histories

Some of the books I've enjoyed the most in recent years have been history books with significant sociological content. 

These have included:

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich 1945-55, by Harald Jähner (cultural journalist, former edtior of the Berliner Zeitung) about how those Germans who had survived (including surviving or having had varying levels of complicity in the Holocaust) lived through the decade 'after'.

The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961- 9 November 1989, by Frederick Taylor, historian, which details how citizens of the two Germanies and, in particular, East and West Berlin adjusted themselves to that most concrete of 'facts on the ground', together with the four-cornered geopolitical wrangling (the US, USSR, East and West Germany) that the Wall both occasioned and expressed.

(and currently - this next is as vast as its subject, so I can use it to kill insects and even small mammals if I don't finish, or even if I do)

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine, a sociological, literary and group biographical account of those who inhabited a housing complex - then the largest residential building in Eurpoe - completed by the Soviet Union in the early 1930s to house the elite and those favoured by the regime. This includes a 40 or 50 page excursus on the nature, definitions and history since the Axial Age - a concept that this book is bringing into focus for me - of 'religion', 'cult' etc, as the author discusses how best to classify Marxism generally and Bolshevism in particular.

The last-named would’ve been worth the price of admission just for this re-reading of Judaeo-Christian scripture through a Dostoyevskian lens:

“The End was pre-determined; the Israelites kept making wrong choices; and the Lord kept blaming them for his continued unwillingness or inability to fulfill his promise. The world’s first heavenly autocrat was also, by virtue of his chronic theodicy problem, the world’s first Underground Man (or Adolescent). Constantly snubbed by his spiritual inferiors, he bragged about his great accomplishments, promised even greater accomplishments, nursed his many grudges, feigned humility, relished his ability to cause pain and thwart expectations, and fantasised obsessively about a spectacular public humiliation of the strong, the arrogant and the well-connected.” 

As a believing Christian and a clergy spouse (my flower arranging is rubbish, my tea and coffee rota skills are so-so, my baking is 'on point'), I naturally think that there's A Bit More To It Than That - a helpful and pertinent challenge to be asked to articulate what, though.

(Plenty, perhaps more of which later - though there's also "of that which we cannot speak" etc).

Thinking about long, immersive histories, it may be time to try reading Gibbon again ("one must not say that one is reading Gibbon, always that one is re-reading him" - High Table folklore), though I can't imagine why anyone might be tempted to read a painstaking chronicle of the at first slow and then horribly sudden fall of a great Empire around now [heavy sarcasm].

space merchants (recent & current reading)

 

Margaret Renn’s ‘Paul Foot: A Life in Politics’ (out last month from Verso) narrates the life of this celebrated figure from a family who have been political for generations (former Labour leader Michael Foot was his uncle; before that, mostly Liberals) who, never falling away from revolutionary left convictions acquired in his twenties, edited the Socialist Worker for a time during the 1970s, wrote columns for the Sunday Telegraph (a somewhat odd fit), Private Eye and the Mirror, and found time to campaign on numerous miscarriage of justice issues as well as writing a book on Shelley. Not a hagiography (and not hagiographic about either the democratic or revolutionary Left either), but an exemplary life.

(With the family background, the connections, the money, the house in Hampstead etc, it’d be possible to rubbish Paul Foot as ‘a champagne socialist’ – as according to one tired right-wing set of tropes any socialist must either be POOR and therefore marginal, motivated by the politics of envy etc or RICH and therefore a hypocrite, a champagne socialist etc. Don’t fall for it – and if you’re a socialist *and/or* a price-conscious consumer, sign up to Verso’s mailing list for the regular 80%-off ebook sales!).

Alec Nevala-Lee’s ‘Astounding’, a literary history of the American magazine of that name (and particularly of its hugely influential editor across three decades or so from the 1930s through to the very early 1970s), later rebranded as ‘Analog’, which effectively defined so-called ‘Golden Age’ science fiction. L Ron Hubbard and Dianetics, later Scientology, features largely in this book – two things which I feel I learned from reading this were, first, just how unpleasant a human being Hubbard was (and how malign a movement Scientology was, right from the get-go) and, second, just how deeply implicated and involved much of early 1950s science fiction culture, some of its leading lights certainly, in this nascent movement. Indeed, Scientology could be seen – as this book implicity does – as a sort of mirror-image (or Jungian shadow) of some of 1950s America’s best hopes.

Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth’s ‘The Space Merchants’ (1952) is a fortuitous library find, having just finished the above (that distinctive Gollancz yellow does tend to draw the eye). Asimov and Heinlein I feel I know… but this, with its ecologically wrecked planet Earth, its Consies (think the International Workers of the World, aka the Wobblies, crossed with Extinction Rebellion), and its politics and space colonisation efforts driven almost entirely by over-mighty advertising agencies, somewhat gives the lie to any one-dimensional view of science fiction’s Golden Age as Truman-era American boosterism, fictionalised. (Perhaps Alfred Bester already did that). I mean, one imagines Adam ‘HyperNormalisation’ Curtis buying a ticket for this train…

I’m also midway through ‘Paradise Lost’, again (about once a decade, particularly at times of personal challenge or change) and also Doris Lessing’s ‘The Golden Notebook’ – which I’ve begun a couple of times before and which has previously defeated me. I think I begin to grasp what this book is, does, and is ‘for’ now (her famous early 1970s ten-years-later preface is good on, among other things, how and why certain books only land with us at specific phases of our lives and also on how this book in particular has interacted with its readership, then and since).

 

burnham beach amusements

Though the Long Poem Magazine - that most Ronseal* of UK literary magazines - didn't want this homage to Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach' threaded with uncomprehended references to Marxian economics and the state of the nation under Theresa May (remember her?), you do. 

Disclaimer: poems are fictions and, while Sarah, Meg and I did indeed housesit for friends in Burnham-on-Sea, neither of them resemble in any sense the small-time gangster & all-round bad 'un that 'Geoff' appears to be. (IRL 'Geoff' was the name of their French bulldog - great fun, much missed).

*if you're British and over 35, you'll know

===

Burnham Beach Amusements


Cash-starved companies pay scrip instead;

Poets short on inspiration pay out others’ words,

Signage, half-remembered jokes off Twitter,

Others’ poems too, though only if conveniently out of copyright;

T.S. Eliot did it, he was in publishing;

If anyone would’ve known about copyright…

 

You know what? Call it sampling. Think The Prodigy, The Orb,

Other Dad dance-bands of the inter-war era

The sea was calm that night,

The tide was full, the moon lay fair

Upon the straits; over at Hinkley, the light

Gleamed and was gone, you get me?

 

On telly, Boris Jumpstart gobbing off about Brexit again,

Personified bumptious disappointment and bad faith

It was the heatwave summer, summer of flies;

Battered by work, SATS, interior decorating, we’d repaired to Burnham

To celebrate Meg’s eleventh birthday there,

That, and England losing to Croatia, better than Iceland though, yeah?

 

Imagine – house-sitting an eight-bedroom beachfront property

With only wife, daughter, smartphone, guitar,

Apricot wheats, New Scientist and

Dover Thrift edition of Matthew Arnold for company

Bit like being a Palestinian desert hermit, only not.

 

Garage In Constant Use, Thank You says Geoff’s garage;

‘Why are you saying thank you? It’s not me doing it,’

I always used to think; My Motor’s Mucking Fagic

And I Hate People that Take Drugs – Like Customs and Police

Say the stickers on Geoff’s other car;

Those are the bumper stickers of a younger man

But I’d like to see you try telling Geoff that.

I don’t know how he made his money, we don’t ask;

He has a firm handshake and a lazy eye;

We’re always careful to leave the place very, very tidy;

Good old Geoff.

 

Come to the window, love; sweet is the night air

I’ve written one about you, sweetheart

It’s also about the falling-away of Western civilisation;

Listen though; you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin and cease and then again begin

With tremulous cadence Jon Snow, bringing

Regulatory alignment in.

 

Some afternoons Burnham-on-Sea brings

Into my mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery

Maybe sitting in that free air-conditioned seating area

For patrons eating lukewarm fish and chips did it;

Won’t be going there again, ‘Somerset Life’ or no.

 

Mind you, the amusements are where it’s at, yeah?

And I mean, it makes you think, I mean, I mean  –

And as I fed £1.50 in tuppences from a margarine tub

Decorated with one-armed bandit symbols into the pacman twopenny drop machine

In Novichok Amusements or whatever it was called,

I thought about what Kim Stanley Robinson (Mars trilogy guy)

Calls Gotterdammerung capitalism – a spiralling turbo-charged tragedy

Of the commons in which Capital discards even the pretence

Of securing its own continuation, racing instead to liquidate

Societal, material, financial assets

 

Still, one thing many of us have asked ourselves

Eighteen months into the Trump administration

Is why volatility indicators such as VIX have been holding steady

With market sentiment positively sanguine at times

That would seem a reason to be cheerful

But maybe there’s a Pascal’s wager here;

Like, the markets can bet on or presage or bring about

A range of possible outcomes, but one thing

They can’t bet on is the end of the market system itself,

Whether through some civilisation-ending cataclysm

Or transition to a saner post-market social arrangement

Then, despite the occasional clatter into a receptive metal tray

Of bits of my own money returning to me like,

Oh, I dunno, pebbles being washed up on the beach or something,

The £1.50 I’ve allowed myself expires;

Gamble Aware; When The Fun Stops, Stop.

