lou reed - a life (anthony decurtis)

Having read a biography of Arthur Miller last year whilst working on All My Sons, it is fascinating to see how Reed and Miller, seemingly two very different beasts, had so much in common. The offspring of the pre and post war Jewish immigration to New York were a generation that was intellectually ferocious and creatively brilliant. (Sontag is another that comes to mind.) Both Reed and Miller lived in the shadow of their fathers. Both rebelled in their fashion by choosing to take up a career in the arts. Thereafter their lives might be said to have taken a different course, but both were provocateurs and rebels, an impulse forged in the furnace of their family background. DeCurtis’ biography of Reed is rigorous. He shapes the book around the albums Reed produced, which were numerous. The music is the key to tracing the singer’s concerns, desires and psychosis. Reed comes across as complex, difficult and a slave to his own creativity. In another era he might have died in a pauper’s grave, but the biographer informs us he actually accrued considerable wealth. The tension between maintaining a stance on the outside of the industry whilst still seeking critical and financial validation is clear from the book. Reed’s relationship with the transexual, Rachel, is perhaps the apex of this dialectic. Rachel, who was Reed’s partner for several years but from whom he split, unceremoniously, (as he did with almost all his partners, romantic or musical or professional), ended up as a lost figure in the Reed mythos, someone who vanished into the dirty boulevards of the city, whilst Reed ascended towards its heights. 

the devil of the provinces (juan cárdenas, tr. lizzie davis)

There is a certain style of Latin American novel which Cárdenas’ book maps onto. An elliptical narrative with a semi-alienated protagonist. A sense of quest, to discover something which the reader realises by the midpoint of the book will never be found. A distancing device, perhaps, hinting at a post-political vacio. In this case the protagonist, a biologist, returns to a small Colombian town after fifteen years abroad. He hooks up with old friends and an ex and his former dealer. He has a job in a girls’ school which is mysterious and possibly nefarious.  His brother was a gay politician who was murdered. The novel also incorporates observations on biology, palm weevils and avocados. There’s no shortage of thought-provoking material, but as noted everything is processed through the deadpan attitude of the biologist, for whom nothing seems to matter an enormous amount. 

american war (omar al akkad)

It’s tempting to see Al Akkad’s polished imagination of a USA which has plunged through civil war, pandemic and beyond as an allegory of what is happening today, as was the case with Garland’s Civil War. Yet, it also belongs to a dystopian tradition whose most celebrated text is perhaps Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, but would also include McCarthy’s The Road, among others. Contained within the North American utopian vision is its correlative, the dystopian vision, which will come to pass some day when the wheels come off the capitalist train and it hits the buffers. Al Akkad’s vision might be more astute than the others, and right now it feels like it’s just around the corner, but as in the case of 1984, the fixing of dates within the text means the longer we head towards those dates without the events the novel suggests will occur actually happening, the less terrifying the novel will become. In practice, this is a skilfully realised thought experiment, of the kind Robert Harris employs effectively on a more commercial basis. What would happen if….

The book works not so much because of its prophetic qualities, but because it is constructed around a complex anti-heroine, Sarat, whose life we follow from the age of six until her death as an avenging angel of the south. As in the case of Garland’s film, surely influenced by this novel, mapping the local US politics onto the current state of the nation feels perhaps irrelevant. In American War there is an alliance between Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, a kind of confederate rump, but Sarat and her family are mixed race, so far from conventional rednecks. What the book seems to be exploring  is the divide between a more diversified form of capitalism against a more regimented version in the north. All of which is slightly Dionysus versus Apollo, although the deeper implications of this are skirted. Interestingly the image that is given of the narrator’s final southern home (the narrator, Benjamin, is Sarat’s nephew) contains a homespun idealism which perhaps speaks to the lost world of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. 

43 missing: a detective emilia cruz novel (carmen amato)

Ayotzinapa is a name that anyone with any Latino political awareness will know. It refers to an event which took place in Iguala, Guerrero, in 2014, when 43 students were kidnapped and murdered. It is an event which came to encapsulate the arbitrary cruelty of the silent Mexican war which has lead to possibly hundreds of thousands being killed or disappeared. The very number, 43, has acquired an emotive power.

