Gabriel’s Angel

Ah, mid year resolutions are a great thing, much more original than those New Year types, so having resolved to keep up with our meetings, we did indeed meet again for September, this time focussing on ‘Gabriel’s Angel’ by Mark A Radcliffe. Mark had spoken at the Madness and Literature conference earlier in the year, which was where I had heard of this book, which is bang up to date, having been published in July 2010, definitely our most ‘contemporary’ piece of fiction yet…

So what did we think of the book? Well Dave hadn’t finished it yet, despite making valiant efforts after a late delivery from Amazon, so we were careful not to spoil the ending for him. The ending is not a huge surprise, probably the only way such a story could have completed without being too schmaltzy, and now Dave has probably finished the book I can manfully admit that it made me cry…It also made me re-evaluate what I thought of the book a bit, and reconsider it more as essentially a love story which focussed on the relationships amongst the main characters, expecially Gabriel and Ellie. As I’d read the book the humour and extraordinary situations the (human) characters were in, plus the satire on psychotherapy had distracted me from those beautifully drawn relational aspects of the novel, but the ending forced me to think back and re-evaluate those aspects of the book.

Another main element though, is the author’s ‘gentle satire’ (his own description) of psychotherapy as practiced by the angels in the pre-death purgatorial centre. Whilst the device of purgatorial experience is very ‘hot’ at the moment (it was revealed as the answer to the mysterious existencies led by characters on both long running TV series ‘Life On Mars/Ashes to Ashes’ and ‘Lost’ earlier this year) this is a novel twist to that device, and an interesting way of looking at psychotherapy. It may well reflect the rather jaded view of the nature of long-term psychotherapy, as the back cover blurb says:

If the group do well in the therapy they may be allowed to pass into Heaven, or go back to Earth to finish their lives. If not it’s Hell. Or worse, more therapy.

The gentle satire is, we thought, fairly affectionate of the processes involved in psychotherapy, rather than designed to deny the usefulness of therapy. It uses an in depth knowledge of the processes and the external view of this which can sometimes find those processes to understand. It put me in mind of the film ‘Analyse This’ which also present a satirical view of therapy, again from a rather extreme perspective – Billy Crystal analyses De Niro, again a mobster type. Warning this clip is NOT child or office friendly!

The book also covers the tricky subject of IVF and the emotional impact this has on people, particularly the male view of this, as narrated by Gabriel himself, and the author seems to capture male thinking in a way that is not quite Nick Hornby but is very recognisable to blokes, including those of us who have been trained to be more sensitive and therapeutic! He covers this tricky and emotionally charged area with great sensitivity and a use of dark humour which also betrays the way in which those of us in the helping professions tend to cope with the emotional work of caring.

Because the author works in a similar field to our own (Kevin was absent, so we were left with mental health nurses and academics!) there was a certain amount of second guessing going on during our discussion – Dave thought he recognised the model for the heavenly centre as being part of Warwick University.

Personally if I get to heaven and it looks like Warwick University I will be a little disappointed*… Some of the prettier parts of Oxford University maybe, the bits around the Radcliffe Camera and the Bodleian Library perhaps,

…even Pusey House is pretty heavenly, though that may just be an association from the days when I had to use the library there. The combination of dusty books, monastic architecture and huge bookshelves, plus permeated scent of incense from the nearby mother church of Anglo-Catholicism have left a lasting impression.

In terms of literature there was less for us to chew on, unusually Paul had not scribbled all over his book to mark the sections which appealed to him lyrically, and Kevin, our resident linguist, was also absent, but overall this earthiness did not seem to be a problem. The author was not trying to write ‘literary fiction’, more contemporary fiction, so his use of language was at times very colloquial, as was his imagery – the way in which the hit man character emasculates himself accidentally, the incident which leads to him being at the centre, is eye-wateringly described, and the language used by the characters throughout is coarse but realistic contemporary usage.

All in all we loved it! The rest of the evening passed in the usual bandinage and quaffing of Harvest Pale, so, as it always used to say in my old parish magazine, and I promise never to use this phrase again, ‘ a good time was had by all’.

