guerilla gardeners

Ali Smith

“She looked round the room at all the books on all the shelves. A closed book on a shelf sat there quietly, not saying anything.”

There but for the

land

books

A wee while ago I asked my friends which books I should read. They came back with an eclectic list - because obviously my friends read a lot of books and (hopefully) also have excellent taste. After whittling out all of the vague authors names-with-no-book-titles, and already-read gems, I now have myself a list. Initially I was going to conduct a Kinders Al Kinley inspired 2013 challenge for myself - but I just don't think I have his determination. (However he did contribute to this list - for which I am grateful). I have added one of my own which has been sat by my bed for many moons (Oh What a Carve Up) which was given to me by a good friend many many months ago. Sorry Jules. It is on a list now, so don't worry. 

I'm not going to make a foolish promise to read all of the books below. Come on. But I will use this is a go-to list. Expect reviews. short and sweet ones. Soon. (Hopefully).

So here you go. My to-reads. 

Margaret Atwood - oryx and crake

Paul Auster – Leviathan

Paul Auster - Mr Vertigo

Franco Berardi - The Soul at Work

Mikhil Bulgakov - Master and margarita

Camus - The Outsider

Camus - The Plague

Jonathan Coe – Oh What a Carve up.

Michael Cunningham - A Home at the end of the world

Jared Diamond - Collapse

Junot Diaz - Oscar Wao + Drown

Dickens - Great Expectations

Jim Dodge - Stone Junction

David Eagleman - Sum

Jeffery Eugenides - Middlesex

Fitzgerald – Gatsby

Robert Girardi - Madeleine's Ghost

Ursula Le Guin - The Dispossessed

Joseph Heller - Catch 22

Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls

Frank Herbert - Dune series

Huxley - Brave New World

Jeroen Krabbe - The Discovery of Heaven

Primo Levi - If This is a Man

Marquez - The General In His Labyrinth

Marquez - 100 Years of Solitude

Last of the Savages - Jay McInernery

Czesław Miłosz - Captive Mind

Haruki Murakami - IQ 84

Alun Paton - Cry the Beloved Country

Mervyn Peake - Ghormenghast trilogy

Marge Piercy - Gone to Soldiers

Thomas Pynchon - Gravities Rainbow

Antione de Sant Exupery - The Little Prince

Salinger - Franny and Zoey

Marjane Satrapi – Persepolis

Rebecca Solnit - Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disasters

John Steinbeck - East of Eden

Scarlett Thomas - End of Mr Y

Stefan Zweig - Chess Story

swansea love story

more blu

the artist is present

gardens

"The problem is, without community, no one feels responsible to anyone else."

this. this film. this film is important. it is also flawed - the people in it are flawed and the story starts off with a beautiful thing destroyed by a horrendous capitalist greed and selfishness that makes my blood boil. but it is an important story that needs to be told, and needs to be a lesson to us all in helping, respecting and encouraging each other to do good things and to work together to reap the rewards.

a separation

beautiful

The Moths 

 The doctor puts the scalpel to my chest and presses it in. Wait, I’m not asleep yet I say. The doctor doesn’t hear me. He tears the scalpel down to my navel and plunges his hands inside. I have to save this patient he yells as he begins pulling things out. First my stomach, then my intestines, then a few sniffing and uncertain mice. A wrench, a handful of hair, my liver. After the fish slides out, flopping and gasping, it’s your turn. You leap out, do a pirouette and a curtsey. You’ve always made magnificent entrances. Then, some moths.

Timothy Wojcik via Scud

empathy

Compagnie Un loup pour l’homme

This evening I came home from my first trapeze lesson for a long time with a goofy grin and aching limbs. buzzing. my muscles loose and warm across my back and arms. thoughts of pointed toes and risks and rolls. I did't realise how good I would feel. I didn't realise how much I missed it. and then I see a video of this company from my friend tin. and now I can't stop watching them. why would I? they're so beautifully delicately strong.

I see teacups in your smiles

come closer.
come into this. come closer.

you are quite the beauty. if no one has ever told you that before know that
now. you are quite the beauty. there is joy in how your mouth dances with
your teeth. your mouth is a sign of how sacred your life truly is. come into
this. true of heart come into this. you are true of heart. come closer. come
closer. know that whatever God prays to He asked it to help Him make
something of worth. He woke from His dreams scraped the soil form the spaces
inside Himself made you and was happy. you make the Lord happy.
come into this.
come closer.

know that something softer than us but just as holy planted the pieces of
Himself into our feet that we might one day find our way back to Him. you
are almost home.

come closer come into this. there are birds beating their wings beneath your
breastplate gentle sparrows aching to sing come aching hearts come soldiers
of joy doormen of truth come true of heart come into this.

my heart was too big for my body so I let it go and most days this world has
thinned me  to where I am just another cloud forgetting another flock of
swans but believe me when I tell you my soul has squeezed into narrow
spaces. place your hand beneath your head when you sleep tonight and you may
find it there making beauty as we sleep as we dream as we turn over when I
turn over in the ground may the ghosts that I have asked answers of do the
turning kneading me into crumbs of light and into this thing love thing
called life. come into it!

come you wooden museums
you gentle tigers
negro farces in two broken scenes.
come rusting giants!