I am not sure how I came to Amato’s book. It is, as the subheading says, part of a series of detective novels which focus on Emilia Cruz, a policewoman in Acapulco. Presumably the fact that Cruz is from the state of Guerrero explains why Amato relocates the action to the neighbouring state of Michoacan. Cruz is assigned to the task force of five trusted police who are allocated to a commission whose intentions is to draw a line under the numerous unsuccessful investigations into the deaths of 43 students in the town of Lindavista. They are not expected to solve the crime or even locate the site of the students bodies, but Emilia’s resourcefulness leads her to achieve this, tying the story in to other non-fictional elements of Mexico’s recent history, notably the escape of El Chapo from a high security prison.

The novel uses Ayotzinapa as a backdrop for this chapter in Emilia’s life. Whilst offering insights into the original crime, one can’t help wondering what people make of it in Mexico. In a similar way to the furore over Emilia Perez, which I saw this evening, it feels as though art is in danger of cashing in on a recent tragedy. Or perhaps it is seen as a way of bringing the case to a wider public? In many ways this speaks of the issues surrounding the writing of crime fiction, perhaps above all in Mexico, where the actuality is so much more arresting than fiction. Before she is kidnapped in Emilia Perez, the Zoe Saldaña character stands next to a newsstand. In Mexico, these newsstands are covered with periodicals describing in gory detail the latest violent killing. Fiction struggles to compete. 43 Missing is a fast-paced read with a plucky heroine, but it doesn’t have much to do with Ayotzinapa, the crime its title refers to. 

the rider (w&d chloé zhao)

I watched Zhao’s second film during lockdown on a small screen. At which point she might have been the most feted up-and-coming director on the planet, fresh from Oscar success and the Marvel call-up. Which, watching The Rider again, seems such a confusing career step, for someone whose art appears to be baked into the nuanced, anti-climactic possibilities of cinema. The Rider is a film where almost everything has already happened. Brady, the protagonist, has fallen off his horse and damaged his skull. Lane, his friend, has fallen off his horse and become irreversibly damaged. This is a film about coming to terms with trauma, not seeking it. As such it is obviously a wonderful corrective to the idea of the western as a proving ground for a man’s machismo. These men have proved and lost and now they have to face up to living in a world where all their aspirational values are worthless, or even suicidal. Zhao’s slow burning take on Brady’s crisis is filmed with such assurance that it makes up for the lack of action. There is an ingrained tension in the idea that he will seek to get back on the horse, but even this tension is underplayed to an extent, the filmmaker emphasising the aesthetic as much as the the dramatic elements. This is the golden hour sunset of the western and all the baggy messed-up dreams it carries with it. 

advertising shits in your head, strategies for resistance (vyvian raoul & matt bonner)

This is a short sharp analysis and guide to subvertising, the art of both questioning and subverting advertising. Whilst the author could clearly have gone into more detail as to the science and strategic uses of advertising by the capitalist machine, this is not his pimrary mission. The first half of the book quotes Bernays and Sut Jhally as it briefly interrogates the way advertising has become an all-pervasive form of brain-washing. The second goes on to both demonstrate the work that has been done by subvertisers and their methodology. For all its brevity its a great book, both in terms of reminding ourselves quite how hostage we are in our daily lives to forces we are barely aware of annexing entire quarters of our brains, and  secondly that resistance is possible.  Raoul & Bonner’s book takes us to the levellers of our day, those brave, unheralded souls who strike back against the empire. 

exit west (mohsin hamid)

It is noted with some amusement that the Obamas' production company has acquired the rights to Exit West. On imdb the putative film project, ‘in development’ is headlined by a pair of British tyros, one of whom is a friend of a friend. The presence of the Obamas is, these days, something of a double edged sword. On the one hand a badge of liberal consciousness in a world where the extremists are on the rise, on the other, a badge of compromise, a validation of a system, (US imperialism, with all that implies), which remains a dangerous and far-from-beneficial influence on the shape the world is and has been taking over the course of the last 50 years, or more.

