Ronald E. Purser: McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

David Keenan: This is Memorial Device

“I did it to stand up for Airdrie. I did it because of Memorial Device. I did it because later on everyone went off and became social workers and did courses on how to teach English as a foreign language or got a job in Greggs. Well, not everybody. Some people died or disappeared or went into seclusion, more like. I did it – well I was going to say I did it because back then anything seemed possible, back then being 1983 and 1984 and 1985, what I call the glory years. The glory years in Airdrie – what a joke, right? But really that would be untrue because back then everything seemed impossible.”


“…we’re looking at a time before the internet, when routine access to anything but local culture was hard work. The music papers gave you glimpses of music from all over the world, and not just music—there was also film, comics, science fiction, radical politics, all kinds of layers of pop and semi-pop and avant-garde weirdness It was a fascinating map of the wider world, full of information you wouldn’t happen on by any other route, in the 1970s especially, and certainly not from TV or the grown-up papers.”

Will Eaves: Murmur

Pain is memory with witness or corroboration. It isn't real to anyone else, and that is what allows torturers, including governments, to be torturers. They can pretend it isn't happening because it isn't happening to them.

Ali Smith: Spring

We

need to suggest the enemy within. We need enemies of the people we want their judges called enemies of the people we want their journalists called enemies of the people we want the people we decide to call enemies of the people called enemies of the people we want to say loudly over and over again on as many tv and radio shows as possible how they're silencing us. We need to say all the old stuff like it's new. We need news to be what we say it is. We need words to mean what we say they mean. We need to deny what we're saying while we're saying it. We need it not to matter what words mean.

S

Alexander Trocchi: Cain's Book

It provides the police with something to do, and as junkies and potheads are relatively easy to apprehend because they have to take so many chances to get hold of their drugs, a heroic police can make spectacular arrests, lawyers can do a brisk business, judges can make speeches, the big pedlars can make a fortune, the tabloids can sell millions of copies. John Citizen can sit back feeling exonerated and watch evil get its deserts. That's the junk scene, man. Everyone gets something out of it except the junkie. If he's lucky he can creep round the corner and get a fix. But it wasn't the junk that made him creep.


No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats… these are the facts.

Carl Neville: Resolution Way

Deborah Levy: The Cost of Living

It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world, too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rules.

Antony Beevor: Stalingrad

The army’s exact losses are still uncertain, but there was no doubt that the Stalingrad campaign represented the most catastrophic defeat hitherto experienced in German history.

Patrick Langley: Arkady

My brother had begun to teach me about the world and our place within it, how we lived in the shadows, unwanted, unseen. We were kids who came from nothing, were nothing. The city would only make room for us if we forced it to, the way you force a door with a crowbar, or use plumber’s freeze to smash a lock:

These little acts were ways of opening space to breathe in a city that didn’t want us, wouldn’t protect us, narrowed choices to a flatline.


A fan stirs the room’s thick heat as the officers talk. Jackson wags his legs under the chair and watches his shoes as they swing. The officers speak about beaches. A pathway. Red flags. The story does not make sense. When they finish it, Jackson looks up. The door is open. It frames a stretch of shrivelled lawn and a column of cloudless sky. Colours throb in the heat.

‘Do you understand?’ the woman asks.

‘We are sorry,’ says the man.

Blue uniforms cling to their arms. Black caps are perched on their heads. Jackson peers into the caps’ plastic rims, which slide with vague shadows and smears of light. The officers mutter to each other and swap glances with hooded eyes. The breeze through the door is like dog-breath, a damp heat that smells faintly of rot.

‘Where’s my dad?’ asks Jackson.

The man’s thumb is hooked through his belt. He stands like a cowboy, hips cocked.

‘We don’t know,’ he sighs. ‘Our colleague saw him a moment after. We’re sure he’ll come back soon. You have a small brother? We take you to the place, and you tell him. Tell him your father is coming back. We’ll find him. I promise. Right now.’

They are staying on the side of a mountain, a short but twisting drive away from the nearest coastal town. The hotel is enormous. From a distance it resembles a castle, its high walls strong and stern, its red roofs bright against the mountain’s grey. The valley below is dotted with scrubby bushes and half-finished breezeblock homes. At its centre, a dried-up riverbed runs through copses of stunted trees: a jagged path connecting the hotel to the town.

Frank is in the crèche with the other toddlers.

Peter Fleming: The Worst Is Yet To Come

Twenty or so people were waiting outside a grey little apartment. London was cold tonight. It was a “rental viewing” and the agents were late. Even so, given the shortage of accommodation in the city nobody was going anywhere. Including myself. Each of us needed somewhere to live. And fast.

