The author Paul Hillyard has a lovely sense of humour, which I believe must be essential if you are trying to sell spiders to the rest of us. I have oThe author Paul Hillyard has a lovely sense of humour, which I believe must be essential if you are trying to sell spiders to the rest of us. I have over the years overcome my phobia and can now admire the elegance of common garden spiders and their fabulous webs and the vibrating cellar spiders who live in my cellar, where else. But that doesn’t mean I’m ever gonna get up close and personal with these strange cohabitees of our beautiful and terrifying planet.
Here are some favourite quotes from this small but perfect book :
The problem for spiders in general is that they are good to eat
The male has a huge pair of jaws to restrain the female during mating
A bizarre species that at rest resembles a bird’s dropping
The prey is sucked dry rather than mashed up
Giant Huntsman : an impressive species, especially when found in a house
Beautiful, rust-coloured and fast-moving
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A notorious species which causes considerable fear
The small male looks like an ant
The mouse spider : the species appears somewhat “mouse”-like
The spider runs very fast in short bursts with frequent changes of direction
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Runs over vegetation with great agility, leaping from stem to stem
Known for its unusual method of courtship in which the female requires a present from the male, before mating, of an insect wrapped in silk
The brown male is so small he can fearlessly climb over the female’s body
Vibrations from a tuning fork can bring a response from this spider
During the day this weird spider resembles a twig
This spider is difficult to see because it is reluctant to emerge from its impenetrable web
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When disturbed the spider bounces up and down and becomes a blur
A beautifully-marked but temperamental species
He often lives with the female for some weeks but then dies and she eats him
It had been glowering at me for I think over ten years, intimidatingly unread, corpulent and haughTHE YEAR OF THE WHOPPER
This was the whopper –
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It had been glowering at me for I think over ten years, intimidatingly unread, corpulent and haughty. Full of itself, you could say. I heard it at night muttering “You’ll never read me…Quail before my mighty unreadness.” Unquailing one day, like a pelican swooping down to pluck from the mighty torrent a squiggling fishy, I cantilevered the mighty volume from its roost, blew off a cobweb and committed a month to reading its 1120 pages. And it turned out to be great! And also tremendously peculiar! This is an excellent combination, and it was my novel of the year. It inspired me to read the author’s biography
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And no surprise, he turned out to be a real weirdo. That reminds me I also read a novel called Weirdo.
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It was a deeply so-so comic novel. I didn’t do well with comedy novels, but this one was actually funny :
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and I reread this outrageous almost-masterpiece :
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just in time, before the recent terrible events turned this novel into something now completely unreadable.
WEIRDEST NOVEL OF THE YEAR
The Temptation of St Antony by Flaubert – no contest. I mean, what is that?
MOST POPULAR NOVEL OF THE YEAR I READ
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I ditched it half way so me and popular taste seem to have parted company for the moment. Although having said that, I did love Barbie.
WORST NOVEL OF THE YEAR
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I read it because of a very nice booktuber who loves cheap nasty horror and said it was great. He lied. It’s really not great. It is so not great. I will still watch your vids, Criminolly, but I will not take your recommendations. No offence.
ODDEST BOOK OF THE YEAR/MOST UNPOPULAR BOOK OF THE YEAR (joint award)
Perhaps not too surprisingly, this guy wrote it -
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Francis William Newman, brother of the more famous John Henry, wrote it, all about his truly agonised and immersive journey from one microhabitat within the Protestant faith to another microhabitat within the Protestant faith. He was in search of a perfect understanding of God and his plans for the universe and for Francis William Newman. Very glad I read it but I wouldn’t recommend it to ANYONE. I see that only five other Goodreaders have rated it. This is all for the best.
BEST ANNOTATED BOOK OF THE YEAR
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Every home should have one. Just gorgeous and like a little encyclopedia.
ANGRIEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
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This is a blazing hot book about racism in the USA, a great follow-up for anyone who enjoyed (if that is the right word) Ibram X Kendi’s fantastic Stamped from the Beginning.
BEST BIOGRAPHY
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According to Ian Kershaw’s introduction, they had to twist his arm behind his back for several minutes before he would agree to write a biography of Hitler. In the words of the Lovin’ Spoonful (1965), he didn’t want to have to do it. But he did it and I read both vast parts of this vast book. Amazing story, and no hifalutin professorial language either. 100% recommended.
COMEDY OF THE YEAR
Novels did not provide me with great comedy this year but unexpectedly some oddball literary criticism did – Stephen Moore wrote two very funny books which demonstrate that a) you shouldn’t turn your hobby into your job and b) you shouldn’t get to know your heroes. He is a gentle-hearted edgelord literary critic who has read more unreadable books than anyone else and loved every one. He has garded every avant there is so naturally it was a dream come true ™ when he got a job with the Dalkey Press, who specialise in publishing completely unreadable books. And what a miserable time he had of it! This is recounted in horrible detail in his memoir :
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Through that job he got to work closely with Alexander Theroux, brother of the more famous Paul Theroux, a moderately obscure novelist who loves to grind out vast unreadable books filled with words like geloscopical, kalkydri, post-lapsarian, solisequious, malneirophrenia, ignivomous, chantepleure, rosydactylate, panmoronium, chrysopoetic, zielverkooper, cataphatic and so forth, and who loves to portray himself as a human vortex of sesquipedalian misanthropic nastiness. To his shuddering horror Stephen found that OMG when you get to know him he is really like that! It’s not an act!
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MOST INSANELY DETAILED BOOK OF THE YEAR
A very clear winner : The McCartney Legacy Volume 1 1969-1973 by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair – 770 pages about four years in the life of Paul McCartney. Will I be reading future volumes? Got to admit that 800 pages on the Mull of Kintyre years are not quite so appealing.
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MUSIC BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR
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Famous men often turn out to be famous monsters and we knew that Chuck was at one and the same time one of the great creators (I think the great creator) of rock and roll and also a terrible human being; so this first major biography had a huge task to perform; and it did. This is a model of how it should be done.
AND FINALLY…. A NEW FEATURE
MOUSEWATCH
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This year seven people scrambled to inform me that the title of John Steinbeck’s book Of Mice and Men is a reference to a poem by Robert Burns and should NOT be taken literally. The lively message thread for this review generated a further 186 comments, many hilarious, and shows no signs of flagging....more
This book gets some reviewers’ goats (I’m not sure there are multiple goats, I think actually there’s only one) – take the title of one review in the This book gets some reviewers’ goats (I’m not sure there are multiple goats, I think actually there’s only one) – take the title of one review in the online magazine The Critic
Militant humourlessness A pseudo-history of British comedy leaves one depressed
Or this from the Irish Independent
British comedy is no laughing matter, at least in this writer’s hands David Stubbs has created a readable social history, even if his diatribes and humourlessness jar with his subject
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I can see this – Davis loves to tick off 60s and 70s tv shows for their poor attitudes towards everyone who isn't a straight white middle class male (i.e. the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived) and he is most eager to finger comedians who were feeding us Conservative propaganda and quite often were actually voting Conservative too! Screech! This for David puts a person beyond the pale. He is the living embodiment of the modern assumption that of course comedy either is or should be socially progressive; and furthermore, that the kindly lefties have successfully prised this thing called comedy out of the dead hands of the sexists, racists, homophobes and transphobics and things are so much better now than they ever were.
