Books I read on my phone in 2024

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I'm gonna do one for each month. Partly cos I take screenshots of interesting bits, but never look at them, so it's a way of reminding myself.

 

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January - Tommi Parrish - Men I Trust

They're a god Ozzie cartoonist, now living in America

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These are the pages I screenshotted

Hopefully gives a good sense of the quality of the panels - each panel basically like an oil painting. And they favour this weird body shape thing.

I've done a lot of "grounding" this year, mainly walking barefoot in the woods, and reading this may have something to do with that.

 

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February - Alex Niven - The North Will Rise Again

Alex Niven - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in N…

"Incorporating sharp questions and big ideas, Niven shi…

www.goodreads.com

Like a lot of zero/repeater books, it's like an extended blogpost, and there's a bias towards where he is from (near Newcastle) rather than to "The North" as I understand it, but it doesn't matter too much. He writes well, is pretty engaging. I found out a bit about the north east i didn't know much about before.

These are the bits I screenshotted - where he's talking about Ridley Scott:

It was in this context that the director Ridley Scott, who had grown up in Stockton in County Durham, and whose family had helped to establish most of the state-of-the-art cinemas in interwar Newcastle, would launch Blade Runner into the world. Released in 1982, as the final, most aggressive phase of northern deindustrialization was kicking into gear, this visionary film was something like the swansong of a particular tradition in twentieth-century art of using an industrial northern backdrop as both creative inspiration and a means of hallucinating an evocative impending future.

Though it would later become an archetype of northern backwater decline (in the context of early 2020s debates about so-called Red Wall and 'left-behind' areas), it was in Hartlepool on the County Durham coast that Scott would pick-up
the inspiration and the professional training for Blade Runner's spectral premonition of the year 2019. An early beneficiary of the British state education system of the post-war years, Scott studied at West Hartlepool College of Art between 1954 and 1958, an experience he would later describe as a 'revelation', because of its 'weirdly dressed students' and 'passionate teachers'. In this nurturing creative environment, and later as he enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London, Scott would absorb certain key high modernist influences while giving them a distinctively northern twist. His first film, Boy and Bicycle (made in 1962), featured stream-of-consciousness voiceovers indebted to James Joyce's Ulysses, underlain with footage of his brother Tony cycling over a landscape of cooling towers and blast furnaces in West Hartlepool and Seaton Carew, on the north-east edge of industrial Teesside.

There is little doubt that such vistas would remain lodged in Scott's mind, so that when he later came to create the cosmic chiaroscuro of twenty-first-century Los Angeles which supplies the backdrop to Blade Runner, he would ensure that it looked a lot like the brooding panorama he had once seen at the mouth of the River Tees. In this weirdly generative space, which had also given Aldous Huxley the imaginative jolt to create Brave New World, Scott would be one of the last in a long line of twentieth-century writers and artists to uncover a sublime other England - one rooted in the urban North rather than the rural Home Counties, and which looked forwards to a technological future, not backwards to a
rustic past. As Scott commented in a 2007 interview:

There's a walk from Redcar into Hartlepool I'd cross a bridge at night, and walk above the steel works. So that's probably where the opening of Blade Runner comes from. It always seemed to be rather gloomy and raining, and I'd just think 'God, this is beautiful.' You can find beauty in everything. And so I think I found the beauty in that darkness.

 

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March - David Keenan - England's Hidden Reverse
Second time I've read it, new edition.

The bits I've screenshotted are where Arthur Machen is referenced...

The Hill of Dreams is his best work, essentially because he came closest in it to his own ideal that language should itself be a rare instrument for the transformation of the soul, akin to music. He belongs to a very particular English tradition, that of the radical conservative. They combine a hatred of commercialism and big business, mercantile and bourgeois values, with a strong affection for tradition and continuity, individuality and the 'good life' in the widest, most all-embracing sense.'

Indeed Machen was equally at home writing about the joys of taverns and good food as he was invoking the great god Pan or tramping the hidden by-ways and pathways mapped out in his The London Adventure Or The Art Of Wandering, published in 1924 well before psychogeographers codified the practice. Machen was also a member of The Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn, a magical society founded by William Woodman, William Wynn Westcott and SL MacGregor Mathers via direct transmission from supposed 'secret chiefs', with a membership including poet WB Yeats, Aleister Crowley, Algernon Blackwood and AE Waite.

But most of all Machen eulogised the hills and valleys of his boyhood home of 'noble, fallen Caerleon-on-Usk, in the heart of Gwent'. Machen sang of the liminal borderland between England and Wales in countless pieces like The Hill Of Dreams and The Secret Glory, which, he believed, caught a glimpse of the eternal.

 

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April - Deleuze and Guattari - A thousand plateaus
(gulp)

OK so I thought I better read this after seeing a talk about the "rhizome" vs the "arboreal".

I've not read it all. But I do really like it. Gotta be one of the best opening lines for a book ever?

But I'm just gonna write out the bits I screenshotted:

What if one became animal or plant through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily

The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature; by procedures specific to it that cannot accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do.

In nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one. Thought lags behind nature.

Take William Burrough's cut-up method: the folding of one text onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under consideration.

Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.
The linguistic tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point S and proceeds by dichotomy. On the contrary, not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status.

 

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A few more. Mille plateaux is actually really well-written. I like the wrong-footing that is going on constantly.

We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes.

Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter.

Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but a brain itself is much more a grass than a tree.

 

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May - Nadia Choucha - Surrealism and the occult

I'm gonna move on even though there's more D&G screenshots. At a certain point, it's enough.

