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Showing posts with the label Literature

Bill McKibben meets Angela Carter

I just read Bill McKibben's Oil and Honey , his memoir of the early days of 350.org, published in 2013.  Of course I already knew who McKibben is - he is the key founder of 350.org and a long-time writer and activist on climate change - and I'd read a few short articles he's written, but this is my first long-form encounter with him, almost a decade after the event.  I may be slow but I get there in the end. McKibben has been writing about climate change for decades.  In 1989 he published The End of Nature , one of the first books to explain climate change to a broad audience.  He kept writing in the years that followed, expecting that sooner or later the penny would drop and governments and corporations would act rationally and reduce their emissions.  Around 2006 he realised this wasn't going to happen without a fight and he teamed up with a few of his students at Middlebury College, Vermont to form 350.org and launch a rolling series of global actions. Oil and Honey

Flatland

 I can't remember where I heard about Flatland.  I suspect in more than one place.   Edwin Abbott Abbott was famous in his own time as the principal of a prestigious London school and a writer of school textbooks.  It's fascinating that almost a century after his death, the only reason he is remembered is for a a little book he published in 1884 which the editors of the British Dictionary of National Biography  didn't even feel was worth noting in their entry on him. Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions  is, at one level, an extended set of mathematical jokes.  They begin on the title page, where we learn that the tale is narrated by A. Square, a play on Abbott's own name (in mathematical notation his initials could be rendered EA 2 ).  I would not be surprised if many of the geometrical illustrations in the book began their lives as jokes to liven up dull geometry lessons for his pupils. The first part of the story describes the land of Flatland through the eyes of A

Intelligent Trees?

 I've been reading a couple of books about trees.  It's made me think, are trees just chemical factories, or are they intelligent? The Overstory  by Richard Powers was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2018.  It has human characters, because otherwise no-one would read it, but it is quite clearly a novel about trees.  Powers has one of his characters sum up what seems to be his ambition for the book, as Ray and Dorothy Brinkman read their way through The Hundred Greatest  Novels of All Time. The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands.  But they share a core so obvious it passes for given.  Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive - character  - is all that matters in the end.  It's a child's creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in a federal court.  To be human is to confuse

All Men Are Mortal

In the third chapter of Genesis we read that one of the consequences of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that Adam and Eve will have a life of hard toil. By the sweat of your brow     you will eat your food until you return to the ground,     since from it you were taken; for dust you are     and to dust you will return. After announcing this consequence, Yahweh banishes them from the Garden of Eden. And the Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.’  So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.  After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. In my youth I was taught, or perhaps just allowed to believe, that being barred from the Garden

She

 As a kind of bonus on the whole Freud/Jung thing, I also treated my self to a read of  H. Rider Haggard's She , which Jung refers to several times as an exemplar of the archetype of the anima , the female (for men) figure who represents our souls, our unconscious or our inner life in both dreams and myths. She  was Haggard's second novel, following the phenomenal success of  King Solomon's Mines  in 1885.  Before publishing his first blockbuster Haggard was a British civil servant and, in the role of secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal, spent six years in Southern Africa where both novels are set.  Afterwards he retired to his native Norfolk and became a writer of fanciful and massively popular adventure stories, many set in exotic locations which at least in theory were in Africa.   Haggard was an early exponent of what these days we would think of as pulp fiction.  He was a forerunner of such prolific writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs (creator of Tarzan), and su

Portraits of Homelessness

Here's some more social isolation reading for you.  As you may know, I've spent a lot of my career working on housing and homelessness.  I could write endlessly about policy and service responses (indeed, I have in other forums) but this is not the place for that.  Instead, here are two books that tell great homelessness stories. ***  A few years ago I read John Healy's The Grass Arena , his account of life as a homeless alcoholic in London. This remarkable book was first published in 1988, made into a movie in 1991, then disappeared off the radar for years after Healy had a dispute with his publishers.  It was finally republished in 2008 by Penguin Modern Classics and it is this edition that I read. Healy was born in London in 1943, the son of poor working class Irish immigrants.  As a child he suffered abuse at the hands of his father and this set the course of his life.  He was an angry man.  As a teenager he took up boxing, feeling exhilaration when he mana

Five First Attempts

I once tried to write a novel and I tell you, it's not as easy as it seems.  Mine was terrible.  I gave it to a couple of trusted friends to read, they kindly damned it with faint praise, and that was that. In the meantime of course I do enjoy good novels that other people write, and I often find myself drawn to where they began.  Perhaps its my parents' fault.  One of my favourites among my dad's science fiction books was an anthology called First Flight: Maiden Voyages in Space and Time  which contained the impressive first published short stories of some of the luminaries of post-war science fiction, including such names as Robert Heinlein, Brian Aldiss, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C Clarke and AE Van Vogt.  I know this because I still have it on my shelf. Later on my mother gave me a lovely coffee-table book (which I also still have) called First Glance: Childhood Creations of the Famous.  This drew its net far wider, including such curiosities as some short pieces co