Article from The Guardian in 2020 :
Rightwing comedians not funny enough for BBC shows, says insider Source says producers have sought Conservative-leaning performers, but most ‘aren’t very good’
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Some of the comedy David (and the rest of us) grew up with which made us roll around busting our sides back then has not worn well- say for example Manuel in Fawlty Towers. It’s the same problem readers find in old novels – my favourite example is Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, a 1938 comedy which is so cute and sweet and funny until suddenly Miss Pettigrew explains to her maid why it’s impossible to marry a Jew. We all know how many times we can suddenly bang our noses on these ancient taken-for-granted contemptuous attitudes. When does this oldfangled nastiness wreck the comedy and when can we shrug and overlook it?
Unfortunately David, when he constantly berates old comedy for its bad attitudes, does indeed sound like an old fart grump somewhat (oh no!) like myself. His book is quite compelling (for British comedy fans only I should think) but it’s not a barrel of laughs. For instance, he loves Monty Python but is very keen to expose its unacceptable parts – talking about one of Terry Gilliam’s animations he says :
that it is the woman who is “liberated” from her clothing, and not the man, says much about how male-determined, how cis-heteronormative, ideas of sexual freedom were in the 1960s and 1970s.
One thing that came across very strongly, and demonstrated poignantly how different those times were, is what television meant to people back then :
The good, the bad, the rubbish, the grown-up and incomprehensible: you watched the telly because the terrible alternative was not watching the telly.
For watching the television, regardless of what was on, was what you did, the unthinkable option being to switch the TV off and go do something infinitely more boring instead.
Well, I guess if you substitute your phone or your laptop for the television, you will still get the same idea.
I give this book points for covering a lot of ground, from Chaplin to The Office. But yes, it's very earnest
Still, it was great to fund someone else who hates Spike Milligan!
I really don’t find Spike Milligan very funny. And when I say not funny, I mean deadeningly unfunny. … I sometimes feel if just one reader is persuaded, after reading this book, not to bother watching Q (Spike’s tv show) this entire enterprise will have been worthwhile.
Very well said David. So true.
Tommy Cooper joke :
I went to the doctor, I said “I’ve broken my arm in several places”. “Well” he said “you shouldn’t go to those places.”
From this dull book I got one lovely anecdote, allegedly true.
There was a high powered discussion panel being held at an institute with an impressiveFrom this dull book I got one lovely anecdote, allegedly true.
There was a high powered discussion panel being held at an institute with an impressive name. Representatives of the great religions were there. The Buddhist talked of how to eliminate desire which is the cause of all suffering. The panellists said
Wow, terrific, if that works for you, great!
Then the Hindu talked about cycles of suffering and rebirth and the way to be released from this endless cycle. The panellists said
Wow, terrific, if that works for you, great!
And so on. Until the Catholic priest talked about the message of the Christian gospel, and salvation through Jesus Christ, and the promise of eternal life. And they all said
Wow, terrific, if that works for you, great!
And the priest thumped the table and shouted “No! It’s not a question of if it works for me! It’s the true word of the living God! And if you don’t believe it you’re all damned to Hell!” And they all said
Wow, terrific, if that works for you, great!...more
A delightful survey and appreciation of the ignoble art of diary writing, which bleeds into the more pompous journal keeping, and is written entirely A delightful survey and appreciation of the ignoble art of diary writing, which bleeds into the more pompous journal keeping, and is written entirely and solely for the eyes of the diarist, except that it usually isn’t. They usually fancy that someone will come along and read this stuff years later and weep or realise you were a genius or both. The refuse incinerators of the world must have consumed a vast number of confessional diaries that nobody gave a monkey’s about.
Thomas Mallon scampers throughout all of literature to bring you a few pages each on many great names like Simone de Beauvoir, Byron, Degas, Anais Nin, Lewis Carroll, Allen Ginsberg, Joe Orton etc and a swathe of assassins like Arthur Bremer and Lee Harvey Oswald, sex maniacs like “Walter” and prisoners like Albert Speer. All of human life is here. Well, quite a lot.
ASSASSINS
The American ones just can’t spell. Here’s Oswald writing about his application to stay in the USSR being turned down.
I am shocked! I have waited for 2 year to be accepred. My fonde dreams are shattered because of a petty offial. I decide to end it. Soak rist in cold water to numb the pain. Than slash my leftwrist. Than plaug wrist into bathtum of hot water. Somewhere a violin plays, as I wacth my life whirl away.
Fast forward to 1972 and 21 year old loner Arthur Bremer is frustrated, he can’t get close enough to Richard Nixon to shoot him. So reluctantly he picks someone easier to shoot – George Wallace. Here he is looking ahead and feeling pretty aggravated:
I won’t even rate a TV enteroption in Russia or Europe when the news breaks – they never heard of Wallace. If something big in Nam flares up I’ll end up at the bottom of the first page in America. The editors will say “Wallace dead? Who cares.”
“But he shoots him anyway” says Thomas Mallon laconically.
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NAMEDROPPERS
On April 8, 1862, the Goncourts note with a mixture of contempt and admiration that Victor Hugo “always has a note-book in his pocket and that if, in conversation with you, he happens to express the tiniest thought, to put forward the smallest idea, he promptly turns away from you, takes out his note-book and writes down what he has just said."
That’s a good example of some heavy namedropping there – yeah, as I was saying to Victor Hugo just yesterday – but that’s the way some of these folks roll. You should check out George Sand (aka Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil). She loves Alfred de Musset but she just can’t get no satisfaction, so as Thomas Mallon says
She gets advice from Liszt, Sainte-Beauve and Delacroix
Two years later she met Chopin and then everything was fine. But what a string of names there. It reminded me of reading Claire Bloom’s autobiography. Her first four romantic entanglements were 1. Richard Burton 2. Laurence Olivier 3. Yul Brynner 4. Rod Steiger
GO ASK BEATRICE SPARKS
Thomas drops a clanger on page 230 when he accepts without question that the well known book Go Ask Alice, published anonymously in 1971, was indeed the diary of a 15 year old girl who had died of a drug overdose. I never read this but just reading the short extract on p232 I thought – surely no 15 year old girl would write like this. Way too assured and stylish. Wiki explains that the person identified as the “editor”, Beatrice Sparks, was suspected fairly quickly of having written either most or all of it. GR now lists it as being entirely by her. And wiki describes her as a "serial hoaxer".
