Category: Books
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Mutiny! [1] – Controlling the means of Production
So… I’m really pleased to announce that my latest book – Mutiny! Why We Love Pirates, And How They Can Save Us – is almost ready for release. You should be able to get your eyes on it in the next month or so! As it comes to publication, I’ve wanted to blog a few…
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Taste in the Age of Universal Access
Nick Hornby’s column ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading‘ in the McSweeney’s writing mag The Believer is always the thing I turn to first, and this month’s (well, March/April – but it has to be rowed across the Atlantic in a bath tub, it seems) is one of the best for ages. He is ostensibly writing about…
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‘We Need Books That Hit Us Like a Painful Misfortune’
Interesting article on Ceasefire looking at Zizek and de Botton, which includes this great quote from Kafka: “Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?…
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Mu… and the art of Unasking
I’ve been reading Brian Christian’s excellent book The Most Human Human over the past week or so – inspired by the very good Radiolab on ‘Talking to Machines.’ One thought from it that’s made me think a lot is the concept of the Japanese word mu. It comes in a section where Christian is describing…
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Doing Unspeakable Things On Our Behalf – Pirates as Necessary Psychic Safety Valves
Been doing some interesting reading around Jungian psycho-analysis. In particular, I was struck by a couple of passages in which he uses the language of ‘blockage’ – which connects with the terminology I have been using to describe piratic acts. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul he writes this: ‘As long as all goes…
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Temples and Follies
Two things have caught my eye recently. Firstly, Alain de Botton’s continued plans for a ‘temple to perspective.’ The idea for this is to have a large, conic structure (shown) some 46m high, each centimetre of which will represent a million years of the earth’s history. The bottom millimetre of the whole structure will be…