Why would the Obamas be interested in Exit West? The novel opens in a Middle Eastern town, which might be Aleppo or Mosul, but is in fact a fictional space, where extremists are seizing power. The semiotics smell of Isis, (the ritual executions, the sense of lawlessness under the shroud of religious devotion). Nadia and Saeed find themselves falling in love against the backdrop of this turmoil. They know they have to flee, which they do, escaping through a magic door to arrive on a Greek island. From there they will hop to London and finally California. The complex process of flight and exile is reduced to a literary device, which, whilst convenient on an allegorical  level, might be accused of minimising the realities and risks of these migrations. However, this also reflects the way that the novel transforms from being a meditation on surviving the impact of religious extremism to a more spaced-out, opaque vision of the near-future, redolent of hypothetical dystopias such as the Parable of the Sower.

Clearly there’s a market for this kind of story, which in the end offers a positivist vision of a millennial future where religious fundamentalism, xenophobia and climate change have been overcome, laying the basis for a kinder, simpler civil society. However, this also means that the novel might be deemed open to charges of over-simplifying what are, in essence, seismic and perhaps intractable problems. The knottiness of these problems is skated over. You open a door and arrive on the other side. 

cowboy graves (bolaño, tr natasha wimmer)

Returning to Bolaño after so long feels like coming home. This book is a collection of three separate texts, excavated apparently from his hard drive, composed in the nineties and in the year before his death. As Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas’ afterword puts it eloquently, the themes and characters are culled from the Bolaño universe. Familiar figures pop up. New arrivals appear. The stories range between Mexico, Chile and Europe. There is nothing new here and plenty that is new. To what extent are the stories autobiographical, marked by the presence of Bolaño’s alter ego, Arturo Belano? Two of the tales feature the day of the Pinochet coup, and these have the smell of the real, albeit we know they are not the real, they are fictions, spun from the writer’s skull. The author will always be a touchstone of my literary life. Part of the pleasure of reading is diving into the themes and issues which fascinate the reader. Few writers of my time have scaled the divides of my own life; but the one who unfailingly goes there is Roberto Bolaño.

l’atelier (w&d laurent cantet, w robin campillo)

L’Atelier has a brilliant premise. A small group of mixed race teenagers from the Mediterranean town of Le Ciotat come together one summer for a writing workshop, helmed by the Parisian author, Olivia Dejazet, (Marina Foïs). The kids are supposed to create a thriller. They debate different ideas, touching on violence, history, race. One of them, Antoine (Matthieu Lucci) presents work which feels ultra violent. He provokes conflict with the second generation kids, from Algeria and sub-Saharan Africa. He’s a troublemaker, but he fascinates Olivia, who starts to investigate and discovers Antoine’s links to the far right. This set-up is highly effective, but the meta-drama between Olivia and Antoine starts to feel as though it pulls focus from the other kids’ story (and the fictional story they are creating). Their stories get lost, and the device, which seems ideal to explore the shape of French history over the course of the post-war period, feels as though it is sacrificed in order to explore Antoine’s neo-romantic radicalisation. It’s great to discover a film with the ambition and the wit to take on the issues L’Atelier does, but the resolution and enlace didn’t feel as though they quite lived up to these ambitions. 

minor detail (adania shibli; tr. elisabeth jaquette)

Man not the tank shall prevail

Next, I pick up the map showing the country until 1948, but I snap it shut as horror rushes over me. Palestinian villages which on the Israeli map appear to have been swallowed by a Yellow Sea, appear on this one by the dozen, their names practically leaping off the page.

It’s been a long time since I’ve passed through here, and wherever I look, all the changes constantly reassert the absence of anything Palestinian: the names of cities and villages on road signs, billboards written in Hebrew, new buildings, even vast fields abutting the horizon on my left and right.

Perhaps it has always been the way that the workings of the wider world, which have no obvious material impact upon our personal lives, nevertheless impact on other, more atavistic levels. When I was a child, the ghost idea of Boney, (Napoleon Bonaparte), still existed in the folk memory of the British isles, and one can imagine generations of British children being touched by the residual fear of a figure who died in the early nineteenth century. Wars have an effect which go far beyond the waging of them; the effects percolate through into the future. In my lifetime this has been true of Vietnam, Iraq, the Malvinas, Rwanda, Afghanistan, to name but a few.