[image] But still, this book gives you a fast & furious tour of so many wildly different lives & situations from the 15th century onward – from the deeply melancholic to the luridly porny to the horribly obsessive to the silly to the profound, it’s the whirligig of life....more
Anthropology pretty much gives me the creeps. People, mostly white middle class types, go to exotic lands, like Papua New Guinea or the Trobriand IslaAnthropology pretty much gives me the creeps. People, mostly white middle class types, go to exotic lands, like Papua New Guinea or the Trobriand Islands and cosy up to the natives and learn their language and write furiously about their culture then leave and write a scholarly book and get a professorship. I don’t see many people from Papua New Guinea coming to study the anthropologists and then writing a bestseller. It's kind of a one way traffic.
For all his public attacks on racial scientists and eugenicists, even Boas tended to see faraway peoples as laboratories
And as you know some people thought of some other people as entertainment. Shortly after the Chicago Fair of 1893
The American Museum of Natural History briefly played host to Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy man who would later be placed on public view, alongside apes, at the Bronx Zoo
And much later, in the 1920s, Margaret Mead adopted a common love ‘em and leave ‘em approach to her field work in Samoa. Two years after she left, her essential Samoan partner in all the information gathering wrote :
Where are you now? We haven’t received a single letter from you. Why haven’t you written to us? I wish you would write to us. We love you so much and we still remember you.
But the motives of the anthropologists are pure. They want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. At least, the ones in this book did. They fought the good fight against racism and eugenics. They went as far as to say that the whole notion of “race” was fictional. They even tippytoed around the concept of gender fluidity (in one society they found “a woman could have a penis; a man could wear a wedding dress” – p124.)
The globe-hopping vastness of these anthropological dreams and schemes, plus the way Charles King tells the story, which is to start with Franz Boas and then tell the stories of three of his main students, including the famous Margaret Mead, in all their sprawling interconnectedness and rambunctious romantic interfacings, is like being dragged on to one whirling carousel after another by happy drunken friends. After a while you wanna get off.
I admire Charles King’s work ethic, to cram this amount of STUFF into 450 pages.
THE MOST HAIR RAISING SECTION OF THIS BOOK
Is not the part where Zora Neale Hurston meets a zombie or Margaret talks to a cannibal but when the anthropologists denounce the rise of the Nazis and have to point out the profound similarities between the Nuremburg laws and American racial laws
The Germans had spent the 1930s not so much inventing a race-obsessed state as catching up with one. Most of the United States, not just the Confederate South, had some form of mandatory segregation by race in schools, public offices, theatres, swimming pools, cemeteries and public transportation. Most had prohibitions on marriage between racial categories or treated mixed-race couples as having committed a crime. Most used forced sterilization as a tool of eugenic betterment or as a form of punishment for the incarcerated.
The American “system” was praised in Mein Kampf – Hitler liked the country’s commitment to its racial improvement.
3.5 STARS ROUNDED UP TO 4
This is because CK’s big argument is that these anthropologists fearlessly challenged the idea of rigid identifiable races and gender stereotyping which had great progressive implication for all future thought about race and gender, and this seems to be quite true, but he just doesn’t spend enough time explaining their arguments. Many pages about Margaret’s travels and Franz Boas’ academic career but hardly any on WHY they thought race was a wrongheaded notion, and how they grappled with a world in which it is so stubbornly entrenched. Also, that title is not good! Gods of the Upper Air? What’s that supposed to mean?
AND FINALLY
You have to say that sometimes these anthropologists seem a bit naïve. CK writes that they had an idea that
Just as the cure for a fatal disease might lie in an undiscovered plant in some remote jungle, so too the solution to social problems might be found in how other people in other places have worked out humanity’s common challenges
It turns out that not only was Tennessee not Mr Williams’ real name, he wasn’t even born in Tennessee either and as far as I can see he never even livIt turns out that not only was Tennessee not Mr Williams’ real name, he wasn’t even born in Tennessee either and as far as I can see he never even lived there. I wonder what the 6,886,834 actual Tennesseans of 2021 think about that. But it is a beautiful name (whose etymology and original meaning are now lost in the mist of time).
But this is all beside the point.
This play is one of the kazillion modern dramatic productions of stage and screen that demonstrate how oppressive families can be, how injurious to mental health, and how venal, mendacious and duplicitous, and how suborned each family member can be, especially if they can see their way to a fat imminent inheritance of 28,000 acres of the best soil west of the River Nile.
The two main characters are Big Daddy and his favourite son Brick. Both of these are married to women they have contempt for, and they demonstrate this very freely throughout the proceedings. The occasion is BD’s 65th birthday and unpleasant revelations are in the air. The thing is that BD has been rather unwell for three years and finally they have got tests done and he & his wife (who is called, yes, Big Momma) has been told it’s nothing, jest an ole spastic colon, but meanwhile the doctors, apparently, have said to the number one son Gooper (I am not making up these names) it’s not any ole spastic colon, it’s terminal cancer, he hasn’t got long, leading Goop to figure that he better get BD to MAKE A WILL (he hasn’t so far cause he wants to live forever) and make Goop the sole beneficiary because that no good Brick is just a handsome falling down drunk which can be demonstrated by the fact of him hopping around for th whole play with his leg in a cast because he broke his ankle trying to jump over a hurdle at three in the morning yesterday.
Brick doesn’t love his lovely wife but he did love his friend Skipper (“friendship with Skipper was that one true great thing”) who died of drink. Both his wife Margaret and BD himself attempt to drag out of him an acknowledgement that this one true great friendship was in truth homosexual and both of them are pretty cool about it too, but poor old Brick can’t take all the pressure and so he has become a full-on alcoholic -
[Brick crosses to the bar, takes a quick drink]
[He hobbles directly to liquor cabinet to get a new drink]
[Brick has replaced his spilt drink]
[smiling vaguely over his drink]
[He smiles vaguely and amiably at his father across his replenished drink.]
[This last statement is made with energy as he freshens his drink.]
So there’s the gay revelation and the cancer revelation and lots of self-delusion and all-round irritation and steaminess. I liked it. There are a few zingers – Brick’s wife Margaret is complaining he never shags her and he says :
I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage.
One thing I was not expecting was the bizarre nature of the stage directions. At one point it directs Margaret like this :
she has to capture the audience in a grip so tight that she can hold it till the first intermission without any lapse of attention.
