Notes from reading
William Davies
The Reaction Economy
Starts from the way social media is all about reactions. How can we move beyond that?
Takes in cybernetics.
"The idea here is that while everyone (animals included) is capable of reaction, only a rarefied minority is capable of genuine action. Action, from this perspective, means leadership, which in turn implies a far larger quantity of followership. Combating this mentality requires us to think of action democratically, as something made possible by the fact of human plurality. Thus all action is in fact interaction."
'Forgiveness, for Arendt, holds a very important role in enabling us to break free of perpetual reaction and counter-reaction"
Joe Dunthorne
Two Poems
Bad Dreams
As I ease the blade from my father’s chest
he looks surprised – as though opening the curtains
to snow. Remember the Emperor who beheaded
a soldier for dreaming of the Emperor....
Inauguration
While today is a day of celebration let us not forget my father, the king, inside whose independently-swivelling ears – supple and peach-furred – I warmed my hands when I was young.
Raymond N. MacKenzie
This Woman, This Man by George Sand, translated by Graham Anderson This Was the Man by Louise Colet, translated by Graham Anderson
Both novels recount the relationship between Alfred Musset and George Sand, fictionalised. Colet's is the one worth reading. Colet also had an affair with Flaubert. Musset also wrote a novel based on it, as did a friend of Sand's.
James Butler
Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care by Madeleine BuntingThe Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? by Emma Dowling Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet by Nancy Fraser
I've not read this yet, but here's a couple of quotes picked from it:
"Recent NHS figures suggest around 14,000 people in hospital no longer need to be there."
"As with many of Britain’s social ills, the architecture of today’s care system is a product of Thatcherism, essentially unaltered by the Blair administration: an archipelago of small firms, each owning a single care home, alongside huge chains backed by venture capital. Long-term NHS geriatric beds are gone, and local authority homes have almost vanished."
Tareq Baconi
Short Cuts: Israel’s Liberal Bubble
The liberals protesting about the extreme right now in power in Israel don't care about Palestinians.
Matthew Bevis
The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Poems, Vol. I: 1927-39 edited by Edward MendelsonThe Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Poems, Vol. II: 1940-73 edited by Edward Mendelson
Text
Barclay Bram
Against America
"America against America was published in 1991, three years after its author, a young academic called Wang Huning, returned from a six-month visit to the US." ....
"In the years since his visit to the US, Wang has risen to the top of the Chinese Communist Party. [He] is currently fourth in the party hierarchy"....
"Though much has been made of Wang’s predictions of American decline, his account is surprisingly balanced."
Irina Dumitrescu
The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships by Barbara Newman
"This ‘porous selfhood’ was modelled on the Christian doctrine of coinherence, the notion that the three persons of the Trinity dwell in one another simultaneously. The idea extended to humankind, too, since people were understood as participating in the mystical body of Christ and, by extension, in one another."
The relationship between teacher and pupil.
Mysticism, the claim of speaking not one's own thoughts but revelations directly from God/Christ, was a way women got around the restrictions on women's ability to participate in the church.
Frances Morgan
At Tate Liverpool: Turner Prize 2022
The four 2022 shortlisted artists:Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan (winner) and Sin Wai Kin.
I saw Pollard's Carbon Slowly Turning in Milton Keynes Gallery last year. One display that stuck with me from that exhibition was photographs of black people in the English countryside. It caught my attention because of the very point of 'why on earth should that be something of note'. But of course there are places in the UK that are overwhelmingly white. Living in multiethnic Milton Keynes it something I notice when travelling around the UK. I, a white man, have sometimes felt uncomfortable because I'm surrouded by white 'gammons'. I remember that in a restaurant in Lincolnshire, for example.
Clare Bucknell
A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 by Paris Spies-Gans
"At least thirty female artists made their debut at the Louvre’s Salon between 1822 and 1827; in 1824, 101 female exhibitors showed a record 237 works. In London the same year, at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition, submissions by women accounted for more than 10 per cent of all the works on display. (As Paris Spies-Gans notes at the beginning of her book, works by female artists comprise less than 5 per cent of the pieces on display in European and American galleries today.)"
Michael Wood
At the Movies: ‘Saint Omer’
"Alice Diop’s film Saint Omer is a work of fiction, but close, in various ways, to her documentary Danton’s Death (2011), a study of a Black man from the Paris suburbs who spends three years at the Cours Simon, a drama school not far from Père Lachaise cemetery."
Abigail Green
The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean by Jessica M. Marglin
"Nissim Shamama, a Tunisian Jew, became an Italian count and fast-tracked his way to citizenship by royal decree. But he was also a refugee who fled his country of origin in a moment of political crisis, never to return, and lived for the rest of his life in Western Europe, without learning to speak a language other than Arabic. After his death in 1873, the civil court of Livorno declared him stateless, a ‘cosmopolitan’ who ‘did not belong to any nation, and thus did not have – nor could he have – any national law’."
"From exile, Shamama continued to make charitable donations every month to the impoverished Jews of Tunis; he supported Hebrew publishing by financing a translation into Judeo-Arabic of a book written by one of the lesser medieval Jewish sages; and filled his Parisian household with Tunisian Jews."
Legal battles over his citizenship after his death - because it would determine where his wealth ended up.
Eric Foner
Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War Two at Home and Abroad by Matthew F. DelmontAn Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era by Beth Bailey
The conventional view is that race wasn't an issue in second world war but it was in Vietnam (we are all together fighting the evil Nazi's, right?). The reality is rather different.
I remember my mother saying that during the war there were arguments in the pubs of Liverpool because white US troops wanted the landlords to keep the black Americans out, and the Liverpool landlords wouldn't agree to it. But TBH my mother would always report Liverpudlians in the best possible light - and was suspicious of the americans. ("Over paid, over sexed and over here" was the complaint.)
Peter Howarth
On Tour
Reflection on festivals, such as the Wigtown Book festival.
Howarth did a research tour of festivals, and explains: "I am interested in this because as well as being an academic I am a priest, which means I organise a mini-festival every Sunday, and I want it to do its work. There have been moments when people’s defences have crumpled and a lifetime’s habit of shame abandoned. But a lot of the time I’m just rolling up my sleeves with the other volunteers, because no festival happens unless someone organises the programme, sets up the chairs and tests the PA. In any case, calling something a festival is no guarantee it will actually become festive in the deep sense. Some Sundays, like some festivals, are exercises in niche connoisseurship more than genuine enthusiasm. Others are doomed gesticulations to a half-empty tent."
Oliver Cussen
Affluence and Freedom: An Environmental History of Political Ideas by Pierre Charbonnier, translated by Andrew Brown
"In Affluence and Freedom, the French philosopher Pierre Charbonnier builds on Wrigley’s argument [growth would always be constrained by the limits to the supply of land] to offer an unlikely environmental history of Enlightenment political and economic thought – a body of texts that seem, at first glance, to have nothing to do with the environment."
Michael Hofmann
Siblings by Brigitte Reimann, translated by Lucy Jones
East German writer Brigitte Reimann, born in 1933.
Charles Glass
Diary: In Beirut
Lebanon is in a mess - literally (rubbish piling up in the streets) and politically (a local saying goes: ‘Most countries have a mafia. In Lebanon, the mafia has a country.’).
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