Ali Smith's introduction to this edition very effectively renders any comment from me superfluous, since Smith seems to be coming from a perspective bAli Smith's introduction to this edition very effectively renders any comment from me superfluous, since Smith seems to be coming from a perspective by my side and is much more eloquent and insightful than I could hope to be. As she points out, Carrington's vision of nuclear winter is entirely swap-outable for the in-progress fossil-fuel-induced climate catastrophe. Her comments on feminist themes in the book, including attitudes towards older women, were similarly on point. My urging fellow youngish whitefolks to value and respect the genius and (often subjugated) knowledge of elders will be less helpful than urging them to read this book. Read it!
If at times I felt the splendidly unconventional narrative, a spectacular hybrid of fairytale quest, apocalyptic mysticism-themed mystery (kind of a la Umberto Eco), and satirical fable, made no sense, I also felt that this was intentional, although occasionally I had a feeling that some privately intelligible symbolism was at work in collaboration with my own expansive ignorance. According to some participants in this discussion, all sorts of interesting things are going on structually and thematically that I only caught snatches of. Nonetheless, I had a feeling of bracing refreshment, as if the rug I was sitting on with my book and blanket had suddenly decided to fly out of the window and give me a tour of an enchanted land.
There are some issues. The 'Negress' Christabel Burns has an impressive role, revealing secret and spiritual knowledge. This inevitably reminded me of the Hollywood 'magic Negro' trope, since she seems to have no back story and unlike the other characters, no vulnerabilities, preferences or emotional ties. I was distressed by the narrative's victimisation of a trans woman and her misgendering, although I noticed that the deadnaming applied to her was partially reversed, hinting at a trajectory towards trans acceptance (I have to hope so anyway, since the 70s was a pretty dodgy decade for cis feminist attitudes to trans* issues)
I found this an easy read despite the ornate language and elaborate, frenetic creativity especially on the part of Marian's friend Carmella. It's really delightful to read something that so joyously and hilariously challenges attitudes to mental health. Carrington here makes unmistakable what is so often misunderstood in surrealism: the stimulus to see, hear, feel, more clearly and more deeply, to see beyond the myths and other illusions of conventional socialisation and the deadening of the senses enforced by a narrowed and narrowing culture, by recognising the absurdity, the surreality of what goes on in our lives every day.
Oh and I love that Marian doesn't eat meat (and is persecuted for it institutionally) and is friendly with animals. Cat lovers will appreciate this one = )...more
I should have read this BEFORE I became the 'social media coordinator' (actually I just tweet) for my local Green Party. Still, I'm glad I got around I should have read this BEFORE I became the 'social media coordinator' (actually I just tweet) for my local Green Party. Still, I'm glad I got around to it eventually and glad to be Green.
As promised this is a short and easy to read book explaining Green politics, which has four strands: environment, social justice, grassroots democracy and peace. Yay!
Not all yay. You woulda thought everyone would be voting for that, but they aren't, perhaps because the dominance of the current major political parties is so entrenched by the electoral system and the support of corporate interests, plus the media and education system, which a Green business leader friend of mine describes as 'parts of the rich peoples' car. They are in their car... The media is like a wheel or a gear.' Quite.
So this book talks about how to influence politics without being in power. Lots of Greens are anarchists or otherwise anti-party in any case, but either way, there's always frustrating compromise involved.
Climate change is explained (it bears a lot of repeating, even for me) and Green philosophies are discussed. Wall notes that Green party folks rarely spend time talking about either of these things much, as they are too busy engaging in direct action or working through the political system to advocate for climate justice, environmental protection, economic and cultural rights and survival strategies.
The most radical bit is economics. The whole growth basis of capitalism just doesn't scan when you remember that we live on a finite planet and look at the ecological limits we have already crashed heedlessly through. Wall draws on the work of Amartya Sen and Ted Trainer to critique consumerism, the use of GDP as a measure of prosperity (it counts bombs but not childcare, as Vandana Shiva points out elsewhere) and corporate globalisation. Localism, social sharing, Elinor Ostrom's work on the commons, the Green New Deal, and Maria Mies' feminist rethinking of economic structures get space.
