A brief stroll through my Library

They spawn!

My Library? Nobody ever asked me to do this before so here goes. (after Mark Fisher's blog K-Punk)

1) How many books do you own?

Oh lots. Hundreds. Several hundreds! They crowd out of their shelves, spawn families, and sometimes cascade onto the floor across desks and into stacks on floors and staircases. They are a nightmare to move home with. Life without them is completely unthinkable. They grow relentlessly. They are my friends. They are the representations in material reality of my mind's development throughout my lifetime. They form semi- autonomous communities of critical and cultural theory, Philosophy, Poetry and literary criticism, specialist studies of the Sonnet form, Shakespeare, Stevens, Coleridge and Shelley.

Nietschze dressed by Walter Kaufman wrestles endlessly with Plato while Socrates looks on stroking his beard. Graphic novels and comics. Outdoor pursuit skills and bushcraft texts. Novels, the Folio’s complete works of Conrad.

Folio Society limited editions of the Letterpress Shakespeare but also of The Canterbury Tales illustrated by Eric Gill and 'Gawain and the Green Knight' rendered by Simon Armitage and Paradise Lost with illustrations by William Blake. Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’. Collections of short stories by Nathan Englander and Miranda July, Wells Tower and Mark Haddon, the glorious Chekhov, O’Connor, Katherine Mansfield, Joyce of course if only for ‘The Dead’, Borges for a magical realist hot sauce.

Critical texts from the world of Social Work. Pikkety's weighty 'Capital in the Twentieth Century' nestles up to Shoshanna Zubhov’s 'Surveillance Capitalism'.

Homer in all his/her/their various translations is/are heavily represented. My preference is for poetic translation to capture the feel of the original but I will read it all. Homer and Greek literature has been the cornerstone of my reading from the age of 8 or 9 when my mother first bought me a children's copy of The Odyssey rendered by Barbara Picardie, which I must have read over a hundred times. Emily Wilson’s later translations add a bright and dynamic feminine perspective.

Plato holds forth in ‘The Republic’ and the various dialogues. Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ apparently completed by his son, and my latest obsession-Curleys collected works of the immortal Spinoza as well as the surprisingly bright translation of the Ethics by George Eliot, the first by a woman though only recently published and edited brilliantly by the redoutable Clare Carlisle.

Lots of texts on the craft of writing but only one-Stephen King's 'On Writing', is absolutely essential. But maybe Anne Lamott’s Birds too? Lots on poetics-structure and form. Heaney and Hughes are collected. Robert Frost’s Notebooks and, of course ‘The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’ who I adore. The journals of Andre Gide.

Science and Speculative fiction with Olaf Stapledon and Ursula Le Guin and Richard Mattheson and Philip K Dick joined recently by Brain Catlin’s mad ‘Vorrh’ Trilogy.

Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ is essential to understand the current Western Hegemony and highly readable. In fact an essential text to understanding why the Industrial Revolution originated in Britain is also ‘Power and Progress-Our thousand year struggle over technology and Progress’ by Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu, both economists is a surprisingly brilliant read.

Ghormenghast awaits a third reading. And of course my much adored Complete Sherlock Holmes Stories and Novels of Arthur Conan Doyle fully annotated by Leslie S Klinger and published by Norton Books. Let’s also mention ‘The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci’ though we must remember he was also a weapons manufacturer.

Sprituality has been a constant theme through human existence and remains an ongoing work in progress with great highs and some terrible lows. Though he fell from grace some years ago, the Collected Works of Ken Wilber occupies significant space on my crowded shelves and he remains, for me, one of the most brilliant explorers of transpersonal spirituality, drawing on disciplines from ancient religions and practices and uniting them with philosophy and psychology, hard Sciences and Social Science into a remarkably coherent synthesis of types and stages and states of spiritual development. His somewhat simplistic application of Spiral Dynamics to his original conceptualisation has, I believe, alienated some readers. However the famous once hermit-like bald mystic has, I note, returned to social media of late, bewigged and full of beans and I am revisiting his earlier work-’Sex, Ecology and Spirituality’ remains the Ur Text.

