I've written something for a blog that tries to inspire young artists. I talk about my journey so far and my ideas about writing linking it with mental health. Link is below.
Writing For Me is a Way of Being
Wednesday, 8 July 2020
Wednesday, 10 June 2020
'Only One Earth' by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos
'Only One Earth' an unofficial report by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos could hardly be more timely, yet it was written in 1972. It's subtitle, 'The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet', makes clear the subject matter of the book. How can industrialised and developing countries continue on with their high levels of living while surviving on a resource limited rock?
It's urgency couldn't be more felt today with books like Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything', George Monbiot's 'Heat' and David Wallace-Wells' 'The Uninhabitable Earth' and the phenomenon of Greta Thunberg our impact on the Earth is well documented, well understood and catastrophic if nothing about it gets done.
This book struck me by being very well written in almost novelistic prose that catches not only the scientific instinct but the emphatic one too. Our increasing mastery of our world that has grown since the seventeenth centaury has given us extraordinary comfort and well being but, as Monbiot would put it, it is a Faustian bargain where the cost of all our luxuries maybe too high for us to pay.
Though this book is not a doom-and-gloom fest. It states the facts of our existence and gives a look at the stark future if we do not reduce consumption. But because I am reading this in the year 2020 it does seem that we are further down the knife edge of living and I find that frightening.
Drawn on from the collective knowledge of forty countries this is truly a global book that tries to take the whole world in it's entirety while compiling the facts. This makes sense as it was the first photograph of the Earth from the moon that was a catalyst for more environmental campaigning and political policies.
For the history of environmental writing this, for me, is a key book that puts all the data succinctly, comprehensively, and humanely. Compelling and gripping it may make you want to join Extinction Rebellion in the hopes of continuing life on this planet where we can experience new challenges and new adventures and for our grand children to experience.
We are bothers and sisters on this spaceship, or as Carl Sagan puts it 'a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam', this is our home and it's the only home we've ever known.
It's urgency couldn't be more felt today with books like Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything', George Monbiot's 'Heat' and David Wallace-Wells' 'The Uninhabitable Earth' and the phenomenon of Greta Thunberg our impact on the Earth is well documented, well understood and catastrophic if nothing about it gets done.
This book struck me by being very well written in almost novelistic prose that catches not only the scientific instinct but the emphatic one too. Our increasing mastery of our world that has grown since the seventeenth centaury has given us extraordinary comfort and well being but, as Monbiot would put it, it is a Faustian bargain where the cost of all our luxuries maybe too high for us to pay.
Though this book is not a doom-and-gloom fest. It states the facts of our existence and gives a look at the stark future if we do not reduce consumption. But because I am reading this in the year 2020 it does seem that we are further down the knife edge of living and I find that frightening.
Drawn on from the collective knowledge of forty countries this is truly a global book that tries to take the whole world in it's entirety while compiling the facts. This makes sense as it was the first photograph of the Earth from the moon that was a catalyst for more environmental campaigning and political policies.
For the history of environmental writing this, for me, is a key book that puts all the data succinctly, comprehensively, and humanely. Compelling and gripping it may make you want to join Extinction Rebellion in the hopes of continuing life on this planet where we can experience new challenges and new adventures and for our grand children to experience.
We are bothers and sisters on this spaceship, or as Carl Sagan puts it 'a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam', this is our home and it's the only home we've ever known.
Wednesday, 27 May 2020
'Lives of the Artists' by Vasari
Every great writer needs a Boswell and in Vasari's 'Lives of the Artists' the Florentine artists have one. The stories and exploits of great artists such as Giotto, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and others, about how they got their first starts and the anecdotes behind the great works, is told with insider appreciation of Vasari, himself a painter. And there is much to wonder at here.
From the story of one painter getting captured by pirates only to be released when he paints such a wonderful painting of the slave owner, to Giotto's 'o' and da Vinci's empathy for caged birds, it makes you feel that those times were incredibly rich and fruitful, a time of humanising development and excellence.
I say a rich time because it wasn't all painting nice pictures, there was war too and then the mathematically minded artists turned engineers creating weapons and defensives to help with the combat.
In fact these artists were very scientifically literate, especially da Vinci who used his sketches as a way of trying to understand how the human body works. The art they made was another expression of their creative scientific imaginations showing how the divide between the 'two cultures' was not always so and in fact their science helped invigorate their art and visa versa.
