REVIEW OF 2019

MY WORD OF 2019  RE-BALANCE

BOOKS READ IN 2019  

FOCUS:  THE SCIENCE FICTION OF H G WELLS

H G WELLS-  THE TIME MACHINE/  THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON/  WAR OF THE WORLDS/  THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU

CAPITALIST REALISM- Mark Fisher

THE OVERSTORY- Richard Powers

THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM- Shoshanna Zuboff

HOW MUSIC WORKS-  David Byrne

NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER- Kevin Barry

SONG AND DANCE MAN-Michael Gray

TEAM HUMAN- Douglas Rushkoff

NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU- Miranda July

ON FIRE- Naomi Klein

WILLIAM BLAKE NOW- John Higgs

WHO IS THAT MAN?- David Dalton

BOB DYLAN:  BEHIND THE SHADES TAKE 2- Clinton Heylin 

REVOLUTION IN THE HEAD- Ian MacDonald

A FABULOUS CREATION- David Hepworth

CHRONICLES- Bob Dylan

STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE- Donna J Haraway

CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE- Paul Mason

THIN AIR- Richard Morgan

POSTER BOY- N.J. Crossley

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH- David Wallace-Wells

THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE- Margaret MacMillan

I AM DYNAMITE  A LIFE OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE- Sue Prideaux

SILENT SPRING- Rachel Carson

THE VORRH- B. Catling

MY RE-READS

OLAF STAPLEDON- Last and First Men

HOMER  THE ODYSSEY  (Emily Wilson’s Trans)

OSCAR WILDE  LETTERS AND ESSAYS  (Vol 3 Folio Collected Works)

THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES-  Arthur Conan Doyle

THE SONNETS- William Shakespeare

MUSIC OF 2019 

FOCUS: THE REDISCOVERY OF BOB DYLAN

HIGHLIGHTS

BOB DYLAN

THE MOBILE FIDELITY REMASTER OF BLOOD ON THE TRACKS  LIMITED EDITION

THE MOBILE FIDELITY REMASTER OF BLONDE ON BLONDE  LIMITED EDITION

NEW MORNING (Mobile Fidlity)

TIME OUT OF MIND

MODERN TIMES

MORE BLOOD MORE TRACKS

OH MERCY

LOVE AND THEFT

TRAVELLIN’ THRU

THE BEATLES

THE BEATLES  5OTH ANNIVERSARY RE-ISSUE  ABBEY ROAD

ANGEL OHLSON 

ALL MIRRORS

NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS 

GHOSTEEN

BRIAN ENO AND DAVID BYRNE

MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS  ENO AND DAVID BYRNE

MY PODCAST OF 2019  

HOW’S IT ROLLING BOB?

MY GREATEST TRIUMPHS OF 2019  

·       I WROTE MY FIRST SCREENPLAY AFTER COMPLETING A SCREENWRITING COURSE  (BUT SEE GREATEST REGRET)

·       I wrote an entire training programme for social workers working with Looked After Children and personally delivered it.

·       I successfully interviewed for a position with the Social Work Regulator for England

MY GREATEST REGRET OF 2019  

NOT FINISHING A SINGLE PIECE OF WRITING

MY BIGGEST LEARNINGS OF 2019  

·       THE UTTER USELESSNESS OF BINARY POLITICS.  Politically, 2019 was a monstrosity of division. There appeared to me to be a complete lack of any sense of respectful discourse or willingness to listen to different views.  This boorishness was echoed by social media and reflected in politician’s behaviour with the single honourable exception of Jeremy Corbyn who, whatever your political views about him might be, behaved with courtesy and grace throughout, while being subjected to the most vicious and vitriolic lies and accusations, I have ever seen.  The entire media were a disgrace.  The publically funded BBC came across as biased and in the service of the right wing of the UK.  There should be an enquiry into its behaviour and its leadership.

·       The growth of far right nationalism and the increasingly open behaviour of racist thugs in our society is a warning from history.  An Islamophobe is now our Prime Minister who has openly insulted Muslim women.

·       If democracy is only as good as our education system, then our education system must be broken.

·       THE IMPORTANCE OF STRATEGY TO EVERYTHING.  There has to be a better way to do this.  It begins with the study of history, particularly military history.  How to make the best decisions in extreme circumstances is an essential skill.  Decision making in war is the example.  We are not seeing any world leaders with a strategic mindset.  Possibly with the exception of Jacintha in New Zealand.  But there is also AOC and Bernie in the US and Gina Miller.  There’s Edward Luttwak. 

·       MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL HEALTH IS LIKE A GARDEN; YOU MUST TEND THEM!

MY MAN OF 2019 

JEREMY CORBYN

 

MY WOMAN OF 2019 

GRETA THUNBERG.  
 
