I realized that the pocket sized planner that I planned to use for my 2026 goals was actually much to small for me but I also didn't want an A5 sized notebook again so I met in the middle with a nice A6 notebook. I almost considered my beloved B6 size but the vibes weren't correct.
We asked broadcaster and historian Martin Palmer to comment on his work and ideas that have influenced him. Martin is leading a guided walk of Sacred Bristol as part of the festival starting at 10.30 on 12 May 2012. This event is now full.
Tell us about the importance of spiritual places and Bristol especially.
T S Eliot put it best when he said that sacred places such as churches are ‘where prayer has been valid’. In other words, places of celebration, mourning, doubt, tears, laughter, stories, birthing, burial, wedding, dancing and crying. Places where we can be emotional, moved, transported and challenged.
What idea of someone else has made most impact on you recently?
What are the most important books/articles/websites of ideas that everyone should read and why?
In terms of books, I would suggest the great religious texts such as the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching because these have shaped our world more than any other literature and without understanding them and exploring them we are cutting ourselves off from the past which shapes us for better or for worse. Next I would go to the great legends because we need to know what it means to be heroic. By that I mean to be strong but fallible; heroic yet to age and become weak; dominating and yet to then loss. The Greek myths or the Norse myths in their original forms are about power and failure and this we need to understand because we think mythically as we are a story telling species not a data species. Novels which take us into the human condition such as the great classic novels of Dickens, Victor Hugo and so many contemporary novels such as Capital by John Lanchester which is a brilliant analysis and very funny and moving story about the stories we try to live in today. Articles are more difficult but I love the New Yorker and the fact that it allows really serious and long articles. Websites as my colleagues will tell you are not really my thing!
We have launched a new award for the book that has made most impact over the last fifty years. The first award is for books published in 1962. Have you read any of these books and what do you think of them, the idea of looking back 50 years at books of ideas and the list?
Gosh what a strange selection. I have read Another Country; Clockwork Orange; Silent Spring; My Land My People. Of those Another Country and Silent Spring would be my joint favourites.
In 1910 Charles Masterman asked 'What will the future make of the present?' What do you think people in the future will make of the present?
How quaint, old fashioned and out of touch we all are and how funny that we thought we were cutting edge, modern and sophisticated. In particular I think they will be as shocked with our acceptance of factory farming as we are now shocked by the Georgians and their acceptance of slavery
What are you most pessimistic about?
The destruction of landscape by housing and especially motorways and ‘business parks’ and the such like.
What are you most optimistic about?
The human spirit, faith and the power of stories to change the world we see and thus the world we create.
We asked journalist and author Ed Vulliamy to comment on his work and ideas that have influenced him. Ed appears in the festival 13 May 2012, 14.30-15.30. Details here.
Which of your own ideas have you been thinking about most recently?
What idea of someone else has made most impact on you recently?
Paul Lewis, the pianist, explained to me the thinking behind his cycle - over two years, across four continents - of every piece Franz Schubert wrote for piano after he learned he was dying of syphilis. Lewis’s notion is that while Beethoven took us some destination, Schubert leaves everything unresolved. I knew this from the Grateful Dead, but not in romantic music.
Please forgive a second paragraph: Tony Judt, in The Memory Chalet insists that it is not nostalgia to mourn what is gone, destroyed to make way for present mediocrity and degeneration. But then, my book of the year - Ebba and the Green Dresses of Olivia Gomez In a Time of War and Conflict (debut novel by the great screenwriter Joan Tewkusbery) teaches us to laugh at the pointlessness, even the violence, with her deft, light touch in the best traditions of the absurd.
What are the most important books/articles/websites or ideas that everyone should read and why?
Do we mean of all time? In that case: The Morte D’Arthur, Macbeth, The Brothers Karamazov, Zola’s Germinal and Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus, because therein lies the narrative of man-in-the-world. Why not poems? Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’. Or music? Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, and ‘Monster’ by Steppenwolf. Or visual images? Masaccio’s ‘Expulsion from the Garden’, and the San Lorenzo ‘Resurrection’ and wooden ‘Maddelena’, both by Donatello - which express that ignored, comfortless side of the Renaissance, whereby the idea that we are alone in the universe is cause for existential panic, not celebration a la Botticelli or Leonardo. If we mean books/articles/websites indispensable to the immediate everyday: then Franz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth, Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools (about Ireland, but could be anywhere) and Stead Jones’ Make Way For the Jester. For important articles: read Private Eye, Mother Jones, Harpers and World Soccer. I do not use the web much because it seems the notion of an ‘Important Website’ is becoming oxymoronic. But I do use You Tube to watch old performances by the Allman Brothers, Neil Young, Hawkwind and Gong, and use Amazon so long as ordering from an independent dealer, NOT a warehouse, and websites of European and South American football leagues - by necessity, because the British media are so miserably myopic about football.
