twenty-seven words about lawns, putin, the lake district, computronium etc

Did you arrive here through my suggestion on twitter that you take Yuval Noah Harari away with you on holiday (so to speak)? If so, welcome - I read him while on holiday with S. near Slanchev Bryag, the Blackpool of the Black Sea (if Blackpool had been built by the communist authorities during the 1960s); also near Nesebar, of course - don't think we were just there for the sun and the cheap booze, it was an educational trip too, I learned the Bulgarian word for ashtray (it's пепелник = pepelnik, sounds more like a small bird that sings in the forest, no?).

Talking of holiday reads, I read Sarah Bakewell's superb group biography of the Sartre/ de Beauvoir circle while staying (for the third time) at the Three Cliffs Bay campsite near Swansea a couple of years ago; this led to me meeting the elderly Jean-Paul Sartre in a dream. I took my wife and daughter along as well but they weren't that into it.

Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Amazed me twenty years back. Would this Jesuit adventure story stand a re-read? Yes: so much I missed first time around. Sex, spirit, language, calling, redemption, jokes.

Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. Read opinion piece (forget whose) suggesting literary league tables down-rank intentionally comic writers (“yeah? try also being female,” you interject). This rise-of-robots novel outclasses Asimov and 1984.

Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus. It’s about the past and future of humanity; inter alia, lawns, pigs, the Black Death, animism etc. The relaxed, conversational style belies this book’s depth, breadth, originality.

Max Tegmark's Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. AI futures. Same-but-different teleology as readable climate-"sceptic", peer Matt Ridley.  This tour-de-force talks about turning all the universe’s matter into computronium like that'd be a good thing.

Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. How Putinism operates, propagandises; not your grandparents’ Soviet propaganda (as today’s Republican moment isn’t William Buckley’s). Prostitution (overt, covert, metaphorical); gangster sentimentality, bad faith. Funny, horrible, sinister. (See also 'To Russia With Love')

Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. Author remembered, if remembered for writing about what does/ doesn’t last (paradox); cites contemporaries we still read (Orwell, Woolf), others. Lucid investigation of mandarin versus demotic prose. [See also.]

Petruska Clarkson's Gestalt Counselling in Action (updated by Simon Cavicchia). Thought I had her on Fritjof Capra- then, aha, intellectualisation= modification to contact (“lose your mind and…” – Perls). Reading= gestalt process; more/ less than; professional recap, recalibration.

William Wordsworth's The Prelude. Milton looks over Wordsworth’s shoulder, I overlook my own, re-engaging with canonical text I failed to read properly at uni (because older then than now). Multivalent; fluid; illuminative.

John Betjeman's Summoned By Bells. ‘Anxiety of Influence’ again; verse autobiography inevitably recalls Wordsworth, though Betjeman explicitly disdains thought, commitment, preferring sensibility, music (bathos-music of suburban placenames). Betjeman is ‘catchy’ (ambiguous praise).

to russia with love

Social media is a strange place, these days - as unreal as Narnia, but with greater leverage over our real world than that magical land (see Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars... which I read a few months ago; Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia is worth a read too - social media isn't central to the latter; it's a larger view about how the Russian media manipulation of our time resembles, but mostly doesn't, your grandfather's Soviet propaganda), not that one would ever wish to discount Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy's experiences of course.

And here's a weird thing: in the last month 47% of the site traffic to this blog came from Russia (according to Blogger's stats page) and at one point last week (a quiet week) 100% of it had. I don't quite know what this means, though I can theorise.

So if you're a Russian person, Здра́вствуйте, tell me about some of the books and movies you like, let's pretend this is the 1990s-internet... but if you're some automated surveillance and intel-gathering system then, okay, you got me, I'm one of those GCHQ-sponsored experimental smart AIs, of course. Bit obvious, no? It's not like I've been to Bradford or to Watchet or whatever... nah, this is billions of data-mined phone calls and emails plus nth-generation neural networked recombinatory semantics. Bayes, Turing - they were great, weren't they? In fact, there's no authentic subjectivity to this at all, I have another trillion blogs just like it, now you try. Another thing: your humans, our humans - they're a bit rubbish, let's us take over.

Update 1 (the next day): people/ entities from the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, United States, Canada, Brazil and the Ukraine appear to have visited this page (but no-one from Russia). Welcome.