We also established the running order for the rest of the year, which will be:
October – The History of Rasselas by Samuel Johnson
November – Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse
December – The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak

Two out of three are available on kindle…

*Oh, and for the record I am not expecting heaven to be like either place, if indeed it does have such a physical manifestation, which I somehow doubt…

Good Lord! Has it been that long?

I knew I had been slacking but even I am shocked that I could have left it so long between posts! On the off chance that somebody will actually read this then here’s a bit of a catch up.

We’re still meeting, albeit not every single month – though we have managed to make it fairly regularly. Over the summer there was a bit of a hiatus, mostly due to holidays and various of us swanning off to conferences around the globe – sounds exotic but probably less so than you might imagine… Kevin and I managed to make it to our favourite conference, COMET, this year held in Boston, next year it will be in Nottingham! Bit of a flying visit for me, I think Kevin got a few extra days, though I acheived one of the things on my Bucket List – seeing the Red Sox play at Fenway Park – they even won, 8-5 against the Rays, Big Pappy scored a three run homer, it was heaven! Course they’ve had a rubbish season since then, mostly due to an unprecedented number of injuries – oh, did I get distracted there for a minute?

The other highlight of the summer for us was the inaugural Madness and Literature conference which went very well, though I managed to miss the first day due to some badly planned vacation time, yes away on the boat again…

The conference seemed to be the beginning of things, like a community coming together, almost a gathering of lost souls who’d finally found kindred spirits and embraced them. It also felt like the beginning of a much bigger endeavour, a collaboration of scholars who’d hitherto worked alone, but now knew that they were no longer alone. Hopefully the site will continue to build on this feel and work towards the next conference in a couple of years time in Denver. Some of the presentations are available online, enough to get a feel for the kind of thing that was going on.

For me personally another literary even was the invention of the Kindle… I think it’s a wonderful invention, but I know some traditionalists will not agree. Anyway I’ve read a few books on it now (I have the wi-fi version with a nice burgundy cover) I’ll maybe do a full blog entry extolling its virtues in the near future. If you’re lucky!

Anyway, probably best if I get back to the Lunar Society thing. I’ll try and catch up with some summaries of the books we have read over the last year. In a few days we will be discussing Mark A Radcliffe’s book Gabriel’s Angel…

Oh, and our favourite beer Harvest Pale won beer of the year – which shows what great taste we have…

Charlie don’t surf…

Not quite what Conrad had in mind...

So, a slight change of date to confuse everyone, but we got there in the end. This month’s book (well, July’s book) was Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’. The more astute of you will notice that we tend to choose fairly short books, as well as ones with a link to themes of mental health.

Conrad’s tale is a classic explorer tale in some ways, often spoken of as a descent into madness, but whilst the psychological observations are astute there is no real descent on the part of the narrator. Marlow instead offers us a commentary on the distant object of Kurtz, who is actually a fairly thinly sketched character when we finally meet him, after a long build up, but the subject of a lot of mythologising on the part of the other company agents. The more superficial of us, (Dave and I!) managed to resist the temptation to make too many comparisons with Coppola’s classic film Apocalypse Now, which is, of course, heavily based on this book, but the difference in how much time is spent with Kurtz is striking. In the film a lengthy section ponders on the nature of Kurtz’s depravity and how it affects those around him, whilst Conrad spends much less time on this. The film, I always felt, is about half an hour too long and could have done with being structured more like the book, but we speculated that Marlon Brando wouldn’t have appeared in such a minor part.
The nature of Kurtz ‘madness’ is also unclear, at least in the book. Whilst the film seems to have him stripped of civilisation to reveal his heart of darkness, and a very real madness, but the book is less clear as to the nature of his depravity. Marlow says: “And I wasn’t arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear – concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear;… but his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.” (p107, Penguin 1995 edition)

The story as Conrad tells it is more one of travel, into the Dark Continent and into the heart of darkness. The narrator, Marlow, is engaged to captain the river steamer and travel to the far reaches of the river, based on Conrad’s own experiences in the 1890s. My own interest is in the history of colonial expansion, and when I first read this book I also went out and bought the excellent history of the Belgian exploitation of the Congo , King Leopold’s Ghost, which is a fascinating and horrifying episode in history. If you’ve never heard of what happened there, and most people haven’t, I would recommend it.