This was a recommendation from @Murphy and @DannyL in the AOS thread

Nadia Choucha's book is alright too

Surrealism and the Occult: Shamanism, Magic, Alchemy, a…

An art historian shows how many surrealists and their p…

www.goodreads.com

I like that Nadia Choucha book a lot.

She pulls up a good quote from Eliphas Levi

As a fact, a great sinner is more really alive than a tepid, effeminate man, and the fullness of his return to virtue will be in proportion to the extent of his errors.

And a good bit of goss regarding the Breton/Dali falling out

Dali has provided a witty account of Breton's disapproval of his painting The Lugubrious Game (1932). In this painting, Dali has
portrayed a man whose underpants are smeared with excrement, to Breton's extreme disapproval. Dali, quite naturally, defended his right to paint whatever he chose to. He compared Breton and his colleagues
to the 'Church Fathers' and wrote on the affair:

"I understood from that day forward that these were merely toilet-paper revolutionaries, loaded with petite bourgeois prejudices, in whom the archetypes of classical morals had left indelible imprints. Shit scared them. Shit and arseholes.
Yet, what was more human, and more needful oft ranscending! "

 

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More from Nadia Choucha

In the final issue of Documents (No.8, 1930) Leiris contributed a remarkable essay, 'The "Caput Mortuum" or the Alchemical Woman' which is accompanied by full page photographs of a woman in a black leather mask, creating a disquieting and sombre effect.

It deserves to be discussed at length, since it is a particularly good example of a surrealist synthesis of such diverse topics as eastern dervishes, costume, totemism, fetishism, eroticism, mysticism and alchemy.

Leiris writes how he was inspired to write the article after a conversation with William Seabrook, who had sent the photographs. In their conversation, they talked about their mutual interest in occultism and their scepticism of Western civilization, and how it could be overcome, mentioning their monism- i.e. body and soul, matter and thought are unified. Seabrook told Leiris a story from his travels in the Middle East about a monastery of dervishes.

One young initiate was showing rapid progress, so his tutor told him to spend a night meditating alone in the ruins of an ancient mosque, whereupon he would gaze on the face of God. When the tutor went to the mosque the next day, he asked the initiate if he had seen the face of God.

The trembling initiate replied yes, he had seen the face of God at the end of the night. When the tutor asked him what it had looked like, the boy replied that it was his own face.

Leiris uses this story as a starting point for the discussion of the photographs, which he perceives to be both erotic and mystic, because the woman's head is disguised. He discusses 'disguises' in a general way: uniforms, tattoos, theatrical costumes, carnival masks, women's make-up and tribal totems.

In the latter, the individual identifies with an animal spirit, wearing a mask to cause a transformation of identity. The psychological process is similar to that which occurs in sexual fetishism, when a man focuses his desire on an article of woman's clothing, which functions as a symbol for the whole woman.

Fetishes attract desire because of their estrangement from the real object, and their ability to epitomize and intensify the concept of the real object. The manufactured object is charged with a social value, as opposed to pure nudity.

Leiris seems to suggest that the fetish, symbolic of the greater distance from the real object, can paradoxically bring us closer to our own source of desire in this distance - which can be compared to the initiate gazing upon the face of God, his own face.

In this sense, the mechanism of erotic fetishism comes close to religious fetishism, particularly the cult of relics, for they both employ the same type of magical thinking. The part is taken for the whole, the accessory for the person; and this part is not only equal to the whole, but becomes stronger than the
object that it represents, like a diagram.

This part, or diagram, is like a quintessence, more moving and expressive than the whole because it is more concentrated, less real and therefore more exterior to us. When the real object becomes assimilated with its disguise, we undergo a metamorphosis. Thus, the masked woman becomes a generalized and more abstract woman, and the image of her body acquires a surplus of intensity.

She is made more mysterious in her anonymity, and Leiris describes her as Nature and the human symbol of the exterior world, which men try to dominate.

Her head, the symbol of her individuality and intelligence is negated by the mask. She is no longer able to look up and appear elevated, so she represents the pleasure of sacrilege, a simple and universal erotic mechanism'. The joy experienced by the young dervish applies to the man faced with the masked woman. Love becomes reduced to a natural, instinctual process because the brain is symbolically negated by the mask. Hiding the face, the quintessence of human expression', reduces the woman to an 'infernal and subterranean significance.

There is a reversal of human custom by covering the head and leaving the body naked. The whole body is symbolically reversed, with the head covered in leather, usually reserved for making shoes, boots and whips, thus creating an element of fear to be overcome. Leiris describes eroticism as an ecstatic means of transcending the self, breaking the lines of morality intelligence and habit and 'conjuring up the evil forces to brave God and his substitutes'.

He calls the process of metamorphosis which results as 'caput mortuum', a term borrowed from the ancient alchemists, who applied it to the phase of the Great Work where all seems rotten when all is regenerated.

Leiris shows in this article how mystical and erotic feelings both stem from the same impulse to enter into a more direct contact with reality by transgressing the artificial boundaries of the self. He uses an alchemical term to show how this conjunction of the high and low, the base and elevated, where sexual instinct provides metaphysical insight.

This is a principle to be found in Tantra, and there are also similarities between the concepts raised in this article and the system of Austin Spare...

The body as the alchemical vehicle was a concept that Dali had written about:

'I have an alchemist's view of the human being. I do not believe in an abstract notion of man - his genitals, his odours, his excreta, the genes of his blood, his Eros, his dreams, and his death are an integral part of existence. I believe on the contrary that the 'substance being sought is the same as that from which it must be derived', which is the basic principle of alchemy. Every element of matter has a treasure within it. And man to me is alchemical matter par excellence: the well from which wealth must flow, the gold mine of the absolute, provided you know how to transcend it.'

Would like to read the original Leiris doc. Quite a lot to unpack in that.