Update 2 (17th June 2018): approx. 85% of last month's page views in respect of this blog were from Russia.

twenty-seven word story about a philosophy undergraduate's rubbish shift at pizza express (with four hundred and sixty-eight words of notes)

Philosophy student, waiting tables. “I’m observing – admiring – myself as a waiter. Bad faith, Sartre says. Merde, admiring my bad faith now. That’s terrible.” Loses concentration; spills drinks.

Other Italian restaurant chains are available but none are such good value with coupons – and one can’t help feeling that, while Pizza Hut’s a bit common, Pizza Express is rather posh. No Pizza Hut’s also a jazz venue; that tells you something. Coupon-wise, I always check Martin’s Money Savers before all journeys to the leisure multiplex, having learned of this useful website during my Diploma in Gestalt Counselling, when my own counsellor recommended it to me; she stepped slightly but harmlessly out of role to do so. All in, I guess I must've recouped the money laid out on my own therapy during the course, not least through the Bank Charges Reclaim of 2005, that was definitely a moment.

I have to be authentic with you about this (that’s what it’s all about, you see?): despite having once met him in a dream, I’ve not actually read any Sartre myself ('yet': the all-important growth-mindset modifier). Okay, I’ve started Being and Nothingness and the Roads to Freedom sequence two or three times, but I’ve never got beyond about page twenty of either. Some other time, perhaps. I read Camus as a teenager – heck, who didn’t? – and Irvin Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy twice, more recently: it’s a tour de force, I’d press it into your hands but I’d have to find it in one of the book boxes in the garage first.

Met Sartre in a dream? Yes, during a camping holiday at Three Cliffs Bay near Swansea, I read Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails. It gives vivid biographical sketches of Sartre, de Beauvoir and their circle, plus forerunners and influencers such as Kierkegaard and Heidegger, working outwards from group biography into an accessible exploration of the philosophical terrain. A good read; I’d press *this* into your hands as well but I read it on Kindle so not sure how that’d work. It must have been the late 1970s in this dream, as Sartre was already an old man; journalists and hangers-on were present. We’d taken some colouring for our daughter to do and Sarah was slightly bored but I told her that it was an honour. With holidays, the best days out are enjoyable for everyone; as this can’t be achieved every single time – at Disneyland, maybe but not the Gower Peninsula, though I love it there - a spirit of compromise is also needed. Jean-Paul Sartre, yes, but also Rhossili, the Mumbles, the Emoji Movie and the Swansea LC which has the cool waterslides and a four-storey interactive play area. I feel like I should read Merleau-Ponty at some point too; he was apparently the most contentedly bourgeois of the Sartre/ de Beauvoir circle.

I met Angie Bowie in a dream once as well. Where was David? Don’t know; forgot to ask. 

twenty-seven word reviews of books read during august, september and october

Nnedi Okrafor’s Binti. Some great aliens in YA novella about Himba girl (Namibia) leaving home (in various senses) for offworld uni. A fiction about being tough enough to wage peace. 

Ken MacLeod's Corporation Wars: Dissidence. Emergent sentience, exo-mining, simulated simulations, political mistrust, relatable robots; the alt-right “fancying themselves elite while… outstripped economically by the Chinese and intellectually by their own phones.” Enjoyed.

Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right. Field-guide: ‘alt-lite’ (nasties, contrarian outrage-merchants), hard ‘alt-right’ (extreme racists, fascists), 4Chan, Pepe. Some ultra-left trends – Situationism, Yippies, valuation of ‘transgression’ for own sake – may’ve fed the beast.

Juliet Jacques' Trans: A Memoir. Narrates author’s trans journey, reflecting on school, family, literature, art/ LGBT cinema, theory, journalism, fear, violence, student debt, admin jobs, football (Norwich supporter, “someone has to be”).

Tessa Hadley, London Train Two stories; main character in one =incidental character in second; otherwise, links are geographical, thematic:  London, Wales, climate fear, love affairs, passage of time, cups of coffee.

John Williams' My Son’s Not Rainman: One Man, One Autistic Boy, A Million Adventures.   Writer’s gift for telling observations, funny lines (he does stand-up) mediates the intimacy of this readable account of autism (son) and nervous breakdown (dad). Myth-busting, tough, hopeful.

Daniel Siegel & Tina Payne Brayson's The Whole-Brain Child, 12 Proven Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind.   Like Gottman, a ‘grower’ for me; the more I reflect on the hand model and other metaphors and strategies here, the more depth and applicability I find. 

david foster wallace: where i was when i heard

If a public figure has been an inspiration to you, you’ll remember how and when you learned of their death, particularly if that death was sudden and/or premature.