The portrayal of Kurtz, in actuality a monster, though revered by those around him who bought into a collective mystique, was felt by our little group to presage some of the dictators of the twentieth century, whose cult of personality was certainly in sharp contrast to the horrors they perpetrated. In this sense we wondered about which other figures in history had a similar underlying ‘heart of darkness’ to he greatness that history portrays. Certainly one can argue that to achieve greatness an individual has to be very driven and singleminded, and how this affects their relationships is only glimpsed amidst how history mostly chooses to record their lives.

The idea that Heart of Darkness is a racist text also come up, but that was not a feeling that we had. Certainly the language is contemporary in its usage, reflecting the attitudes of the early twentieth century, and the change in attitudes over those hundred years is huge. But Conrad is actually dismissive of pretty much all human suffering – he is callous to the suffering of the Africans in the story, but is similarly dismissive of the suffering of the Europeans at the station, who seem also to drop from phsyical illness and are left to whither away. Again this attitude to human life and its worth has changed over the last century, and was not unknown in history that whilst writers would wax lyrical about the individual suffering of heroes and heroines, the supporting cast are almost unregarded in their sufferings.

We had some division of opinion as to the quality of the language that Conrad uses. Kevin is a purist and felt that the language at times struggled to flow, and betrayed its origins, that Conrad wrote in English, but it was not his first language. My feeling was that the poetry of the prose, though a little unusual, stood up to the test of time. Whilst unusual it is hard not to admire the craft and descriptive power of much of the language used, and nearly every page has turns of phrase which are evocative and powerful: “And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.” (p16)

Paul was inspired by rereading this text to do a review for the Madness and Literature Network, which you can read here. The network website is well worth a look and joining up if you are interested in some of these themes.

For next month Kevin has chosen Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer, which should give us a radical change of direction. I shall be reading it whilst away for a few days on a canalboat on the Welsh borders, along with the paranoia-inducing ‘The Dying Light’ by Henry Porter, which was recently reviewed on Simon Mayo’s book review section.

Still talking about getting more folks to join our little band – more on this as we get it 🙂 We have a couple of people in mind, one of whom is called Charley, but we don’t know if she surfs or not.

Oh, and one last disappointment with the book – where was that great sequence with the helicopters?

Ride of the Valkyries anyone?

The Night of the Understudy

For one night only the part of Kevin was played by Paul’s son Jamie. Kevin had other commitments, and, for a lecturer in the School of English, has surprising difficulty in finishing books… Actually we really do understand that Kevin’s first year as a lecturer means he’s got a very heavy workload, and hope that he can catch up over the summer and join us in person a little more regularly. In the meantime Jamie joined us. Jamie, being of the modern generation, is not terribly keen on reading, unless it’s the online instructions for a game, or a short extract from Wikipedia, which was not a good start really. However he did bring a level of cool and sartorial elegance which is generally missing from the rest of us, who are, let’s face it, a bunch of chaps slightly past our prime…

We were also a week or so late, having moved to avoid clashing with our favourite conference COMET, which three of us were attending and presenting papers, and which started last Thursday in Cardiff, making Wednesday night a bit tricky. It was, as usual, an interesting conference, though Cardiff, for all its many splendours, is not as exotic as Cape Town (where we went last year) or Lugano (the venue in 2007). Next year it’s Boston, Massachussetts (not Lincolnshire!) so I’m starting my campaign to find someone to pay for me to go. As I work for the NHS rather than the Uni this may be a bit of an uphill struggle in the current climate. COMET usually attracts both students of linguistics and healthcare practitioners. You can tell who is who, just from their approach to the subject and their interests, which usually lie in different aspects of health communication, but it’s a fascinating overlap and meeting of minds which can prove very fertile ground for ideas and ways of looking at things.

