My bedside table
I have eight books on my bedside table. I am reading all of them. In anti-alphabetical authorial order, they are:
Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City. I started reading this book some time ago as something I could read on public transport and before sleep. Williams is one of my intellectual heroes; I still remember how sad I felt when I learned that he had died, because it had been one of my ambitions to meet him. He’s not only a subtle thinker, but he’s also a good writer. This book looks at the changes in English letters related to the transition from the countryside as the place where power lies to the rise of the cities as centres of power. The book gives me a cultural perspective on the problems of urbanization that are part of my current research interests, which have been focused on social and political economic analysis.
Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World. My interest in urbanization derives from a broader interest in poverty and poor people in world politics. Vargas Llosa’s novel is about the millenarian community established at Canudos, in the drought-stricken Northeast of Brazil in the late Nineteenth Century. The settlement was squatted on an abandoned estate but it took a strongly anti-Republican political stance and thus was attacked both by the traditional landed elite and the new government based in the south of Brazil. The followers of the religious leader of the community included both the pious poor and bandits and others, and they resisted three military onslaughts. On the fourth time, the whole community was wiped out. The site now lies at the bottom of a lake created by a dam.
Terry Prachett’s Thud! I’m reading this because I felt like I needed to read something that would make me laugh out loud. Pratchett is good at small things, well-crafted comedic language, so it’s a tickle to read.
Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. I have an interest in Tarot and there is a lot of dreck written about it. This book is not dreck. Pollack’s take on the Tarot is sophisticated and draws on a series of both spiritual and psychological sources to analyse the Tarot deck and she draws from it a very interesting reading of the whole deck as a philosophical statement about human life and development.
Caroline Myss’s Anatomy of the Spirit. This book was recommended to me by a friend who took an interest in my physical and spiritual well-being, in part I think because Myss sees these as deeply connected. I confess I find some aspects of her book annoying: for example, the notion that health depends on submission to the divine plan for life. But what is really wonderful about the book is the series of questions for self-examination Myss puts to the reader. Her argument about the seven chakras as expressions of and links to different parts of one’s physical and psychological connections to the world certainly departs from any shallow notion of spirituality as “personal” space and I have found that addressing the questions she poses, even when I disagree with her premises, is a wonderfully eye-opening exercise.
Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution. Lefebvre is so important to me for so many reasons. Like Raymond Williams, this is a small book I have been making my way through very slowly. Lefebvre argues that power and accumulation are now organized by a process he calls urbanization. Urbanization is not just the migration of people to cities; it is the way that social (and political economic) space is increasingly driven by forces that are themselves located in and organized by cities: cities exercise power over the territory and are themselves organized by the power they exercise. This book examines the analytical tools needed to come to grips with urban phenomena; it lays out many of the concepts that were explored in more abstract terms in The Production of Space.
Tracy Hogg’s The Baby Whisperer Solves All of Your Problems. Well, not all of my problems. I read this to ramp up my anxieties around an imminent event to the appropriate levels.
William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Along with Patti Smith and Arthur Rimbaud, Blake is one of my favourite poets. He brings many of these threads together: spirituality, urbanism, Raymond Williams and Vargas Llosa. The first two verses of “London” read:
I wander thro’ each charter’d street
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice; in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
Mind-forg’d manacles. I am reading eight books before sleep each night. A long time ago, as an undergraduate, I learned two important lessons about books. First, it is important always to take a book with you wherever you go. You never know when you will be spending time standing in a queue. Second, it is a good idea to be reading two books at once. This opens the possibility for chance perspectives on one of the readings coming from the other. But eight books, that means something completely different to the possibility of fertilizing the imagination. I think I am running in eight different directions at the same time, which means, of course, getting nowhere.
I need to simplify but I think that all of the books I am reading – and all the tasks I am trying to accomplish – are important. I think the best strategy for me is to set priorities. But how do you do that? Which of these tasks is most important, and at what part of the day?
posted by spike at 10:49 pm
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