“The Politics of Experience” by R.D. Laing
What if the "delusions" reported by patients during psychotic episodes were not symptoms of a disease, but valid descriptions of their experiences?
The Triumph of Triviality
We are the people of tomorrow, we have more stuff than anybody's ever had before, and we are so stupid and self-absorbed that we can't even bring ourselves to care about our imminent destruction of the planet (voting on the…
Americans in the gulag
Just caught a fascinating piece in the Times Literary Supplement about the thousands of Americans who, either out of idealism or to escape the Great Depression, moved to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Many of them were then swept…
Books not to miss in 2009
I’m never sure how these lists get created. In any case, the Guardian has named it’s books not to miss in 2009. Odd phrasing – not books to read, but books not to miss. Like the best advertising, it suggests an urgency,…
“A Pale View of Hills” by Kazuo Ishiguro
Most of this novel is memory: a woman thinking about her daughter’s suicide and remembering an earlier summer in post-War Nagasaki. Almost nothing happens in the present day. The whole story of A Pale View of Hills takes place in…
"Three Stories" by Alan Bennett
All three of these stories have a deeply satirical flavour, with dry, mostly successful humour and pointed observations on the various absurdities and hypocrisies we live by. “The Laying on of Hands” describes a memorial service for a masseur to…
Interesting thought
The human being may be no more real than is a cinematograph film. When the projected light is switched off all that remains is a blank screen. That which has been projected by light was a series of ‘stills’. Such…
Franco Moretti on the Novel
Read a very interesting piece by Franco Moretti in New Left Review, July/August 2008. It seems like a synopsis of a much longer, multi-volume work on the theory of the novel, which I plan to read when I have time.…
“Parecon: life after capitalism” by Michael Albert
This is not the most interesting book I have read lately, but it is one of the most important. It deals with the topics so often left vague in left-wing literature: the nitty-gritty of how a non-capitalist economy would actually…