But also a shout out for AOC who has burst into the US Congress like a stunningly beautiful thunderbolt.

MY FOCUS FOR 2020

STRATEGY/ MILITARY HISTORY/  NAPOLEON/ POLITICAL THEORY/ CHESS/  GUITAR/  SOCIAL WORK THEORY AND STRATEGY/  LEADERSHIP/ PHYSICAL FITNESS/ CYCLING ON THE BROMPTON-WHAT IS POSSIBLE?/MORE BOB DYLAN/ THE ISSUE OF ISRAEL

MY RELATIONSHIPS WITH MY WIFE AND CHILDREN AND FRIENDS

CONTACT

MONEY
ONE WRITING PROJECT A MONTH - MINIMUM-COMPLETED AND SENT OFF

MAY 2020 BE A YEAR OF PEACE AND JOY FOR YOU AND YOUR LOVED ONES

 

Please use your vote on 12th December for life and for the future.

 My dear fellow Britons,

So here we are at the end of the second decade of the 21^st Century on our little island home.  A home that has caused an inordinate amount of trouble for the planet over the years.

But let us not weep over our history right now, though we occasionally should.  Unprovoked war.  Slavery.  Empire.

Let us look at where we are right now.  A multi-cultural nation of black, brown, yellow and white people.  All the races!  All the genders!  That's what puts the great in GB.

A pseudo-monarchy, yes, but maybe our noble Prince Andrew will be putting an end to that nonsense fairly soon.

A haven for money-laundering crims?  Well yes, maybe so.  A financial sector that is the envy of the world?  Maybe also a diseased sore?  A corrupt incestuous oligarchic aristocracy of land grabbing bandits?  A self-entitled, privately educated toffery?  A culture rooted in Jeremy Kyle style stupidity?  A haven for racist brutes?  A divided land?  A London-obsessed urbanity?

Yes of course we are all of that.

But we are also a land of amazingness.  Of incredible people with a unique ability to laugh in the face of immoral power.  We are a land of artists and poets and the greatest musicians and sculptors and basketweavers and storytellers.  We are a land of warriors of peace as well as war.  Of philosophers on the doorsteps.  Of ordinary people with ordinary decency and wisdom.  Wit seeds through the society like a golden thread of ironic laughter.  We are a people who created the NHS and the BBC and a financial support system for any in our society who fall on hard times.  It is the envy of the World!  Pity the poor sods who have to lead us!

We are on the cusp of an election on 12^th December 2019 that will determine the lives of a whole generation to come.  Maybe the future of our dear Earth and of all our wonderful non-human brothers and sisters.

The choice is between humanity as an end in itself and humanity as fuel for the profit of Corporations.

The choice boils down to- Are you for life?  Or are you for money?

Are we here to realise something beyond our own limited lives, for a future promise?  Or are we here to be plundered for profit?

We have a vote on 12th December.  Nobody gave it to we working folk!  Our ancestors fought and bled for it! 

Please make it count and vote for The Labour Party or vote tactically to keep out the Tories-they are a cancer in our society that could well destroy us all.  You must know this to be true.

Happy Christmas to you and your loved ones and may you have a liberating and transformative, healthy and love-filled 2020!

My kindest regards,

heartofbalance

The Zer0 Books statement. Also Repeater Books. Discourse for the left. Mark Fisher.

I am regularly supporting and referencing the work of the late lamented Mark Fisher in this blog.  I like this zer0 books statement taken from Mark's collected posthumous writings K-Punk, and it may well have been written by Mark, it has his slightly overwrought hammering adjectivalism.  But what it speaks to is the story of the ripped out heart of the community, intellectually, socially, architecturally, visually, culturally.  It speaks to the flattened and corrupted times.

'Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual.  Former public spaces-both physical and cultural- are now either derelict or colonised by advertising.  A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheered by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor.  The informal censorship internalised and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity that the propoganda chiefs of Stalinism could only have dreamt of imposing.  Zer0 books knows that another kind of discourse-intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist-is not only possible: Its is already flourishing in the regions beyong the striplit malls of so-called mass media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy.  Zer0 is committed to the idea of publishing as a making public of the intellectual.  It is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.'

Careful with the China! The small time social corruption of the Corporate Hotel Space!

 The corruption of Public Space is an inevitable impact of the Corporate Culture-car parks and CCTV and vile brutalist many-roomed battery hen hotels.  Here's my recent experience:

I recently had a very unpleasant two days staying in the very awful Northampton Marriot Hotel-a dull hideous building set just outside what is a very interesting city implicated in every aspect of Britain's industrial revolution.  As well as notoriously being the birthplace of Comics genius, and Chaos Magician, and general bad boy,  Alan Moore,
At £130 a night and additional breakfast costs of £13.60 yes that is £13.60!  I expected to be carried in from my taxi on a dais by a quartet of Mr Universe winners and massaged by winnowed maidens until my bones melted and I collapsed into a huge four poster to the sound of an actual live quintet who would discreetly withdraw as I began to snore in contented and much deserved slumber on feathered down cushions produced by highly spoilt free ranging geese from Hungary.
Oh and I had to pay a further £350 for a training in a emotionally malnourished methodology for working with people with a learning disability called PAMS.  But I will write about this scam in more detail in a few weeks.