Their art was only possible with the patronage of the popes who wanted religious icons in their churches to bring a bit of colour and visual flair to the proceedings. Their scope of what they could make was, perhaps, a bit narrow but it was a very potent focal point for them to focus in and delve deep in the great biblical subjects that inspired their culture.
These stories inspire me to create short dramas about each of the twenty artists listed as they are not stories that get retold much and yet to have such devotion to master a craft really does leave you in awe.
These artists changed the world for the better. Thankfully Vasari has wonderfully capture the spirit of those times and left a tangible, if possibly inaccurate, book on the subject that artists in the future will no doubt turn to and draw inspiration from as they make their way through the world.
From the story of one painter getting captured by pirates only to be released when he paints such a wonderful painting of the slave owner, to Giotto's 'o' and da Vinci's empathy for caged birds, it makes you feel that those times were incredibly rich and fruitful, a time of humanising development and excellence.
I say a rich time because it wasn't all painting nice pictures, there was war too and then the mathematically minded artists turned engineers creating weapons and defensives to help with the combat.
In fact these artists were very scientifically literate, especially da Vinci who used his sketches as a way of trying to understand how the human body works. The art they made was another expression of their creative scientific imaginations showing how the divide between the 'two cultures' was not always so and in fact their science helped invigorate their art and visa versa.
Their art was only possible with the patronage of the popes who wanted religious icons in their churches to bring a bit of colour and visual flair to the proceedings. Their scope of what they could make was, perhaps, a bit narrow but it was a very potent focal point for them to focus in and delve deep in the great biblical subjects that inspired their culture.
These stories inspire me to create short dramas about each of the twenty artists listed as they are not stories that get retold much and yet to have such devotion to master a craft really does leave you in awe.
These artists changed the world for the better. Thankfully Vasari has wonderfully capture the spirit of those times and left a tangible, if possibly inaccurate, book on the subject that artists in the future will no doubt turn to and draw inspiration from as they make their way through the world.
'Bully for Brontosaurus' by Stephen Jay Gould
'So much of science proceeds by telling stories- and we are especially vulnerable to constraints of this medium because we so rarely recognize what we are doing' so says Stephen Jay Gould in 'Bully for Brontosaurus' his fifth volume of collected essays in science popularisation which do tell good stories about the various aspects of evolution and considerations for the intellectual world.
'Some people have seen me as a polymath, but I insist that I am a tradesman' the ever modest, ever humble Gould writes in the introduction implying the hard work involved in learning and the functionality of what is learned. Certainly by reading him you get a deeper appreciation of just how Darwin has changed culture and how much of his theory seeps into everything.
For Gould Homo sapiens is a 'tiny and accidental evolutionary twig' that conducts an 'interesting but dangerous experiment in consciousness' where 'the history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress'. Yet this does not seem to dim his enthusiasm for being part of it, to experience it at all, a privilege to be enjoyed if we can be aware enough to. His love for the subject is contagious as his interesting writing makes you interested in what he is writing about, popular without dumbing down or making concessions. It is a masterclass in communication.
Making the case for enlightenment Gould is in a tough fight against anti-intellectualism:
'We live in a profoundly non-intellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and the dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information- all in short (and loud) doses of "easy learning"'.
In trying by 'noting popular trends and trying to divert some of their energy into rivulets that might benefit learning and education' he gives a tour to a world of ideas, interesting in and of themselves that may prick curiosity and lead someone further down the road of understanding of the world and it's workings for those people who haven't only let the world work for them. 'We must rage against the dying of the light- and although Dylan Thomas spoke of bodily death in his famous line, we may also apply his words to the extinction of wonder in the mind, by pressures of conformity in an anti-intellectual culture'
He is a dispeller of misconceptions about science, 'science is a method for testing claims about the natural world, not an immutable compendium of absolute truths', and gives descriptions of scientists,
'You might almost define a good scientist as a person with the horse sense to discern the largest answerable question- and to shun useless issues that sound grander', allowing readers a chance to change their perspective on how to view such matters that may give a greater clarity than previous prejudices afforded.
I've taken a lot of inspiration from Gould in writing my blogs; his friendliness, his kindness and his knowledge are all things that I aspire to personify in my writings. It's been highly enjoyable to read about the evolution of the typewriter, the furore around Darwin and current culture as he makes it easy for me. A dip-in book for those odd, loose moments hanging around the house that satisfies while being edifying.