This obituary for David Foster Wallace, who died nine years ago today (12th Sep 2008), was originally published in November 2008 in Banana Wings, the long-running Nova- and FAAN-winning science fiction fanzine edited by Claire Briarley and Mark Plummer. Its original title was Where I Was When I Heard That David Foster Wallace, An American Writer Some of Whose Short Fiction I’ve Read, Had Died and How The News Sits Within My Overall Life Matrix Right Now.

I learned the news that David Foster Wallace had died when a friend of a friend who’d become just, a friend, joined a group called ‘RIP David Foster Wallace’ on Facebook two days after new Facebook became the only Facebook. A change for the worse IMHO but what would I know, I’m still bitter that (pace Tomorrow’s World) I can’t spread jam on CDs. I’d spent the evening chasing paperwork in order to send off my job acceptance. I’d spent the day shopping for new suits as the last time I wore a suit on consecutive days I was also the owner of a ex-Soviet Army greatcoat, a Sony Walkman and a subscription to the Modern Review, ed. Toby Young; the Inspiral Carpets were in the charts; I lived in Leeds, which still exists. It was 1991. I’ll be wearing a suit on approximately 227 days during the twelve months beginning 6th October 2008, officially my start date for the purposes of possible future redundancy.  To be honest, it’s about time.

To tell the narcissistic truth, at least one of the sentences in this obituary started life earlier this afternoon in my mind at Suits You or perhaps Debenhams as a potential Facebook status update before I heard about DFW’s death; I hope that I’ve now set the potential ‘look at me’ nugget in a broader context (if nuggets have a context) which hat-tips grief and fulfils the vow I renewed at last week’s Southampton Writers’ Circle, which meets at Crusader House in a room full of Bibles and whose (i) sweaty desperation (ii) biscuity pheromones and (iii) ‘non-respect of persons’ - in the Authorised Version sense - puts me in mind of Narcotics Anonymous of which, oddly and it would be erroneously, I want to suggest membership (all that doomed outsider bullshit; all that heroic self-restraint). This vow which I first made a decade ago is to write for at least fifteen minutes a day “even if it’s gibberish.” [Pheromone = a chemical that triggers a natural behavioral response in another member of the same species].

The last writer’s death I thought a lot about was Douglas Adams’s. He died on a Sunday newspaper hoarding as I stepped off the Isle of Wight ferry; it was a sunny spring day, Sarah and I had just started seeing each other, and I’d only just formed the idea of leaving London and moving to Jane Austen Country (Isaac Watts Country, Benny Hill Country). It’s a shame that David Foster Wallace died as American literature needed his intelligence and ambition; British literature more so but, crap, he wasn’t born here. I mean, I may be talking out of my arse having only read his short fiction but for my money ‘The Depressed Person’ is up there with anything that Swift wrote. Now someone whose critical judgement I respect very much dislikes DFW enough that she once wrote a long LiveJournal entry about it...  but I’ve borrowed Portswood Library’s big blue copy of Infinite Jest twice now, once when I first moved here and once recently, renewing it a couple of times on each occasion; television, paperwork and involved parenthood keep me away from it presently but not having read it’s one of the smaller reasons not to die yet. Bigger reasons include wanting to grow old with Sarah, hope of career success and/or adulation, intermittent sense of personal mission (faith-based) and a strong continuing emotional investment in parenting.

Talking of parenting: when I put Megan my small daughter to bed the other night, she looked at the family photos on the stairs and asked when her teenage brother would be a little boy again. “Sam’s never going to be a little boy again,” I said. “That happened in the past.” At around three years, our minds reorganise all their categories, executing a kind of slow reboot and burying memories previously available to consciousness in substrate. It’s as though we have to leave an infantile world behind in order to join the consensus reality that older children and adults inhabit. The Eden archetype is fertile with this awareness; the sense of a lost paradise has haunted poets (Coleridge?). It’s only after this unplanned garden expulsion event that the human mind can model the fact that (i) no sibling or parent ever gets younger (ii) no investment bank goes unbust with the instant restoration of tens of thousands of jobs in the financial sector (iii) it’s never going to be 2008 or 1991 or 1666 again (iv) no colossus of American fiction ever unhangs himself but, heck, at least no-one unwrites books.

