Books in… and it's only Tuesday.

Oh dear. A bit of an avalanche this week.

Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse - after a recommendation by a Twitter contact. It's a set of essays on cultural criticism, mostly exploring the relationship between history and other literary forms - Vico, Croce, Derrida and Foucault make significant appearances.

Brian Baker, Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000. My PhD was about masculinity in 1930s Welsh novels, so I need to catch up on subsequent developments.

Eric Linklater, The Impregnable Women. It's an invasion novel and a re-telling of the Lysistrata story (women go on sex-strike to end a war). Unfortunately for Linklater, he published this tale of a French invasion of Britain in… 1938. So much for foresight.

Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma: more good quality scientific muck-raking from the good doctor.

Jonathan Meades, Museums Without Walls: another blast of polemic from one of the best cultural and architectural critics in the business.

Barry England, Figures in a Landscape. Ben said it was good. It won the Booker in 1969 and it's a 'horrors of war' novel.

Philip Pullman, Galatea. Pullman's rather deranged-looking fantasy novel for adults. Nazis! Zombies! He doesn't like to talk about it. He also doesn't like to talk about 1972's The Haunted Storm, but I don't have £750 spare to buy a copy of that. My friend Mark has it though, picked up for pennies in a charity shop as usual…

Finally, two new Moomins reprints: the comic strips Moomin's Winter Follies and Moominvalley Turns Jungle. Because they're charming and wise.

Leave our libraries alone!

One of the most depressing features about the Tory/Lib Dem government is it's kneejerk response to economic problems: attack the poor. Whether it's housing benefit, schools funding, tuition fees, transport or healthcare, they do the same thing: reduce services, and cut taxes for the corporations and the rich. 


Amongst these nastly little attacks on the national fabric is an apparently concerted effort to close down free public libraries across the country: rich people, who are mostly Tories, don't borrow books. They buy them.


Libraries are deeply subversive institutions. Within their walls are the tools for shaping a new world. From SF to philosophy to romance, the books sketch out visions of other - dystopian and utopian - possibilities. Any of you can walk in and come out with Plato, Aristotle, Thoreau, Ken MacLeod, Austen, Dickens or even Catherine bloody Cookson if that's what you want. Compared to them, bookshops and the well-stocked libraries of private schools are bastions of privilege and class warfare: knowledge is there but only if you've got the cash. What a change from the Victorian period, in which the super-rich were endowing free public libraries across the world, rather than closing them. 


We need to resist this Philistine attack. The resistance has already begun. Please, please read this transcript of the great Philip Pullman's speech in defence of libraries and a humane way of life.

It’s imported the worst excesses of market fundamentalism into the one arena that used to be safe from them, the one part of our public and social life that used to be free of the commercial pressure to win or to lose, to survive or to die, which is the very essence of the religion of the market. Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of political power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life.

 The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that’s all he understands. What he doesn’t understand is enterprises that don’t make a profit, because they’re not set up to do that but to do something different. He doesn’t understand libraries at all, for instance. That branch – how much money did it make last year? Why aren’t you charging higher fines? Why don’t you charge for library cards? Why don’t you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books – you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there – what’s on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs.

That’s all the greedy ghost thinks libraries are for. 

The ultimate source is probably the tendency in some of us, part of our psychological inheritance from our far-distant ancestors, the tendency to look for extreme solutions, absolute truths, abstract answers. All fanatics and fundamentalists share this tendency, which is so alien and unpleasing to the rest of us. The theory says they must do such-and-such, so they do it, never mind the human consequences, never mind the social cost, never mind the terrible damage to the fabric of everything decent and humane.

My mother took me to the public library just off Battersea Park Road and enrolled me. I was thrilled. All those books, and I was allowed to borrow whichever I wanted! And I remember some of the first books I borrowed and fell in love with: the Moomin books by Tove Jansson; a French novel for children called A Hundred Million Francs; why did I like that?

The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what’s going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You’re a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?

 I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence in a town or a city reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about, things that have the power to baffle the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism, things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight. 

The core of freedom of speech

There's a lot of whinging around at the moment - people claiming that anything 'offensive' to their ears should be banned.

Nonsense: I don't want to live in a world in which I hear nothing with which I disagree. I want to hear my opponents, then put them in camps (I believe this is the core argument against prior licensing of printed material in Milton's Areopagitica).

Philip Pullman says it better than I could:

Yo! Bumrush the show!

