P.D. Smith's Blog, page 2

March 23, 2018

Elisabeth’s Lists

We've just returned from a few days staying in Lisbon - a beautiful hilly city of cobbled streets, tiled houses and delicious food. You can see some of my impressions of the city on Flickr.


[image error]


Before I left, I read Elisabeth’s Lists: A Family Story, by Lulah Ellender, a hauntingly beautiful meditation on life and death, spanning three generations of a family. The narrative is anchored in a book of lists kept by the author's grandmother. The lists range from inventories of household linen and a “register” of eggs laid by her chickens during the war, to what to serve at a cocktail party for eighty people. According to Ellender, “Elisabeth’s lists are her filing system for her troubles and her joys, triumphs and boredom”.


Ellender also explores how we use lists to bring order to the world: “these catalogues hold our chaos”. As his marriage crumbled, Einstein handed his wife an impossible list of Conditions for Marriage. Before he married, Darwin wrote down the pros and cons of marriage, eventually deciding a wife would be “better than a dog anyhow”.


My review of Ellender's book is published in Saturday's Guardian.


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on March 23, 2018 09:55

March 6, 2018

Inside the Mind of Marine Le Pen

I've been reading former philosophy lecturer Michel Eltchaninoff’s study of the ideas of Marine Le Pen. One former senior figure in the Front National tells him: “Marine Le Pen doesn’t have any ideas. She only acts through instinct, because her brain is like a reptile’s. what ideas? What concepts? She’s an echo chamber, that’s all!”


But his fascinating ideological detective work shows how her thinking is deeply embedded in the tradition of French far-right thought: “Le Pen moves behind a mask and she is very good at the game.”


Read my review at the Guardian.


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on March 06, 2018 07:27

February 26, 2018

A Philosophy of Dirt

I've just read A Philosophy of Dirt by Olli Lagerspetz. It's one of those rare books that are worth reading purely for the pleasure of observing a superbly subtle mind at work. Lagerspetz provides a master class in philosophical thinking, a lucid and rigorous analysis of a commonplace notion, one that opens up a new and fascinating view of dirt “based on our physical engagement with the world”.


[image error]


You can read my review at the Guardian.


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on February 26, 2018 02:32

February 18, 2018

Owl Sense

I've been reviewing Owl Sense, by Miriam Darlington. It's a wonderful account of the author's fascination with owls and an attempt to re-wild our imaginations with some primal owlishness. This bird has featured in our myths and religions from the beginning: the Chauvet cave paintings dating back to 36,000 BC, include the oldest depiction of an owl, an almost life-size version of a Long-eared Owl, whose penetrating gaze meets those entering the cave: “the artists understood something of the Janus nature of the owl, its troubling liminal status on the boundaries of light and dark”.


 


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on February 18, 2018 01:20

February 4, 2018

The Pixels of Paul Cézanne

I loved Wim Wenders' exhibition of polaroids, Instant Stories, which I saw recently at the Photographers' Gallery. There was a beautiful line in the exhibition by Wenders about polaroids:


"You couldn't help feeling

that you had stolen this image-object from the world.

You had transferred a piece of the past into the present."


Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire - the German title is so much better) has always been one of my favourite films ever since I saw it at university as a student of German.


So for all sorts of reasons I was delighted to be able to review his collection of essays, The Pixels of Paul Cézanne.


[image error]


It didn't disappoint! Here's the first paragraph of the review:


Just like the camera in Wim Wenders’ films, his writing demands the “freedom to move”: “I need to be able to ‘circle’ an idea”. For this reason he chooses to write in free verse – or what he modestly refers to as “my odd verse” – for many of the essays in this illuminating collection. In his hands it becomes a playful and wonderfully malleable literary form that allows him to create a flow of images and ideas, a kind of rhythmic thinking: “visible blocks of thought”. Each line becomes a separate tracking shot as the writer-director moves restlessly around his subject, words crystallising into ideas in the same way as a narrative emerges during the editing of a film.


Read the full review at the Guardian.


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on February 04, 2018 04:23

January 20, 2018

Being Ecological

I've just reviewed Timothy Morton's Being Ecological for the Guardian. It's the first of a regular series of non-fiction reviews I'll be doing for the new-look Review section. I'll also be reviewing paperbacks as usual, so there will be plenty of fascinating non-fiction titles to choose from in 2018. Happy reading!


[image error]


Morton's book is full of remarkable insights and ideas - it's a brilliant and only occasionally Delphic display of intellectual pyrotechnics. He doesn’t offer a plan to make society more environmentally friendly: “the idea of sustainability implies that the system we now have is worth sustaining”.


Instead, in what is an inspiringly idealistic book, he wants a paradigm shift in our relationship to the world and for us all to live the idea that we are “a symbiotic being entangled with other symbiotic beings”.


Read the full review here.


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on January 20, 2018 02:17

July 18, 2017

A literary city

[image error]


I've written a piece for the Guardian about Winchester to mark the anniversary of Jane Austen's death in the city two hundred years ago today. As well as being a very historic city, it has links to many other authors, including John Keats and Thomas Hardy. Even the great detective Sherlock Holmes travelled down by train from the Big Smoke to solve a mystery...