But alas no.  The Corporate World cuts service to the bone because service costs.  And the imagination of the corporate world as illustrated by my Marriot Hotel stay is constrained at every level by penny pinching, mean spirited, high priced servility that I found actually quite disgusting.  What a horrible place to have to be away from home-without warmth, humour, beauty, or creativity.  You have a problem?  Well the organisation won't sort it for you.  Don't want to pay £13.60 for a rasher of bacon and a sausage.  Oh well you have paid in advance and 'we cannot refund your payment because it has to go to our central office...etc...etc...'

Oh my God I had to stay at the Sheffield Holiday Inn!  More Kafka than Burroughs!  Great city though.  The Museum Pub-brilliant fish and chips and the friendliest welcoming staff.  Returning to the Holiday Inn was like going back to an underfunded psychiatric unit!

Oh my God I had to stay at the Coventry Ibis!  Like a secret meeting place for paedophiles or GRU assassins or dark web dissemblers, or purveyors of dodgy psychedelic shipments from Malawi, or a venue for organ transplant smugglers, or just people who were struggling financially but were also actually evil.

Oh my eyes and whiskers! I stayed at The Jury's Inn in Glasgow-my birthplace you donut!  It was ok-ish but then I was with my brother!

How do you find the best B&B's for struggling writers, philosophers and social workers, revolutionary poets and barabarous artists?

Organisational Theory/ The Amazon Burns!

 Jeremy Lent is proving to be an interesting and stimulating thinker.  This is from a recent blog post:  An attempt to answer the single relentless question to the current destruction of out planet's lungs and the extinction of many of the myriad non-human creatures living withing this unique environment.

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?

 'Of all the terrifying news bombarding us from the burning of the Amazon, perhaps the most disturbing was the offer of $22 million made by France’s President Emmanuel Macron and other G7 leaders to help Brazil put the fires out. Why is that? The answer can help to hone in on the true structural changes needed to avert civilizational collapse.

Scientists have publicly warned that, at the current rate of deforestation, the Amazon is getting dangerously close to a die-back scenario, after which it will be gone forever, turned into sparse savanna. Quite apart from the fact that this would be the greatest human-made ecological catastrophe in history, it would also further accelerate a climate cataclysm, as one of the world’s great carbon sinks would convert overnight to a major carbon emitter, with reinforcing feedback effects causing even more extreme global heating, ultimately threatening the continued existence of our current civilization.

Macron and the other leaders meeting in late August in Biarritz were well aware of these facts. And yet, in the face of this impending disaster, these supposed leaders of the free world, representing over half the economic wealth of all humanity, offered a paltry $22 million—less than Americans spend on popcorn in a single day. By way of context, global fossil fuel subsidies (much of it from G7 members) total roughly $5.2 trillion annually—over two hundred thousand times the amount offered to help Brazil fight the Amazon fires.

The Amazon is burning, while our global leaders do nothing. (Reuters/Ricardo Moraes)

Brazil’s brutal president Bolsonaro is emerging as one of the worst perpetrators of ecocide in the modern world, but it’s difficult to criticize his immediate rejection of an amount that is, at best a pittance, at worst an insult. True to form, Donald Trump didn’t bother to turn up for the discussion on the Amazon fires, but it hardly made a difference. The ultimate message from the rest of the G7 nations was they were utterly unable, or unwilling, to lift a finger to help prevent the looming existential crisis facing our civilization.'

WHO ARE THE POLLUTERS?

WHO POLLUTES THE MOST?

 

So the barbarous Saudi State now controlled by a murderer, runs a company called Aramco that, on it's own is responsible for 4.38% of global emissions.

 Twelve of the top 20 companies are state-owned and together their extractions are responsible for 20% of total emissions in the same period. The leading state-owned polluter is Saudi Aramco, which has produced 4.38% of the global total on its own.

Chevron topped the list of the eight investor-owned corporations, followed closely by Exxon, BP and Shell. Together these four global businesses are behind more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965.

A SPLURGE ON AUDIBLE- BLEAK HOUSE WILL BE READ...FINALLY!!!

AN AUDIBLE SPLURGE!  Did you know you can replace your books on audible's easy exchange.  It's like an endless library!