In the Politics for Life chapter Wall runs through the obvious stuff: renewables, publicly funded free healthcare for all, education as a human right, homelessness (and creating energy-efficient homes) and decentralisation of power. What's annoying is that he doesn't address here or anywhere why the Green Party in England and Wales at least seems to fail to appeal to folks racialized as minorities here, and why it doesn't tackle gender race and class robustly. Feminism and ecofeminism is mentioned, as is migration, but social justice doesn't happen because you think you are doing it. If a discourse fails to talk about race, it will be read as white.
He saves the best til last: the final chapter deals with what-you-can-do which is so much more than sign that petition or turn off the PCs when you leave the office, but is still pretty paltry in prospect compared to the success of environmental movements led by indigenous people in Latin America, Aotearoa-New Zealand and other places. While we white settlers struggle to decolonise our minds enough to recycle a frickin soda can, indigenous folks are showing up and speaking out for the biosphere in serious ways. Wall mentions this a lot, but not enough; to me Green politics as decolonisation is the keystone. Must find out more about Wangari Maathai......more
I'm so glad Susannah Clapp, Angela Carter's literary executor and friend, decided to write this little book, not only because one more precious piece I'm so glad Susannah Clapp, Angela Carter's literary executor and friend, decided to write this little book, not only because one more precious piece of Angela in the world is a blessing, but also because she's chosen such a clever way to tell her own bit of Carter's biography, revealing her character so colourfully and amusingly through postcards she sent and the messages they carried.
The messages are short, and it's Clapp's eloquent, tightly woven commentary that brings them vividly to life and nests them in a brilliant sketch of Carter's life and personality. I adore Angela all the more, and I think anyone who likes her writing will be delighted by this. And if you don't know Carter, my favourite white writer, then whet your appetite with this amuse bouche!
I don't want to spoil too many of the gems so I'll say no more…
"I find nothing more erotic than the spectacle of a man up to his elbows in the sink" ...more
In Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Ngugi wa Thiong'o complained that African neo-colonial leaders behave so ridIn Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Ngugi wa Thiong'o complained that African neo-colonial leaders behave so ridiculously that it's hard to satirise them (similarly, my Dad recently quoted to me from an interview about Bremner Bird & Fortune 'it's getting easier to make fun of politicians. Lots of our later sketches mainly consisted of reading out government policy') but he manages to do it here to painfully funny effect. At the same time he completely demystifies power by revealing the thought processes of the Ruler and his scheming ministers.
I remember reading in Decolonising the Mind about how his books were read by the Kenyan people he wanted to reach once he started writing in Gikuyu. Since in many villages literacy was not widespread, literate folks would read aloud in public places like bars. The whole time I was reading, I was imagining that space, where newcomers would need to ask questions and be appraised of background detail; where someone would forget an earlier plot point and explanations would be necessary, where jokes were repeated and howled over, and where politics expanded into discussion.
Of course, Ngugi wa Thiong’o has translated his own book (affirming his expression of hope in Decolonising the Mind that the art of translation would help him continue dialogue with people everywhere), so it’s perfectly expressive, but the translated-ness has its own interesting consequences for how the book’s humour works. More than that, it provokes me to mindfulness of the Kenyan village & the knowledge that he wrote this book for the people there first, and for me last. And I love this, that my gaze is the least relevant, the humblest. In reading The Famished Road, I felt Ben Okri created an inhospitable surface to break the colonising gaze of Whiteness (of course, that probably wasn’t his intent at all!), but in Wizard of the Crow there is no such disruptive confrontation – I simply feel myself a benign eavesdropper listening at the back, hearing imperfectly, missing some references.
On references though, Ngugi wa Thiong’o doesn’t assume much prior knowledge; he takes care to contextualise and inform about things he wants to bring into the tale, like the Ramayana. The experience he assumes familiarity with to play on is of living in a neo-colonial state under the gaze of a one-track international media. He shows a lot of love to fellow writers, placing literature as a source of knowledge and wisdom among folktales, songs, proverbs and political analyses. It’s extra nice that African and Indian women novelists are mentioned; in such a strongly feminist book, it’s super of Ngugi to send the reader to hear from the horse’s mouth.
The role of White Euro-American influence, gaze and individuals is sent up exquisitely. I particularly love this quote about an organized political process made by a group of women:
Some foreign diplomats laughed out loud, thinking that this was a humorous native dance, but when they saw that state officials and ministers were not laughing, they restrained themselves and assumed that, pornographic as the act might have seemed, it was actually a solemn native dance.