Eeek! I bet that has made a few actresses turn pale. And I especially liked this stage direction where Tennessee kind of confesses directly to the audience :
Brick's detachment is at last broken through. His heart is accelerated; his forehead sweat-beaded; his breath becomes more rapid and his voice hoarse….The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man's psychological problem. I'm trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent--fiercely charged!--interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis.
Finally, this was very interesting because TW was explicit about the relationship between the playwright and the director. He tells us that Elia Kazan, the first director, wanted the third act rewritten – he had his own good reasons. And TW wasn’t in a position then to say no, so there are two very different third acts in existence (both printed in this Penguin edition)....more
This play is really very learned It was written by this guy Bernard And really I think the title is a bit of a lie Because this Superman doesn’t wear a cThis play is really very learned It was written by this guy Bernard And really I think the title is a bit of a lie Because this Superman doesn’t wear a cape or fly Or catch bad guys like Lex Luther or Braniac It seems to be all about an idea invented by that maniac With a name nobody can spell, Friedrich Nietzche About whom GB Shaw is keen to teach ya As for the rest, a smorgasbord of intellectual dumplings Enlivened by the characters’ neverending grumblings There’s a hypocritical romantic Whose psychology tends to the frantic And another guy who wants a revolution Whose ideas were borderline offensive where they weren’t lilliputian There’s a hoity-toity mademoiselle And a long debate that takes place in Hell Outrageous opinions are bandied around Shaw’s firecracker paradoxes often astound But it’s okay, nobody in this play gets hurt And the revolutionary ends up (spoiler alert)...more
I am not sure I made myself completely clear in my last letter to you. Judging by the reply you were so kind enouLETTER FROM A YOUNG POET
Dear Mr Rilke
I am not sure I made myself completely clear in my last letter to you. Judging by the reply you were so kind enough to send, I don’t think you quite realised that my landlord has now issued a notice to quit, the period of which terminates this month, and, as I tried to explain, I have been let go from my position at the slaughterhouse – I stress that these are not metaphors, or ironic parables, dear Mr Rilke. It could be that you thought I was speaking poetically. This was sadly not the case. This being so, I was wondering if you could see your way to being able to advance me a sum of somewhere in the region of 2500 marks to get me through the coldest winter we have experienced in many a long year. I put it to you plainly – the last bottle of gin was finished last night and I am hoping that wallpaper contains some nutriments because that is the only edible thing left in the house from which I will be imminently ejected. 3000 marks of course will be better, I could then replace my boots and would not have to walk the streets wearing two blocks of ice. I know you many times advised me to embrace my solitude, to not demand answers to life’s questions but to live intimately with the questions themselves, but surely, not to the point where one might reasonably be expected to contract tuberculosis.
Your affectionate correspondent Franz Xaver Kappus Berlin 1928
PS – at a stretch I can live with 2000 marks if I sell some minor body parts to the Hospital....more
This is a glorious handsome opulent edition of 26 famous stories festooned with notes by Professor Maria Tatar who is your perfect companion, full of This is a glorious handsome opulent edition of 26 famous stories festooned with notes by Professor Maria Tatar who is your perfect companion, full of insight and knowledge but not freezing – in fact she is slyly playful at times (Snow White in the glass coffin “becomes something of a tourist attraction”….and later : “fairy tale women seem to be unusually tolerant of the hedgehogs, pigs, snakes and other beasts that steal into their rooms at night, perhaps because the animals usually manage to make the transformation in to human form before getting between the sheets”).
Reading this slowly over the last six months was like gathering pebbles from the beaches of my own childhood, some intimately familiar, some goldenhued and strange. Two of them I knew just from Danny Kaye’s songs “The King’s New Clothes” and “The Ugly Duckling”. Some I thought I knew but didn’t (“Puss in Boots”, “Rapunzel”). Most I knew but have no memory of how.
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There are surprises. I was expecting atrocities, dismemberments, rapes and cannibalism and I got that in spades, but my oh my, there are a few very alarming stories in here. Perhaps the most extreme-horror tale is “The Juniper Tree”. In this one the step-mother one day gets so irritated at her despised stepson that she beheads him by slamming down the lid of a chest while he is reaching in to get an apple. So then she gets nervous, wondering what her husband will say when he comes home and finds his son beheaded.
She went to her room and took a white kerchief from her dresser drawer. She put the boy’s head back on his neck and tied the scarf around it so you couldn’t tell that anything was wrong. Then she sat him down on a chair in front of the door and put an apple in his hand.
Then she tells her daughter to ask the kid for the apple and if he doesn’t answer, she should slap him on the face. So she does that and of course the head flies off his neck. This ruse enables the mother to blame the daughter! Now what?
“Little Marlene,” said her mother, “what a dreadful thing you have done! But don’t breathe a word to a soul, for there’s nothing we can do. We’ll cook him up in a stew.”
So the father comes home and eats the stew and then the story takes an unexpected turn which is far too crazy to summarize.
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I wasn’t expecting an oddity like Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Match Girl”. In this short tale there’s a little match girl from a very poor family. Barefoot, she wanders the streets on New Years Eve. Because she hasn’t sold any matches she can’t go back home. So she freezes to death. The end. She gets taken to heaven. So it seems that the moral of the story is very sucky – the meek will be saved, God is counting every hair on your head, don’t worry about being outcast and despised, it will all be okay in the end. But wait. She has a pocketful of matches but she freezes to death. There is a different point here from the meretricious fake ending this slight story has. The real point is that with her matches she could have burned down a rich person’s house and not frozen to death. The real point is that the poor and oppressed have the power in their own hands to change their situation should they only realise it. And further, that conventional piety exists to divert them from this dangerous truth.
I was also not expecting “Donkeyskin”, which I didn’t know. This is a tale explicitly about incest. The dying Queen makes the King swear that he will never remarry unless he finds a woman more beautiful than she is. Some years pass and he realises that their daughter is more beautiful than her mother. So her proposes marriage! The rest of the tale is all about how she escapes that fate.
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Maria Tatar weaves many mythologies and folklores together in her notes as she explores the many profound cultural motifs and the psychosexual bedrock from which they spring
[From a note on Rumpeltiltskin] In ancient religions naming the gods compelled them to respond to worshippers, hence the taboo against invoking their names. Knowing the name of your antagonist represents a form of control…in numerous myths and folktales, there is a prohibition against asking the name of the beloved, and violation of the taboo often leads to flight or transformation into an animal.
In tales of three sons, the youngest and often the stupidest of the three is the one singled out for good fortune.
So skipping from heavyweight ponderings to wry humour and always adding a note precisely when the reader thinks “wait, what the hell did I just read?” Maria Tatar could not have served up this bejewelled confectionary any better, not if she had seven league boots on and was attended by twenty frog princes.
