Category: Books
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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…
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Gay Pirates
I received a present the other day – a book through the post from an ex-colleague: ‘Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition.’ It’s a fascinating read. Admittedly, I was a little wary: there’s a long history of ‘actually, they were gay’ books which would have us believe that Jesus, St Paul, Shakespeare and even George Michael…
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Review of Pete Rollins’ New Book: Insurrection
It’s been good getting to know Pete over the past few years. Our first books came out at pretty similar times, when we were both involved in similar projects in Ikon and Vaux, and since then I’ve come to count him as a good friend, and companion on a journey. The very nature of conversation…
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‘Other’ – a Book for a Post 9/11 World
As we come round to 10 years since 9/11 I wanted to do a quick plug of Other, for the simple reason that it meets head on the challenges of living in a world where difference so desperately needs to be understood. Whether it’s personal issues of depression or the alienating effects of technology, or…