A black BMW pulled up and two suited men stepped out. Mmmm. Men? Both looked about eighteen, more like boys. The British rental market is deregulated and anything goes, so this wasn’t surprising.
“Hi guys”, the two agents beamed, unlocking the front door as the throng clambered to get out of the cold.
As I entered my worst fears were confirmed. A complete shithole — but one that would still suck up nearly half my monthly salary.

I asked one of the “boys” if the apartment had central heating. “Have no idea,” the youngster replied. He was darting from room to room, seemingly without purpose, high on some fashionable amphetamine no doubt.
The other bug-eyed youth demanded to see everyone’s passports. He started to photograph them on his phone. The government’s new “Hostile Environment” policy concerning illegal immigration meant rental firms had to check everyone’s papers.

I pulled out my New Zealand passport and bug-boy froze. “You better have a valid visa buddy”, he hyperventilated. I did as it happened, which he scrutinised with suspicion. “Bit funny looking, isn’t it?” he commented. New Zealand passports have a black jacket.

I continued to wander through this glorified cave.

In the bathroom — it hadn’t been cleaned since the previous occupants had left, in a hurry apparently — I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The person before me was pale and exhausted. My eyes darkened as I surveyed the damage.

The suited boys were still bullshitting next door. I looked down at my hands. They were tight white balls. Here I was, a forty-four-year-old man, betoken to those two coked-up little shits, begging for an apartment that wouldn’t look out of place in Midnight Cowboy. Jesus, was I a contemporary manifestation oWhen I arrived in England in 2003, it was so much easier to take the brutality. Conditions were rough back then too, of course. The rent was outlandish and the city resembled a rubbish tip as today; but London’s possible overthrow was a unique part of its internal narrative, a radical vitality that reached its darkest corners, breathing life into its wasted infrastrucf Ratso Rizzo?


I stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. Jesus Christ, what happened? My body had not only visibly aged, but become grotesque too. I looked like a distorted Francis Bacon painting. Fat and pale, with tinges of bluish pink.

As I turned away in disgust, I remembered the swollen, unhappy people I’d seen after first arriving in England a decade before. Somehow, I had become one of them, working too much and not exercising.

I decided to visit my doctor for a check-up and he took a blood pressure reading. “Mmmm, that can’t be right”. He took another, “Impressive”, he muttered.

He gave me that look you never want to see from a health professional, something like, “I don’t know why you are wasting time talking to me, you should call an ambulance.”


Milton Friedman famously argued against Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Focus on profits, he said, and let the stateand churches deal with human welfare. However, CSR became popular nevertheless and is now big business. Almost every corporation has a CSR programme of some kind. The concept is fundamental to neoliberal utopianism because it peddles the falsehood that capitalism can be both ruthlessly profiteering and kind to the planet. Have its cake and eat it too. As a corollary, governmental regulation is deemed unnecessary. CSR provides an excuse for corporations to regulate themselves, and we all know where that leads. It is no surprise that CSR is most visible in controversial industries like mining, oil and gas, arms manufacturing and tobacco (often involving glossy brochures and websites depicting happy African children playing in green rainforests). Moreover, the tax benefits enjoyed by billionaire philanthropists are another good reason they like CSR.



Revolutionary pessimism practices a speculative negativity that goes too far… much too far. It perceives in this decomposing world both a taste of things to come and a way out. When unhappiness is weaponised in this manner, we will have very little to lose. And our survival depends precisely on that loss.

Roald Dahl: Danny, Champion of the World

A message To the children who have read this book. When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important. A stodgy parent is no fun at all! What a child wants -and DESERVES- is a parent who is SPARKY!"


Ah yes, and something else again. Because what I am trying to tell you… What I have been trying so hard to tell you all along is simply that my father, without the slightest doubt, was the most marvelous and exciting father any boy ever had.


Most of the really exciting things we do in our lives scare us to death. They wouldn't be exciting if they didn't.

Lloyd Bradley: Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King

Slave revolts, especially in Jamaica, were a far more regular feature of life in the colonies than history books have ever cared to reflect. Indeed, Christianity was eventually accepted for no other reason than it was the only route to literacy, as the Bible was the only book slaves were allowed, and in order to read it they had to be taught to read. However, the first black preachers immediately adapted the scriptures to acknowledge both their people's sufferation and their resolution to remain independent. And as for manner of worship, it was going to be as gloriously, vibrantly African as possible.


In a nation as small as Jamaica, you can never hope to put much daylight between business, politics and art, or the potential commercialization of art.

Jeanette Winterson: Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.


I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.


Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

Tim Lawrence: Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979

Elizabeth Taylor: Palladian

His head felt as if someone were doing knitting in it. Nothing was simple. He believed that he loved Cassandra tenderly; but marriage is not simple. It brought with it, Nanny had reminded him, so many complications which were beyond his energies. Tinty stood before him, and Tom, Nanny with her talk of refrigerators and change, the thought of beginning a new life in that fast-crumbling house, of leaving a smouldering and rank corner of earth to sons, perhaps, and then engaging servants, spending money, laying down wine, planting and clearing. In the library last night, no one, nothing, had stood between him and Cassandra. Now so much interposed. She was a child merely, to be led into so dark, so lonely, a wilderness as his heart. For her, so much unravelling of people, so much sorting out of possessions would have to be done. He might draw her to him and ease the passion which lay under her silence, lead her into the circle of ice which encompassed him: but the obstacles were still outside, where the world was, and even within him, there was Violet.