The human race has been a very colourful experiment 'So why not keep this interesting thought experiment around, at least for another planetary second or two?'
Thursday, 14 May 2020
'History of the World' by J. M. Roberts
In terms of the universe we have just arrived, yet in our short time we have travelled far as J. M. Roberts looks back on human existence in 'History of the World'. How can one write such a book where each epoch requires detailed study in it's own right and also for it to be coherent to read? With a lot of editing I imagine. Yet going into our past has been absorbing; civilisations rising and falling, wars and inventions, centuries of stability and stagnation and decades of combustible innovation. To know where we are is to look back as a means of going forward.
Clocking in at 1109 pages it is a bible of history that contains almost everything from Ice Age man to the Cold War. First written in 1976 it is a gargantuan of social evolution making you appreciate the differences in culture and sensing the historical forces that guide present life. There are some great stories here. The conquer Alexander the Great meeting the philosopher Diogenes, the conversion of the Indian leader Asoka from a war faring man to peaceful man, and the Egyptian King Menes diverting the river Nile by a levee. So this is a very rich book and all will be made rich by reading it.
It is, after all, our heritage that we can comfortably read at a our leisure with curiosity, excitement, fear and wonder. But of course this is the point of view of one British scholar, as encompassing of a view that might be, whose general thrust might be different from say a Japanese scholar or a Mexican one. People who write histories of the world may be seen to be the machos of the intellectual world who decide to write not just one thing but everything. This is 'Moby Dick', it's 'Ulysses', it's big and it has something to prove.
As incomplete as it must be it is nonetheless an engaging summary of human life. Decidedly academic, unlike Andrew Marr's recent version which is a rollicking tale from a story spinning journalist and has more juicier, plumbable, quote to be seized with joy and re-told to your mates in the pub, it is very readable for the student of history as it does go into enough detail while giving a understandable overview.
It's the book I read when I can't sleep, a long almost chronological story of people who had lived, did things, and left it to us. It's humbling to know that we now exist in relative comfort after hundreds of generations struggle against famine, war and poverty that those people kept going against the odds and worked together so that we may have this futuristic present, which for all it's problems is probably the time I would most like to live. It's a great time to be alive because so many people have created things we can now take from and make our own thereby creating our own things for the future.
This is a book to be reading for the rest of your life; always finding something new in it that you hadn't noticed before, being in awe of time and it's progression, and thinking on those lives.
Clocking in at 1109 pages it is a bible of history that contains almost everything from Ice Age man to the Cold War. First written in 1976 it is a gargantuan of social evolution making you appreciate the differences in culture and sensing the historical forces that guide present life. There are some great stories here. The conquer Alexander the Great meeting the philosopher Diogenes, the conversion of the Indian leader Asoka from a war faring man to peaceful man, and the Egyptian King Menes diverting the river Nile by a levee. So this is a very rich book and all will be made rich by reading it.
It is, after all, our heritage that we can comfortably read at a our leisure with curiosity, excitement, fear and wonder. But of course this is the point of view of one British scholar, as encompassing of a view that might be, whose general thrust might be different from say a Japanese scholar or a Mexican one. People who write histories of the world may be seen to be the machos of the intellectual world who decide to write not just one thing but everything. This is 'Moby Dick', it's 'Ulysses', it's big and it has something to prove.
As incomplete as it must be it is nonetheless an engaging summary of human life. Decidedly academic, unlike Andrew Marr's recent version which is a rollicking tale from a story spinning journalist and has more juicier, plumbable, quote to be seized with joy and re-told to your mates in the pub, it is very readable for the student of history as it does go into enough detail while giving a understandable overview.
It's the book I read when I can't sleep, a long almost chronological story of people who had lived, did things, and left it to us. It's humbling to know that we now exist in relative comfort after hundreds of generations struggle against famine, war and poverty that those people kept going against the odds and worked together so that we may have this futuristic present, which for all it's problems is probably the time I would most like to live. It's a great time to be alive because so many people have created things we can now take from and make our own thereby creating our own things for the future.
This is a book to be reading for the rest of your life; always finding something new in it that you hadn't noticed before, being in awe of time and it's progression, and thinking on those lives.