I see teacups in your smiles upside down glowing. your hands are like my
heart. on some days how it trembles. let us hold them together. I am like
you. I too at times am filled with fear. but like a hallway must find the
strength to walk through it. walk through this with me. walk through this
with me. through this church birthed of blood and muscle where every move
our arms take every breath we swallow is worship.

bend with me. there are bones in our throats. if we choke it is only on
songs.

-Anis Mojgani

right?

#RageForGaza

In solidarity and with love.

Eid

"The tractor was built during the Muslim month of Ramadan when the heat, hunger, and thirst make it impossible to do anything. Most Palestinians think Caterpillar tractors are death machines. I asked myself why they blamed this machine, when after all it is the person who renders the machine good or bad. I drew sketches of this tractor on large rocks and on paper. I may have seen one once or twice in my life, but really I remember seeing it on the internet. I thought carefully about how to build it correctly. I like these tractors, how they move, their size… This tractor is made from sawed iron pieces. I requested the iron scrap from somebody in my village, who told me I was crazy and could take the scraps. It was difficult to cut the iron as my tools were not good enough. I felt this tractor in my body and my soul."

Originally found on Bristol Palestine Film Festival

November

This time last year I was in Oslo with an Oregonian, a Mexican American and a fellow Bristolian watching these guys be fucking incredible. "I want to live inside their songs." Yes please. 

Dear Coal

This letter is taken from this site originally written by this person. Gold. 

banks

"I built it with my hands. Straightened old nails to put the sheathing on. Rafters are wired to the stringers with baling wire. It's mine. I built it. You bump it down - I'll be in the window with a rifle. You even come too close and I'll pot you like a rabbit."
"It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I don't do it. And look - suppose you kill me? They'll hang you, but long before you're hung there'll be a guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy."
 "That's so," The tenant said, "Who gave you orders? I'll go after him, He's the one to kill."
"You're wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told him, 'Clear those people or it's your job.'"
"Well, there's the president of the bank. There's a board of directors. I'll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank."
 The driver said, "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were, 'Make the land show profit or we'll close you up.'"
"But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me."
"I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't men at all. Maybe, like you said, the property's doing it. Anyway I told you my orders."

"I got to figure," the tenant said. "We all got to figure. There's some way to stop this. It's not like lightening or earth quakes. We've got a bad thing made by men, and by God that's something we can change."

John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, Chapter five, 1939

books

So lately I've been reading some books.

 Post-MA I'm finally reading all those highly recommended oh-my-days-you-would-adore-this-book type of books.

I started with Owen Jones' Chavs. This was good. In fact, it was so good I stole it from Oxford library (sorry - I was leaving Oxford and hadn't finished) gave it to a friend (who lives in Oxford so will inevitably return it, don't worry). It's one of those books that makes you continually nod and make affirmative noises out loud. Finally someone wrote a book saying all those things you've been thinking. About the working class, what it means to be middle class, what Thatcher the milk snatcher did all those years ago when we were wee. Each chapter could have been a whole book in and of itself - and it got reeeally interesting in the final chapters when the discussion around immigration and class was stirred up. Would love to see that issue covered in more depth. 

Second up was Paul Mason's Why it's Kicking Off Everywhere. Which at first hit my big cynical attitude with a resounding thud. But as the pages turned and I found myself never without it, the cynicism that began with my thinking Paul Mason was niave (in a profound niavity of my own) melted away, and I realised that actually he's right. Shit is kicking off everywhere - and like it or not, Shirky is right too. That big old internet and those lovely social media platforms are playing a huge role in changing society, protest and organisation. Big things are yet to come and the youth know how to use the technology to make it happen. An inspiring read. 

Third up Doris Lessings' The Good Terrorist. Now, this one got me so excruciatingly confused at what she was trying to say using harsh sterotypes and personality traits of a group of squatters in 80s London. I profoundly disliked this book - but I literally couldn't put it down. I read it in two days (granted I was bed bound at the time) and was hooked constantly and consistently. I don't know whether it was due to the sporadic nature of the main character Alice, or because I was itching to become furious at the next presumption that Lessing would make. Don't get me wrong- some aspects were really interesting; the gender roles, the relationships between the characters. But the context and the attitudes was infuriating. All squatters and squats are dysfunctional. Alternative forms of resistance such as direct action are conducted carelessly by people who don't know what they're doing. That ideologically this group of self-proclaimed communists were lost, because they just wanted to 'resist' society and fight the po-po... But I'm probably reflecting through red-tinted glasses, having felt consistently rubbed up the wrong way. 

However, all in all a good starting line-up of the shape of books to come. What will it be next?