Everyone reading this has got one, unless you suspect you might be a brain in a vat being programmed with fake sensory inputs. It’s an intriguing theoEveryone reading this has got one, unless you suspect you might be a brain in a vat being programmed with fake sensory inputs. It’s an intriguing theory but it won’t help at all when you’re pulled over for speeding. “I’m just a brain in a vat, officer”.
So that thing you have there draped round your soul, yes, your very body – did you know that it’s like an explosive device waiting to go off at the slightest movement? It’s so offensive! Depending on the context.
For instance, on p155 we read:
Jock Sturges has been photographing the same nudist families in France year after year, watching the children grow into young adults. Sally Mann photographs her own children negotiating the turbulent waters of childhood.
This book was published in 1994 and in the last 24 years we have had such a tsunami of revelations about the prevalence of paedophilia that the very young nudes in these two photographers’ works are now alarming and very unsettling. (But still on sale at Amazon.)
How’s this for a story about the offensive qualities of the human form. A modest form of swimwear was created for Muslim women which got called the burkini – actually it’s nothing to do with the burka as it does not cover the face, but it covers everything else.
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The burka had already been banned in France as you will know. But then the burkini was banned by various French resorts. What could possibly be the problem? The Independent newspaper explained:
The first city to announce the prohibition was Cannes, where mayor David Lisnard said he wanted to prohibit “beachwear ostentatiously showing a religious affiliation while France and places of religious significance are the target of terror attacks” to avoid “trouble to public order”.
So then you had the crazy sight of French policemen on the beach ordering Muslim women wearing the burkini to expose more of their bodies or face the judicial consequences. “You’re offending public decency by wearing too many clothes!”
This fits right into the chapter of this remarkable book called “Politic” – “the body as a site of contested meaning and value”. Boy, you can say that again.
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So this book is stuffed full of 366 photos – “35 in colour, 331 in duotone” (yes, black & white) – of the human body in its many phases and attitudes, from the very gruesome
Felice Beato 1865 – Crucifixion of the Male Servant Sokichi who Killed the Son of his Boss and was Therefore Crucified. He Was 25 Years Old
to surrealistic fun in the 1930s and all the way to the pinnacle of straight and gay male and female beauty. It’s also stuffed with rather turgid and waffly prose consisting of statements of the obvious and statements of the indefinably abstruse with very little in between.
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One of the most interesting chapters is called “Estrangement”, dealing with imperfect, disfigured, disabled, rejected, sick and dead human bodies. So here we have the bound Chinese foot, the Fijian cannibals with a fresh corpse, the hermaphrodite, elephantiasis due to scarlet fever, and a selecting of grossly deformed foetuses in big jars (always a crowd-pleaser). And let’s not forget
A Filipino Freak Of Seven Or Eight Years Old Having An Extra Pair Of Legs Protruding From The Pelvis, C 1900
We are then informed that
in the 19th century there was a brisk trade in such photographs of 'the other' : the circus freak, the bearded lady, Siamese twins, and so forth were popular subjects to be collected and traded
So all those sites on the internet specialising in the gross and the grotesque have a venerable pedigree.
A book like this demonstrates how our notions of what is decent and what is indecent mutate quite confusingly as the decades roll on by. I now think that the Victorian collectors of pornography would not be shocked by modern porn; instead they would be delighted at the quality of the images. We 21st century people, however, might well be shocked at some Victorian practices :
Dead babies were another popular subject. Although to our thinking there is something of the macabre in this practice, people in the 19th century seemed to find much solace in it, as they did also in the so-called spirit photograph, a portrait of the widow or widower with an image of the dearly departed (manufactured by double exposure) hovering reassuringly over the shoulder.
(If you’re interested, just google “Victorian babies in coffins”)
* In 2016 Lucy Martin became a weather presenter on the BBC – here she is
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I’m used to her now but at first she kind of shocked me. Okay, not kind of, she did shock me! I’m still trying to work out why....more
I bet if he had called it Whiney the Pooh it wouldn't be so popular...
Aw look, out of fucking honey again, why does this always happen to meeee.... anI bet if he had called it Whiney the Pooh it wouldn't be so popular...
Aw look, out of fucking honey again, why does this always happen to meeee.... and my dealer's been arrested....and they stopped my benefits payments again ... ...more
Not a happy experience, in fact quite disconcerting. Usually if I don’t like a book I take the fairly reasonable view that it’s them, not me, where thNot a happy experience, in fact quite disconcerting. Usually if I don’t like a book I take the fairly reasonable view that it’s them, not me, where the problem lies. But here, I think it’s me. This is probably a pretty good book but for me it was…urrghhhh…. Like mudwrestling with a shapeshifter. One minute it’s the gift giving culture of the Trobriand Islanders, next minute the Bovine Mystique of the Basotho and then an examination of the concept of culture and how central it is to anthropology (and ordinary plebs too) followed by a deconstruction of the whole stupid fallacious concept of “culture”, like, what does that mean, seriously? Nothing! Okay, Prof Engelke doesn’t put it quite like that but he sure means it that way. Or maybe he just wants you to know that some top anthropologists do. It’s hard to say. He’s like well, some remote tribes do like this, and some do like that; and some anthrolopopolological guys think like this, some guys think like that. There’s no One Ring to rule them all, this isn’t Middle Earth.
So it all gets exhausting. Why should I pore through his chapters on Value, Blood, Identity, Authority, Reason and Nature when I know that sometime soon he’ll be telling me that there ain’t no such thing as Value, Blood, Identity, Authority, Reason and Nature even though a ton of anthrololopolologists have written a ton of books on precisely those things. Like Chuck Berry said, too much monkey business for me!
I also didn’t like the historical creepiness of anthropology, which is that often it was used by colonial authorities – and is still used by big companies – to figure out how to handle the natives. (“Natives” is a term the professor is still okay about using. There’s a whole couple of pages about that very point as you might have guessed.)
So, this book did not make me feel good. It made me feel fairly dim-witted. I could not keep up. I can’t seem to find the brain power to add the hropologist to my thinking, so I’m sorry to say that now I think I just Think Like an Ant. ...more
A Day Off by Storm Jameson was not something I would have touched with a broomstick except that it caught my eye in2016 YEAR IN FICTION
THE GOOD STUFF
A Day Off by Storm Jameson was not something I would have touched with a broomstick except that it caught my eye in a perusal of 1001 Books You Must Read Before We Do Something We Will Regret and it turned out to be bitter, bleak, black and delightful
I’m meandering through a list of crucial British novels from the 50s and 60s which I should have read years ago, and I got to Alfie by Bill Naughton – I was expecting it to make me cringe but it was great, an account of a sexist bastard struggling towards some kind of self-awareness, but not quite making it – and the humour is so piquant you can’t dismiss Alfie, what a character. He’s not just a 60s guy, he’s still with us. Recommended!
Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce was another fierce modern American slice of self-destructiveness – the fictionalized account of the author in her waitressing drugs and sex phase – not everyone’s chocolate éclair, but it was predictable that I loved it badly. I don’t think it loved me back but that’s life.
True Grit by Charles Portis was the year’s only 5 star novel and the first of those since Fourth of July Creek at the end of 2014. I think if anyone doesn’t enjoy True Grit they might consider quitting novels for something else, maybe taxidermy would be a more engaging hobby. I read it because of the Coen Brothers movie, which is an unusual way round for me.
After that came a zillion three star novels (10 to be exact) and the next one to knock me out was Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante – I don’t like to get caught up in the surges of hype that surround some books, it often ends up in tears before bedtime (Robert Bolano, for instance) but of course the critics can’t always get it wrong, and this novel was fairly special if you like truly crazy truly mad female voices. I’ve now discovered a whole catalogue of these damaged souls and even the ones that I don’t like are memorable experiences – here’s a little list Brass The Piano Teacher Dot in the Universe Magda The Driver’s Seat Hick Dietland The First Bad Man Dept of Speculation A Day Off Grotesque Miss Macintosh, My Darling Eileen Love me Back
Then came His Bloody Project which didn’t win the Booker Prize and Vanity Fair which would have won the Booker Prize in 1848 – the longest read of the year, it took me a month – was it worth it? Sure, now I can brag to all my friends. And lastly the short sharp The Restraint of Beasts reviewed today. So those were the really good ones, we will ignore all the middling ones and go on to
THE REALLY BAD STUFF
Flaubert’s Sentimental Education was completely bereft of any reason to continue turning the pages. Who could dredge up any interest in the fate of Frederic Moreau, a young dweeb who could get lost in a crowd of three. I was glad to discover that Henry James also loathed this awful book. I believe that Flaubert turned to intravenous drugs after writing the wonderful Madame Bovary. It’s the only explanation.
I have an ongoing ridiculously-long-novels project, where I read the first 100 pages to see if this 900 plus page monster is worth bothering with, and the first three in the series were all turkeys, for different reasons. Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas was awful because it was tiresome and confusing; The Kills by Richard House was awful because I had not realized it was just a big fat thriller; but the prize worst book of the year (and maybe any year) goes to Miss Macintosh My Darling by Marguerite Young which is almost indescribable. I needed therapy after those 100 pages. As you see, this project is not going well.
And two major disappointments – these weren’t very bad books, just nothing like what I needed from these great authors : The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters and The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray. So let’s not talk about those but remind ourselves of Fingersmith and Skippy Dies , two fabulous five star fiestas.
WHAT ELSE
A whole series of great non fiction books is what. These are totally recommended if you’re interested in the subject.
Dying : A Memoir by Cory Taylor – okay, who cannot be interested in this, since it’s the one inevitable experience? Well, this is a memoir about the modern long-winded version of dying. It would be more compassionate if a giant flyswatter emerged from the clouds one day and splatted you out of existence before you even saw it coming, but medical science has ruled that out.
The Devil’s Candy by Julie Salomon – a very detailed account of how they made the notoriously bad movie The Bonfire of the Vanities
Execution : A History of Capital Punishment in Britain by Simon Webb
Trashed and My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf – two graphic memoirs. Mr Backderf was a friend of the future serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in high school, so imagine his surprise when Jeffrey hit the headlines. Then later he spent a couple of years as a garbage collector. Both books recommended!
You Never give me your Money by Peter Doggett – a great account of a depressing but fascinating subject (the breakup of The Beatles). Bottom line : it was inevitable.
Shrinks : The Untold story of Psychiatry by Jeffrey Lieberman. A one stop shop of a book about how bad psychiatry has been and how it has only recently rehabilitated itself.
Comrade Corbyn by Rosa Prince – for British readers only, I guess. How the most unlikely Labour leader captured the Labour party in a kind of people’s coup, therefore ensuring Labour will not win the next three elections.
Munch by Steffen Kverneland – brilliant graphic biography of Mr Scream himself.
At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell – don’t let the title put you off – okay, I do admit it is about existentialism…
This is London by Ben Judah – all about immigrant London, brilliant reporting
Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton – I was weeping on every other page!
This is why we Can’t have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips – all about the horrible phenomenon of internet trolling. Really fascinating.
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I'm hoping for better things from novels in 2017 - you know, "hey, novels, listen - no more threes, you can do it, be fours or even fives, aim for the stars" - but I got a feeling. Maybe I read all the knockout novels already. I hope not. I think there's still great ones out there. It's just a matter of finding them....more
Goodreads has its own rituals – perhaps my favourite is when the management team makes any change whatsoever they will be met with howls of foam-fleckGoodreads has its own rituals – perhaps my favourite is when the management team makes any change whatsoever they will be met with howls of foam-flecked rage and predictions of an imminent apocalypse, and someone with the name Suzie Fluffylittlerabbits will change her name to Suzie*the new font makes me vomit twice daily you bastards*.
For a sensible review of this tedious little book (so much tiresomeness packed into so few pages) see this one from Jonathan Cook
My 2015? Speaking personally I'm glad to see the back of it, but let's talk about books...
THE YEAR IN FICTION – THE GOOD STUFF
I got round to a few famMy 2015? Speaking personally I'm glad to see the back of it, but let's talk about books...
THE YEAR IN FICTION – THE GOOD STUFF
I got round to a few famous books which delighted me and some that were more like shoving your hand in a toaster or finding yourself in that pothole in The Descent which I will come to in a moment. Love goes out to No Country for Old Men and As I Lay Dying, they were great; the 1001 books list gave me The Life and Death of Harriet Frean and also The Charwoman’s Daughter (neither of which I would have come across in a million years (okay, maybe after 600,000 years) so all the 1001 Books haters can go and…. Make their own list); and Things by Georges Perec was more like an essay/memoir than fiction but at least I have read one thing by M. Perec.
The Whites was a good solid Richard Price police procedural
I was stunned by This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Tadeusz Borowski), as I knew I would be & had been putting off reading it for years because I knew it would be tough tough tough.
Troubles by J G Farrell – I thought this was going to be worthy and earnest – all about the Irish troubles (you know - boring) - it was nothing like that, it was a HOOT and totally totally delightful (this was the “lost Booker Prize winner”)
London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins from 1945 – the find of the year, a real treasure – also one which daunted me to begin with, at 730 pages – but it’s fast & soapy & lovely and as English as it’s possible to get
A reread of Breakfast at Tiffany's got me in the mood to read a big biography of Capote, called Capote, then watch Capote the movie, then watch Infamous, the other movie about the exact same thing as Capote, i.e. the creation of In Cold Blood. Both movies excellent, and the biography was almost brilliant.