Monday, 20 April 2020
'Francis Bacon In Your Blood' by Michael Peppiatt
Michael Peppiatt was twenty-one when he first met the now mythic shock painter Francis Bacon, then fifty-three, for an interview. From there they begun a life long friendship, spiky though it could be, and Peppiatt charts it all in 'Francis Bacon In Your Blood', a subjective memoir.
And what memories. Peppiatt seems to have remembered all of Bacon's cutting remarks, his witty retorts and his acid phrases. "Champagne for my real friends, and real pain for my sham friends" was one of his most memorable sayings, probably because it so well distils Bacon's feeling for life. He was a great boozer; settling in dingy Soho clubs drinking wine after wine (that's bottles, not glasses) and gambling in casinos until his money ran out. He also seemed to know something about pain.
If you've ever seen a painting by Bacon then you will know that pain was his subject, the great existential questions as to why we suffer. Cadavers with wide open mouths on plinths and screaming bishops, he was no picturesque portrait painter. With his brush he could dissect a victim, blood streaming and with a vital viciousness that went beyond mere sadness.
Of his youth little is known and came to painting somewhat late, just after he was thirty. When asked how he became a painter he says:
"Well, I've spent so much of my life just drifting...from bar to bar, person to person. I often regret that I didn't have more discipline and concentrate myself when I was young. I mean, when you think of how many French artists...have been so concentrated from the start. I didn't really to paint at all seriously until the war. I did little before, but it was no good. When the war came, I was turned down because of this asthma of mine. So I had that time to just drift in and do nothing. It's true I'd been doing odd jobs to make my way- I worked in an office for a bit, then I tried to design some furniture. I even became someone's valet. But I had been thinking a great deal about painting. about how I might perhaps begin to make this thing work a little."
Worked it did. Bacon was one of the greatest British painters in the twentieth century who pulled no punches and did extraordinary works of art.
Though a great drinker he was also extremely hard working. He went over and over canvases and was always trying to go deeper into his subjects for many hours in the day. "One is never hard enough on oneself" he says. He was also a great lover of life, laughing until he cries and drinking bottles of champagne as "it's all we have" and that "for some reason, although I believe in nothing, my nervous system is filled with this optimism".
It's no wonder that Peppiatt feels surprised that he's drinking with one of the great masters of art as a friend and confidant. In fact for Peppiatt, Bacon is like a 'father figure' where he helped guided the young Cambridge student into maturity and worldliness.
Bacon is a great personality and looms large in these pages and though I wouldn't be so comfortable with meeting him, I am glad that he lived (to 82, 82!) and glad that Peppiatt recorded it all for us. Though Bacon is a spiky figure the friendship between the writer and painter is actually a tender one and an interesting one. His opinions on then current art trends and his place in it are fascinating glimpses into an uncommon mind. Yet Peppiatt remembers fairly of his father figure and doesn't write a hagiography as Bacon can be kneecapingly unpleasant and his treatment of those who he dislikes is visceral.
Reading this book made me feel like I was drinking with them, that close and personal is the tone of this book and it was one hell of a drinking session.
And what memories. Peppiatt seems to have remembered all of Bacon's cutting remarks, his witty retorts and his acid phrases. "Champagne for my real friends, and real pain for my sham friends" was one of his most memorable sayings, probably because it so well distils Bacon's feeling for life. He was a great boozer; settling in dingy Soho clubs drinking wine after wine (that's bottles, not glasses) and gambling in casinos until his money ran out. He also seemed to know something about pain.
If you've ever seen a painting by Bacon then you will know that pain was his subject, the great existential questions as to why we suffer. Cadavers with wide open mouths on plinths and screaming bishops, he was no picturesque portrait painter. With his brush he could dissect a victim, blood streaming and with a vital viciousness that went beyond mere sadness.
Of his youth little is known and came to painting somewhat late, just after he was thirty. When asked how he became a painter he says:
"Well, I've spent so much of my life just drifting...from bar to bar, person to person. I often regret that I didn't have more discipline and concentrate myself when I was young. I mean, when you think of how many French artists...have been so concentrated from the start. I didn't really to paint at all seriously until the war. I did little before, but it was no good. When the war came, I was turned down because of this asthma of mine. So I had that time to just drift in and do nothing. It's true I'd been doing odd jobs to make my way- I worked in an office for a bit, then I tried to design some furniture. I even became someone's valet. But I had been thinking a great deal about painting. about how I might perhaps begin to make this thing work a little."