Good morning, children. I can almost see light at the end of this week's tunnel, and what a week it's been. The latest on the redundancy front is that the uni has threatened to advance the compulsory redundancy phase if we keep saying nasty things about the vice-chancellor (such as calling on her to resign). Oooh, scary!

Neal turned up last night, tired, hungry and beardy after spending a week with the hippies at CAT, eating lentils and building his test walls (he's doing an MSc. in sustainable building). I fed him meat, made him use a cup and saucer as part of my drive to live in a civilised fashion, and he's probably still asleep. I wish I'd spent the week in Wales with hippies!

Rather shamingly, I found the passport I'd lost 5 or 6 years ago. Having blamed my former landlord for accidentally chucking it out, it turned up as a bookmark in a biography of Samuel Beckett…

Tonight, a little more culture: The Revenger's Tragedy at the Arena theatre in Wolverhampton, followed by curry with my sophisticated and suave colleagues Ben, Frank and Hilary. It's by Thomas Middleton (it used to be attributed to Tourneur), was first performed in 1606 and is still considered shocking, dark and violent. Highly recommended.

Then tomorrow it's off to Bangor University, for its 125th anniversary: there's a discussion between novelists James Hawes and Philip Pullman which I might not arrive in time for, then Super Furry Animals performing in the main hall. My friends Aimée and Vicky are also attending, so we'll have a good gossip as we haven't got together in a very long time.

Banned books special

It's the American Library Association's banned books week, as Intelliwench reminds me - more an American thing, as the European countries tend not to ban books much any more (though Ireland in particular had a strong track record in closing its citizens' eyes). It's easier to ban books in the US because it's a very democratic country - there are elected citizens on school boards, in the dog-catcher's office, on the town, county and state boards of education, plus the myriad of legislatures, and stupid people are often the ones who stand and vote…

Britain prefers to allow dictators and businessmen in other countries to sue in British courts over books not even sold in Britain - the US has even passed a law to stop this libel tourism.

But I digress. How many of the banned books have you read, and which ones astonish you most? Philip Pullman's back in the top ten after the film of The Golden Compass (which should be banned on artistic grounds), Anything which presents homosexuals positively attracts the book-burners, as does Harry Potter. Amongst the classics, The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men and Huckleberry Finn attract the ire of banners for 'language' offences or political content.

This is the 100 most frequently challenged classics: I've read 62 of them and have read other works by virtually all of them. Some are stunning choices - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, lots of E. M. Forster, Hemingway, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling and Willa Cather! Most of them clearly annoy people on the right, though there are a few, such as Gone With the Wind which have attracted the opprobrium of the dimmer bulbs on the left.

Early Friday conundrum: what would you ban? Dan Brown, Jeffrey Archer, How Green Was My Valley - all on quality grounds. Oh, and that chick-lit author who's standing for the Conservative Party - Louise Bagshawe.

Day of Remembrance

For lefty types like me, it's a special day. Firstly, Oliver Postgate died today - grandson of George Lansbury the Labour Party Leader, cousin of Angela Lansbury, the creative brain behind Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and many more. I've never seen Bagpuss and don't give a flying one for childhood TV nostalgia, the last redoubt of rugger-shirt wearing students, but I know enough of Postgate's work to understand that like Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman, they're responsible for the generations of enthusiastic, open-minded, imaginative and thoughtful cultural socialists we have: liberation socialists, we could call them. There might not be many of them, but they're out there.

UPDATE: Zoe Williams makes my points much more eloquently - but then she's a professional journalist. Channel 4 News last night also claimed that Ivor the Engine was set in Wales because Postgate was a huge fan of Dylan Thomas - and there is a (gentler) ring of Llareggub about the cartoon. Also, Professor Yaffle was inspired by meeting Bertrand Russell. Everything I learn about the man makes me sadder that he didn't run the country rather than make cartoons in a cowshed.

Which brings me on to Milton - not forgotten at all, as the Today programme's grumpy slot claimed. I teach Milton in an ex-Poly, and some of my colleagues specialise in his work. I'm not an unalloyed fan of JM - the mouthpiece of a genocidal regime as far as Ireland's concerned - and as Ackroyd's Milton in America suggests, he could so easily have become an Ayatollah figure, but he was also a Republican in body and spirit, and a force for rationality and liberation in so many ways. Here's Philip Pullman reading Milton and here's Terry Eagleton's summary of Milton's greatness (the poetry's pretty good too).