The past months have added another war to that list. A war which feels like the apogee of the unjust twenty first century war. All war is perhaps a perverse blend of courage and cowardice, and the objective of those who wage war is to minimise the amount of courage required, as courage comes with a cost. Twenty first century warfare has evolved into an object lesson in cowardice. Dropping bombs from the sky to kill civilians requires no courage. Anymore than leaving cholera infested blankets on trees. When the armoury of the media is employed to reinforce this cowardice, the effect is doubly obscene. Children stagger across the eleven inches of your laptop screen, wailing in terror, blood-soaked, and this is pronounced as some kind of act of courageous military valour. When, in your bones, you know you are witnessing actions which are crimes against humanity.

All of this has a terrible relevance to Adania Shibli’s slender, compelling novel which uses fiction to investigate the theft of Palestinian land and the reality of Palestinian oppression within the apartheid state which Israel has since become. The novel opens with an account of the events leading up to the criminal rape and murder of a girl by soldiers who are participating in the establishment of Israel’s southern border. The prose is relentlessly material: language as an unvarnished testament. The skill in the writing is the way in which the authorial voice is reduced to the bare minimum. The story is presented from the point of view of an officer, commanding his troops, and there are moments where the reader almost (but never quite) comes to sympathise with the officer, who seems to be a force for the maintenance of civilised mores within war, until he isn’t anymore. The soldier is in great pain following an insect bite and this pain ultimately destroys his moral compass, and he becomes as much of a criminal as the soldiers he is trying to keep in line.

The second part of the novel is told from the point of view of a female writer, an avatar for the author, who is investigating the crime committed by the soldier all those years ago. History filters through and repeats itself. Once again, the story is told using pragmatic prose, which describes the fearful and absurd constructions placed upon an ordinary Palestinian citizen within their own country by the Israeli state. The narrator decides to research the crime, a process which involves entering the Israeli side of the country, with all the fearful paranoia that this engenders for a Palestinian. Simple things like hiring a car and driving that car down a road become fraught with risk. Terror stalks her heels, a terror that was initiated in the construction of the Israeli state and the theft of Palestinian land, and a terror that is all too understandable today, because it is underpinned by an apparent right to kill Palestinian citizens with impunity.

In her trip, the narrator notes how the geography of the land has been rewritten over the course of the last fifty years. Towns and villages which existed for centuries have been erased. The current events in Gaza appear to be an extension of this colonial practice. Reading Shibli’s novel reinforces a sense of impotence in the face of injustice. The only thing we can do is bear witness, as writers and as readers. The scales of history will have the ultimate word on whether the occupiers’ cowardly war will be one which succeeds in its aims or ultimately, as is the case with so many cowardly wars, leads only towards a Pyrrhic victory. What is undoubtable is that the end of the war will not come with the cessation of violence, because, as Shibli’s novel so eloquently shows, the violence committed by one generation lives on to haunt those that follow. 

essayism (brian dillon)

Dillon’s succinct and rather beautiful book weaves the personal with the enthusiast with the academic, as he discourses on the nature of the essay. His references range from Barthes to Derrida to La Rochefoucauld and Bacon, also taking in Didion and Hardwick and Cioran. The book consists of approximately twenty five essays, some themed around a particular writer, others more discursive, and others still plainly autobiographical. As much as an investigation into the possibilities, limitations and wonder of the essay form, this is also a book about how essays can save your life, which is no small beer. Much of Dillon’s reading echoes favourites of mine, or of any curious soul with intellectual leanings born in the late sixties, even if Dillon is Irish rather than British (we are not so very different). In part, as well, this is another examination from the Fitzcarraldo stable of those intellectual waters which exist at the margin of the Anglo-Saxon consciousness, and therefore attract the outsider, the one who seeks an intellectual framework above and beyond that handed down by the syllabus. (The patron saint of this line of thought, a figure who has now recurred in three Fitzcarraldo books I have read this year, is Sebald, who I have failed to engage with as furiously as Dillon, Cooper and Mallo.) Dillon balances the lure of the likes of Barthes, Derrida and Cioran with Sebald, Hardwick, Brookner and Didion, but it is still intriguing to see the way in which the former bunch of deconstructionists, essayists, aphorists and creative philosophers have become a kind of scapegoat for the intellectual echelons of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, the apogee of all that is wrong in a world where ethics and profit are supposed to be happy bedfellows. The outsiders, those who struggle to find a place in this world, are drawn to the sinuous prose of Barthes, or the arcane mysteries of Derrida. It is also interesting to note that, in celebrating the essay, Dillon celebrates a profoundly un-commercial form of writing (it has not always been so, because there was a time when the essay was the most profitable format out there), one which has none of the commercial clout of the novel or the screenplay. Dillon, like his stablemates Cooper and Penman, would appear to be a survivor of the war against the intellectual that is rigorously waged on British soil, and his book is a triumph of complex simplicity and the shining power of the marriage of word and idea. 

