The books I read in 2019

    

      Recent hogmanays have seen me writing down a few of my reflections on the year past. My ruminations usually start as an attempt at rational discussion which - quite unconsciously on my part - segue into a rant. If I tried the same this year it would be one hundred per cent all rant so I've decided it will be much less wearing if I penned something innocuous - a list. Even so, I accept that lists themselves are not without contention.    
     Umberto Eco liked lists. So do I, but there any comparison of myself with the great Italian thinker and author ends  Here is a list of the books I’ve read in their entirety this year. If I make little comment on some it does not mean I didn’t like them. Indeed if I finish a book it means that I gained from it.

I have compiled this list because I think the readers of lists like then to consider what their list is or would be and how it would differ from those of others. Our lists are special to us. What follows is not a spectacular list but it's my list.

     The books are entered in the order I read them. My code for the list is F = fiction, NF = non-fiction which includes essays and academic studies and P = poetry.

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Winter   Ali Smith  (F)

Spring   Ali Smith. (F)

David Hockney cover eh? Must have cost a bit

These are the second and third books of a quartet. I read Autumn last year. Through Elizabeth, her principal character, Ali Smith gives us home truths about the referendum/Brexit world and how it really was and is. We await 'Summer.'

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Child of the Jago   Arthur Morrison  (F)

"There was a thickness in his voice and a wildness in his eye."

An enthralling novel of the 1890s about the poverty in working class life in the slums of the East End of London. Expect a tale violence and crime as well as scenes from family life.

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 Sisters Brothers   Patrick De Witt  (F)

A feral Lonesome Dove.

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Mrs Osmond   John Banville. (F)

John Banville does his impression of Henry James.

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A History of God   Karen Armstrong  (NF)

Karen Armstrong lucidly pursues the narrative of the strands of thought and beliefs that have brought us to the Gods we have now.   

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In search of Alan Gilzean The lost legacy of a Dundee and Spurs legend   David Morgan  (NF)

 

     This was a gift from my grandsons who know I am mad about Dundee Football Club. Gilzean, a native of Coupar Angus, was one of my heroes. I gulped this down.

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Dunbar   Edward St. Aubyn  (F)

     A well written modern re-run of King Lear. Inevitably the plot is predictable.

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Kudos   Rachel Cusk   (F)

The concluding part of an exceptional trilogy. The first two books were Outline and Transit.  Cusk is an original. In my view no one is writing about the human predicament, especially as women experience it, the way she does.

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In a House of Lies   Ian Rankin  (F)

As ever Rankin provides a thundering good read : insightful, suspenseful and exciting. Rebus is in a different role but still at heart himself.

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Murmur   Will Eaves  (F)

A fictional account of the life of Alan Turing : difficult but persuasive.

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Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence   James Lovelock  (NF) 

The celebrated centenarian scientist suggests we can use 
artificial intelligence (even if it supersedes our own). 

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Selected Poetry   Samuel Taylor Coleridge, compiled by, and with an introduction by Richard Holmes. (P)

 

All the great poems are here: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan and as well, as the surprise of Coleridge’s sonnets'

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A Weekend in New York   Benjamin Markovitz  (F)

  A fading professional tennis player deals with family matters in late August/early September when the US Open Tennis Championship is being played out in New York City.

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The Turn of the Screw   Henry James

Still as frightening as when I first read it. It stands up well to a re-read. He really likes long sentences.

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Coventry   Rachel Cusk  (NF)

A thoughtful collection of essays by a great novelist. I’m still thinking about the essays.

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Our Need for Others and its Roots in Infancy   Josephine Klein  (NF)

A wide ranging study about the basis, development and significance of early relationships , written more about human beings than John Bowlby's attachment theory, as profound as the latter may be.

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Theatres of the body - a psychoanalytical approach to psychosomatic illness   Joyce Macdougall  (NF)

     
     This book is what it says on the cover. It deals with outward symptoms caused by neurosis which in my view still rests at the core of psychoanalytic thinking,  but it is accessible to the general reader.