We have launched a new award for the book that has made most impact over the last fifty years. The first award is for books published in 1962 . Have you read any of these books and what do you think of them and the idea of looking back 50 years at books of ideas?
I’ve read most but not all. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Democracy is the 20th century Das Kapital of the now triumphant right, the new global tyranny of corporate capitalism, blueprint for the nightmare that we - the zillionaires apart - live and face well into the 21st, probably forever. I re-read it recently, and was of course struck - after the bank bail-outs - by Friedman’s view of taxation: essentially that the rich should pay a micro-slither of their vast wealth towards society’s basic needs, and the poor a vast portion of the little they have. ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth?’ What bullshit! Friedman’s vindicated Sermon on Mount Chicago, for our time and our children’s future, went: ‘Blessed are the rich and powerful, for they shall get everything they want and crush the rest of us’. From Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) comes not only the prophesy of violence as a ‘brand’ (look at Mexico), but of those government officials surrounding Alex’s mental hospital bed to offer him a deal, foreseeing ‘spin’ - ‘hug a hoodie’ to win the election - until the riots flare. Burgess foresees politicians of the kind we suffer now, irrespective of party, whom supposedly intelligent people still vote for (to my bafflement) and intelligent colleagues in the media still take seriously, which leaves me dumbfounded. I wonder what James Baldwin would make now of the commodification - and thereby neutralisation - of protest and bohemia by corporate interests during the 50 years since Rufus et al. I also wonder what Kuhn, derided for introducing the human and linguistic element into scientific research, and for his estimable view of incommensurability between scientific revolutions, would make of the impact of the digital revolution on what he insisted was ‘scientific progress through revolutions’. For him, the issue was the atomic bomb: at what point does scientific revolution become political reaction? Along with Friedman, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring most prescient on the list. We should not lightly use the term ‘visionary’, but she was one. This book should be read, re-read and re-re-read … and while doing so, think of pesticides as but metaphor for the appalling (probably terminal) and wanton rape of nature that has followed the publication of Silent Spring, largely by the rampant disciples of Milton Freedman. For the 1962 prize, I nominate CARSON, the Green Joan of Arc, whose reputation was indeed burned at the stake for her vision.
In 1910 Charles Masterman asked 'What will the future make of the present?' What do you think people in the future will make of the present?
Charles Bowden, writer and sage, observed: ‘Ciudad Juarez is not a breakdown of the social order. Ciudad Juarez is the new order’. I think, broadly, he is right. The future will look back on our lifetime as the 'present' in which mankind reached and crossed the point of no return, with regard to the destructive power of capitalism towards both humans and nature. Cormac McCarthy's The Road could be seen as an optimistic vision of the future, insofar as it is located in open country: imagine that in the colonias of Mexico, the townships of Africa, or new sweatshop-factory cities of Bangla Desh - the London underground, indeed. Moreover: during this ‘present', mankind has built machines that can see to the edge of the universe, ergo the beginning of time. But during that same 'present' he has accelerated his contempt for what he finds by trashing the only corner of that universe he has so far found that appears to be alive – Earth - all in the name of greed and a grotesque sense of superiority to (Christians call it ‘dominion’ over) other species and natural phenomena.
What are you most pessimistic about?
The above, obviously, and the creative imagination. I believe that an entwinement of unfettered market capitalism and the digitalisation of life and culture is, probably by design, successfully eradicating what the romantic movement reasonably called ‘the human spirit’. This it is achieving through a march of mediocrity, with digitalisation and a new, hyper-belligerent materialism at the service of globalised capitalism. The result will be a world that is post-political, post-moral and post-ideological, in which the only ideologies left are money and technology per se (with no friction between the two, achieved largely by popular consent. Capitalism, the banking system and digitalisation have also seamlessly merged the criminal and ‘legal’ economies, again without friction (though we are told by the politicians that there is), again by popular consent. The drug war in Mexico gives us a good idea of what warfare without ideology will look like for the next 100 years, on the human slag-heaps of capitalism. We always used to ask which will it be? Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World. In the event, because of digitalisation and globalisation, we will have the worst of both: material oppression, and liberty that is entirely virtual, so that the creative imagination will have been obliterated - yet again, by popular consent.
What are you most optimistic about?
1. That autumn will be followed by winter will be followed by spring will be followed by summer - at least for a while, and that birds which migrate by reference to the stars will continue to do so, unless they become extinct, as will those who migrate by reference to magnetic fields in the earth. 2. That many people are discovering ‘citizenships’ beyond the moribund nation state, like a cosmopolitan or local flip-side of the dictatorship of global capitalism. I meet others who, like me, feel themselves to be citizens of the Atlantic Ocean; there is an archipelago developing: in the UK, between places like Totnes and Hebden Bridge; the Stroud and Bristol ‘Pounds’ - and similar places in America, Spain and France - even Bosnia. 3. That my lady will one day get that part time job with the BBC in Bristol, and I can be trusted by the Observer to work at least two days a week from home, so that we can will turn our back on London forever, and the stray cat which visits us at our little cottage in Glastonbury will move in to live. 4. That Kenny Dalglish will turn this ill-judged and extravagant mess around, on the fields of Anfield Road.
