Stephen Palmer's Blog, page 4

Upcoming

Here’s a quick update on upcoming work. With the last Blue Lily Commission studio album and gig completed, and with the Mooch back catalogue all uploaded to Bandcamp (release date Sunday 30th March), what is coming into view is I Am Luna, the text for which is finished and the Tom Brown cover – see banner – is sorted. I expect to publish this on Thursday 24th April. I’ll be previewing and publishing extracts from the book on my Substack starting soon:

Stephen’s Substack.

I Am Luna follows our Moon from the rock shelter of Abri Laussel all the way to Neil Armstrong’s first step upon it in 1969. There is an album of music and songs to accompany it. This I expect to finish soon, with mixing and mastering to follow. Depending on demand, I’ll publish a hardback of the book with the album at the back in a clear wallet.

Eternal Boy by Matthew Dennison

This is a biography of Kenneth Graham, best known for writing the classic novel The Wind In The Willows. The book is superbly written and researched, with much access to letters and other papers from the Graham family archives. In it, Dennison charts Graham’s somewhat unusual, even tragic life. Losing his parents at an early age (his father simply departing elsewhere), and with a love of nature, childhood enthusiasms and solitary pursuits, this sensitive, imaginative boy had a childhood in parts golden and marvellous (two or three years between 5 and 7) and, later on, depressing and chaotic. In these latter periods, Graham was looked after by relatives in houses he disliked.

As an adult he took a semi-tedious job in banking, rising in due course to one of the top positions at the Bank of England, but always his imagination made him write stories, and in due course he had some published. A disastrous marriage, his eternal bachelor lifestyle (similar to Tolkien’s, I thought) and his antagonism towards cultural novelty, any politics innately non-conservative, and the despoliation of the countryside – also reminiscent of Tolkien – led to his writing of The Wind In The Willows. The golden, pre-WW1 setting and traditional ethos of this classic are made plain by the author, who notes in passing that Mr Toad of Toad Hall regains his stately pile from woodland malcontents clearly left-wing and from the lower classes.

Beautifully written, sad but illuminating, this marvellous biography illuminates a tragic life, yet one filled with some joys and some successes. Highly recommended.

Lance & Laser Podcast

Toby Frost and I have created a new podcast, set in the imaginary pub the Lance & Laser. There, we chat about the weird world of writing and publishing…

Close Encounters Of The Fungal Kind

Close Encounters Of The Fungal Kind by Richard Fortey.

Has Richard Fortey ever written a bad book, or even a so-so book? Don’t think so. Not any of the handful I own, anyway. Plus, he’s always worth a watch on tv.

This terrific new work, which I received fresh and in hardback for Xmas, continues Fortey’s fascination with the world of fungi. Mushrooms and toadstools are his thing, including – this is Fortey, after all – eating them. The book is eminently readable, arriving in a number of short-ish chapters each dealing with some aspect of the fungal world, whether that be rotting, blowing minds, living inside trees, living inside ants, and much more.

Fortey and his wife Jackie own a small patch of woodland near their Oxfordshire home, in which they enjoy regular walks. The synergy between Fortey’s interests and his lifestyle (and his wife’s – she takes the photos) is evoked via all the stories he tells.

As usual, the book is very well written, with the occasional jokes subtle and well integrated. His feel for language is enviable. Another great book from a great man.

Donald & His Lies

In a Substack a while back, Dominic Cummings wrote of Boris Johnson:

He rewrites reality in his mind afresh according to the moment’s demands. He lies – so blatantly, so naturally, so regularly – that there is no real distinction possible with him, as there is with normal people, between truth and lies. He always tells people what they want to hear and he never means it. He always says: “I can’t remember” when they remind him and is rarely ‘lying’.

Tony Schwartz meanwhile, interviewed by Frontline, observed of Donald Trump:

I don’t believe he has a different relationship to the truth than he had then, which is a very thin one… In a civilized society, we operate on an assumption that what another person is saying to us is factual. If we lose that connection, we’re in chaos. And I fully believe that Trump would pay as little attention to the truth as president as I observed he did 30 years ago when he was making deals to buy up property.

What does this tell us about narcissistic individuals such as the two above – that pair of so-called alpha men, whose only desire is to control the world from their position atop the boys’ pyramid?

Well, admittedly they are extreme examples of the kind of intense self-obsession young children display: the tantrums, the anger when they’re obstructed, the inability to recognise the independence of others. The ‘terrible twos,’ and beyond…

It’s rather more serious than that however when they reach positions where they can press the nuclear button. The issue of lies and the truth becomes critical. Both Trump and Johnson are routinely called out for lying – the Washington Post newspaper even carried a cumulative lie total for Trump during his first term – yet there is a darker heart to all this. Cummings put his finger on it. What if those two men cannot distinguish between truth and lie? That would be like saying they couldn’t distinguish between reality and their own warped version of reality – surely a step too far. Yet… is it going too far?