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Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.  Edgar Allan Poe with an introduction by Will Self.

     These remain gripping gothic stories: 'The Purloined Letter' 'Murders in the Rue Morgue' together with impressive poems like 'The Raven.' I got interested in reading Poe again because I discovered he had for a short time attended a school near Clissold Park where our eldest daughter and her family live.

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Attention Seeking  Adam Phillips. (NF)

Psychoanalyst and celebrated essayist explores attention seeking and finds guilt and shame. Writing very much of today, still, the writing of Adam Phillips reminds me most of the work of the 17th century poet John Donne. Phillips's mode is metaphysical.

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The Diary of a Bookseller  Shaun Bythell  (NF)

The enchanting, humorous and moving journal of a Wigtown bookseller contains sadness and joy. A book that raises serious issues about the way publishing and bookselling are going but at the end of the day this is a couthie book. It’s my book of the year.

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Normal People   Sally Rooney  (F)

This is a rite of passage novel as Irish students make the transit from school in a small to middle-size Irish town to university life in Dublin. I am beginning to understand how different is student life today from my own over 50 years ago.

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Crudo   Olivia Laing. (F)  

You can see it was bought on the cheap, but that is not its nature

     This is a raw meat novel. It’s a short text and at times I struggled to understand it but I liked the author’s approach which was a kind of stream of consciousness which throws out many powerful images of life in 2017. 

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The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis   José Saramogo  (F) 

In my view folks should read anything they can of this great Portuguese author.

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The Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought   Erich Fromm  (NF)

Fromm provides a readable and careful re-examination of Freud’s major theories.

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 Inequality What can be done?   Anthony B. Atkinson  (NF)

Following a comprehensive examination of how capitalism has bred extraordinary inequality, the late lamented and renowned academic Tony Atkinson suggests ways we can, as Joni Mitchell might sing, 'get back to the garden'.

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Michael Marra  Arrest This Moment   James Robertson (NF)

An imaginatively presented biography of Dundee’s bard.

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The Blue Suit   Richard Rayner   (NF)

I was given this book as a Christmas present. It is a memoir of a Yorkshire boy who gained a place at Cambridge University in the 1970s. I read it in two days. It is compelling reading but the confessions of criminal and shameful acts put me in touch with some of the shameful things I did as a student and still can’t admit.

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Down to the ground, down to the ground: more maturational angst

      In all human development different stages of life introduce characteristics that come to represent them. The infant’s desire for the breast, the child’s desire to be thought of as good by his or her parents, the teenager's search for identity and what seems to adults (with all too short memories) the adolescent’s over concern with personal appearance, and indeed, the demands of parenthood are just a few of the elements which influence life's vicissitudes. I might, and will now go on about another element: approaching elderliness. This is the staging post where I am currently positioned on my journey to.........well, wherever.

      Many will be aware of common signs of ageing such as going to a room to do something particular but on entering the room finding that the purpose for being there has been forgotten. My mind has developed this trait to a more advanced level and now I find when I do eventually remember the reason I entered the room I discover that I am in the wrong room to do it.

      This is but a trifling matter when I compare it to one of the issues I really want to discuss here and that is the case of my trembling hands.  They begin to shake when I hold on to objects like cups or cameras and because of this shakiness my handwriting has become illegible. In the age of the personal computer that should not pose a problem but I find that my shakiness influences my typing accuracy on the keyboard. I am continually correcting typing errors when my shaky finger only partly hits the intended letter key and also touches the neighbouring key. This means I am ever making spelling corrections. Of course I can always use the App which types to the sound of my dictation but I find that with my Scottish accent the spoken word does not always equate with what eventually appears in the text. 