Currently in my meditation I am exploring Red Pine’s translation of ‘The Lankavatara Sutra’. Beautiful and wonderful and slightly mad but as Wilber’s famous Pre/Trans Fallacy states-both pre- developmental and post developmental stages are pre and post-rational so logical analysis will not help us here. As someone once said ‘Unless ye become as little children’ maybe gives us a clue here.

Food is an essential element of my physical and cultural life. Cooking, studied and learned and practised to a professional level, is, to me, essential for a civilised life. Ignorance of cooking as a signifier of maleness is, to my mind, utterly inexplicable. The expectation that women will shop and cook for their male partners is extraordinary. Some women make great cooks but it should be by choice not expectation. I own and have read probably over a hundred cookery books alone. But it is the same ones that end up be-spattered in my kitchen. Delia’s Summer and Winter books. Jamie’s 30 minutes book (you will never make anything in there in 30 minutes!) and his ‘Return of the Naked Chef’. Nigel Slaters 'Real Food'. Nigellas ‘How to Eat’, a string of texts on fire cooking, a particular love of mine. Francis Mallman’s ‘Seven Fires’ deserves a particular mention. The vegetarian cookbooks of Dennis Cotter, ‘Paradiso Seasons’ and ‘For the love of Food.’

More recently a focus on more classic culinary texts such as Carrier’s ‘Great Dishes of the World’, my currently favourite Chinese cookbook ‘Classic Chinese Cookery’ by Yan Kit courtesy of the amazing culinary sinophile, Fuchsia Dunlop.

Tom Kerridges ‘Hand and Flowers’ cookbook is food as art. Thomas Kellner’s ‘Ad Hoc at Home’ is my current read and Mark Ruhlman’s ‘Twenty’ must be read if only for his Fried Chicken recipe which my most critical son declares the best he’s ever eaten!

Harold McGhee and Elizabeth David are also present as also is Richard Olney with ‘The French Menu’ though finding a nearbye duck’s flipper to season a cassoulet is somewhat challenging these days! It can however also be read as an anthropological text!

Food and the environment and inequality is a theme that must preoccupy the thoughtful, as well as the welfare of animals and the growing area of the rights of animals to exist and flourish and the necessity of that for human and environmental flourishing as so cogently expressed by Peter Singer.

Food and eating together around a fire is to go right back to our ancestral beginnings and to touch the very wellsprings of thought and song and story. It remains the glue that binds family, friends and travellers together. Food IS essential education!

Reading IS education!

As Public Libraries are the material representation of the communities intellect so their destruction under Austerity represents the destruction of thought itself in the Public Sphere. This is the ultimate aim of the Neoliberal project. The destruction of independent critical thought itself and its replacement by non-autonomous consumption propaganda.

2) What was the last book you bought?

'Mythologies' by Roland Barthes I have heard many times it is magnificent in thought and deed. I will explore once read in a post.

3) What was the last book you read?

'The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Globalised World' Maya Jasanoff. William Collins 2017

A beautiful biographical and cultural and literary celebration of the great Polish writer Konrad Korzeniowski. A lovingly written summation of Joseph C as a visionary who anticipated neo- liberal globalisation, industrial colonialism and global terrorism. Three books are the cornerstone of this thesis 'Lord Jim', 'Heart of Darkness', and 'The Secret Agent', all of which are essential texts for an educated human.

Conrad was famously called ‘a bloody racist’ by the great Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe.

CEDRIC WATTS from University of Sussex in an article dated 1977 has it thus:

“In the lecture entitled 'An Image of Africa' (Massachusetts Review (Winter, I977), 782-94), the distinguished novelist Chinua Achebe declared: 'Conrad was a bloody racist'.

Heart of Darkness, he claimed, is 'an offensive and totally deplorable book' in which Conrad has adopted 'the role of purveyor of comforting myths'.

The lecture was variously cool, mocking, sarcastic, and angry; and disconcerting enough.

Like many other readers, I have long regarded Heart Of Darkness as one of the great works of fiction, and have felt that part of its greatness lies in the power of its criticisms of racial prejudice and the colonial mindset. Particularly disconcerting, then, was this attack, coming from an important and influential black novelist whose work ‘Things Fall Apart’ can be regarded as 'a Heart of Darkness from the other side’.”