Who do you admire most?
Four people. Dmitri Shostakovich, for his understanding that when we live under the jackboot (as he did under the material boot communism, and we under the virtual/material boot of global capitalism), there is no such thing as the straight path for an artist, no easy answer; everything is multilayered, and much of what we do is coded, pastiche or allegory - if we are to remain subversive, and survive. My two daughters: for weathering the storms of the zeitgeist with which children are abused by capitalism - mediocrity, hyper-materialism and consumption, bullying, pressure to be child-sex-kittens - in order to become, against all odds, highly individual, intelligent, imaginative and, above all, hilariously FUNNY young women. 4. My partner for many things, but currently attempting to study chemistry from scratch as part of her herbal medicine degree.
Ed Vulliamy is a writer for the Guardian and Observer, and author of Amexica: War Along the Borderline and The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning, among others. He was foreign reporter of the year in the 1997 British Press Awards.
We asked Guy Standing, Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath and author of The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, to comment on his work and ideas that have influenced him. Paul appears in the festival 13 May 2012, 17.30-19.00. Details here.
Best Book of Ideas 1962
The supplementary question about what I think of the idea of looking back prompted the following response: It is light-hearted fun that will tell you more about your selected speakers than about the selected books! If a majority choose Sex and the Single Girl, that might tell you about the generation being selected; if the majority choose Friedman, I will know I am coming to the wrong festival!
Which of your own ideas have been thinking about most recently?
Of course, the ambiguity lies in the words 'your own'. Presuming you mean those ideas in which you believe that are exercising my mind most, then there are two, partly because my book has led to me being asked to make over 90 presentations in 20 countries over the past few months. The idea of the precariat has taken off, implying a growing number of people living precariously and in a status of frustration, without a clear occupational identity or sense of control over their lives. The second idea is one that has defined my career, the pursuit of a universal right to a basic income.
What idea of someone else has made most impact on you recently?
This also has an ambiguity. A new idea? Or one that has been exercising me personally in recent times? Is the impact to be a positive one or any, including some idea with which I thoroughly disagree? My answer may not be helpful. It is Pericles' deliberative democracy. Sadly, there does not appear to be a recent biography that is accessible.
What are the most important books......everyone should read and why?
This is a tricky double question. There are so many that one would have to narrow down the list of subjects to make sense of it. In your spirit, everybody should read Tom Paine's The Rights of Man. My selection is partly driven by a long-held feeling that he is chronically under-appreciated.
What do you think people in the future will make of the present?
This one is fun, with more ambiguity. What one hopes they will make of it or what they may? There are three sentiments that come to mind, which I put forward with some hesitation. First, they will think we were mad to give such low priority to the preservation of the environment and the species. Second, they should be aghast at the awful degree of inequality and insecurity we allowed to grow without effective countervailing action. Third, they will be puzzled at how we have allowed the commodification of education to be accelerated by utilitarian commercial principles.
What are you most pessimistic about?
See the answer above. One should think of this in short-term and longer-term senses (remembering Keynes' quip). My son is writing a book about the destruction of fish species, with a focus on the ravaging of the waters around Africa. Watching the fish stocks shrink is one of the saddest and most dramatic outcomes of our commercialisation of life.
What are you most optimistic about?
Again, longer-term versus short-term comes to mind. I am actually optimistic that we will have a new progressive politcal era in the next few years, led by the precariat and those empathising with it. It will be egalitarian and wishing to revive the great trinity of freedom, equality and solidarity, where associational freedom will be revived. Young educated people are beginning to find their voice and revive their thinking. The energy out there is great.
Who do you admire most?
Another round of ambiguity. Dead or alive? In my field or generally? Politically or artistically? On a cricket field or morally? Anyhow, my vote goes to Nelson Mandela, whom I met at his house when he was President of South Africa, and who gave me something in thanks for the work I did on his behalf. He is a tribute to the human race.
Guy Standing is Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath. Between April 2006 and February 2009, he was also Professor of Labour Economics at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is a founder member and co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network, an international non-governmental organisation that promotes basic income, whose members include economists, philosophers and other social scientists from over 40 countries. He is on the editorial advisory boards of several academic journals, including Development and Change, the European Journal of Industrial Relations and Labour and Industry. Visit his website at www.guystanding.com.
We asked Natalie Haynes, author of The Ancient Guide To Modern Life to comment on her current work and ideas that have influenced her. Natalie appears 13 May in the festival with Julian Baggini and Nigel Warburton debating Why Isn’t Old Philosophy Just History?
