Wanderland - Jini Reddy

 WANDERLAND - JINI REDDY

The past is another country but in nature is where you'll find the weird. Foreign countries can be referred to as being 'exotic' but in the depths of an English city or even out on the weather-eaten council estates you'll also find exotica and mad fauna along with quark, strangeness and charm. There is mystery and city hobgoblins in our man-made environs but in the English countryside dwells monsters, demons, life-force. magick and essence rare. That's my opinion at least, and that's the reason for me reading Wanderland by Jini Reddy.

In her book, Reddy takes heed of her inner voice and sets off on a personal quest to find the arcane and the mystical, or what she calls the 'Otherness' of the landscape. Indeed, the strapline of the book is 'A Search for Magic in the Landscape' but right there straightaway in the way she spells 'magic' is a clue as to where she's coming from and where she's going wrong because as any good alchemist would tell you, the way to spell 'magic' is with a 'k'.

You would have thought spirituality and 'New Age' would be classless, egalitarian and non-hierarchical, but it's not. It's absolutely riddled with class prejudice from a mealy-minded, entitled, middle class perspective and Jini Reddy's position in it is a prime example. She would deny it vehemently of course but that's because she's unaware of it herself, which is mightily ironic if not tragic for someone who has written a book on 'awareness'.

Wanderland is chick lit for New Age steppers. There's a very girlish-gosh!-dashing-hither-and-thither feel about it with a lot of anecdotal mentions of where the author was last week and who with. All along the lines of 'I was talking to a friend of mine, an ex-barrister who now lives on the foothills of Tibet drinking nothing but a finger bowl of water a day, and I mentioned that I'd recently spoken to our mutual friend, a neuro-brain surgeon from Hampstead who in her spare time is a tree hugger'. It's tedious, to put it politely. 

She contacts a woman who owns a labyrinth in Cornwall, who has a longhouse on 70 acres of land with her own beach. 'Just whizzing off to set up the Festival of the Sea in Looe' the woman tells Reddy 'But it's all yours for three nights.' And you just know Reddy is telling these people that she's a journalist on The Times or some other newspaper she freelances for who's writing a book and can she come and visit? Which is why everyone she contacts says 'yes'. The fact that she's on a quest for the 'Other' on the back of a book deal casts a shadow of inauthenticity over the whole thing, however, as in even if she doesn't find anything at the end of the Yellow Brick Road it will all be a jolly jape anyway and she'll get a book out of it at least.

In the process, unfortunately, she has to suffer the indignities of travelling to 'boringly tame' places such as Hastings, sharing train carriages with Sun newspaper readers. Can you imagine? For someone who throughout the book gushes about previous places she's been such as remote river valleys in Iceland, the desert in northern Namibia, remote tree-lined valleys in Australia, and so on, it must have been terrible.

But a book out of it she got, published by Bloomsbury and available at all Waterstones. And what a book it is. What a disappointment. What a let down. What a boring load of middle class, self-serving, pretentious piffle.

If nature is a language then it's one that Reddy neither reads nor speaks. At one point in her book she admits to feeling no connection to tales of King Arthur, Merlin or The Green Man and that's fine but then she also admits to having never been to Stonehenge or Avebury which is pretty incomprehensible given the subject matter of what she's writing about. At another point she admits to having never taken magic mushrooms. Well, perhaps she should try them one day? Or at least watch Ben Wheatley's film A Field In England? Or the film Enys Men? Or even Lars von Trier's film, Antichrist? 

Near to the end of her book Reddy writes of meeting musician Nitin Sawhney who quotes from Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance where Robert Pirsig says Buddha is not to be found only in the petals of a flower, but also in the circuits of a computer. 'I think that's absolutely true' Sawhney tells her and Reddy admires him for his honesty. But does Reddy actually understand what he's saying? Possibly not, because if she did then her book may not have ended up being so rubbish.

Sometimes I read these books so that you won't have to. I sometimes literally read 'em and weep.

John Serpico

A Diet Of Treacle - Lawrence Block

 A DIET OF TREACLE - LAWRENCE BLOCK

More pulp fiction, this time from 1961 and involving 'sex, drugs, and murder in the land of the lotus eaters', as it says in the blurb on the back cover. What this means is that it's set in Greenwich Village when that particular area of New York was being newly populated by Beatniks and stoners who, of course, over the coming years would evolve into hippies. Written by Lawrence Block, A Diet Of Treacle takes its name from a line in Alice In Wonderland where the dormouse is telling Alice about three sisters who lived at the bottom of a well.

'What did they live on?' asks Alice. 'They lived on treacle,' the dormouse replies. 'They couldn't have done that, you know,' Alice remarks 'They'd have been ill'. 'So they were,' the dormouse says. 'Very ill'.

A Diet Of Treacle is a sort of morality tale, but also by accident rather than design it's very much an Existentialist novel from almost the same school as works by Camus and Sartre. That's not to say it's in any way philosophical but there are passages that are clearly echoes of Camus' The Outsider and Sartre's general brooding in any of his Roads to Freedom trilogy.