hurricane season (w. melchor tr. hughes)

Having read Paradais , it made sense to get to grips with Hurricane Season, which some have compared to Marquez. If this is correct, (and in this translation it doesn’t feel like it is), then it is a frightening reflection of what has happened to the Latin American literary world, and perhaps Latin America itself. In her machine gun prose, Melchor takes the killing of a trans and spins it into a golgothic voyage through a dead end Mexican pueblo. In this place, everyone is desperate, everyone is driven by venal desire, everyone will meet a cruel fate. Teenagers have miscarriages, other teenagers fantasise about fucking and killing their best friends, the elders have had all hope extinguished. There is no magic in this realism, the magic has been expunged, even the black magic has had its throat cut and died in a ditch. It’s not an easy read and there is no redemption to be found. The only thing that the characters know is that it will rain one day and they are likely to die sooner rather than later.

Although the scale of Hurricane Season is grander that of Paradais, the novel feels less nuanced. There is a reliance on the flair of the prose over and above the development of character. It is, one imagines from an editorial perspective, seductive. Long sweeping tracts of text, stepsisters to Bernhard, trampling over the Mexican littoral, delivering adrenaline shots of brutality and sexual violence. It is a representation of Mexico which mirrors one reality, whilst at the same time annulling all the others. The novel has much in common in with the section in 2666, the Part about the Crimes, without any of the framing contextualisation of Bolaño’s novel. The horror is overwhelming and restrictive, the novel peering through the narrowest of lenses at a world no-one would ever want to visit IRL. 

berta isla (marias, tr jull costa)

The eponymous heroine of Berta Isla is an archetype for the kind of heroine that shouldn’t work. Berta does nothing except wait. Her husband, Tomas, is an agent for the British secret services. Where he goes and what he does remains a mystery, both to Berta and the reader. He might be in Northern Ireland, he might be in Buenos Aires. We and she will never know. Marias’ novel riffs off the work of Le Carré and Fleming, but where their writing takes us inside the workings of the secret service, Marias leaves us, like his heroine, firmly on the outside. She is Penelope, and the author stitches together her patient story with a minimal colour palette. This is also a novel about the beginning and the end, with very little in the middle, the middle being dedicated to the art of patience.

All of which makes for a curious, deliberately frustrating novel, which seems to undercut the demand for narrative and action. The plot points are staked at the beginning and ending, the suspense comes from not knowing, the jeopardy is ever-present but kept at arm’s length. In this sense, the novel subtly adopts the position of the reader. Few readers will be engaged, as Tomas is, in the defence of the realm. This is the luxury of peace, of modern European life. The dramatic action of our lives is tepid. Movies and literature seek to spice up this bland existence with tales of unlikely heroism, which have little to do with the realities of the cold war fought by those like Tomas. We sit at home, patiently awaiting our little drama of mortality, as we watch Netflix and contemplate which colour car to choose in order to destroy the planet.

Perhaps there is a cold fury lurking somewhere in Berta Isla, but it is so deeply buried that it can only emerge in the occasional news reports Berta catches of a murder in Belfast or the sinking of a ship in the South Atlantic. These currents, the book declares, course back and forth beneath the fabric of our lives, enabling us to circumvent tragedy. The price we pay for this, which is also our reward, is a kind of atomised, civilised banality.

And we should remember, as we flirt with other realities, the value of this banality.