     Associated with this phenomenon is the propensity with which all the things I need and use, preternaturally fall to the floor of their own volition. This is not only when I am holding them, picking them up, or putting them down but they are also under instruction from Isaac Newton when I walk past them.  It may be a poltergeist - I don't know - but I can tell you the ensuing bending down to pick them up is a struggle. It's alright if I have my long handled metal gripper nearby but it's seldom to be found in a handy position because it too deliberately and frequently falls to the floor and hides itself in places it can't be found.

Hand level object evolving into a low level one seeks a hiding place

When I am out and about and pull my wallet from my pocket, all the contents of the wallet: my debit, library, senior rail and others cards, inevitably fall to the pavement, or descend to the floor of the shop or café I happen to be in at the time. Occasionally they have fallen down street drains which has complicated matters to a point of impossibility. All this is an embarrassment to me and though I am grateful that younger, and sometimes not so very much younger people come to my rescue and bend over to pick up and return to me whichever of my belongings have obeyed the law of gravity, what is most shameful for me is the idea these thoughtful people have assessed me as one who looks as if he will struggle to bend down to pick up what I have dropped.  I can feel diminished by this. It's not good for the ego, yet I eventually come around to thinking "Damn my ego! I needed someone to help me.”

These often deliberatedly dive from my wallet

  For some reason the proclivity for things to fall down brought to mind the repeated phrase, “down to the ground, down to the ground.” It has become a line I can’t get out of my head and it is from a great Joan Armatrading song  Down to Zero .

.     I first saw and heard Joan Armatrading perform in February,1985 at the City Hall, Newcastle upon Tyne. She entertained us magnificently on that night. Her wide ranging, lyrical voice electrifies her songs. She's a great musician and peerless poet/songwriter. Down to Zero is not about the ageing process but more about sustaining self-belief in the face of adversity and certainly that has a great deal to do with growing older.

 I hope the song will inspire me to gee myself up and to act on an  aphorism of another great woman, Mary Ann Evans, (also known as George Eliot), who proposed, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”  Well, maybe.

Le Taureau nouveau à Totnes est arrivé

        The Bull Inn on the Rotherfold in Totnes is springing back into life. Mrs Geetie Singh Watson and those who have supported her in this achievement are to be congratulated. People who read this blog will know the inn closed two years ago.  It has been missed by its customers and for many more it was sad to see a historic building of such social significance in our community have no life in it.   
         The Bull has had many patrons over its hundreds of years of offering hospitality to local people and to those in passage. There are any number of Bull Inns scattered across the United Kingdom and they are invariably very old hostelries. The Bull Inn at Totnes is no exception. It is likely that there has been an inn on the site since cattle were first brought to market on the Rotherfold. The inn is situated near the junction of the old road to Plymouth and the road to Kingsbridge so it was an important staging post for travellers. 

       It has been depressing to see it empty for so long and it was pleasing one evening in early October as I walked down from the Bay Horse Inn to look across the Rotherfold and see lights on at the inn. Of course the illumination was for tradesmen working late on the interior yet it was the first sign of night life at the establishment I had seen for over two years.

The first signs of night life

In recent weeks and days the exterior has appeared to be reaching its new finished state.

       This last week when peeping through the windows it could be seen that tables and chairs for future diners have been set out, beer pumps have been fitted and polished, staff have been training and now, as I write, final rehearsals are taking place.

            The Bull is in the ring! 

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       Post Script

       A number of worthies in the town who might wish for anonymity have been advising the good burghers of Totnes that the Bull Inn will open on every ensuing day in October, November or on December 1st, or 2nd or 3rd or...    Soon they will be proven. right!
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Sorry We Missed You: Ken Loach, the Scourge of the Gig Economy

  


 Sorry We Missed You : released November, 2019; Director, Ken Loach, Screenplay, Paul Laverty.