The word narcissism can be used in various ways: as a description of vanity, as a clinical diagnosis, as an umbrella for grandiose behaviour. Yet below all these psychological uses a deeper level rests. Narcissism is a normal and inevitable development in very young children, one with a particular use to them. It’s not that Johnson and Trump developed their intense narcissism as they became adults, rather that they never grew out of it as children. Those Trump balloons showing him as a baby were spot-on.

The fundamental metaphor of narcissism is the use of a self-serving mental model unsupported, unamended by and resistant to reality. Neither Trump nor Johnson operate in the reality you and I live in. They live in their own fantasy worlds. And when people like that manage to claw their way to the top of the boys’ pyramid, that’s dangerous for the rest of us.

This, then, is the crux of the matter. To lie, you have to have both a concept of reality and an understanding that other people can use reality to check your statements and deeds, for which they need to be understood as independent. But Trump literally does not understand that he can be fact-checked. He has neither a concept of independent facts nor of the independence of other individuals. The people he experiences in his life are all aspects of his own mind: his desires, his needs, his plans.

In this sense, as with Johnson, he does not lie. Lying is too subtle a description of what these men do. Rather, they state the particulars of their fantasy world. They then expect us to believe those particulars. When, unexpectedly and annoyingly, some people they interact with don’t respond according to the rules of their fantasy world, rage results. They dig their heels in, try to bolster their case, and pontificate on the value of personal loyalty.

In history, these sorts of dangerous characters appear often. The boys’ pyramid of power is set up for such individuals, albeit these days with a few nods to the rights of the rest of us plebians. Napoleon was one such character. One of his lieutenants described the loyalty Napoleon needed as “verging on self-negation.” Well, yes. Of course.

Let’s not dignify Johnson and Trump as liars. That’s too generous. They are dangerous individuals living in their own fantasy worlds. We cannot judge them according to our standards. Their ultimate plan is to make the real world identical with their fantasy world; and that’s not a great deal for the rest of us.

(This essay first appeared on my Substack in 2023.)

Donald Trump & Greenland

Many reasons have been put forward to explain Don’s latest mad ramblings. He’s distracting people from his legal woes, he’s all bluster, it’s a game, and so on and so on…

He lives in a fantasy world of his own imagination, as described in many posts I wrote a few years ago when he was president. His narcissism is so extreme, he, like young children, can’t distinguish between reality and mental model of reality. And this I think is why he is spouting all this nonsense. Because he has had the idea to annexe Greenland and Panama, he simply assumes that he can do it. Lacking any sense of the real world, he can’t work out what we real people are going to think or do about it.

The identity between fantasy and reality is direct with Don. You and I know the two things are different, but all narcissists as extreme as this can’t tell the difference. Remember that as his behaviour gets madder and madder.

2025

Happy new year to all my friends & fans!

So it’s a new year again… I’ve got a few plans for 2025. On February 28th it’s the final Blue Lily Commission album, Decommissioned. I’ll be sad to finish, but it’s the right thing to do after 25 years. Time to move on, to progress! In April I’m going to self-publish I Am Luna. I Am Taurus sold around half what the publisher wanted, but I want to continue the series. The book has a wonderful cover by Tom Brown. It will come with an album of Moon songs too.

The punk book is published in August – really looking forward to that! In September I’ll be celebrating 30 years of the Mooch album Starhenge with an album of never-before-heard music from the same era, Return To Starhenge. This music was rescued and restored by Tom Ryder Runton from a single surviving cassette. Later in the autumn I hope to be doing a promotion for Beautiful Intelligence. Lots to be getting on with!

Review Of The Year

Festive Book Signing

Festive book signing today at the Castle Bookshop. Great fun! Big thanks to Stanton Stephens at the Castle Bookshop. Top chap.

The Invention Of Nature by Andrea Wulf

The winner of the 2015 Costa biography award, this book about Alexander Von Humboldt, “the lost hero of science,” is a detailed account of the life of a scientist now half forgotten, especially in the English-speaking world. Yet his influence was apparent to Charles Darwin, he invented single-handedly concepts of connectivity and holism in nature, and it would not be until James Lovelock that a man of equivalent breadth of vision appeared in science.

It’s a detailed and enjoyable read, but I can’t help feeling in retrospect that the detail sometimes overwhelms the insight. What is excellent is the setting of the man in his political times, through the American and French revolutions, Waterloo, the 1848 revolutions, and so much more. The focus on how Humboldt influenced Darwin, and subsequent naturalists and authors, is also terrific. Yet, at the end, I found myself bemoaning a lack of insight into the character of a man with many unusual personal qualities: his energy, his mode of incessant speech, his drive, and his inability to sit or stand still. All this is written of, yet without much by way of conclusion.

Still, this is an enjoyable book. The earlier sections detailing crazy expeditions in South America are fascinating and evocative. Overall, a good read.