“Why is there bread in the baker’s shops and cakes in the cake shops, why do the street lamps turn on and turn off, why does the stock market go up and down and everyone receive his or her high or low salary at the end of the month? This seems perfectly normal to us and yet it’s really quite extraordinary, it’s amazing that each day begins and ends.”

the orphanage (serhiy zhadan, tr. reilly costigan-humes & isaac stackhouse wheeler)

Serhily Zhadan is a cult writer of novels and poetry from Kharkiv, a city I had never heard of a month ago, but one which has now joined the list of names that will forever be associated with the evils of war.

The Orphanage was published in 2017. It should be compulsory reading for two reasons. Firstly because, if you want an idea of what it is like to exist in Ukraine right now, this book gives you that. The Orphanage is set across three days of war. The down-at-heel Pasha is someone who ignores the news and doesn’t realise that conflict is about to break out once more in his Eastern corner of the Ukraine. When he finds out how bad things have got, he sets out to bring his nephew, Sasha, back from the orphanage he has been put in by his Pasha’s sister, who works as a stewardess on the long distance train to Kyiv. Pasha gets on the bus which doesn’t get far and then begins a journey into hell. The novel traces his movements across a battle scarred terrain. Death is always one step ahead or one step behind. He befriends people and then fears that the building they were sheltering in has been shelled after he’s left them. Life is transitory and endlessly, exhaustingly terrifying. Three days is a chaotic lifetime where nothing matters except getting through the next hour alive. In some ways the novel is reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, except that the tone is more deadpan and mordant. There is no real sign of poetic redemption to be gleaned from the mess of the world that the conflict is creating.

The second reason has to do with the date of publication. The Orphanage is five years old. I remember watching Bartas’ Frost in 2017, a film which revealed the extent of the ongoing war in Eastern Ukraine. What is occurring now is not new or unforeseen. This conflict has been armed and dangerous for many years. Which suggests that the fact it has escalated should not come as such a surprise, and also make one question the statescraft or lack of it that has failed to build in measures to prevent the escalation. Looking back now, Zhadan’s novel was a clear warning of what was happening and what might go on to happen. It has become a prophetic work, one whose prophesy has been ignored to everyone’s cost. 

confessions of a recovering environmentalist. (paul kingsnorth)

We need to talk about Kevin, was the name of a very successful book. Substitute the word Kevin for the word ‘ecocide’ and you get an idea of what this intriguing collection of essays is and isn’t about. The essays span a decade. Kingsnorth claims at times to have lost his faith in Environmentalism as a movement, as it seeks accommodation with realpolitik, in a bid, he laments, to maintain our current way of life, rather than to radically reform it. There’s a slightly doleful essay where he talks of planting five hundred trees on the plot of land he and his partner inhabit, and then points out all the environmental compromises that were involved in the planting. (Use of plastic, machine made tools, diesel to move materials, etcetera). This points to the way in which, even this most would-be radical of environmentalists, who is dubious about windfarms and solar energy, cannot avoid the paradoxes of modernity. The very fact that you are reading his book, in my case on an iPad, feels like its testament to the inviability of his idealism.

However, these observations are to miss the point, somewhat. Because it is evident that Kingsnorth is more than aware of the paradoxes involved in his project. These essays, on the other hand, which come close to extolling the virtues of the Unabomber, and at times might even give succour to a rightist, anti-environmental movement, are a provocation, a way of broadening the discussion. Kingsnorth’s loss of faith in the environmental movement is replaced by a new kind of pantheistic faith, one that references Wordsworth, among several other key figures in the eco-literature movement. He espouses, in line with Ghosh, the importance of narrative as a means of changing perception and the dreaming of modernity, steering it towards something that can reconcile humanity with what might be its imminent decline, or at least its recalibration.