A college girl from Uptown New York visits Greenwich Village because she's bored with the life on offer to her and feels there must be something else, something more. She finds it in the form of Joe, ex-Korean War veteran who after two years of dodging bullets in Korea has returned home and after a short spell at New York University has dropped out and is now part and fixture of 'the scene' in the Village.

In reality this means hanging out at down-at-heel cafes, living in a rented hell-hole of a single room with his soon to be heroin dealing friend, and contemplating being, nothingness and what Joe refers to as 'immobility'. The girl moves in with Joe and his friend forming a sort of anti-Jules et Jim menage a trois, whereupon she's one day raped by Joe's roommate before him killing a police officer forcing all three to go on the run.

For a pulp fiction novel such as this, the allusions to Existential thought are quite surprising although the morality it espouses not so, in fact it's a little disappointing. The treacle the title of the book refers to can be interpreted as either the Beatnik lifestyle it describes as in the mythological lotus eaters' preoccupations, or more specifically - drugs.

The first time the girl tries marijuana, for example, is at a house party where she becomes so stoned that she takes off all her clothes and has sex with Joe in the middle of the floor, watched by all the other party-goers. As you do whenever you first smoke weed.

Smoking marijuana also leads on to taking heroin, which then leads to murder and prostitution, apparently. All good, American 1950s moral majority type-stuff and conservative to the hilt. But apart from this, so long as you can keep the morality from eclipsing everything else,  A Diet Of Treacle is a decent enough book and is worth anyone's few cents at the dime store.

John Serpico

The Guns Of Heaven - Pete Hamill

 THE GUNS OF HEAVEN - PETE HAMILL

I thrive on this stuff and I don't read enough of it. Pulp fiction. Dime store novels from the '50s, '60s and '70s. The problem is that you don't see them on sale much these days and when you do they're quite expensive because they've become so collectible. I have a theory, however: Because they're so well-designed in an eye-catching, clickbait style I think people buy them only for their covers but that they don't actually read them. Which is fine, of course, because the covers are always really good and you can't blame people for wanting to collect them but it's also just another sign of the times and of the age we live in where the world is like an iceberg that we only see the one third that's on the surface and the other two thirds under the surface are not even considered.

Hard Case Crime is an imprint that specialises in crime fiction, republishing lost pulp classics alongside publishing new work by new writers. In the world of book publishing they've obviously spotted a gap in the market and have come along to plug it. And very welcome they are too, I might say.

The Guns Of Heaven by Pete Hamill is an example of modern day pulp fiction written and presented in the classic style of old-fashioned pulp fiction. It doesn't actually demand any reflection, consideration and least of all analysis because it's written to be simply read and enjoyed. It helps, of course, if a book of this kind isn't ludicrous or badly written and in the case of The Guns Of Heaven it's not either of these things, in fact it's really well-researched and most importantly of all, it's really well-written.

'Tomorrow, the struggle will be fought on our streets', says the blurb on the back cover and that was enough to straightaway tickle my fancy. The plot - and yes, there is one - involves the IRA, the UVF, Christian apocalypse fundamentalists, a cameo by Ian Paisley, a lone reporter and the largest shipment of arms in the history of the IRA, with all the action hopping from Belfast to Switzerland to New York.

'That was the way it always seemed to go,' ponders the lone wolf reporter at one point 'You believed first in normal abstractions, in God, or country, or Karl Marx. And then you believe in guns. The guns of liberation. The guns of the dialect. The guns of heaven.'

And that's pretty much the tone and style of the writing throughout the whole book: Snappy, succinct, with a heavy dose of panache. Boys Own stuff quite possibly, but great stuff all the same.

John Serpico

Occupy - Noam Chomsky

 OCCUPY - NOAM CHOMSKY

When Piers Morgan recently interviewed Noam Chomsky, to everyone's surprise Morgan actually allowed Chomsky to talk without interrupting him constantly or trying to challenge Chomsky's answers. It's unclear what drove Morgan's change of interviewing technique but it would have been a pretty unedifying sight had he tried to get one over on Chomsky or tried to come out intellectually triumphant over a 91-year old man. In the end, however, because he was allowed to talk rather than to try and reduce ideas into 30-second soundbites, Chomsky wiped the floor with Morgan, practically turning Morgan's worldview upside down and leaving him with a somewhat glazed look in his eye like some computer having blown a fuse and left on a 'does not compute, does not compute' loop.

Actually, it may not have been Morgan's intention (for only he would truly know) but rather than trying to claim the crown for being the first ever interviewer to bring Chomsky down on an ideological or intellectual level, Morgan came across as being the person trying to bag the 'prize' of being responsible for the last ever interview with Chomsky before he croaks it. In that sense, it was still unedifying though unwittingly in approaching a Chomsky interview from this angle it was what allowed Chomsky to so demolish the questions. By accident rather than design we sometimes have much to thank Morgan for, it would seem. Then again, on second thoughts - fuck him.