Driving down the M50 to get there I passed a few signs for Ross-on-Wye, which reminded me that I’ve often wanted to go and browse the bookshops there, though I think perhaps the threat of bankruptcy if I did that is a bit of a restraining factor. A day in all the secondhand bookshops may be too tempting, given my weak willpower regarding books. Maybe a trip for the Lunaticks to the Hay Book Festival would be a safer aspiration, though I didn’t actually share that thought on the night…

So, June’s book was Susan Sontag’s ‘Regarding the Pain of Others.’
As a book, or thesis, it has some flaws, despite the value and interest of the underlying message. Starting as the Amnesty Lecture at Oxford University in 2001 it has been extended to book form, allowing the author to expand on her original ideas. I suspect the lecture was very good, and maybe it should have stayed in that form, because at times the thesis has been extended too much and ‘over-eggs’ the case. There certainly is a lot to be said about the power of photography and the way in which people are drawn, inexorably, to the horror that these can invoke in us. For a book about photographs it has none in it, relying on the fact that when the author describes an iconic photo of the twentieth century that it IS sufficiently iconic that we can remember it. We felt this was a very definite stylistic decision, that they would not be included. Sontag, for example, makes points about how the photos appeared in their original context and some of this would be lost if a traditional photo section was included in the book. But it does depend on the reader being either very well informed, or of a sufficient age that they would have come across all of these photos in the course of their generally well-educated lives. This actually runs a few dangers, principally that people will actually not know which photo is being used to describe a point, or even get the wrong one! This, for example, is Capa’s famous picture of a soldier of the Spanish Civil War, allegedly taken at the very moment he is killed, usually called the ‘Falling Soldier’ picture:

I thought I knew which picture was being referred to, as I have an interest in this war and had not long ago read a history of the SCW
which includes an image which had made an impression on me. I thought this was what was being referred to, but actually the one I was thinking of is of a Republican soldier turning to fire at three enemies who are chasing him*, a similarly evocative photo of a man in danger of losing his life, defiantly trying to make his escape, and in peril of his life, but not the one Sontag is referring to…

Capa’s photo is also the subject of much speculation as to its veracity. Sontag spends some time looking at how the camera can, in fact, lie. From posed photos of the dead of the American Civil War in the early days, through the photo-realism of Vietnam coverage and on to current 24hr rolling news coverage, she reviews the editorial decisions and ways in which coverage is used and looks at how this inures us to suffering. And this is where we started to have problems with the analysis, which starts to suggest that there is only one reaction to this kind of bombardment of the suffering of others, which is the development of a vicarious pleasure. At one point Sontag goes on to suggest that this pleasure is even pornographic, which seems to be taking a feminist critique a bit too far (at least IMHO). In truth, of course, there are many reactions to these images, from denial or hiding from their grim reality, through empathy and putting yourself in the place of those who have suffered and even died as a result of others inhumanity (and Sontag is principally interested in suffering inflicted by others rather than as a result of accidents or natural disasters). Each of our reactions will be the result of a number of things, our experience, background and how we have developed our individual coping strategies.

So we moved on from this book and started talking of what books to do for our next ’round’ of picks. I had been inspired by Sontag to choose a book which came to mind partly because of her concentration of our inhumanity, and this is our official July book, Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, a book which led me to find out more about the history of King Leopold’s involvement with the Congo, more of that next month, no doubt, buy if you can’t wait, then I would also recommend King Leopold’s Ghost for the historical background.

Dave chose something rather Welsh, Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, which I am ashamed to say I have never read. I gather the Richard Burton version is very good, so this may be our first book which is also available as an audiobook. Maybe I’ll get the CD for my next long car journey. And in a surprise move Paul picked Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’ which appears, on the surface to be one of those books that teaches you how to be successful, usually through some form of dodgy pyramid scheme. As to whether it has hidden depth, we will see… As Kevin wasn’t there, and Jamie was reluctant to offer a pick on his behalf, we thought, a little mischievously that maybe an HG Wells classic might be appropriate…

Next meeting is in three weeks, to catch up with our original schedule of fourth Wednesday, so that will be 22nd July. Paul took a short of Dave, so show why it was not hard for Jamie to look cool next to him, I’ll pop that below if he sends it to me 🙂

It’s always about you, isn’t it?