Some of the White people have ridiculous names; (sweet revenge?) Gabriel Gemstone is my favourite. For all the broad strokes though it’s full of subtlety. The Ruler calls the Global Bank officials racists because they deny a loan request, but himself articulates all manner of vile anti-Blackness.
One of my students asked me what this book was about and I said ‘it’s about a very clever, brave woman and a very kind, spiritual man’. It’s about so much more than the central couple, but I love how they complement, balance and complete each other. I also loved the ideas about renewal and healing in nature, self-awareness, contemplation and visionary exploration. I can honestly say that every time I opened this epic I entered book heaven. It was never hard going, never dull, always delightful and enthralling.
If there were no beggars in the streets, tourists might start doubting that Aburiria was an authentic African country
[the Ruler] was baffled by anyone not motivated by greed. he could never understand the type who talked of collective salvation instead of personal survival. how was one supposed to deal with these recalcitrants? a fisherman puts a work at the end of the line, but if the fish ignores it, how is the fisherman to catch the fish?
Here are stories tumbled out variously conversational, oratory and literary. King hands them over, ge
The truth about stories is that that's all we are
Here are stories tumbled out variously conversational, oratory and literary. King hands them over, generously, and reminds me that they cannot be unread; they go with me now, marks on my chest. I feel them swirl about me like a cloak, keeping out no weather, but turning back temptations to hard-heartedness and despair
He starts by comparing a Native creation myth, which presents a universe governed by co-operations that celebrate equality and balance, with the one in Genesis, which offers a universe of hierarchies and celebrates law, order, power and obediance. You've heard this before? King tells it better. If you see the world as the Bible paints it, he points out, you can't see the other version, where the good/evil binary, the deviance of woman, the subjugation of the Other, just make no sense.
Not spoiler but long optional digression! (view spoiler)[I thought it was interesting that King didn't talk about that other story about the creation of the world, the one from the tradition of science. (In a way he did, because he has the sea animals thinking physics. Perhaps this is a smart way of showing how scientific learning fits into story-pedagogy.) Maybe this is different, as it's a story whose many tellers want to agree, and argue fiercely over the details, instead of just sitting back and enjoying the other version. In Darwin's Dangerous Idea Daniel C Dennett argues that the theory of evolution upended the hierarchy of mind (and God) over matter.
Ignoring its Greek pagan roots, our science mainly drew nourishment as it grew from the 'Western' tradition whose creation myth has one Dude in the sky making the Earth and its creatures. It has struggled to place or negate Him in its tale. In the abstract, to its proponents, it is a search for truth, correspondence, coherence... what lessons does it teach? On the one hand it presents the universe as a book open to read by anyone, yet dissent is only permissible insofar as it serves the effort to erase previous errors. At least science does not burn its heretics.
Perhaps this is all irrelevant! King's use of physics ideas acknowledges their importance, as tools, as bits of knowledge without ethical freight. But of late I have felt that we are so often presented with an idealised conception of science, and that science is so often invoked to shield some destructive activity. I must read Bad Science. (hide spoiler)]
Indigenous activist organiser and writer Andrea Smith points out in this essay that one of the logics of white supremacy is the genocide of indigenous people: the original inhabitants of colonised lands must disappear to make space for the colonisers. King has so many stories that bear this out, long and short, sad and enraging, told with a lightness that only makes them more weighty. Laws, wars, broken promises, and above all colonial myth-making (scientific racism, and the constructed tragic, noble, vanishing Indian) are marshalled against First Nation people. In this context even to stay alive is an act of resistance. And to tell your tale much more so...
If King is right then how you live, how you treat people, depends on the stories you believe. While I was in the middle of the book I heard a talk on the radio about the stories of refugees. Agnes Woolley points out that often the life-chances and even the survival of such people depends on their ability 'to tell a good story'. But she also says that we need other stories than the bearing-witness to trauma that mediates survival: we also need the ones that make life worth living.
I heard a story about a migrant on the radio another time. It was about a young man who fell from an aeroplane when the wheel compartment he was hiding in opened before landing. He was probably dead from cold before he fell. The neighbourhood where his body was found was moved; they laid flowers, told his story, found his former partner, learned about his life. Looking at the British newspapers, the irony of this is agonising: what would the reaction have been if he had arrived alive? King wonders aloud (as Baldwin did in The Fire Next Time) why North Americans fail to live the ethics they espouse, except on rare occasions when a story captures their imaginations. The British are just the same.