 

Geoff says I overthink things; says, you’ve a head for figures,

Should do what I done: got FOREX trading software on my tablet,

FOREX Foreign Exchange, yeah? I punted a spare ten grand,

Doubled my stake inside of a fortnight, nearly,

You should try; Geoff, I say, I don’t have a spare ten grand;

Five then, he says; tell you what,

I shorted the pound the night of that referendum,

It was the right outcome, will of the people and that,

Plus I made an absolute packet; mind you,

Funny thing was I felt sad during that weekend, I don’t know why

Life’s a Russian novel sometimes, yeah? Good old Geoff.

 

You know at Angie and Mike’s wedding, sweetheart?

Geoff had had a few; me and him were talking out by the marquee.

All of a sudden he says to me, he says,

“You know what, Mark lad? I used to believe in things.”

Then he got very quiet, wouldn’t say what he meant.

Later he got even more drunk, tried to get off with whatshername

 

And you know when you watch the news?

Seeing sinister-clown types spaffing on about sovereignty

Puts you in mind of what  Marx said,

‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’ I think it was,

About the backward-glancing, fancy-dress aspect of historical praxis

Because this ‘will of the people’ stuff is a distraction-conjurement

Away from new-tech and new-media’s ability to

Manipulate huge data sets and also to

Use narrowcasting, bots etc to prime in a calibrated behaviourist sense

An almost infinitesimally segmented demos –

A sort of always-and-everywhere focus group –

Nah, me neither, I was only joking!

 

You know what, though, I really, really love you,

Love it that you smoke roll-ups, believe in Jesus,

Won about ninety tickets on the horse-racing machines

Which helped our daughter towards the sparkly emoji stress ball

She so coveted from the Novichok Amusements’ gift shop,

That you binge watch ‘Say Yes to the Dress’

And once, aged 22, played Simon & Garfunkel songs

On an acoustic guitar to the lifers at Parkhurst;

You should finish that comedy script about the Secure Training Centre

Pitch it to BBC3 or something

 

But in the meantime hold me,

And when you’ve left off, I’ll hold you

Maybe we can hold each other in a reciprocal customs arrangement

 

Please do not feed UKIP, they are pests. Sedgemoor District Council

Say signs leading down unto the beach; if they don’t, they should.

Trump mis-speaking flattery to Putin; Jumpstart’s bad Latinisms;

Steve Bandwidth wading in, telling us which prisoners we should release;

Who the hell does he think he is? No, don’t answer that.

 

[This stanza about Piers Morgan has been removed

Because it did not meet our community standards.]

 

While during this too-hot presaging heatwave, ignorant armies clash on Newsnight,

A naturalist writes: to my shame I’ve not been minding my language

And the President of the United States tweets:

I am fighting for a level playing field for our farmers – and will win

And I am in Brussels, but always thinking about our farmers

And I am watching what is going on in Europe

And Twitter is getting rid of fake accounts at a record pace.

Will that include the Failing New York Times?

 

Please note that patrons who lean against

Or rock the machines will be asked to leave

 

Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together please for Matthew Arnold,

Thank you to the highminded nineteenth century guy who foresaw it all

On honeymoon beside these Northern seas. I’m only sorry

That us later poets pay out scrip instead of cash – he saw that too.

listen

Have you been listening to anything good lately..?

My current favourite 'spoken word' listens are This Jungian Life (content-rich, yet also has a warmth to it, perhaps something to do with vocal timbre - so the psychotherapeutic equivalent of watching 'All Creatures Great and Small' with grandparents at some imagined cosy teatime during the late postwar consensus), Our Opinions are Correct (SFF/H genre stuff from Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, almost at 150 episodes now, all of them good) & Classroom Psychology with Dr Cora Sergeant (about how gender variance shows up in education and across society: I like the gracious yet pointed approach of taking public figures' transphobic or just ignorant public statements as 'the questions they were so clearly intended to be').

Other podcast listens: Pluto Press (Radicals in Conversation) / The Verso Podcast / Zer0 Books & Repeater Media / Houston We Have A Podcast (NASA) / The Good Robot / The Angry Clean Energy Guy

Also, audio books: Ulysses this autumn, The Brothers Karamazov this spring. Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan are excellent interpreters of the former. As for the lattter, Dostoyevsky is very good at abnormal psychology, addiction and intense situations and the narrator, Luke Thompson, is also great at ‘doing the voices’ and particularly at drawing out the weird, subterranean hilarity that gleams through the text at moments. He gives a particularly good turn when portraying the drunken voluptuary Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov at his varying levels of inebriation and shame and the self-conscious, priggish ‘1840s liberal’ Pyotr Alexandrovich Musov whom he baits relentlessly during their encounter in the monastic cell of the Elder Zosima. Fyodor’s manservant Grigory and his possible illegitimate son Smerdyakov have Yorkshire accents, which kind of works...