Review of "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" by Andreas Malm

Short essay with footnotes and links about the tactics and strategy of the climate movement, with the emphasis on a critique of the commitment to non-violence. Like everything that's clever it's better on diagnosis and analysis than it is on prescriptions. He's very good on all the things that has been wrong with XR, including the fetishisation of the rather dodgy analysis of Erica Chenoweh and Mariah Stephan (both of whom have links to the US intelligence establishment), the wrong lessons it has learned from the history of direct action movements, and so on. He's much less good on what is to be done, though he does talk interestingly about the distinction between violence against property and violence against persons, about coordinated vandalism against SUVs, and climate camps. 

It's not surprising, and this stuff is just hard. Getting off fossil fuels is more like dealing with an eating disorder than kicking a heroin habit. We can't live without energy, and fossil fuels are a fabulous convenient source of concentrated energy, which underwrite our social and technical system. There's no way out of them without changing all that, and there are very powerful forces standing against.

Not the end of a discussion, but a good start. Everyone interested in politics outside and against the system should read.

Review of "Patrick Leigh Fermor; An Adventure" by Artermis Cooper

I finished this book with a feeling profound disquiet and unhappiness. I had read PLF's two major travel books, "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water", and I'd loved them, even though I could sense that he was a posh boy with a sense of entitlement who strode across Europe with a string of aristocratic connections and the hospitality that this provided for succour. The privations he endured were real, but must have been softened by the knowledge that he would always be a posh boy with posh friends to bail him out. 

And reading the biography, without the beauty of his writing or the charm of experiencing his personality directly, that becomes much much more apparent. So I'm not attracted to him as a character at all, even though Cooper clearly loves him and thinks he's wonderful. His politics are reactionary. He's not a racist, though he doesn't seem to have a really big problem with people that are. He is a charmer, and a chancer, and a serial shagger - not sure if it can be called serial adultery when he's not married to the woman that he sort of shares his life with. There are a lot of pretty young women.

There's a lot of scrounging too. For most of his life he lives off the generosity of posh friends - they give him houses to live in, in London, in Greece, in Paris. He gets commissions to write travel books and film scripts without any particular qualification, and he is published in little literary magazines by his editor friends. He does have obvious talent as a writer, but there are a lot of other people who have just as much or more talent who will never have this kind of leg-up. Or not need to support themselves.

I suppose it's a sign of Artemis Cooper's talent that I can read her book and come to different conclusions from her. But I also feel kind of dirty, and a bit stupid, that despite myself I was charmed in this way, and it retrospectively detracts from my enjoyment of his books.  

Review of Encanto

Nice and thoughtful Disney film, set in Colombia, with some interesting sibling rivalry themes (like Frozen) but also a character who is ADHD/Aspergers, and therefore absent and not talked about. There's some magic and light supernatural stuff, referred to in the film as a "miracle" - perhaps so as to not upset the American viewing public, which is increasingly hostile to anything that could possibly be construed as anti-Christian. 

Some of the moderate peril (collapsing buildings, jumps over ravines) felt quite tense to me, though a grandparent I spoke to said that they only place that their little ones had actually been scared was an in-song depiction of the three-headed dog that Hercules kills. 

Oh, and beautiful depictions of plant and animal life...personally I liked the donkeys best, though the rats ran them a close second. And better music than I can remember for a long time in a Disney film, I kept wanting to get up and dance.

A real pleasure to watch, and I was really pleased to hear that the Colombian side of my family had all watched it together and loved it too.

Watched in the middle floor at Springhill on a legitimate Disney Channel subscription!

Review of 'The Alchemical Marriage of Alastair Crompton' by Robert Sheckley

I haven't read Robert Sheckley since I was in my 20s, but I had fond memories of 'Mindswap'. I saw this in a charity shop, bought it and put it on the shelf - probably ten years ago. I just read it...and it got off to an amazing start, with lots of interesting psychological insights. I was particularly struck by this quote, which reminded me of my recent experience with Internal Family Systems therapy:

"How many identities do you have?" Crompton asked.

"Inumerable," Secuille said.

"I find all of this difficult to believe," Crompton said.

"That is only because you haven't consciously experienced for yourself the influences which your selves, past and present, have on the identity you happen to be at the moment. Crompton, every sentient creature lives simultaneously in various timebound sequences, and tries to better things for himself by influencing one or more of his selves. The voices that you hear in your head, telling you what to do and what not to do, these are the voices of your other selves at other times and places, casting their votes, trying to improve conditions for themselves."

There are lots of funny and clever bits later, and then suddenly it seems as if Sheckley got bored with it, because the end is pretty rubbish. It would have been better just to have stopped it twenty pages earlier. 

Review of 'Good Behaviour' by Molly Keane

Beautifully written book about awful gentry in the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, I think in the inter-war period. Put me in mind of the Mitfords, but also the awful aristocracy depicted in the recent BBC series about the Duke and Duchess of Argyll...partly because the people in this book, like the Argylls, are utterly disinclined to pay any bills that they owe. Nice to be reminded that being landed, and perhaps even rich, does not make you happy - it's possible to perfectly miserable despite a privileged background. 

Review of 'Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always'

Grim, gritty film about a young woman from small-town Pennsylvania who is pregnant, can't tell her parents or get an abortion in the small town, and goes to New York with her young cousin to get that abortion. Starkly filmed, lots of hand-held cameras and unpleasant surfaces, with no detail about the process of getting or experiencing an abortion left out. Not fun to watch, but good, should be widely seen, especially by young men.