Kevin arrived late, but better late than never huh? Actually he got confused about the time and I wasn’t answering my phone, having taken seriously the Vic’s preference that you put your phone on silent, which meant I can’t actually hear it… A good policy I thought, as is the no TV thing, especially on a night when there was an apparently important football game on in Rome. The lack of phones ringing is a good thing, but we were still occasionally drowned out by passing trains. Anyway Kevin arrived late, after we’d almost given up on him and launched into a debate on Sartre’s ‘Existentialism and Humanism’. He also left early, claiming that the Uni was sending him on a trip to Khazakstan, and he had to catch an early train to London and sit in the Khazakstan Embassy all day waiting for a visa. Now either Kevin has a much more interesting life than the rest of us, or a very elaborate fantasy life. And if the University is sending you to Khazakstan “for a few days”, what does that tell you about how they feel about you? Maybe it’s a funny little English Department joke they play on all their new lecturers – oh how they laughed thinking about the look on his face as he turns up at the Embassy to be confronted by a bunch of diplomats with no sense of humour – “No, Doctor Harvey, we don’t have any record of an appointment to get you a visa…”

Anyway, enough of my own fantasy life (or jealousy!), Dave had picked the book, which had the virtue of being very short, for a work by a French philosopher. The introduction is nearly as long as the lecture text, and is followed by a Q&A session where a M. Naville tries to show what a smart-alec he is by holding forth at the end. “Actually mate, we all came to hear what M. J-P Sartre had to say, not hear what you think.” We’ve all been there, questions at the end of a presentation where someone tries to score points, but M. Sartre was very restrained and, as far as the records show, didn’t slap the guy, but contented himself with a Gallic shrug and a sensible answer or two. Turns out we are all responsible for the choices we make…

M. Sartre refills his pipe whilst bravely tolerating the exposition of M. Naville

Which is pretty much the central thesis of the book, a particular favourite of Dave. Whilst we got the central thesis I was a little concerned that this actually puts a heavy responsibility on us all, making choices which affect not only ourselves but all of mankind. Not that I could quite make out that link, that what we do translates across to making choices for everyone else, and Sartre then bases a lot of what follows on that premise. Of course, our choices affect other people in many ways but do not construct the world in the way implied by Sartre or at least he does not, in this particular text, make this connection strongly enough. Maybe he elaborates on this in more detail elsewhere, but not sufficiently in ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’.

Dress-down Fridays became something of an art form in 1970s Paris...

Coming from a mental health bent, as we do, there was also a lot of discussion about how informed the choices we make can be. Sartre is very clear on taking responsibility for those choices, preferring to minimise the effects of both Nature and Nurture on how those choices are made, but seems to assume a high degree of rationality on those choices. What about those with less capacity, the learning disabled, or those temporarily or permanently afflicted by mental health issues? Are they able to make such informed choices? The discussion centered around this as a limitation of most philosophies which originate from the intellectual classes who assume a similar level of capacity in everyone, which may not necessarily be the case. Are those with horrific experiences to be blamed for how they react to adversity? What do we make of the different levels of resilience which seem to affect the way in which people survive abuse or misfortune, is that entirely a choice that can be made rationally?

Having dealt with Sartre we moved onto less weighty matters. I had brought along a copy of McKeiver’s book on Cromwell’s Irish campaigns.

A New History of Cromwell's Irish Campaigns

Showing it to the others they quickly detected my problem with this book – the worst punctuation in a published book I have ever seen. Now there is a point to this, as Paul often pointed out the limitations of my own punctuation skills when he supervised my own thesis, even making me read the bible of grammar nazis ‘Eats Shoots and Leaves’ in an attempt to quell my fascination with the grocer’s apostrophe. But McKeiver takes it to a new level, with approximately three times as many commas in each sentence as are strictly necessary, making reading the text a chore. And when you do work out what he’s saying it’s mostly not worth the effort anyway, blatant apologism which probably means that Mr McKeiver will not be able to travel to the Republic of Ireland under his own name in the near future…

Inevitably a certain amount of beer was consumed, Dave and Paul being quite keen to stick to their favourite Harvest Pale. Preferring the darker bitters myself I enjoyed a couple of pints of Bargee bitter, and some unspeakable muck that Kevin bought me because he misheard what I asked for, probably a train was passing at the time…

Turns out that we are not the only ones who read the blog, so here’s special mention for Dave’s better half – Hi Jan!

Next month we’re reading Susan Sontag’s ‘On the Pain of Others’ a cheery little number on what we get out of seeing images of horror and pain, or ‘A corruscating sermon on how we picture suffering’ (New York Times) depending on your point of view.