Coming in at the end of the year was Booker shortlisted The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota – very impressive, completely depressing.
And a surprising – nay, shocking – book of short stories I LOVED called I Love Dollars by Wen Zhu which had been on my (real life) shelf for some years, so those unread books you already have might be just the thing you’re looking for!
There were extremely-only-okay novels which as usual came wreathed with gushes from The Pope, Bruce Springsteen, Philip Roth and Stephen Hawking and even more important people in other words the usual suspicious overpraise – these were
The First Bad Man by Miranda July (you can skip it but you must see her movie Me and You and Everyone we Know which is the real deal)
Dept of Speculation (Jenny Offill) – was like an x-ray of an actual novel
The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink (no, Nell Zink is not the Second Coming)
Girl at War by Sara Novic (people other than me will love this one)
Did you ever have a Family by Bill Clegg (well…. It wasn’t bad, you know, but I really don’t want to be hoodwinked into reading not bad novels – I know, my own fault)
THE YEAR IN FICTION – THE REALLY BAD STUFF
Sometimes you just find yourself in the wrong novel. You have to wonder how you got here. And you have to reach for your scimitar like Michonne in The Walking Dead and chop out a few jugular veins.
All my Puny Sorrows (Miriam Toews) was mawkish
Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann) was after a brilliant opening really boring - no more we was poor but we was happy/unhappy growing up stories please
A Question of Upbringing was the first volume of A Dance to the Music of Time and the last one also for me – readable and occasionally faintly amusing but tedious and politically disgusting too
The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes)- interesting title since it was the nonsense of the ending which made me hate it
The Rehearsal (Eleanor Catton) was a like a dance of the seven veils with schoolgirls, sounds like illicit fun until you read it
Speedboat (Renata Adler) – this gets the big heavy praise? Well who put the Benzedrine in all those critics’ Ovaltine? It was shite!
The Last September (Elizabeth Bowen) - unreadable
The Adventures of Augie March – defeated me, it was too loud and too monotone. I admire it, you know, because you have to, but from a safe distance.
In the Light of what we Know (Zia Haider Rahman) – tendentious, ponderous, elephantine, porcupine, turpentine
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Safran Foer) – well I did a parody of this which people liked so the experience wasn’t all bad.
The Naked and the Dead (Mailer) – unreadably macho
Housekeeping (Robinson) – I drowned in all the plangent prose and they still haven’t found my bloated corpse but when they do they will find a note attached “Marilynne Robinson done it”. She has armies of fans. Probably the same people who like Tree of Life & Melancholia.
WHAT ELSE
I shall not bore you with the music, true crime and pop theology books I read but most of those were solid or excellent – standout was One of Us (the Anders Breivik story) by Asne Seierstad. And a great graphic novel : The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel about which I have been urging all & sundry to read & getting some funny looks too – people don’t seem to believe me that a 500 page soap opera about some rad-fem lesbians in the 90s and 00s is going to be a classic read. But they are wrong! It is!
Finally, it was a year of rediscovering the voyeuristic pleasures of reading biography – I slurped up the following : Hiding Man – Donald Barthelme; Norman Mailer; Pauline Kael; Saul Bellow; Philip Larkin; and Capote. Now I know a lot of stuff I did not know in 2014. The world is a wicked place. But it can be quite amusing too if you squinch up your eyes and bend your neck a bit. ...more
[Please note – rude things are mentioned here including one use of the c word which I thought was funny]
Remorseless humour may be the only way the sex[Please note – rude things are mentioned here including one use of the c word which I thought was funny]
Remorseless humour may be the only way the sex trade can be written about – the awful mixture of the possibility of bliss, probability of loneliness and certainty of exploitation for everyone involved gives it a unique piquancy. But o the laddishness of this author. It’s like a 191-page tiresome article in one of those mags like Nuts or Zoo
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Here’s Bruce describing himself on p81 :
I’m three stone overweight, bald, have a number of badly inked tattoos, and tend to become struck mute when I’m not attached to the umbilical cord of my laptop…. I wanted to get behind the PR campaign, and tear apart the UK sex industry like a bucket of fried chicken, until all that was left was a pile of bones, connective tissue and gristle.
So, thickly coated with the oozing jokiness, blokiness, affability, knee-jerk humour, endlessly gurgling wit and banter of Bruce Barnard, the reader is rewarded by some flashes of real humour* and by the sometimes eye-opening (but not too eye-opening, you might get something in it) accounts of the behaviour here delineated.
For instance? Well, since you asked.
After attending a couple of sex parties, interviewing performers, and observing the filming of a gay porn movie in France Bruce decides that he needs to get more hands-on experience in the sex biz, but being the guy he is (see above) he decides phone sex is the only way to go. As a straight guy, he thinks ah, I’ll be a sex phone worker for a few weeks. Ladies will ring me up and talk dirty. It will be fun!
He finds out that there’s no such thing as a straight male sex phone worker. Women don’t require such a service. If there was any market at all, you can be sure the ultra-capitalist sex biz would have spotted the market. But it doesn’t exist.
This tells you something about the difference between male and female sex lives right there. I wish I knew what it says, but it surely says something.
Anyway, he decides he will be gay for pay & gets taken on by a gay phone sex company, and he describes how difficult or easy it was accommodating the various types of callers – The Regular (these guys are not going to fall for your chitchat about the new line of Prada suits which you undertake to try to drag out the call - the longer the better, heh heh); The Silent Type (occasionally these turn out to be anxious young guys who just want to talk to another gay man about being gay); The Cranks (these want to rant about gays going to hell, and the phone sex companies LOVE them, because the longer they rant, the more money the company makes); and the occasionally really odd one.
During one shift I took a call from a softly spoken man, and during the small talk I noticed that there was someone else listening in on another line. I asked who it was , and he happily confirmed that his wife was on the bedroom extension.
So the wife liked to listen to her husband describing the gay sex he’d like to have with an anonymous guy on a phone line.
And what's wrong with that?
The nasty side of the biz is not glossed over. There’s a chapter called “M.B.S.“ which stands for manager boyfriend syndrome. Bruce attends an amateur porn shoot (foot fetishist) at which a row erupts between the female performer and the manager-boyfriend, and the guy starts hitting the woman. It’s a vile little scene and Bruce acknowledges that it’s one repeated throughout the porn biz. At this point his joviality fades away completely.
Okay, moving on…. I would like to tell you all about the bukkake party chapter, it would have you coughing your Dr Pepper all over your keyboard, but… my powers of description are defeated and my brain is struggling to cope with the whole concept. According to Bruce, some women enjoy this as much as the “performing” males. I really do find this hard to believe.