This review is a ramble. I'm trying not to say the crass cheesy thing I should have said, which is Read This. Because it just might change your life....more
Several years ago I went to a poetry recitation competition in Lincolnshire that had two unforgettable consciousness-shifting highlights. One4.5 stars
Several years ago I went to a poetry recitation competition in Lincolnshire that had two unforgettable consciousness-shifting highlights. One was Ursula Ledbetter's magnificent and hilarious rendering of Tennyson's Lincolnshire dialect poem Northern Farmer: Old Style (yes friends, this is technically my native tongue). The second happened when an elderly man in a shabby coat, fat like a great tenor, shuffled onto the stage and said in a rich, deep, sonorous voice "I'd like to recite a poem by Robert Hayden". The poem was this:
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labour in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?
I still think this is one of the most perfect poems I know, and I was grateful enough to buy this book without further research to thank Hayden for giving me a poem that shows me how to feel for my own dad... The book has finally reached the top of my pile and I have discovered that he was an African-American poet, and converted to his wife's Ba'hai religion from his adoptive parents Baptist faith, so I read and (mis)interpret his work through this knowledge.
In the introduction Arnold Rampersad suggests that the consciousness of violence is probably the most constant element in his work, whatever the theme. Many poems deal with Black history, both to work through and reflect on the violence perpetrated against Black people and to memorialise and celebrate some heroic figures like Frederick Douglass (who gets a sonnet here) and Sojourner Truth.
Violence is everywhere though; In 'The Tattooed Man' he says 'all art is pain/suffered and outlived'. Elsewhere art is a refuge from violence. In 'Zeus over Redeye' he gives eloquent, conflicted passion to protest against nuclear weapons couched in their absurd machismo: 'guarded/like a sacred phallic grove/Your partial answers reassure/me less than they appall'. His poem 'Perseus' ends
Yet even as I lifted up the head and started from that place of gazing silences and terrored stone, I thirsted to destroy. None could have passed me then - no garland-bearing girl, no priest or staring boy - and lived.
I can't help but think of Alice Walker's discussion of Medusa in The Temple of my Familiar" where she interprets the 'gorgon' with her 'snake' hair and fatal 'ugliness' as an archetype for Black Woman, a defensive European demonisation of an African mother goddess. How does this relate to the 'hero''s overflowing will-to-violence?
Rampersad shows how Hayden's sense of 'the uses of violence' evolved over the course of his life, towards strong opposition. For example in his poem about Macolm X he celebrates the renunciation of racial hatred, and again in 'Words in the Mourning Time', he calls on us thus:
We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstraction police and threaten us.
And he also says 'I am tired today/of history, its patina'd cliches/of endless evil'. He seeks tranquility and love. I am writing too much, I ought to just say that Hayden wrote luminous verse and that I can't understand why more people don't read it. Perhaps his pessimism is too much. In 'The Mirages':
And the mirages, the mirages -
I knew what they were yet often
changed my course and followed them.
Less lonely, less lonely then,
the stranger said
is something profoundly sad that rings true, echoed in 'Traveling through Fog': 'the cloudy dark/ensphering us seems all we can/be certain of. Is Plato's cave', but also too harsh for me, because we put meaning into our paths by walking them, mirage led or no, (and there is nothing outside the cave for the wise old White man to bring back down to us. Their claims are lies.)
Perhaps this 'pessimism' is best exemplified by Hayden's gently mocking poem 'Astronauts', in which he asks 'What is it we wish them/to find for us, as/we watch them on our screens?' Part of this scepticism may come from the amusement of a religious man with the childlike excitement of science setting out to find meaning far from the quotidian. Part of it may come from frustration with the White man's untroubled sense of himself as all humanity. In any case, his questions send us into ourselves for answers...more
I feel this book richly deserves its status. Kahneman has handed over the rich & surprising fruits of a lifetime of creative thought and research, in I feel this book richly deserves its status. Kahneman has handed over the rich & surprising fruits of a lifetime of creative thought and research, in a well-organised book free of academiese (hurrah!) He also makes the material interactive by inviting us to do little mental activities to illustrate his simple study methods and assist the delight of recognition that makes this such an enjoyable read.
One of his goals is to provide ways to talk about and tackle some everyday problems by considering the way we think as two interacting systems, and to point out the weaknesses and mistakes that arise from ways these tend to (co)operate. He frankly admits that it is easier to see others' sub-optimal performance than our own, and the tools he offers are generally for 'water-cooler talk' or gossiping about co-workers and negotiation partners. This is a lot better than it sounds, I promise!