Worked it did. Bacon was one of the greatest British painters in the twentieth century who pulled no punches and did extraordinary works of art.
Though a great drinker he was also extremely hard working. He went over and over canvases and was always trying to go deeper into his subjects for many hours in the day. "One is never hard enough on oneself" he says. He was also a great lover of life, laughing until he cries and drinking bottles of champagne as "it's all we have" and that "for some reason, although I believe in nothing, my nervous system is filled with this optimism".
It's no wonder that Peppiatt feels surprised that he's drinking with one of the great masters of art as a friend and confidant. In fact for Peppiatt, Bacon is like a 'father figure' where he helped guided the young Cambridge student into maturity and worldliness.
Bacon is a great personality and looms large in these pages and though I wouldn't be so comfortable with meeting him, I am glad that he lived (to 82, 82!) and glad that Peppiatt recorded it all for us. Though Bacon is a spiky figure the friendship between the writer and painter is actually a tender one and an interesting one. His opinions on then current art trends and his place in it are fascinating glimpses into an uncommon mind. Yet Peppiatt remembers fairly of his father figure and doesn't write a hagiography as Bacon can be kneecapingly unpleasant and his treatment of those who he dislikes is visceral.
Reading this book made me feel like I was drinking with them, that close and personal is the tone of this book and it was one hell of a drinking session.
Wednesday, 8 April 2020
'A History of Warfare' by John Keegan
Starting off with a denouncement of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, 'war is not the continuation of policy by other means', John Keegan begins a thorough survey of all aspects of military adventures throughout history in his 'History of Warfare'.
For a nominal pacifist with deep ignorance of the army I found much to my surprise in this book that has changed the way I see warfare.
For example: did you know that 'the great nobles of Japan...did not seek military reputation at all, but stove for literary glory' thereby meaning that the samurai all wanted to be poets? Or that, also on the samurai, 'for whom fighting was an act of self-expression by which a man displayed not only his courage but also his individuality'. This sentence alone gives me a deeper understanding of why man makes war.
Keegan argues that it is not politics that drives war but culture, that 'war embraces much more than politics: that it is always an expression of culture'. This somehow makes war into more like an art than a necessary tool for survival. Yet the objects and stories of war are consumed with fascination by people who want only second-hand experience. But as Keegan suggests some people are only fit to be soldiers embracing the lifestyle boredom punctuated by moments of terror.
So to the question: would I fight? Say their was a group on their way to murder everyone in my town, friends, family, my friendly newsagent, would I try to organise a group with whatever weapons were laying around to fight them off? I suppose I would have no choice, though as Keegan says
For a nominal pacifist with deep ignorance of the army I found much to my surprise in this book that has changed the way I see warfare.
For example: did you know that 'the great nobles of Japan...did not seek military reputation at all, but stove for literary glory' thereby meaning that the samurai all wanted to be poets? Or that, also on the samurai, 'for whom fighting was an act of self-expression by which a man displayed not only his courage but also his individuality'. This sentence alone gives me a deeper understanding of why man makes war.
Keegan argues that it is not politics that drives war but culture, that 'war embraces much more than politics: that it is always an expression of culture'. This somehow makes war into more like an art than a necessary tool for survival. Yet the objects and stories of war are consumed with fascination by people who want only second-hand experience. But as Keegan suggests some people are only fit to be soldiers embracing the lifestyle boredom punctuated by moments of terror.
So to the question: would I fight? Say their was a group on their way to murder everyone in my town, friends, family, my friendly newsagent, would I try to organise a group with whatever weapons were laying around to fight them off? I suppose I would have no choice, though as Keegan says
'when men of equal worth fight on unequal terms the side with the better weapons wins'. Right now I probably couldn't, despite having a black belt in karate (though not practicing for fourteen years), but if I had a few months and some decent weapons then maybe. But I'll do it Celt style.
The closest I've come to warfare was playing Gavrilo Princip, assassinator of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in street theatre. I sat on a bench, gun in hand, waiting for my moment. Then when the time came I launched off in front of the wooden car and fired two shots. So maybe my revolutionary potential is there. Acting is one thing but what about the real deal? Well if war is supposed to be a type of performance I could probably convince myself to do some heavy method acting.
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