eleutheria >Books

February 23, 2007

COLLAPSE

Someone sent me their MySpace address the other day a I spent a while clicking from one friendship group to another on MySpace: what a dull experience this natural network made. Obviously, it matters where you start. I had had the impression that I'd have an interesting find eventually. Wrong! These people's interests, made clear by the friends and groups they had linked to, were brim-full of dull enthusiasm and narrow horizons. The following day, I clicked through the Collapse links <here> and found an amazing cross section of people on the web, a group who, previously, would not have been put together. It reminded me of MySpace, but did the MySpace thing so much better.

Collapse 2 is out soon. See reviews of the first volume:

Poetix (Review of COLLAPSE#1)
Infinite Thought (Review of COLLAPSE#1)
Sweet Effay (Review of COLLAPSE#1)
Readings and Thoughts (Review of COLLAPSE#1)
The Weblog (Review of COLLAPSE#1)
Transversality(Reviews [1, 2] of COLLAPSE#1)

May 14, 2006

baby books

Mothers and fathers, here is my recommended reading:
Deborah Jackson Three in a Bed & Do not Disturb (a new edition of the latter has been issued with the title "Letting Go as Children Grow: The Benefits of Relaxed Parenting for You and Your Child")
Hetty Van De Rijt, Frank Plooij Why They Cry: Understanding Child Development in the First Year
Mary Renfrew, Chloe Fisher, Suzanne Arms Bestfeeding: Why Breast Feeding is Best for You and Your Baby

Please get these books! They are written with love, intelligence, sympathy and understanding. If you read them at the beginning you may have the confidence to follow your instincts right from the start and not have to worry about doing things "properly". These books all support each other in their philosophy and they make sense in ways that G1n@ F0rd, et al, never could. Together, I believe, they offer all the practical support you will need without any rules to follow blindly.

The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff is another book that is supposed to be interesting along the same lines, but I haven't read this yet so can't recommend.

January 24, 2005

Sylvia Plath and Marjane Satrapi

Last week I read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Marjane Satrapi's comic book memoir Persepolis 2 2 days in succession. The Bell Jar has been on the book shelf for about 5 years - bought it back then as number 3 book in a 3 for 2 offer. Persepolis 2 was a chance find in the library. I was struck by parallels between the two books. At one point during Persepolis 2, I thought this book is a direct copy of The Bell Jar. At least, they show how similar the societies of America and Iran are. Both books concern themselves with a young woman growing up and learning about the daily realities of life as a "woman". Plath's book is driven by the young woman's insight into childbirth birth as a medical complaint, watching a doctor-controlled childbirth.I highly recommend both books.

December 16, 2004

Magical childhood

More mindless destruction of the past successes in evidence here. I used to spend hours looking at the cover pictures of my childhood books, comparing them to the illustrations in the inside pages - always by a different illustrator - letting my imagination play with all the information the images offered, thinking about the faces, examining the backgrounds. I realised this when I opened a box containing my childhood books - every image was deeply familiar. The original Magic Faraway Tree cover illustrated on Dread seems to sparkle; I would be seriously worried about any child who spent any time in reverie over the new cover illustration.

October 02, 2004

Recommended books

François Mauriac: Therese
Hermann Hesse: Demian
Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus
J G Ballard: The Drowned World
The Tales of Hoffmann (my copy = Four Square Classics published new selection and translation by Michael Bullock, 1962)
Carlos Castaneda: The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
                         A Separate Reality
                         Journey to Ixtlan
                         Tales of Power
Germaine Greer: The Whole Woman
                      The Female Eunuch
                      The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work
Gordon Burn, Damien Hirst: On the Way to Work
R.K. Narayan: The Man-eater of Malgudi
John le Carre: Absolute Friends
                   Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
                   Call for the Dead
Malcolm Bradbury: Eating People is Wrong
                         Stepping Westward
H. Palsson & P. Edwards (Translators): Seven Viking Romances
Jakob Walter, Mark Raeff (Editor), O. Springer (Translator): The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier
Edmund Wheatley, Christopher Hibbert (Editor): The Wheatley Diary: A Journal and Sketchbook from the Peninsular War and the Waterloo Campaign

If you want to buy any of these books from amazon, click on the titles & urbanomic makes some cash!