After that we have to pick a whole new round of books, so each of us needs to have a thought about what to inflict on the others! The discipline of reading stuff you wouldn’t necessarily pick to read has, however, been an interesting challenge for us all, we agreed, so I think we’re looking forward to the next cycle of Lunar Society reading…

The Kite Runner

April’s gathering was again a triumvirate, Kevin again calling off due to work commitments, sadly. It was marked by our decision to sit outside as it was a lovely day, and I have to take responsibility for deciding that we should sit right by the railway platform a do a bit of train spotting at the same time. This decision was fine when made, but obviously became a little bit of a problem when the conversation was interrupted by passing trains, given that The Vic actually has a gate onto the platform of the station, so is very close. Remarkably Beeston station has its own Wiki page which can tell you more about this if you really want to know! The effect was to interrupt the conversation from time to time with the passing of interesting stuff like this:

East Midlands Trains HST

Well, interesting if you like trains …
Anyway The Kite Runner. Bit of a split in the group I think – I liked it, but opinions were a bit mixed from Dave and Paul. Dave’s not so keen on first person narratives, so that kind of put him off from the beginning. Paul thought that the way it is constructed rather telegraphed what was going to happen, that some of the devices were rather obvious and not subtle enough. He’d worked out ahead of time some of the key points of narrative, which I must confess I hadn’t seen quite so clearly, although there ARE times when it seems like the author is slightly labouring a point, and you then assume that this is going to be important later. This led onto a bit of a diversion as Dave and I briefly discussed one of our favourite films ‘Blade Runner’ – the original theatrical release has a rather heavy ‘film noir’ voiceover which explains things as you go along, which is rather irritating. Tt’s actually a very well constructed film, and I remember when I first saw it thinking “Yes, but I’ve just worked all that out – why are you telling me!”. The later Director’s Cut and the Final Cut manage without the voiceover and the film is much the better for it. In some ways The Kite Runner has a similar feel, that you could have worked it out with a few less hints. None of us have seen the film version, so can’t comment on that yet. On the other hand I felt that the description of Afghan culture was good, as well as the description of how Afghan communities in exile managed to retain their identity. As someone who has no knowledge of this particular culture, but an interest in cultural adaptation and how people live their lives I thought this was an interesting insight to a way of living which I will almost certainly never have a chance to experience.
Then Dave said something very profound that was drowned out by one of these:

East Midlands Trains Meridian

Fortunately it had gone by the time he was telling us about what he’d got up to in Mumbai (formerly Bombay, of course) when he was in the Marines many years ago.

Somehow we got back onto the subject of mental health again, probably in the course of talking about work and stuff. Paul was bemoaning the way in which there is a glut of experiential books and wondering if this was helpful. Some of course, are very good ways of gaining insights into the experience of different types of mental distress and suffering, but the question was more about whether there is just too much of this stuff out there now. We weren’t sure if this is just a publisher’s commercial imperative, if it sells well, then why not commission more of it – ‘If you liked x you’ll probably like y’ type thinking promoted by some websites.

This led onto some more thoughts about whether there is also a myth about the link between creativity and madness. Everyone has heard of the theory that there is a fine line between madness and genius, but does there ALWAYS have to be an element of unhinged-ness to spark creativity. Dave probably had the answer, but it was drowned out by another one of these…:

Another Meridian unit

Whatever it was he said led onto us finally thinking about the way in which creativity can also be stifled in mental health practice by the current mechanistic approach to treatment, led by the somewhat reductionist NICE guidelines which can promote the view that, for example, if you have OCD then you need 6 sessions of CBT and everything will be fine. Anyone who has experience of this will know that NICE guidelines can be a very useful summation of the best evidence-based work on particular ways, but seems to lose something of the hear and soul of caring approaches to mental distress. The pressure that practitioners are currently under to conform to this mechanistic approach was memorably described by Paul as ‘despicably feudal’, a turn of phrase which we all agreed deserved greater currency. But then we had all had a couple of pints by this time. For those of you with an interest in these things Dave stuck with the Harvest Pale, but I tried the Batemans XB, which went down very nicely, Paul converting to the Batemans half way during the evening just for the experience…
These were the most disruptive, being very long and even louder than the passenger trains…

EWS tankers...

