The List

Now....

For nearly three years my main purpose, has been roaming, discreetly - 'stealth' ily... attempting to explore  - two way, let others' attitudes to mainly written culture, be revealed.

And always I ask people what their influences are. 

One day i shall turn it all into some kind of book in itself.

But as I knew from around 20 years ago  -as there ARE 'objective' standards of true art, and the rest...almost everything became just 'the rest'.

I am 100% 'modern'  - meaning i wish only to find another book as genuinely artistic as Kushner's Mars Room. Even if it isn't really my own 'genre'. And rather Apocolyptic. No hints howto really live on. I believe still as I have all my life that the 'thoughtful' books are the only ones that do help and guide us. I have a large collection of them. They did guide me. 

But it took me years of many duds, too, to make me realise that many are duds, and just a few got 'there'.... 

Wonderfully, the last year i have found myself a sometime guide now to a few who haven't read much.  But what with the existential 'crisis' over what are we to Gaza? - now at least suffering 'ethnic cleansing'; the last month many once on the fence now using the 'g' word...etc., I know it's all quite simple - the deeper books, from Solzhenytsen to Primo Levi, to even Backman's Ove, do help us understand who we may be unless we are careful.

In one sentence, nobody in British society can for some years, maybe longer, consider even uttering the phrase "for the common good", ever mind listen to it being cheekily dropped into conversation, by me... and i know for a fact that almost all Europeans still can. And apart from being the basis of a healthy democratic society, actually living that phrase, over time, is just great for sustaining ones own fairly healthy inner life. I am constant, and despite the worse of loss, even 'pain', even fleeting shame, i know i will never and have never cracked up. It is because of decades of better books inside my head. That also seeped into my whole personhood. None however ever having a full 'solution' as to "how to live"  (that book maybe yet to be found?)

 I am adapting Bakewell's title that perhaps sumarises Montaignes project, in his valiant words

How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

....that may get on my list if i ever have a chance to get a copy. I do have all of Montaigne. 

But what are the really great books of  the last few hundred years... that help?

The last year i have had the privelage of several fine minds who are new to grown up books....i nudged to browse my own library... one has created a list of her choices so far  

 (though i dsagree  - the Stendhal i do think is best 'real life' tale of how to live, or persist)

 

So, i have been based in the SW two years. I hate every single thng about it. Especially the clearly disatrous education that squashed ANY rebellious spirit. And it is clear from many chats that from fifty years ago,  and maybe  even longer ago the attitude of the patriachy in charge of school, church, and local community was " books... them's for them folks up country... we down ear don't need any of their fancy new ideas..." and i know this is directly responsible for the most infantalised, ill, and inhuman society i have ever known in my life. It is quite inhuman because understanding the human condition can only come from some of us reading the valiant attempts of many to say something useful about it for about the last 250 years since The Enlightenement managed to kick in the bollocks some 'deity' being in charge, as the load of bollocks s/he  doles out if s/he is... s/he sure could do a better job, not that s/he exits...

Noonan did a great job of showing up that particular blind alley in human evolution in Ragged Trousered over 100 years ago...  shame that the people of the Middle EAst didn't have their own 'enlightenment' or the gazans may have a few allyways left to wander up and down in the ragged, shrapnel torn,  trousers. 

Anyway,  false victimhood (now superbly exposed in the truth of the Salt PAth the last month - she managed to even lure famous film actors into her con, believeing they were 'victim' of judicial injustice rather than scared perpetrators almost on the run from a knock on their door from the justices )  , saccharine pity,  and just made up emotion, are not literature. We learn nothing from any of that stuff. Nor do we evolve as a people.  Only 'persisting' despite the bullshit can educate. 

This is why the film Captain Fantastic seems to universally encourage a few with minds, left....

Now, for one reason or other I am only 'European' For 30 years of my life, work, love, sex, and gradually culture, for me was only European. Mainly because i had intuited the reality of the UK and then had it proven to me in the great books of John Pilger (numbers 4-6 in his cannon of work, about how so often the UK is there in the background profiting from many a cannon sold to some mad despot we infact subtly encourage them to use them on theiir own women and children )

But it all started with this one...

Incidentally made ('finished' ?) two months before the magnificent 1968 Paris uprising - that was rather successful by any reasonable measure: various Enlightement values especially a litte egalitarianism and a bit less militarism, were  booted back into fashion... , 

Please do note that the female lead - is shown superbly as the private schoolboys' 'equal', after the initial suggestion in the encounter that it will only end in civil war between the classes - that is real art. She stands tall on their motorbike pillion because she wants to. 

Not my kind of ending as European  especially Russian literature, often artfully guides us into the message i always took to heart: don't take anything to heart. Don't bear grudges; all conflict is absurd, absurdist... 

To be cont. if i ever get a plug to work on it... the so mean South West too narcissistic to ever keep to one promise they make, merely to make themselves look good.