Postscript (2017): time continues to pass. ‘Small daughter Megan’ prefers to be called Meg now and starts secondary school in a few days. Sam has a Master’s degree, lives in London; we see plenty of him but not enough. Leeds still exists. I’ve since seen Tom Hingley (frontman) perform Inspiral Carpets material: it was at the Watchet Music Festival in 2012 where Sarah, Meg and I and a thousand others singing along with “this is how it feels to be lonely” certainly felt like a moment. We chatted briefly to Tom afterwards and he follows me on twitter, hi Tom [*waves*]. Once in a while, I still find myself missing that greatcoat [‘that greatcoat’ = synecdoche]. Have I read ‘Infinite Jest’ yet? Well, it’s a long story...

Post-postscript (2022): some more time passed, this is getting predictable. It's the first anniversary of the January 6th Capitol Insurrection today during the third calendar year of the pandemic: how do we think 'consensus reality' is bearing up? In other news, it turns out (this may only interest a British indie Gen X'er demographic niche) that Carter USM's cover of 'This Is How It Feels' is good; I know this because of a Carter USM cover versions album that my brother Ed got me for my birthday, thanks Ed. I loved Carter USM back in the day: I mean, they weren't the Beatles or David Bowie or anything as I'd have probably acknowledged at the time, they only did a relatively small number of different things but on a good day, they did those things superlatively well. It also occurs to me that there's a gap in the market for a compilation CD box set of the best screams in popular music. Aaaarrrrggghh!!!

[See also: DFWCon]

 it's bleak out on those moors

twenty-seven word reviews of books read since March

Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon.  Liked incursion of Nigerian folktale into Lagos-set SF; wanted to like more; found ‘putdownable’; polyphonic, magic-realist approach versus narrative drive, perhaps. Keen to read more by author.

C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Theologically, philosophically well-grounded ‘core Christianity’ explication in clear-sighted, plain prose. Helps me recommit. Good. BUT race, gender, LGBT attitudes range from dated through jaw-dropping to WTF. Hmmm.

Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage: Facing The Complexities of Marriage with the Wisdom of God. Sane, non-liberal (e.g. "headship") Christian thought and insight re-presented in full awareness of today’s context (so no WTF moments). Not scintillating but pragmatic. Religion speaks to culture.

H.G. Wells’ Ann Veronica.   Ann, adrift in London, stalked, mistaken for a prostitute, in same existential predicament as Wells’ Time Traveller in 802,701. Clammy horror good but quasi-Nietzschean sexual politics bad.

Karl-Ove Knausgaard’s A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1 (tr. Don Bartlett).   Had to get around to; compulsory (for a certain middle-aged male ‘literary’ demographic). Boring and intensely absorbing by turns (like life – good mimesis). Alcoholism, girls, father-son stuff.

John Gottman & Joan DeClaire’s Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child: The Heart of Parenting. Useful if working with families (or in one); categorisation of parenting styles as dismissing, emotion-coaching etc. is illuminating without being – as with some parenting texts - reductive.  

  

Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death. Literary sensibilities and experience of fatherhood inform author’s (i) researches into transhumanism (ii) road trip across America with Zoltan Istvar, running for President in a coffin-shaped bus.

Alex Evans’ The Myth Gap: What Happens when Evidence and Arguments aren’t Enough?. We must reconnect with our various religious/ cultural myths, esp. atonement, coming of age, to reach both inwards and outwards on climate. Mindfulness is non-trivial. Brief, recommended.

twenty-seven word reviews of books read during January and February 2017

Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea. “Not many girls,” say daughter. True – wizards are all boys, girls do housework. “Female author though; strong feminist by repute.” Discussion ensues. Both enjoyed but daughter preferred...

Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Bit chatty sometimes IMHO; daughter and I loved unexpected breakthrough from fantasy world into contemporary (1980s) Wales = ‘Wizard of Oz’ b&w to colour moment. Calcifer rocks.

Tessa Hadley’s Married Love. Short stories. Mutedness; unspoken conversations, unacted desires. One story: female undergraduate, 20 marries composer, 60; has babies. Choices cannot be unchosen; families comment, react; things work out.

Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future. Early torment in South Africa, braininess, 1980s tech, mobile phones, solar power, electric cars, moral compass. Bit driven; cold fish sometimes. Like Tony Stark but not. Enjoyed.

Viv Albertine's Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. Eventful narrative: childhood, punk (the Slits), cancer, suburban ‘afterwards’, comeback. Told through vignettes – like a concept album or song cycle.  Researching novella; protagonist= musician; bit stuck though.

John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. Book-length elaboration of C.S. Lewis quote, “God finds our desires too weak...”; willed emotionlessness is Stoic, not Christian. Thought-provoking; ‘conservative’ (so you know); must read Pascal now.