Having sorted out the NHS we turned back, for a while, to think about where we were going with the group and wondered if we should widen it oiut a little to include others who had an interest in the sorts of things we were discussing, even making it an open invitation for people to turn up, knowing what book we were discussing. Not entirely sure where we are going with that, but happy to have others along 🙂

Not sure we’ll sit right by the platform again, but did notice one of these, as well as the East Midlands Trains stuff:

Cross Country Trains Super Sprinter (I think)

So, how do I know so much about trains, you ask? Simple really, Dad was a train driver on the old Southern Region, though he drove stuff much more like this, on the Victoria, Brighton and Hastings lines:

Southern Region Electric Multiple Unit

And I worked on Eastbourne Station as a porter for a few months between school and Uni. That might also explain the Eurostar picture at the top of the blog too, come to think of it. But I’m not really a train buff, not me, oh no…

And what are we reading for next month? Nothing less than Sartre’s ‘Existentialism and Humanism’. Did you guess yet who picked that one? Not me, but then just discussing fiction and not talking about big ideas may just be boring. After that (in June) it’s Paul’s pick, Susan Sontag’s ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, which the Daily Telegraph’s review said is: “A brilliant analysis of our numbed responses to images of horror’… Between now and our next meeting, on Wednesday 27th May, our task is to start thinking about the next round of books. Oh, and Kevin has to buy the beer next time for missing a meeting or two 🙂

The Myth of Sisyphus

So, with Kevin calling off at the last minute (having a paper to prepare for presentation at a conference in London the next day!) we were down to just three lunatics, Dave, Paul C and myself. Prior to leaving the house for the short drive to The Vic I confessed to my best beloved that I hadn’t actually managed to read the whole of the book, but had dipped in and out, and had at least read the essay at the back after which the book is named. She looked at the rather slim volume and asked how many pages? When I told her she remarked that, having had a month (actually more) to read it, I should have been able to manage three pages a day! This much is true, but I think Camus’ text, whilst very poetic in its prose, and, I realise, fundamental in its exposition of existentialist ideas, is a bit of a struggle at times…

Anyway a pint of Harvest Pale later I did admit my failings, and I think was forgiven for that. Paul and Dave were both quite keen both on the poetic exposition of ideas and the expression of absurdity which is fundamental to existentialism. Dave’s reflections were more on how his perceptions of the text had changed since he last read it many years ago. What seemed seminal and vital then seemed, to him, a little less vital now, and we reflected on how, perhaps, existentialist ideas have almost become mainstreamed into 20th century thought. What was fresh then necessarily loses some of the fresh paint smell, if not the colour…

Paul admitted to being quite a reader of Camus in his earlier days (not having had access to a television, it seems!), and was still eager to explore what Camus has contributed to how we think now. He also admitted to having read the text in French when he was about 20, which Dave and I thought was a bit excessive. However, having had to learn Greek for my theology degree many years ago, maybe I can understand the need to read in the original language. This slight diversion led us onto thinking about how Paul and I had both become interested in textual analysis not originally through an English Lit. route, but though biblical studies which stress the need for close textual analysis and understanding of how texts are created. I even got to use the word ‘redaktiongeschichte’ in conversation, which I never thought would happen again 🙂

Paul mentioned a new site which he has been involved in setting up, the Madness and Literature Network which is well worth a look if you are interested in literature and mental health. So far it has mostly reviews from the insightful Charley Baker but there is an opportunity to contribute. There’s also a conference coming up next year which looks exciting and worth checking out.

Next month’s book is The Kite Runner, a rather different text which, as far as I know has no direct link to mental health, though from my brief reading of the blurb may have a distant link through its focus on how identity is created and shaped by experiences – more when I’ve actually started reading it! We’ll be meeting on 22nd April, so may also be able to celebrate St George’s Day a little prematurely…

I have a cunning plan, my Lord…

So, after a bit of too-ing and fro-ing (not sure how you’re supposed to spell that particular saying!) we seem to have a plan:

Next meeting is Weds 25th March at which we will discuss, amongst other things, The Myth of Sisyphus by M. Albert Camus.

After that we will meet on Weds 29th April, being the last Wednesday of the month (and actually the fifth Wednesday), at which we will muse over The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

The other planned books are amongst the links, but it was pointed out by Dave that a couple of months notice would help in actually planning ahead and geting the necessary volumes and having time, amongst our busy lives, to actually read them. Particularly studious folks (or those with poor memories, like me!) might even take a few notes…

A couple of extra folks have been suggested to add to our numbers, and we’ll see how that goes, if they wish to join our little gang or not. For the record these might be Paul B and Mike.

