somewhat impairs his work ethic - thanks for that, IMDb). Then there the films watched during Second Lockdown, which provide a quick hit of the live music/ festival experience that the past year has so conspicuously lacked – Yesterday, Spinal Tap, Still Crazy. (Haven’t yet watched Woodstock for, what?, the seventh time… but I’ve been forever just about to), followed by both the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogies over Christmas and New Year. Last but not least, there have been films which fit the category of oddball indie romantic comedy with consciously retro detailing set in New Zealand – Eagle Vs Shark, for instance. Come to think of it, there’s one film in this latter category: it’s Eagle Vs Shark. 

This year, I read some non-fiction.

Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Fame’s corrupted Peterson as the Ring in Tolkein corrupts its bearers. While some observations in this are cheap and a bit tawdry, others correct prevalent fuzzy thinking.

(Possibly Maps of Meaning was good. Let me get back to you on that).

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything.   Klein, a gifted storyteller of true stories, explains ‘extractive’ mindsets past and present, the war for public opinion, and how to prosecute the intensifying struggle for liveable futures.

Douglas Gillette & Robert Moore, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine.    Everyone who can read and who’s ever attended a Men’s Group has read this. I read it again during a camping holiday in North Yorkshire, journaling extensively.*

(*but not neglecting opportunities for family time and good fellowship in so doing; what kind of a human does that? Okay, a fallible one: true. I don’t always sleep well, let’s say. Have Kindle Reading Light, Will Travel. And some of what I wrote down was stuff I wanted to share with my son and then did, so there’s that).

Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense. This – from admirably versatile author who’s also covered ‘British boffins’, Krushchevite thaw- contains the most vivid (persuasive?) explanation I’ve yet read of what ‘sin’ means to a Christian.

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.  Interesting, careful, sensitive work from this increasingly concerned veteran explorer (since before there were home computers, almost) of the social psychology of the human-machine interface.

Chris Harman, People’s History of the World. Ambitious; flawed. When Harman narrates primitive communism, dawn of agriculture, writing etc, he sounds fascinating, well-informed. When he speaks of Catholicism and Protestantism as “religions”: tone-deaf, under-researched.

 

Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. Two axes (scarcity versus abundance; egalitarianism versus hierarchy) yield four possible futures (communism, rentism, socialism, exterminism); too simple, perhaps, but an interesting model to think with. 

Leigh Phillips & Michal Rozworski, The People’s Republic of Walmart: How The World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundations for Socialism. Firms like Walmart and Amazon are, essentially, monopolies; “any firm’s a planned economy on the inside” (and when Ayn Rand fandom pretends otherwise, Sears-like disasters may unfold).         

Speaking of libertarian disaster movie scenarios, do read ‘The Town That Went Feral’.   

The graph above - which starts from Peter Frase's work - is by Shalev Moran, game designer, curator and artist based in Copenhagen; it was accessed at this site. See also Speculative Tourism.

Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. This ‘memoir of ideas’ by pioneering sociologist, political theorist, and editor of the NLR is both emotionally involving and thought-provoking, especially about British and diasporic identity formation. 

(It’s what Stuart Hall says of his friend and former mentor E.P. Thompson, best known for ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ – his remarks for warm, considered, appraising, and in some measure distancing – that’s particularly got me thinking. There’s, on the one hand, a ‘left’ version of 'our island story' – Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson help tell it – which, at best, can motivate and inspire but, at worst, will tend to mystify the concept of ‘nation’ as much as 1066-and-all-that ‘King and Country’ stories do; there are, on the other hand, readings of history which make more space for the plural, compound, shiftng identities that many of us live in, for, and with. Hmmm).

Hunter Davies, The Other Half: Ten Candid Insights into the Lives of Britain’s New Poor and New Rich.  Ten intriguing, naturalistically-rendered ‘slices of life’ from the Beatles biographer and journalist; companion volume to every kitchen sink drama you’ve ever watched. Relatable: I’m part-curate, part-“N.S.P.C.C. Inspector."

James Riley, The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties. Fascinating linked series of explorations into the 1960s darker, more apocalyptic aspects: ‘Poetry Incarnation’ and after, bad drugs, Altamont, Satanism and occultism, armed antinomianism, flights from reason.

David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse). Some of this is filler, much of it’s a workable guidebook to the American 1970s told from a conservative though sane (Frum’s a Never-Trumper) point of view.

Vivian Gornick,   Fierce Attachments. A portrait of the artist; the growth of one Jewish- American socialist-feminist poet’s mind; a meditation on belonging; an extended love (/hate) letter to the author’s mother. 