Cast      

       Last Sunday afternoon we visited The Barn Cinema in the idyllic setting of the Dartington Estate to watch Ken Loach’s moving and harrowing film Sorry We Missed You. Like his last film I, Daniel Blake action is set in Newcastle upon Tyne - a far cry from Dartington - and it concerns the struggles of the Turner family, Rickie and Abbie, the parents, Seth, a 17 year old son and Lisa Jane, a 12 year old daughter.
      Both parents work with exploitative companies who demand they be self-employed. In having no choice but to work in this way Rickie and Abbie have no contracts which would offer them humane working rights. Constantly overworked they are at the mercy of these 'gig economy' companies and ever under the threat of loss of work or fines should they be unable to fulfil their almost impossible schedules. If they are ill, they must find a replacement to do their work and if they can't they must pay the company a fine which is then used to finance a replacement.
       In the opening scenes we discover that as a result of the uncertain economic climate brought about by the years of austerity, Rickie has found it difficult to find long term employment and has flitted from one short term job to another.
       Determined to build a more secure future Rickie is persuaded by a friend to take on a franchise with a parcel delivery company.  To do this he must have a van to deliver the parcels and is only able to finance the purchase of a van by asking his wife Abbie to sell her car which with some reluctance she agrees to do.
       On first turning up at the delivery company's depot, Rickie is told by the unbending and pitiless depot gangmaster, Gavin Maloney, how his time and work will be controlled by the schedule set by the black phone he gives to Rickie. Maloney makes it clear that the phone is a valuable and critical piece of equipment for it provides proof of the punctual delivery of packages.  
       Abbie Turner is a self-employed carer for a social care agency. Her duties involve providing support to the elderly and the disabled in their homes. She carries out her care in a sincere and conscientious way, but a consequence of the sale of her car is that she must travel by public transport to meet with her clients, (the latter a word she hates to use to describe the people she helps) which makes her working day even longer than it had been. 

To make enough for family life to be financially feasible, Abbie and Chris work 14 hours a day for 6 days a week. This places great strain on what is not a perfect but a good enough loving family. Chris and Abbie, are increasingly unable to find sufficient time for their parenting duties, and cracks begin to appear in what up to now has been a strong family edifice. Son Seth, a friendly and sensitive young man with a passionate yet thoughtful interest in his street art, is suspended from school and Lisa Ann, a smart bright articulate girl begins to wet the bed. Rickie becomes angry and aggressive in reaction to these family frustrations and at a critical moment he strikes his son. A family taboo is broken. 
       The fallout from these developments define the denouement of the film as we witness the collapse of a once loving family.  There is a heart wrenching crescendo in a scene set in a hospital where Rickie has gone after he is beaten up by thugs who have ransacked his van and smashed his black phone. While waiting for medical attention in A and E Rickie calls Maloney using Abbie's phone. The gangmaster insists Rickie must pay £1000 for the black phone and that he must find someone to finish his work schedule for the day or he will be fined. On hearing this Abbie calls Maloney and in a verbal assault upon him, (which we as watchers all relish hearing),  she tells him with a barrage of expletives how cruel and inhumane he is. On reflection Abbie is ashamed of her use of foul language. Another taboo has been broken.  Rickie, injured, and in the thrall of the fear of financial disaster leaves the hospital and returns to work ignoring his wife and children's desperate protests against this.

     The potency of this and a number of previous Loach films is that they are about ordinary people struggling with the distress caused by government legislation or, as is the case of this film, the dearth of effective legislation to protect workers from exploitation.

Watching the film we encounter characters whom we recognise and know from our own day-to-day lives. Many of us will see ourselves in them. We sympathise and suffer with them.

Contrast Sorry We Missed You with the trailers of the other upcoming films we watched before the screening. These were about 'tough' Americans shooting and blowing up things to save the world from the Russians while another was about even more Americans saving the us from alien invasions. Films like these, as most commercial films seem to do, depict a violent, weapon toting world which has little to do with our every day experience. They are exercises in violent excess.  Certainly there is violence in Sorry We Missed You but it is commensurate to a narrative with which we can associate.

This moving film has political implications but first and foremost it is a film about good people in a good family being destroyed by the 'gig economy'.

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R.D. Laing,the idea of 'withness' and PIP assessment, the idea of 'againstness'.