Occupy is another one of those books composed of interviews with Noam Chomsky and transcripts of speeches he has delivered, this time in regard to the Occupy movement. It's presumed that everyone is aware of what the Occupy movement was and if anyone isn't then it's yet more evidence of how well managed the mainstream narrative is, and how well developed are the mechanisms of propaganda. What may not be so well known is what became of Occupy? What happened to it? Where did everyone go?

Social movements swell and ebb like waves crashing upon or even gently lapping at the shore, and the Occupy movement was an example of both. It was always a very broad church under whose roof gathered a very disparate number of people of various political temperaments. The common denominator was an awareness of the inequality in the world where the wealthiest 1 percent influence and near-control the lives of the other 99 percent. Not that this statistic was any great revelation at all, it was just that Occupy managed to push it onto the agenda and bring it to the fore so as to become almost a standard framework of discussion. People already knew it but for the first time in years rather than an Ayn Rand-type ideology being the prevalent spirit of the age as promoted by politics, business and mainstream media, Occupy simply said that another world was possible.

Similar to the Sixties mantra of 'All we are saying is 'give peace a chance'', Occupy said that it was okay to care for one another. Subsequently, rather than the wealth of the world being mainlined straight to just one percent of the population, Occupy called for a change and that a more egalitarian society be built where the wealth of the world is more evenly distributed. It was never exactly a radical request that was being made but more a natural one, more a normal way of life already being lived by most people yet usurped and kept at a distance from the levers of power by the one percent and all those who worked to aid and abet them in keeping things just as they are.

So what happened? Well, the tactic of 'occupation' as a means of throwing a spanner in the works was easily quashed by the police merely wading in with truncheons and pepper spray and evicting the occupiers from the space they had taken over be it on Wall Street, in Zuccotti Park or indeed outside of St Paul's Cathedral. As a tactic, on the physical level it failed but on a metaphysical level it succeeded in sending out a message to not only the one percent to let them be aware that the pitchforks are coming but to the 99 percent to let them know they are not alone. That to those even with the smallest of niggling doubts about whether it's fair that children starve while the rich live lives of luxury beyond the dreams of Solomon - that they weren't wrong in having that doubt.

Ultimately, those actively involved with Occupy fell back into the woodwork and went back to whence they came but importantly though no longer holding a presence on the streets they would still hold a presence in their communities and in their work places and this was where, according to Chomsky, the real work for change is made: in the building of communities and in the creation of change from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

To the well-known Karl Marx quote where the great bearded one said 'the task is not just to understand the world, but to change it', Chomsky adds that 'if you want to change the world in a constructive direction, you better try to understand it first. And understanding it doesn't mean just listening to a talk or reading a book, although that's helpful sometimes. It means learning. And you learn through participation. You learn from others.'

It's important, then, to understand how the world got to where it is today in regard to the terrible inequality and the 99 percent equation. According to Chomsky, it mostly started in the 1970s and the falling rate of profit in manufacturing, causing major changes in the economy. Manufacturing shifted to overseas, which became very profitable once again though not so for the work force. The economy shifted from productive enterprise to financial manipulation leading to a concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector. Subsequently, this concentration of wealth led to concentration of political power that yielded legislation such as tax changes, rules of corporate governance and deregulation that simply increased and accelerated the cycle.

And so there you have it. In a nutshell. As advised by one of the foremost intellectuals in the world today: it's corporate business and financial institutions that rule this fucked world with the profit motive being the main driving force. There is no real party political solution to it either, as all political Parties are committed to maintaining the machine as the machine is their paymaster. In America in particular where election campaigns are absolutely dependent on corporate funding, with the better the funding the better the chance of electoral success.

So where does that leave you? Where does that leave me? Where does that leave us? Well, have you ever wondered why there are so many dickheads around spouting constant Right-wing rhetoric to the point of high comedy? Droning on like an audio version of Daily Mail and Telegraph newspaper editorials? Colonised to the point of obsession with such notions as anything to the left of Right-wing conservatism being 'woke'? This is where the ideas of Antonio Gramsci come into play where Gramsci talks about cultural hegemony being established by systems of power.

'I like Gramsci,' Chomsky says at one point in the book 'He's an important person'. And I concur. If voting for a change in how the world is run isn't an option, if those protesting are simply moved out of the way for being a nuisance, and if revolution isn't on the horizon, then all that is left (beyond mass rioting on an unprecedented scale) is a battle for hearts and minds. You can see this happening now in the form of so-called 'culture wars' though it's far more pervasive than just issues of gender and race, it's all to do with acceptance of the depicted normality and how palatable that normality can be made and how unpalatable can any alternative be made?

The world is up for grabs now even more so than ever. Though we're made to feel powerless when it comes to anything beyond what brand we choose to buy in a shop, nowadays more than ever people have the power to redeem the work of the one percent and all those in their employ, and to wrestle the world from them.

People have the power. Power to the people.

John Serpico