September 10, 2004

John Hillaby - Journey through Britain

John Hillaby's Journey through Britain, I recommend. "It is a beauty" (to quote Maurice Wiggin - Bookman)

Hillaby gets through the country at a stunning pace - the book reads very quickly indeed. Not really believing the walk from Lands End to St Ives could be done in a day, we walked to St Ives, from home, the other day (over land, avoiding the coastal path which wasn't so established 30 years ago, when the book was written), and realised it was possible, and a very pleasant walk. Our house is about half way along, and we walked the other way (to Lands End), a few days later. Over land, and avoiding main roads, this was not such fun. Like John Hillaby, I hate going back on myself, and won't retrace my footsteps unless absolutely necessary. As now seems inevitable on all new walks, to reach the destination where we lost the way, we walked through boggy paths and fields, climbing though trees in overgrown woods, over barbed wire and electric fences, and waist high in bracken, nettles and brambles. Leaving Sennen in the evening, we lost the path on the moor, but thankfully not my sense of direction, and finally got home around 12 midnight! Hillaby himself ended up stepping into waist high bog in the misty Dartmoor! Terrifying to all those of us who know practically anything is better than turning back, and could therefore (theoretically at least) be in this position ourselves.

"The fact that I went on is less foolhardy than it sounds. I tended to sink in if I stood still"

later in Scotland, more danger:

"Unwilling to go back, I struck inland, following a stream that took me up to the roof of the brae. How I got down by wading through a bog on the other side is painful even to recall.... And there was nothing ahead I could recognize. I had the feeling that I had strayed into an entirely unmapped, unknown corner of Inverness-shire."

I read the last 2 chapters with my toes tingling absolutely achingly, at the thought of him walking on with his "lost toe-nails"! (This is a familiar feeling to me. When B & V came to visit, we had a conversation about where you feel terror in your body [eg, if you are climbing rocks and lose your grip but don't fall]. I said I felt it in my feet, flooding upwards, and B said his father felt it in his groin, I think. B, where was your equiv? The feet isn't such a good place to feel these aches of fear, and confusion. It makes it difficult to keep your footing too. Thanks for your visit, by the way. We had a lovely time!)

Hillaby highlights something else that I have frequently observed; in a open space with plenty of places to chose from, people will often chose to camp (park, sit, etc, etc) right beside you, in the solitary spot you have chosen for yourself. He does this very funnily:

"Late that night, I got within five miles of Inchnadamph and looked for somewhere to sleep. A hillock beside a stream seemed pleasant enough, but the sight of one man putting up a tent drew first one caravan and then two more off the road. I had started yet another colony.

Unfortunately, I had chosen a very bad site. It hummed, not only with mosquitoes, but black-flies, a little needle-point-sized creature said to be responsible for the Highland fling. Hoping that the caravanners wouldn't think it downright unsociability on my part, I packed up and went higher up the braeside. They watched me go. I turned around and waved my hands, violently, trying to give the impression that I was swotting at flies, but at that distance it probably looked like an abusive gesture."

He has written 2 other books: Journey through Europe, and Journey to the Jade Sea.

John le Carre - Call for the Dead

John le Carre - Call for the Dead. In style, this is a cross between 3 of Carre's best books: Absolute Friends, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It describes the time that the George Smiley first came into the secret service.

If power = abuse of power - ie, if by having power, you are already an abuser - what name should be given to the unhypocritical personal strength carried into public life that Carre describes so well in George Smiley?

Here the Spinozist Smiley confronts real power:

"Abruptly [Smiley] felt inside himself the rising panic of frustration beyond endurance. With panic came an uncontrollable fury with this posturing sycophant, this obscene cissy with his greying hair and his reasonable smile."

Smiley's power makes 'success' impossible. Out of some impulse which is cultural/society-self-destructive but personally-self-strengthening, Smiley is unable to compromise. He confronts reality, and so his life is a constant confrontation.

"It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality." Virginia Woolf

le Carre captures how depressing (at best) it is when people you are forced to deal with are removed from reality, and therefore unable to be communicated with or criticised (the people for whose power = abuse of power eg, Tony Blair).

ps, has anyone else noticed the eery similarities between the film Fight Club and John le Carre's The Naive and Sentimental Lover? (Afraid I did buy Chuck Palahniuk's book Fight Club, but never bothered to read it, and then gave it away, so can't say if the likeness come from the book or not.)