Timothy Morton: Being Ecological

Arguments for the radical cognitive change required to fix ecological catastrophe.

The idea of sustainability implies that the system we now have is worth sustaining... There is a lack of attention to what is being efficiently sustained.


Bataille gave a name to this smooth functioning myth: the restricted economy. A restricted economy is one in which the dominant theme is efficiency: minimum energy throughput. The Earth is finite, and economic flows must be restricted to its finite size and capacities. So much ecological ethics, politics, and aesthetics is based on the economy of restriction.


Things are mysterious, in a radical and irreducible way.


Being ecological includes a sense of my weird inclusion in what I’m experiencing.


We’ve been thinking that we are on top of things, outside of things or beyond things, able to look down and decide exactly what to do, in all sorts of ways for about 12,000 years.

David Toop: Ocean of Sound: Ambient sound and radical listening in the age of communication

Seminal work from Wire-mainstay Toop exploring the free-form 'ambient' turn in music since Debussy.

"There's an experiment I did. Since I did it, I started to think it was quite a good exercice that I would recommend to other people. I had taken a DAT recorder to Hyde Park and near Bayswater I recorded a period of whatever sound was there: cars going by, dogs, people. I thought nothing much of it and I was sitting at home listening to it on my player. I suddenly had this idea. What about if I take a section of this -a three and a half minute section, the length of a single- and I tried to learn it?"

“So that's what I did. I put it in SoundTools and I made fade-up, let it run for three and a half minutes and fade it out. I started listening to this thing, over and over. Whenever I was sitting there working, I would have this thing on. I printed it on a DAT twenty times or something, so it just kept running over and over. I tried learn it, exactly as one would a piece of music: oh yeah, that car, accelerates the engine, the revs in the engine go up and then that dog barks, and then you hear that pigeon off to the side there. This was an extremely interesting exercice to do, first of all because I found that you can learn it. Something that is as completely arbitrary and disconnected as that, with sufficient listenings, becomes highly connected. You can really imagine that this thing was constructed somehow: “Right, he puts this bit there and that pattern's just at the exact same moment as this happening. Brillant!" Since I've done that, I can listen to lots of things in quite a different way. It's like putting oneself in the role of an art perceiver, just deciding, now I'm playing that role.”
- Brian Eno

Benjamin Myers: The Gallows Pole

Grimy tale of anarchic counterfeiters in the pre-Industrial North of England. Read in August 2018.

Yes my sleep it was diysturbed by the sound of the moore tryin to get into my room an the sound of the moore tryin to get into my bed and the moore tryin to get into my mind becors it can do that can the moore and no man can sleep in that state no Not unless thur in a coffing.


Each time he returned to town, to home, to lie in bed perfectly still beside his sleeping wife, his senses enlivened, William Deighton felt utterly exhausted, yet he was nevertheless imbued and infused with a sort of joyful drunkenness too, and increasingly a part of him was still out there, stalking the moor, a half-feral man whose very dreams were now scented by heather and lit by moonlight, crackling with the mute power of all things connected.


Above them a mosaic of crows fell to pieces.


He listened to the sound of the water and the way it sang over the smoothed rocks of flint and grit. The way it danced down through the woods like a child.


The sun rose then, for it had only skulked like a struck cat at the sight of the incoming storm, but now it yawned and stretched itself in layered lengths of light reaching crossways along the smallholdings of the Calder Valley.

Ann Quin: Berg

Man tries (succeeds?) to kill father in seaside town amidst Beckettian chaos and despair. Read in June 2018.

A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father.


Just lying here for an hour since the sun had filtered through the snow that snail-trailed across the window. How silent the place is, as if the snow had penetrated the walls, sound-proofed the habitual early morning scurryings, the alarms. Once a huge snowball, made entirely by yourself, hiding behind the shrubbery, blistered fingers against your mouth, listening for Edith's steps; her Sunday-best hat knocked off, her flushed face as she took you inside, produced the leather strap, buckle-end for you, for naughty boys who never love their mother.

Rachel Cusk: Kudos

Writer writes about writers at writers festival.

She had to admit this journalist was one of her trickier customers, and his interviews nearly always ended with the same argument, since he seemed to take such a long time to get round to asking a question and when he did, discovered that he himself had the best answer for it.


You can't tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.


A saddening thought, she said, that when a group of women get together, far from advancing the cause of femininity, they end up pathologising it.