Thanks for the trees, Swedes!

I've received more books. I bought loads at the weekend (more J. G. Farrell, a cultural history of the depression, an 1899 beautiful copy of the Icelandic Laxdaela Saga and biographies of A. J. Cook and James Maxton), and now another spruce appears covered in words. Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, which I'm ashamed to say I haven't read before, Corder's Lionboy, a graphic novel (i.e. a comic) called To Teach by William Ayers (bought because he's a real 60s radical and the right tried to use him to bash Obama), and four more Penguin Great Thinkers books, with the beautiful designs: Ruskin's On Art and Life, de Montaigne's On Solitude, Locke's Of the Abuse of Words and Hazlitt's The Pleasure of Hating (you can tell I've been marking). They're lovely slim volumes of great ideas which I heartily recommend - some of these links are to the full texts).

I'll find time to read them when I'm made redundant.

At last, a Twintellectual

Some genius has been posing as Jürgen Habermas on Twitter, posting chunks of his seminal work Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension?, a brilliant piece on the political potential embodied by new media. He's not known for pithy aperçus, but the tweets chosen are apt for the medium

Everything you know is wrong. Discuss.

Maurice Charlesworth was my philosophy lecturer at Bangor University. He was, to me at least, something of a legend. He came to work dressed in a brown suit with brown shirt, tie, socks, shoes and briefcase. He was perhaps the world's only Tasmanian nationalist, had a dry and cruel sense of humour which he directed particularly towards the Christian section of the student body, and told us that he took a few minutes during his wedding reception to prove the non-existence of God to his new mother-in-law. He also dealt with people signing in as Donald Duck by undertaking graphological analysis of the entire class. His favourite illustration of the degenerate nature of our times was to remind us that whereas he used to employ a psychologist in his philosophy department, he was now the philosopher in the psychology department.

All this is tangential, however. The abiding memory I have of Maurice is his mantra that a class has failed if the participants think they understand what's just happened, and that the world is just as they thought. He always managed to leave me exhilarated, confused and inspired - the mark of a great teacher, I think. Every session left us drunk with intellectual curiosity and wonder.

Maurice's philosophy colleague, Ed Ingram, was equally bizarre and brilliant, though totally contrasting. Ed wore shorts and vomit-inducing Hawaiian shirts. He clearly had an absolutely brilliant time in the 60s or 70s, and had barely recovered. He was a former computer programmer who handled all the science-related philosophy with amazing precision and joy. We'd turn up, have our heads completely messed up by quantum physics and the like, then go for a soothing drink. We'd then meet Ed in the street and he'd ask us things like where he lived, or what day it was. Between them and Tony Brown, my learned, kind and wise English tutor, these people made teaching a potential avenue for me - shame the only quality I share with them is a gift for sarcasm…

The whole truth

(click on the strip for a larger version)

Teaching English and Cultural studies is all about destabilising fixed world views. I wish my lot would start political arguments though. Apart from the opportunity to foment revolution, there's nothing more validating to a thirty-something's sense of self-worth than destroying the beliefs of a teenager (that's a joke, see?).

I live in the first circle

Not of Hell. Though in Dante's Inferno, I'd be in good company because this is where all the Greek and Arabic philosophers dwell - all those who haven't sinned but weren't Christian and therefore can't be saved. Saladin's there, as are the Hebrew figures from the Old Testament and of course, unbaptized babies.

No, apparently I qualify for the first circle of bookbuyers who are saving publishers from the worst of the economic crash. According to the Literary Review, for which my parents gave me a subscription for Christmas,

First-circle book buyers are stubborn in their habits. The largest proportion of them are women over thirty, and they are the chief sustainers of the fiction market. On average, first-circle readers buy up to twenty books a year, and if there is a twenty-first or a twenty-second that takes their fancy, they will buy that too. If they really like a book they buy multiple copies of it to give as presents.

Now apart from being a woman (and let's face it, life takes us to strange places so let's not rule it out yet), I fit most of this bill. I've bought a lot of copies of Thoreau's Walden for people in my time, I'm over 30 (hard to believe, looking at my angelic, youthful complexion) and I buy … oh, more than 20 per year. It's 105 so far this year which is just over one per day, not including books bought for other people.

So OK, you could, as Laura has done, describe this as a disease, or an addiction (thanks Neal), but I prefer to see it as a) doing my economic and literary duty and b) saving the environment by insulating my hovel. They make me happy too. Except for the ones which depress me (pretty much anything on politics and the environment: we are clearly all going to die slowly, miserable and avoidably because we'd all rather stick our fingers in our ears, shout la-la-la and then drive our SUVs to the airport for a weekend break - if that's you, kill yourself. I mean that, you selfish, evil, poisoning bastards).