Vivian Gornick,  The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir. A sort-of sequel; a love letter to friendship and to New York City which proves so inexhaustible (being also every city: Dickensian London, Baudelaire’s Paris) that one never leaves.*

*and she still lives there in her mid-eighties... so we look forward to her NYC-during-the-pandemic memoir, should she choose to write one.

Vivian Gornick,  The Romance of American Communism.  Recently republished by Verso, this 1970s autoethnographic landmark works outward from her own ‘red diaper baby’ experiences to encompass the lived experience of CPUSA activism more generally.

Francis Wheen, The Soul of Indiscretion: Tom Driberg: Poet, Philanderer, Legislator and Outlaw.  A biography of this strange, talented, capricious, sometimes cruel character - Edith Sitwell, Lord Beaverbrook, Aleister Crowley, Ernest Bevin, Mick Jagger and the Krays all feature.

Humphrey Carpenter, Robert Runcie: The Reluctant Archbishop. Ended up not so much reading this, as looking up ‘women priests’, ‘Thatcher’, ‘gay clergy’, ‘Crockfords preface affair’ and ‘Miners’ Strike’ in the index. It’s how I roll.

This year, I read some mainstream fiction.

Sally Rooney, Normal People. Colleagues were talking about this. I found it readable, pacey; as far as contemporary, ‘realist’ novels go, though, I preferred ‘The Slap’ and ‘Left of the Bang’.

Doris Lessing, The Good Terrorist. The characters in this tense, tightly-plotted novel stick in my mind, as does the ultra-left (pro-IRA) London milieu and the ending. Time to try ‘The Golden Notebook’ again..?

This year, I read some genre fiction. 

Mack Reynolds, ‘Earth Unaware’ (or ‘Of Godlike Power’).  Mack was a prolific American-as-they-come pulp fiction writer, first of detective stories, latterly of SF; he was also a sincere communist, or something close (a one-time regional organiser for the Socialist Labor Party before the writing bug bit him). This has been an important novel for me since plucking a copy out of the bargain bin in John Menzies during my mid-teens; I talked about it in the 'Your Favourite Book That No-One Has Heard Of’ panel at Punctuation, and have written an article about it which may see print in Banana Wings soon. 

(Other panellists chose Peter Martin’s Summer in 3000, Steve Aylett’s Lint, Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Martin Booth’s Adrift In The Oceans of Mercy, a book whose title I forget to write down by George MacDonald, Martine Leavitt’s The Doll Mage, and The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, written at the age of seventeen by Jane Webb who was roughly a contemporary of Mary Shelley’s).

William Morris, News from Nowhere. Honestly? “Stick to curtain designs, Will; this is kitsch.” Interesting… but too much know-it-all lecturing from over-cheerful authorial viewpoint character; worldbuilding ‘too good to be true’. Didn’t finish.

Michael Moorcock, The Dancers At The End of Time Trilogy. Post-scarcity anarchist utopia proves remarkably readable for seventy pages; then plot happens as time traveller Mrs Amelia Underwood teaches Jherek about sin. An early 1970s genre masterpiece. 

Ursula LeGuin, The Word for World Is Forest. This Vietnam War allegory may remind you of (it prefigures) Avatar – though it’s uncomfortably better than that because more nuanced about imperialist motives. [“Are we the baddies?”]

Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven. This parallel-worlds novel’s both a glum-making reminder that we knew about ‘all this’ [gestures at climate] fifty years ago and a sustained meditation upon power-over versus power-with: recommended.

James Herbert, The Rats. This one’s about ‘late postwar [consensus] London’, as much as it’s about mutant feral rats devouring people. I shall doubtless have more to say about both aspects presently.

Tim Maughan, Infinite Detail. This near-future dystopia, in which a massive DDOS-attack's destroyed the planetary internet, leading to worldwide socioeconomic collapse, left me curiously hopeful. Maybe it was the Bristolian trip-hop. 

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire. This is both reminiscent of, and better than, Asimov's Foundation; the world has more texture, etymology, interacting high and low cultures of both imperial and 'barbarian' peoples.

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This year, I spent time on Zoom, and too much time following the continuing twists and turns of the Brexit story (see ‘Two Cheers for the EU’, ‘Boris Johnson's End of the Pier Show’).

This year, I didn’t fly.

And in other news…

there’s apparently a habitable zone in the cloud decks of Venus; phosphine, a possible bio-marker, has been detected there - remember this in the news during September? Dr David Clements, who worked on this project with Dr Jane Greaves, talked us through it at Punctuation; see also this Cardiff University explainer.