I have to agree. Conrad was no racist but he lived in a time of Empire and felt eternally grateful to the British for giving him a home. The Congo was the nightmare delivered by the monstrous King Leopold the Second of Belgium. It remains in that nightmare to the present aided and abetted by rapacious Corporations greedily devouring its natural wealth and potential leaders riven by tribalism and corrupted by insatiable greed and cruelty.

I can heartily recommend David Van Reybrouck’s magisterial ‘Congo’ as a titanic history of the country sometimes known as the Heart of the World. Sadly that heart looks broken for some time to come.

Jasanoff’s Book is described in many reviews, without hyperbole, as a masterpiece. It is!

4) What are you reading now?

Have just read ‘I am Dynamite!’ by Sue Prideaux in audio, narrated by the fantastic Nicholas Guy Smith, a brilliant biography of Friedrich Nietzsche, that crazy poet of the universal thought waves. It has encouraged me back to the original texts and I am currently re-reading Nietzsche’s marvellous ‘An attempt at Self Criticism’ added latterly to 'The Birth of Tragedy by him and demonstrating such self knowledge and wisdom and the obvious fact that, apart from all else, he is one of the greatest German writers of prose as well as a profoundly decent human being. Unfortunately his sister, Elizabeth was a monstrous anti-semite and fascist. Her life alone should be subject to dramatic reconstruction from her Queening over the German colonists in the Paraguayan Free Germania to her megalomaniacal hording and despicable rewriting of her brother’s archive until her death in 1935. She expressed a dazzled admiration of the moustachioed Chancellor, Adolf Hitler. It is clear neither Hitler nor Elizabeth possessed the intellectual capacity to understand the ideas of Friedrich but that did not prevent them from attempting to co- opt him into their Nazi ideology. The very thought would have had him turning in his grave.

Currently I am also reading Nietzsche’s first text, ’The Birth of Tragedy’ in translation by Walter Kaufman and the mammoth 814 page K-PUNK The Collected and unpublished writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016). A true treasure trove of ideas from Repeater Press 2018.

5) What are the five books that have had the greatest impact on you?

Hate questions like these. The Desert Island Disc phenomenon. If you could take only one book, one piece of music etc...

Obviously the two Homeric works, The Odyssey and The Iliad. Equally obviously Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Probably Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ as it would take several years to unpack it. Oh God that’s four already! Then probably a work on Bushcraft by Ray Mears or Mors Kochanski to enable me to build a comfortable treehouse and trap and eat the local wildlife as well as building a birch (or whatever tree equivalent) bark sailing canoe to escape!

One piece of music? Possibly Mahler’s 7th? Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue.’ The Beatles 'White Album' or Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’?-yes we’ll go with that!

That’s a brief look into the crevices and corners of my library. I could go on and explore the various texts on physics and anatomy and neuroscience but perhaps I’ll save that for another day.

What I will also save for a future post is my current project of reading the novels of George Eliot in chronological order. I was astonished to come to a sudden awareness that I had read nothing by her nor indeed anything by the Brontes or Mary Wolstonecroft or Mary Shelley or Elizabeth Barret Browning and only one book by Jane Austen and nothing by Elizabeth Gaskell or indeed Emily Dickinson in any focused way. I am ashamed!

Am I an unconscious sexist pig? I asked myself before diving delightedly into 'Frankenstein'? Clearly something is deficient, hence a further deep dive into George. I am in the middle of the intellectual and dramatic ocean that is 'Middlemarch' right now and will report back upon conclusion of The George Eliot Project. Future hint-the female writers are essential! George Eliot is essential!

My favourite current female author is Helen DeWitt and I have torn through everything she has written and cannot recommend her enough. Start with ‘Lightning Rods’ and then the impeccable ‘The Last Samurai’.

I should emphasise I am no intellectual. I regard myself more as a miner or prospector, digging in the great lodestores of knowledge and history of ideas and drama that rise to the sky over the millennia. It’s exhilarating but sometimes dirty work and can be dangerous to emotional wellbeing. But I firmly believe knowledge mining as opposed to its more physically extractive counterpart is essentially a good in and for the world.

But I do have to say it’s a buggar moving house!