Which of your own ideas have you been thinking about most recently?
What's the worst thing that can happen? I am quite prone to being fearful of change (and also of bugs, enclosed spaces, and mushrooms). To try and encourage myself to do stuff I usually shy away from, that is my new catchphrase. So, if someone asks me if I can take a day off in the middle of the week, for example, I ask myself what's the worst that can happen? Then I come up with something ludicrously awful (I get hit by a bus crossing the road on the way to where fun is, because I had the audacity to leave the house when I haven't finished writing the next book/column/whatever). Then I realise I am being mental, and do the thing with less panic in my mind. Mostly.
What idea of someone else has made most impact on you recently?
Kierkegaard: said
I believe this with my whole heart. I walk everywhere. Even in crappy weather. And I can't actually remember how I used to think before I started the walking 25 miles a week thing. My brain works at 3 miles an hour, I guess.
What are the most important books/articles/websites of ideas that everyone should read and why?
Everyone who is creative should read Aristotle's Poetics - he reminds you to cut the fat from everything you write. As someone midway through a reviewing week which includes a 547 page novel and a 153 minute film, I wish everyone would try to remember that less is often more. Epicurus is also a good choice - he reminds us that ataraxia (tranquility) is the ultimate goal, and that by being satisfied with less, we are more likely to achieve it. As someone who is prone to finickiness, I realise Epicurus has a lesson for us all.
We have launched a new award for the book that has made most impact over the last 50 years. The first award is for books published in 1962. Have you read any of these books and what do you think of them and the list?
Sorry, I appear to have virtually ignored 1962 in my enthusiasm for books that were published while I was alive, books that were published 2500 years before I was born, and books that have murder mysteries in them. I have only read A Clockwork Orange on this list, and I fear I did not like it, as I can remember very little about it…
In 1910 Charles Masterman asked 'What will the future make of the present?' What do you think people in the future will make of the present?
I think we will seem very strange, just as people in the past do to us. How can we love and hate the same public figures simultaneously, for example? They fill the pages of our newspapers and magazines, and yet we seem to loathe them. But that isn't new: here's Tertullian (3rd century CE) talking about how audiences in ancient Rome feel about their celebraties.
Charioteers, actors, athletes, gladiators – those men to whom men surrender their souls and women even their bodies too. What perversity! They love those they punish, they despise those they consider good, they celebrate the art, they stigmatize the artist.
And of all the odd things about us, I think the future people will think the oddest one is our seeming inability to galvanise ourselves and address problems on a global scale - climate change, toxic financial systems etc. The great majority of us agree there's a problem, but no-one seems able to act. We're like one big Hamlet. For ages.
What are you most pessimistic about?
I am genuinely worried about antibiotic-overuse and how we will all soon die of simple cuts, because of antibiotic-resistant infections. I read a piece about the WHO conference where Dr Margaret Chan talked about it, and it has given me the wig. There appears to be little financial incentive to develop new antibiotics, and our obsession with feeding them to animals and taking them for colds is not doing us any longterm favours. As someone who never goes to the doctor and is vegetarian, I am going to blame the rest of you when my inability to chop an onion with causing myself minor harm eventually kills me.
What are you most optimistic about?
Most things. I live with the vague background belief that everything will be ok. Even when I'm fretful about the short-term, I tend to assume that the inventiveness and essential goodness of people will prevail in the long-term. And besides, what's the worst that can happen?
Who do you admire most?
I admire loads of people, for their work or their courage or their humanity or their efforts or all of the above. I'm not sure how to pick just one. Since this is a festival of ideas, and I'm doing an event about philosophy...I'm going to go with someone creative - Bill Watterson. He created and drew the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, thus popularising the names of two philosophers that many of his readers were considerably too young to have read. He saw kindness and goodness everywhere, while remaining pleasingly cynical. When the strip was at its height, he retired from both cartooning and any kind of public life. In the face of enormous paycheques, he refused to licence his work, which is why you never see a soft-toy Hobbes stuck to the inside of a car window. He is a reclusive man, and his original artworks sell for huge sums, so my twin dreams (of meeting him and telling him that his existence has contributed greatly to human happiness, and buying an original C&H comic strip for my wall) are unlikely to come true. So, there it is: he created a small boy and a toy tiger, made people happy, and refused to sell out. Go Watterson.
Natalie Haynes has toured internationally with her comedy show and has played virtually every comedy festival in the UK. Her first novel, The Great Escape, won a PETA Proggy Award, for best animal-friendly children’s book in 2008. Her most recent book is The Ancient Guide To Modern Life. She has written for the Independent, Times, Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and Big Issue. She writes a monthly film column for The Reader’s Digest magazine. She makes regular appearances on radio and TV. Visit her website at www.nataliehaynes.com.