This book also provides some explicit revelation about Chuck Berry, which go way beyond his ding-a-ling.
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*When the case came to trial, the court recorder had to read out a list of all the seized titles. She could hardly keep a straight face. When she got to Hungry Cunts you could see the jury looking at the floor to stop themselves laughing. ...more
I don't know if you remember the song "The Runaway Train" but it was played a lot on the radio at one time. I grew up with the British version, one veI don't know if you remember the song "The Runaway Train" but it was played a lot on the radio at one time. I grew up with the British version, one verse of which went
The porter got an awful fright and she blew, she blew The porter got an awful fright and she blew, she blew The porter got an awful fright, he got so scared his hair turned white
but when much later I heard the Vernon Dalhart hit version from 1925 it turned out the words were
The porter got an awful fright and she blew, she blew The porter got an awful fright and she blew, she blew The porter got an awful fright, he got so scared he near turned white
because porters were "colored" in them days. The joke would be lost on us British types so they changed the words for that reason, not because it was a bit racist. They didn't care about that. Enid Blyton was still churning out Noddy books with Mr Golliwog as the Toytown garage proprietor until the 1980s when in a fit of political correctness he was bought out by some white dude. And we still had golliwogs on marmalade jars until 2001. They made such a fuss about how the golliwog was a harmless children's toy and only people with the meanest Trotskyist loony-left mindset could possibly think anything different.
But I digress.
This is a fabulous looking little book which would be an excellent Christmas present for all fans of dreadful train crashes. Many truly horrific photos. Recommended. ...more
What a name. Existentialism. Too long for most people. They’d fall asleep after the second syllable. Ex-ist-zzzz. That’s most people’s reaction.
The eWhat a name. Existentialism. Too long for most people. They’d fall asleep after the second syllable. Ex-ist-zzzz. That’s most people’s reaction.
The existentialists like to make a big hoo-hah about some pretty obvious stuff, but then they spend a lot of chatter in ignoring some obvious stuff about the obvious stuff if you get my drift. So they say that people are not rocks or animals. This is a point they make. Well any child knows this. And they say like this, rocks don’t know they’re rocks, animals likewise, but we know we are people. And, like a rock cannot but fall when part of an avalanche, and a dog cannot but chase at the cat or ball. However, we people do not have to do these things because we can stop and think … nah, not today man. This means we are free. And, there’s more : we people don’t like to be free, it’s like this dreadful burden. It’s what I’m like on holiday. I don’t like working but at least in the office I know what I’m supposed to be doing.
Okay, the obvious things to say about this obvious stuff is that in theory we people are free to do stuff – you can jack your tiresome job today, tell your boss you never liked his manners or his flappy jowls and just mooch on out of there. Just like in American Beauty and umpteen other male mid life crisis movies. But see unless you just wrote a hit book or top tune, you just have to go and get another job. So you ain’t free. People life is cram full of dire necessities. See here:
Chocoholics beware! Existentialists will not accept your addiction to chocolate as an excuse: you could have refrained from eating that delicious piece of chocolate cake if you had chosen to. Why? Because, as Sartre would put it, there was nothing in your nature as a consciousness that required you to be a “cake-eater”.
I note that they used chocolate and not crack cocaine here as an example. Does Sartre deny the addictive properties of crack? We’ll never know as he was dead before it hit the streets.
Sartre seems to think that we people are never feeling genuine emotion because we are conscious of the motion of the emotion as soon as we get it and therefore too self-conscious to get into it 100%. In this also he is somewhat idiotic as he did not notice that many people are overwhelmed by emotion all the time and never stop to light a Gauloise and think about being overwhelmed. To prove this all you have to do is watch the news or live with a 17 year old daughter* or play Stay with me Baby by Lorraine Ellison. She was really into the moment, there. No Gauloise.
Existentialists like Heidegger liked to jazz their philosophy with cute phrases like “everyone is the other and no one is himself” and “a for-itself conscious is a no-thing” and they like to describe human society as a bunch of alienated inauthentic daseins confronting the they. Well, I can get behind all that. Every in-crowd has its cool expressions, so no different here.
Descartes was very skeptical and said all you could be sure of was that you could think but Heidegger said no man, that’s too cold. There is many other people (that are called daseins) out there. It’s just you stay in your room and you don’t see that. Heidegger did not feel Descartes.
Chapter 5 is called finitude. In this chapter Leibniz’s philosophy comes gliding into view, a foul barquentine bearing a smiley face flag. Wartenburg, named most appositely after Hamlet’s university, says
Given the amount of pain and suffering that exists in our world, it is hard to accept Leibniz’s claim that this is the best of all possible worlds.
For real. The philosopher Leibniz was some potato head, coming up with trash like that. If it wasn’t that the Christians of the 18th century were wanting some fast food justifications of God I can imagine Leibniz being given a broom and told to sweep the best of all possible streets for the rest of his working life. If this book is a fair representation of Leibniz then his disrespect of humanity was so monumental it should have been a theme park & would have dwarfed the Grand Canyon.
Existentialists liked to get rid of God because that’s like obvious but they took a step further and got rid of rational thought. Nah, they said, rational thought is just Vanilla God. Camus said
One must imagine Sisyphus is happy.
You know, the boulder guy. Well, Sisyphus was not on holiday, so I can see that.
One thing I do like about these thinkers is that they thought that the other guys were completely wrong. It was like, cool philosophy, Camus, but totally wrong. Couldn’t be wronger. That was Thomas Nagel. He thought scorn was not the way. (Camus promoted being scornful. He said the boulder guy was happy, but scornful of Zeus.) It seems these existentialists were very keen to get the right attitude to life. When you buy your groceries you should realize the absurdity of this act, but take it seriously, and be scornful of Zeus, and not believe in God or rational thought, and that groceries are Kafkaesque. I regret that none of these existential philosophers lived long enough to take part in a reality tv show. That would have been a hoot. The Sartres. Thinking with the Stars. Strictly Come Beckett. I like that the existentialists think that you should live an authentic life by doing what you want to do and stuff everyone else. This is good when it comes to Joe Strummer dropping out of Eton to form The Clash but not so good when it comes to Jeffrey Dahmer. He was an authentic guy but the results were challenging.
Sometimes it seems that this school of philosophy boils down to saying well kid, there are no hard and fast rules to life, you just have to figure it out yourself. But that doesn’t make my dad an existentialist. He wouldn’t have known a dasein from an inauthentic They.
*Like tonight, she was in despair about her maths revision, I mean like despair, but then I said my friend at work can download the new series of Glee, which you cannot see in Britain for some unknown reason, and that made her authentically happy...more
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