     The following is an extract from my Journal for Wednesday, May 22nd, 1997. It offers my brief reflection on the Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, R.D.'Ronnie' Laing (1927-1989) who was something of a cult figure in psychotherapeutic and wider circles in the 1960s and 1970s. A controversial figure he was sometimes described as being part of an 'anti-psychiatry' movement. I believe I may have made this entry because I had just read a biography of Laing by John Clay, R.D.Laing: a Divided Self: a Biography. 

1997

"I want (or as our former prime minister, John Major was wont to say  'I wunt') to read more of, and about, R.D. Laing and his works. I have some sympathy for his approach which promotes the idea that we must be empathic and live 'with' the  emotional disorders of others and not manage them antagonistically by locking people away in either a physical or drug induced sense. 
     In 1965, to fulfil his ideas, Laing established Kingsley Hall in the East End of London as a therapeutic community for troubled adults. The drawback to this  -  in my opinion  -  right approach to mental health, is that it can take too heavy a toll of some carers. It draws enormously on a carer's emotional resources. How are these replenished? This was achieved with the support every member of the community gave to each other.  Not everyone survived the process and in Laing’s own personal case, in some measure he buried the emotional difficulties he faced in alcohol, drugs, and sex. 

     A word which Laing and his followers often used to describe their approach to helping people overwhelmed by emotional problems is 'with'.  They would say that it was important to be 'with' the person being helped - empathising, recognising and accepting the other’s personal construct of the world and the feelings this induces in them.  

     My view is that Laing’s work has been marginalised because an empiric world wants a more detailed analysis of how this 'withness' is measured.  I do not know if Laing or anyone else has explained the state of  'withness' in specific terms, though it seems to me the methodology for making such a measurement might prove difficult because "withness" is an active inter-personal process and each relationship has a unique symbiosis. 

     To the sceptic 'withness' is a notion which lies somewhere between dubious and spurious.  'Withness' is considered a vague, hippie notion without a valid place in the field of psychiatry. For the latter only science can offer true answers. Nevertheless the sense of togetherness that 'withness' implies is surely something to which we aspire. 

     Laing and his followers may have been marginalised for other reasons. The whole psychiatry lobby, backed as it is by the institution of mainstream medicine, together with the drugs manufacturers who enjoy their profits so much, is a powerful one, and unlikely to allow drugless interpersonal therapy to hold sway in the field of mental health."


2019

     In the main my thoughts about Laing and his works are the same today as they were then.My observations about his personal life though true, may unfairly mask a life of achievement and, in commenting on his declivities, I should also record that he was a talented pianist, an enthusiastic tennis player, but most of all he was an original thinker and author exemplified best by his classic text The Divided Self.

     My own observation is that Laing's concept of  'withness' is one which we as a human community would wish to adhere to in wider aspects of our daily lives. We want to secure a good education and health for all: for those who are doing just about well enough and particularly for those who are struggling.
    It is then, a strange paradox to find we have voted for a government which, though we are a wealthy country, is stripping our public services while replacing and diminishing them with private profit making provision that is not up to the task.                      In my view our government seems to act in a spirit of  'againstness' rather than 'withness.' This is exemplified by its attack - made in our name -  upon our most vulnerable fellow citizens, those with various kinds of disability. Our government, through the Department of Work and Pensions,  hires private companies to deny needy people essential financial support. The companies, who operate what is called the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) assessment process, increase their profits every time they make an assessment that someone should be stripped of his or her PIP. The latter is not only left impoverished but to feel that she or he is a liar and somehow a fraud. 
     Though the United Kingdom is a wealthy community, offering financial support to vulnerable people takes its toll on everyone who pays taxes, but the altruism in giving this support shows a 'withness' to which we, as UK citizens aspire. We have no wish to be cruel to others. We want to help each other. Don't we?
     On December 12th, 2019, if that is when our next General Election is to be, we must vote for a government of 'withness' and not one of 'againstness.'

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