Do I own my library or does it own me?

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.  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.  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. 

Lots of texts on the craft of writing but only one 'Writing', by Stephen King is necessary.  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.

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.  Ghormenghast awaits a third reading.  And of course my much adored Complete Sherlock Holmes Story’s and Novels of Arthur Conan Doyle fully annotated by Leslie S Klinger and published by Norton Books.

THE FOOD SECTION:

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. The vegetarian cookbooks of Dennis Cotter, ‘Paradiso Seasons’ and ‘For the love of Food.’

 So as I say this post has turned into a deeply personal account of my thought growth.  My books are the representations in material reality of my mind's development throughout my lifetime.  They form semi-autonomous communities of thought becoming articulated in the World.  Just 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 consequence of the Neo liberal project.  The destruction of independent critical thought itself and its replacement by non-autonomous consumption propaganda.  The monetisation of existence itself.

Consequently an existential crisis for us all.

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'll let you know!

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 greatest works of fiction, and have felt that part of its greatness lies in the power of its criticisms of racial prejudice. 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 is an unremarked upon holocaust.  Largely ignored by popular history.  It remains in that nightmare to the present day, aided and abetted by rapacious Corporations greedily devouring its natural wealth and potential leaders riven by tribalism, gangsterism and and who appear endlessly corrupted by insatiable greed and cruelty.
Conrad could find nothing else to do than look away with disgust and horror.  Kurtz's last words are all the explanation he can conjure.  'The horror!  The horror!'

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 ’The Birth of Tragedy’ beginning with Nietzsche’s marvellous ‘An attempt at Self Criticism’ added latterly 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 of her brother’s archive until her death in 1935 when 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 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 Shakespeares 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!
So those are my desert island minimum.
The five books that have had greatest impact upon me are:

• The Tragedy King Lear by William Shakespeare.  Good to read about a family even more dysfunctional than mine.
• Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher as a rediscovery of the reason for radicalism and belief in political action.  A tardis of a book!
• The Iliad of Homer.  Naturellement!
• The Collected Sherlock Holmes Novels and Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  I am an addicted Baker Street Irregular!
• Lean Logic by David Fleming.  The ultimate fix for the encyclopaedia browser on what really matters.  Thanks David!