As such, his voice, which came to me via a fellow sceptic, Aris Roussinos, feels like a significant addition to this discourse. Anyone who has children, or nephews or nieces or just knows children, needs to wake up and smell the coffee, and realise that even the best case scenarios which the green movement postulates are unlikely to be realised. The change that is required, Kingsnorth argues, is a spiritual one, and once that has been achieved, the material changes that he says are inevitable will be far less difficult to face. 

platform capitalism (nick srnicek)

Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism is a pithy breakdown of trends in capitalism, the internet and the shape of the future. There are other books which tackle these subjects in more detail, but Srnicek’s is a straightforward overview which is great for the layman, like myself. It pinpoints the development of internet platforms (the usual suspects) and explains how a website which originally set out to sell books is now selling just about everything and probably taking your temperature at the same time. The book details the varied platforms breaking them down into five groups: Cloud; Advertising; Industrial; Product and Lean, before going on to outline how, as the behemoths of the internet struggle for dominance, these platforms begin to elide and overlap. The book is also very astute in explaining how a surplus of capital with nowhere to go has been allocated to the development of these platforms. The Victorians used surplus capital to build railways and sewers; the 21st century builds ever more complex internet architecture. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is undoubtably more extensive in its description of the way in which advertising revenue drove the growth of Google and Facebook, but I have to confess it was too detailed for me. Srnicek isn’t trying to write a history of the internet, he’s giving a succinct breakdown of where we are now in a process that is evolving so rapidly, affecting the way in which each and every one of us lives, that the general public inevitably lag behind any capacity to grasp how the earth is moving under our feet. The only point perhaps worth noting is that the book, originally published in 2017, could probably do with an update already, above all in this year where our on-line existence has evolved to compensate for the decline in our off-line access.

the adventures of china iron (gabriela cabezón cámara tr fiona mackintosh and iona macintyre)

Cabezón Cámara’s novel has been nominated for the international Booker prize and you can sort of see why. It’s something of a romp with its bawdy portrayal of the titular heroine as she crosses the Pampas in the year of our lord 1872. China is the estranged wife of Martin Fierro, (Fierro meaning “iron” in spanish), the subject of the great national epic poem by José Hernández, who appears in the novel as a dissolute army captain running a fort in the wilderness. Fierro also pops up as do other characters from the poem. However, this is a feminist riff on the macho history of the evolving Argentina. China hooks up with an Englishwoman, Liz, looking to reach her husband who has inherited land in the Indian territories. China and Liz roll across the Pampas in their wagon, until they reach the fort. They have a few adventures and a great deal of vigorous sex, with Liz proving to be the model of the repressed Englishwoman who lets it all hang out as she goes native. After their sojourn in the fort, they flee into the Indian territory where they live a kind of Pantheistic idyll. It’s all quite charming and frothy, with some purple passages of beauty as the author describes the landscape they’re headed into, and their eventual assimilation into a (very free-love, hippy), native tribe.

le brio (w&d yvan attal, w. noé debré, yaël langmann)

Introductory note. This was the last film I saw before the great confinement began. It has now been over two weeks since the cinemas were shut. Cinema is a strange beast. The value of theatre as a social tool is self-evident. The day the theatres reopen people will be on their feet applauding no matter the show. The actors will applaud the audience and the audience will applaud the actors and this is exactly as it should be. There’s a tradition of thousands of years of culture which will be being upheld, a tradition which has vanquished plagues, fires, puritans and dictatorships. Cinema is a more private experience. It always feels off-key to me when people applaud a film. No matter how moving or significant the film, it should be greeted with a murmur of appreciation, the contemplation of the credits, the shared sense of having participated in an experience which borders on the religious. Ever since I first started attending the cinema to watch films I have always felt as though the cinema is a second home. There are few places I would rather be if the world were to come to an abrupt end. Perhaps if this goes on much longer we should break into Cinemateca and live there, projecting films through the darkness. Perhaps this is the key to the religious beauty of cinema: the way in which it uses light to transform our darkness. It also explains why television will always be its poor cousin, no matter what they tell you nowadays. On the bad days, and there will be bad days in all of this, I sometimes wonder if Le Brio might not be the last film I ever see in a cinema. Fortunately the good days do battle with the bad ones, and I conclude there will be more moments of sheer luminescence to come. I also give thanks to the brothers Lumière and those others who helped to construct one of the great wonders of the modern age. 

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There’s something slightly uncomfortable about Yvan Attal’s modern day Pygmalion narrative. On the one hand the message is clearly supposed to be a positive one for French second gen immigrants. You can make it to the upper echelons of society if that’s your ultimate intention. On the other it postulates that you’re going to need the dedicated help of a self-confessed anarcho-racist to get there. Auteuil plays the loose cannon, Mazard, a brilliant law professor who cites Nietzsche and Baudelaire in his classes, and has a fierce libertarian streak. In his mind it’s fair game to insult minorities, presumably on the basis that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Camélia Jordana’s Neïla is the winsome young student lawyer who he is designated to give a course of intensive teaching, in order to get him off the hook of a racist attack he made against her which has been uploaded to Facebook. 