You can read my piece here.


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on July 18, 2017 01:36

June 15, 2017

Outskirts

I've reviewed a wonderful book on the green belt for the Guardian. Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt is by John Grindrod, author of Concretopia, a celebration of postwar British architecture (“I do love a bit of concrete”).


[image error]


Part history and part memoir, Grindrod’s evocative and intelligent book explores the green belt and its place in our national consciousness. As well as explaining the history of the green belt, one of the great strengths of the book is that Grindrod tells his own story of growing up on a council estate in New Addington, developed during the 1930s on an exposed Surrey hilltop. Grindrod’s family moved from a flat in Battersea to New Addington in 1969: “a modern phenomenon: the once urban poor transplanted back to the edge of the city, to the country”. Their home was on “the outskirts of the outskirts” and opposite the green belt. His brother said it was “like everything a child could want! There were trees, fields of wheat … It just blew me away.”


Grindrod's wonderful book struck a chord with me. I also grew up on the fringes of London in the 1970s, near the green belt. My parents lived in a rather unlovely 1930s semi on the outskirts of Romford, not far from the rather more desirable garden suburb of Gidea Park, which was inspired by Ebenezer Howard's idealistic vision of a decentralised urban future. "Town and country must be married," Howard had gushed, "and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilisation."


As Grindrod shows, it was largely Howard's vision of garden cities that inspired the green belt, an urban planning compromise designed to limit the growth of big cities such as London, a barrier to save the countryside from an all-consuming tide of subtopia. I was never particularly keen on Romford (although its raucous, colourful market was memorable) but I loved the sense that green spaces were never too far away.


Today 13% of England is designated as green belt – a striking figure when you consider that only slightly more than 2% of land is actually built on. But Grindrod shows that we need a new approach to the green belt to deal with the current housing crisis: “To city dwellers, the green belt is tightening around our throats. To country folk we are ignorant barbarians, intent on its destruction.”


Read my review here and do buy Grindrod's book. You won't be disappointed...


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on June 15, 2017 05:50

March 16, 2017

The Autonomous City

I've just reviewed a fascinating new history of squatting - The Autonomous City by Alexander Vasudevan.


[image error]


Here's a paragraph from my piece:


'Vasudevan sees his book not merely as a dry contribution to urban history, but as celebration of the vital ideas and achievements of those squatters who dared to imagine an alternative vision of life, an alternative to the neoliberal city and the urbanisation that is still engulfing the world. His highly original argument is that the history of squatting reveals “the potential reorganisation of our cities along more collective, socially just and ecologically sustainable lines”. Using archives created by squatters themselves, documenting their evanescent experiments, Vasudevan demonstrates that “the squat was a place of collective world-making: a place to express anger and solidarity, to explore new identities and different intimacies, to experience and share new feelings, and to defy authority and live autonomously”.'


Vasudevan's book is essential reading for anyone interested in the recent history of cities or indeed how we can improve them in the future. Read my review on the Guardian's website.


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on March 16, 2017 05:00

November 14, 2016

The Prince of Tricksters

Netley Lucas was a debonair and charming con man, described by the press as the "prince of tricksters". Matt Houlbrook has written a remarkable study of this extraordinary character who died in 1940, aged just 36. He was a notorious confidence trickster, convicted thief, concocter of fake crime news stories, and the writer and publisher of bogus royal biographies.


9780226133157


Lucas changed identities as easily as others change their clothing. Houlbrook admits being fascinated by the motivation of this gentleman crook: "I'm obsessed with making sense of you."


He began his criminal career aged just 14. A friend later recalled how convincing Lucas could be: “I had no idea that he was other than he pretended to be…he had a fascinating way with other men and women. He would look you straight in the face and assure you that he was lord somebody or a hero of the war – and you believed him.”


Lucas monetised his genteel manners and appearance, sweet-talking hotel managers and shopkeepers, turning charm and class into credit. By 17, he was driving around in a chauffeur-driven Daimler from Harrods and socialising with duchesses and chorus girls. Later he went on to reinvent himself first as a crime journalist and then as the author and publisher of royal biographies. After he published a biography of Queen Mary in 1930, she went through a copy of the book highlighting the errors: “I have annotated this book to show what a number of inventions are written about one.”


For Houlbrook, Lucas’s life-story reveals deeper truths about the period after the Great War in which the boundaries between class and gender were shifting. New forms of mass culture and democracy were changing how people viewed the state’s institutions and offered greater possibilities of social reinvention: “Lucas’s crimes were unusual, but his aspirations echoed those of countless ordinary men and women in a period when advertising encouraged dreamlike fantasies of social mobility.”


Lucas’s success as a confidence trickster suggested that in an "age of disguise" all you needed was money and a veneer of class to pass yourself off as a gentleman. In a society of strangers, his crimes were deeply subversive.


You can read my Guardian review of Houlbrook's book here.


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on November 14, 2016 05:58