1.   Richard Matheson - The Best of Richard Matheson 2.   Richard Matheson - Hell House 3.   Charles Dickens - Bleak House 4.   David Hepworth - A Fabulous Creation 5.   Joe Haldeman - The Forever War 6.   Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker 7.   Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination 8.   Walter M. Miller Jr. - A Canticle for Leibowitz 9.   Gene Wolfe - The Shadow of the Torturer 10.   Robert Tressell - Ragged Trousered Philanthropists   Accompanying reference material (Download PDF) 11.   Larry Niven - Ringworld 12.   Richard Ellman - James Joyce

Outmaneouvering the Wall Measurers-Epistemological trench warfare in Modern Social Work and Mops-their uses and abuses

Just about to leave.  I've made it!  Nearly!  7 hours to go!  I can do it!
This experience has plumbed new depths of value-clashery with the hierachons and I see how we are practically aliens speaking entirely different languages based on completely different epistemologies.  It's no longer about the words, it's about actual MEANING...not what the words mean but MEANING itself.  It's an Ontological nightmare and it's coming for all of us.  It's the Lone Epistemologist and his faithful Sidekick-Onto, come riding into town on Elephants, packing Foucaultian canons in their leather saddlebags
The 'why are we here?’ stuff.
What this means for me is yet another insight (possibly) into the fractured professional world of Social Work.
Give a fool a ruler and he will happily measure all the walls and doors endlessly and record minute change in great detail.  It will not occur to measure what is happening within the walls because that is quite subjective and quite complex and requires DIALOGUE focused by KNOWLEDGE and EXPERIENCE.  Imagination? Creativity?
There are two or even three cultures operating in children's social work and at odds with each other.  In fact in a fight to the death. (Really?  Isn't that 'fight to the death' stuff just you assuming your omniscient view?)
First there is the cult of measurement, what is also being called quality assurance and audit which is measuring the walls dressed up as a useful activity. (It is a useful activity dude!)   Then there is the related target-driven results-oriented performance management which constructs new sets of relationships based on wall measuring data.  (It's like you think consideration of results is stupid! It's absolutely vital!)
Then there is the traditional, necessarily beleaguered, social work neuromancers who chaotically dance in the spaces between poverty and power, creating havoc for the wall measurers and tearing down their walls and rebuilding them chaotically in devastatingly new shapes.  These are the social workers/artists who are the professional monkey wrench throwers.  The high end saboteurs who short circuit the organisation in astonishingly creative ways.  The anarchist advocates who infiltrate senior positions all the better to lay waste, then rappel off the skyscraper chuckling like mad ninja commandos.
They are the lost professional field commanders who spend their entire lives on active service and under fire and who have become the greatest leaders of small groups in action that have ever been seen.  Managing impossible levels of data and human complexity minute to minute with immense grace.
This is the social work I live and love.  The social work of rebellion and revolution.  Highly skilled and talented mercenaries in the service of poor children.  Fighting without mercy to give children in poverty the edge they need against the machine that seeks to condemn them to a life without hope.  Fighting the soulless bureaucrats and robots who mindlessly carry out the machine's tasks without question and who now believe themselves to be in charge...but who are actually...foolishly and busily...measuring the walls.
Then there is the herd mentality, 'the flock jostling nervously in their cage.'  This is the culture of 'not knowing what's going on', or maybe the 'we don't know what's going down man!'
Wading through boggy ground and hoping for a city on the hill.  Wading through glue without a clue.  Minions.  Unguided missiles.  The blind leading the blind.  Drone pilots.  Apathetically apolitical and seeking communities of resistance-but against what?  For what?  Only felt dimly, like the early signs of toothache.  Intimations of pain-to-come.  We watch the ice cream melt and pool on the floor in stupefied fascination, and study all the facts about mops and their uses and practice all the skills of high end technical moppery.  Polish and wax our mop handles.  Scan the horizons for new mop designs.  Carefully replace and repair the mop fibres.  Never leave home without our mop.  Categorise mop skills into arcane groupings-theoretical and practical moppery and classes of skills too-devise Aristotelian labelling systems of Einsteinian complexity translated into fetishised numerological texts only translatable by elite colleges of the Society of Mopperology who, for a handsome fee, will train your sheep to enter their pens happily.
A child asks 'why not just stop the ice cream melting' and is pelted with cream buns amid howls of laughter, bundled into a waiting hot air balloon and flown to a residential re-education centre just off the Australian coast and run by G4S.
'Animals' by Pink Floyd is the soundtrack in our heads.  Border collies chase their tails.  We watch out nervously for wolves...Shepherd crooks rob banks happily and commit daylight robberies.
An old man with a sign saying 'Eat Me!' scorns passers by.  Sirens sound among the hills.  Boots are on the streets.

A magical fountain, atop which Her Real Majesty stands waiting for Alice to unlock her prison of stone with the appropriately translated runes.