The film opens with a brilliant sequence where Neïla rushes across Paris, late, to arrive at the Uni. She walks into a vast, 21st C lecture hall, with hundreds of students hunched over their laptops as Auteuil’s professor speaks to them using a microphone. The scene feels like an embodiment of Western European modernity, where lawyers are mass-produced, where the sheer scale of life means even education is dehumanised. However, thereafter, the film slips towards both cliche and a more ambiguous (and less ambitious) mode. The Pygmalion story contains a twist, in that Neïla ultimately, follows her own path, rather than that dictated by her guru, but it feels as though the film is wary of damaging the feelings of Auteuil’s Mazard, eeking out a happy ending which never feels deserved. Attal seems to pull his punches as the film drifts towards a feel good conclusion. It feels like a film which isn’t entirely sure how it wants to situate itself within the context of an evolving modern France. 

the genius and the opera singer (d. vanessa stockley)

January was inundated with visions of my nemesis city, New York. Vanessa Stockley’s sly documentary captures a corner of the city which even now has been lost. It’s a straight-up observational doc, which follows the lives of two women, Ruth and Jessica. Ruth, the onetime opera singer, is 90, whilst Jessica is her daughter. They live in a rent-controlled apartment in the West Village. The apartment is a valuable commodity and the Kuchneresque powers that be want them out, but that’s not the story here. The story is about the relationship between a mother and a daughter, the former close to death now. Two people who have lived boxed up in a small flat together for many years, who bicker and fight and sing and sometimes betray the fact that they love each other more than either can say. - a love which can only be expressed through song. It’s a fully embedded piece which captures every nuance of the relationship: Jessica’s intolerant wit and Ruth’s birdlike all-seeing gaze. In this sense it’s also a tender portrait of age, “second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”. The film is accompanied by several sequences where Jessica, (who is just as New York as Howard in Uncut Gems), patrols her barrio, and in these sequences the combative energy and argot of the city comes alive, a chaotic energy which is mirrored in the ongoing skirmish between mother and daughter in their flat high above the streets.

psychopolitics: neoliberalism and new technologies of power [byung chul han]

Once upon a time, the theory goes, there was an Orwellian big brother who sought to scare his subjects into submission. He was a twentieth century phenomenon. He ruled with gulags and execution squads and ford falcons and martial law. He strode around the world shaking his fist and some called him fascist and others communist and an old Etonian wrote a book about him, a book that defined him as a bogeyman who would haunt the dreams of little children and old age pensioners alike. There was only one problem: big brother’s tactics were scary but in the end they weren’t that effective. People resisted. Dictatorships were overthrown. People don’t enjoy living in fear and they got so sick of it that they tore down the walls and the statues and installed something known as democracy. Which meant big brother needed to find another way to get people to do what he wanted. He had to do it under the rubric of choice. And also around this time, the start of the 21st century, a phenomenon known as the internet began to invade people’s lives. In a much more effective way than anything big brother had dreamed of. And the interaction of the internet and the people created data. Which could be processed, manipulated, used to understand and control the subjects. It was done not by threatening them, but by asking them what they liked. And what they didn’t like. And promising to deliver these wishes. It created, in the words of Han, “a dictatorship of emotion”. Which also served the purpose of making people more stupid. Because stupid people are docile. They don’t think, they feel. Feelings can be manipulated and satiated. Thoughts are harder. People weren’t really worried about whether or not the information big brother was feeding them was true or false: the point was that it felt good to receive it. Like children being given sweets. And because the data had been studied, big bother always knew which people liked which sweets, and it was no skin off big brother’s nose to give them those sweets. And make them pliant and happy at the same time. 

Byung Chul Han’s text is indeed a text for the age of Cummings, the age of digital data manipulation, the age that we live in. It’s not always an easy read, but it ought to be a compulsory one.  Should you have any interest in understanding why you are thinking what you are currently thinking….