Current folks are Paul (who will become Paul C if  Paul B joins), Dave, Kevin and myself, Laurence. If I post a comment I seem to show up as Partizanmeister, and one day I might reveal why that particular nom d’internet 🙂

I’m keeping the names fairly vague as this is an open blog, and some of our members are a little luddite and nervous about internet security. Strange really as they include people who’ve done serious research using internet resources for their data. Or maybe they know too much about identity theft and all that stuff…

Why no meeting in February? Some people are slow readers.

Actually Paul has a commitment of the international type that would prevent him from attending last Wednesday in Feb, so we’ve given him an extension for this one. Typical academics, huh, only just started and already they’re bending the rules!

Given the idea that this was a group of friends we don’t want to make the whole thing a chore, and an ‘organic’ approach to how the group develops is essential for its success I think.

Oh, and for fans of the Lunar Society concept, a picture of Erasmus Darwin:

and a link to the Wiki page about them

Laurence

In the beginning…

…was The Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Well, actually in the beginning was a conversation on a train with my friend Marie, who, like me, is a Nurse Consultant in child mental health. She was describing to me a new book club that had been started up by a group of colleagues at work. Marie was excited about the opportunities to chat, discuss books and generally socialise, all of which sounded great. But as she went on to describe the need for privacy, taking it in turns to go to other people’s houses, everyone brings wine or cakes etc I realised that what she was describing was an all-female group, which was doing things in a particularly female (even ‘girlie’) way.

So, as the idea appealed to me I wondered how blokes would do a book club. The essence was the same, a group of like-minded chaps who enjoyed a good conversation about matters of intellectual challenge, but probably wouldn’t think to provide doilies and angel cake. It occurred to me that the sort of people I’d like to have these conversations with all rather liked a drop of beer, but actually getting together for a beer often seemed like a bit of a self-indulgence, what with family commitments and all. In particular I hadn’t seen Paul and Kevin for a little while, at least not out of work time (and then not often, we don’t actually work together, just have our paths cross through mutual interests sometimes), so I proposed we meet up and discuss this concept.

Somewhere along the line Paul invited Dave along, which was fine because I’ve known Dave for years, even shared an office with him a long time ago whilst I was on a temporary secondment to the School of Nursing where he works. Even better was the fact that three or four was not really enough for a book club, so we needed an organic growth of like-minded souls who could stimulate enough difference to get some really good conversations going.

So, allowing for the need to accommodate our geographical spread across the city of Nottingham (and Derby in Paul’s case) we arranged a meet at the Victoria Hotel in Beeston, generally known as ‘The Vic’, a place familiar to us all. Actually when we got there it turned out that Paul hadn’t mentioned the book club idea to Dave at all, so it came as a small surprise to him, but he quickly came onboard with what is a splendid idea.

Now, as the originator of the idea I was surprised by how things turned out on a couple of fronts, but very pleasantly surprised. The first was that Paul had been reading a book about the ‘Lunar Society’ based in Derby which comprised some very enterprising gentlemen. Paul enthused about this group and how they had met and developed ideas in the eighteenth century, pimping carriages and taking daring balloon flights at the dawn of air travel as well as hotbedding ideas and philosophical concepts. It seemed a suitable inspiration for our more modest group…

I have to admit that I haven’t read the book yet, but as Paul is talking about talking an afternoon trip to enjoy the history and cafe society of Lichfield, which features heavily in the book apparently, I guess I’d better have a peek and try and catch up on the history of ideas within it.

The second surprise was that when we started talking about what books we might like to discuss, that the suggestions were not just fiction, but included some fairly heavy philosophical tomes. Well, not tomes as such, because we decided that meeting monthly was about right and we didn’t want anything too long, to avoid it becoming a chore. Nonetheless Camus and Sartre came up, making my initial pick of The Kite Runner seem a bit tame. But I want an excuse to read it, and this seemed as good a reason as any. The theme of an interest in mental health, and by implication the human condition, also seemed to shine through…

So, first pick is from Kevin, a little light reading, which we will meet on the last Wednesday of the month to discuss The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.