I would have to type out almost the entire book to share all the insights that impressed me, but I will pick out a few of my favourite themes:
People use an 'availability heuristic' to make judgements about how often things occur - if you can think of a lot of examples of something, you tend to assume it is common. This makes us vulnerable to subtle propaganda techniques, and gives rise to an uncritical conflation of what-is-in-the-news with what-is-happening-in-the-world. Kahneman points out that we tend to ignore absent evidence: what-you-see-is-all-there-is (WYSIATI)
People do not behave 'rationally' when faced with many types of wager that map onto real life decisions. Most people, in fact, behave in predictably irrational ways. Economic models that treat people as rational agents ('Econs') are deeply flawed. Which is a shame, because economists are using those models
Intuition is not magic. People who are very experienced and highly trained have the ability to process sense data and make snap decisions before going through the laborious work of stringing verbal thoughts or calculations together. This works well in many situations: for firefighters, sportspeople, medics etc. However, there is a tendency to overinflate the importance of hunches and intuitions in other situations, particularly stock market trading, where Kahneman's statistical analysis shows that people (even experienced workers) are worse than computer programs, and even WORSE THAN RANDOM CHOICE at predicting and picking winners and losers.
Perhaps especially in Euro-USian white culture, most of us tend to privilege our 'remembering self' over our 'experiencing self'. We tend to care disproportionately about the end of a story, and the ends of people's lives. People asked whether they would bother going on holiday if they had to have the memory of the holiday erased at the end of it often say they wouldn't. Kahneman's (very gentle!) experiments on pain showed that privileging the remembering self resulted in people choosing to experience MORE pain because of the way the experience was presented. He suggests that giving more thought to the experiencing self could improve life for many people. This echoes the concept of mindfulness that is important in some cultural traditions, therapies and religious practices. A friend pointed out that it was similar to Zen.
So, that's your taster; I strongly recommend the whole smorgasbord. I'll definitely be reading this again....more
This book changed my perception of Africa as much as Things Fall Apart did. I was startled to realise, through these books, that I had never imagined This book changed my perception of Africa as much as Things Fall Apart did. I was startled to realise, through these books, that I had never imagined every day life for people in Ghana, had only thought of Africa through negative news reports and famine relief appeals, and had never considered the possibility that Africans might live in cities, go to work in smart clothes and drive cars. Such is the power of ethnocentric socialisation.
Armah's novel twisted my stomach in empathy with its protagonist. Vivid descriptions and harshly poetic reflections made it an excellent read....more
Surprisingly, this is a great source of cultural literacy. These Books of Stuff can be lazily cobbled together from whatever is lying around, but thisSurprisingly, this is a great source of cultural literacy. These Books of Stuff can be lazily cobbled together from whatever is lying around, but this one is well worth reading. The contextualising commentary accompanying each photograph is very helpful and almost every image in this book is captivating and challenging in some way. Dig in & stimulate your critical consciousness....more
Oral tradition is often characterised by repetition, using rhythm, cyclic forms, repeated phrases or figures, returning symbolic props etc. The Epic hOral tradition is often characterised by repetition, using rhythm, cyclic forms, repeated phrases or figures, returning symbolic props etc. The Epic has elements of all of these strategies, and while it's a bit dull on the page, it's easy to imagine it being spectacularly performed (though of course, it may not have been performed at all). In any case, it's full of intriguing motifs, some mysterious, others deliciously familiar......more
I am spellbound by Woolf's powers of description; she lays out a feast of adjectives and metaphors, weaving a shimmering tapestry of words, here formiI am spellbound by Woolf's powers of description; she lays out a feast of adjectives and metaphors, weaving a shimmering tapestry of words, here forming a continuous surface without break of tone. Exposition is forbidden to intrude on the musical flow of language and the 'six sided' inner voice carrying the narrative is only interrupted by the simple frame device of a passing day on a deserted beach
The gift Woolf displays here is for putting sensations, the delights and torments of being alive, from the humblest to the most monumental, into words; however it is not grateful recognition I feel but a sense of initiation into the mysteries. I am pushed beyond the limits of my experience; Woolf shows me how to feel as Bernard, as Jinny; I cannot impose my own, old ways of feeling on them. Both the pleasure and significance are respected. ...more
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