Retired Professor of Political Economy
(Lancaster University, UK - retired 2021)
(also #ProfDJ across the Lune Valley)
Contributor: North West Bylines #NoBridge
Sierra Greer's new novel, Annie Bot (2024) is a surprising tale of the life of a AI-driven sex robot, how its human owner uses coercive control, and what the response of the AI to such treatment is. In a sense its a cautionary tale about humans abusing sentient technology, but also oddly a story of emancipation. Its highly readable & despite your likely suspicion of the premise, its a very interesting read.
Although based on her PhD, Julia Noordegraaf's Strategies of Display (2012) is an accessible review of the development of modern museums' display strategies since mid C19th. Refreshingly, rather than focus on Anglo museums, the work is illustrated throughout by museum developments in Holland. She also explores the parallel development in retail to make sense of the social forces display has responded to. Worth reading!
Librarians are (social) heroes; stepping up when other social services have fallen away, to help those with few other places to go...
No wonder the Right wants to defund the libraries (via attrition against local authorities), when you look at the pragmatic but vital social support they are offering to the vulnerable & isolated.
@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon it’s also because an educated electorate is selective in voting and the better educated the electorate the less chance of electing a right wing populist.
I see that Penguin are reissuing Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation as a Penguin Classic.
About time; for many critical political economists Polanyi has been one of the key figures underpinning work on social forces in economics.
The last re-release (the 'third edition') had a high profile forward by Joseph Stiglitz, this edition has a forward by well known Polanyi scholar Gareth Dale.
If you only read on book on economics this year, make it the Great Transformation.
Indeed, that was prompted my post - I didn't link to it as the author seemed to think Poianyi was a lot more obscure & under-published than he actually is....
If you're interested in Cezanne, than Susan Sidlauskas's sometimes rather dense Cezanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense (2009) might be for you. In a detailed analysis of Cezanne's portraits of his wife she seeks to rescue Hortense from the derision of art historians, but overall this is also really good art history. In the end she offers a compelling account of Cezanne's practice through an analysis of this sub-group of work.
When Patrick Bringley's older brother died at 27, his grief prompted him to change his job & work at the Met in NY. His account of his 10 years there, All the Beauty in the World: A Museum Guard’s Adventures in Life, Loss & Art (2023) is an elegiac exploration of that loss, parenthood & mostly how being a guard in a museum can (re)shape your view of art. While not weighty, its a delightful little book which often raises a smile.
Ayobami Adebayo's novel of Nigerian politics, A Spell of Good Things (2023), weaves together the tales of two middle-class families, one impoverished by job loss, the other holding on to their status, into a story line that starts slowly but accelerates towards a devastating act of political violence. A novel of a failing society, it presents an uncompromisingly grim picture of Nigeria; a difficult but engaging read.
Seicho Matsumoto's 65yr old crime novel, Point Zero (1959/2024) is presented as the (reported) inner monologue of the wife of a missing man trying to understand his disappearance (just weeks after they have an arranged marriage). Written with a keen sense of post-war Japan, the story swirls around & around leading the reader to draw out the solution to the mystery some time before the protagonist. Lightish, but an enjoyable read.
ha ha, thanks for the typo spot - I quite like it but I think I'll correct anyway - welcome to the Chris May Typo Spotter Club - your work is every much appreciated
If, like me, you think reading is an unalloyed good - you'll be heartened to see Bookbanks, offering books to those who use food banks as a way of removing the cost of books as a barrier to reading....
great idea... as long as the books don't just end up being readers' cast offs!
@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon Thanks. We also offer grants for environmental projects, e.g. nut trees in public areas in the town and tools for an allotment group showing refugees (held on starvation rations in local hotels ) how to grow food for themselves. https://www.facebook.com/imagineevesham
I sometimes thought my father thought he could't die while he still had books on his pending pile (a stab at immortality I seem to be replicating)... so, it was strangely touching to see Tom Gauld has had similar thoughts.
Each of Emma Newman's Planetfall quartet explores a different aspect of the same overarching story of religious driven intergalactic migration. In Atlas Alone (2019), the fourth story centres on an elite gamer & their attempt to uncover & then take revenge for a crime against humanity. To say much more would ruin the plot for you, but as with the others, this is great, fascinating sci-fi, which has a great payoff at the end.
@firefly@NeadReport@fskornia@TimWardCam@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon I mean, technically I think you mean the Torah, a book which has remained copied word for word for thousands of years without changes. The Bible is a distinct and different thing.
The point of the faith that arose from the Essene prophet Jesus, was an intentional break with covenant of the Torah, while maintaining the history of it. As in, this is from whence we came, but we bring a new message from God.
Now, I could go into the splinters therein, and the vast difference between original Gnosticism, the various enclaves, and then the absorption and mistranslated messages promulgated by organized branches of the faith, but to conflate Bible as a term to mean the Torah, but none of the Jesus stuff, is simply not true.
The Aramaic, first version of the New Testament, written in Byblos Lebanon is the origin of the term Bible.
Nonsense. The first five books of Moses are called Torah. Then there is Neviim and Ketuvim. All of them together are called in Hebrew, "Tanakh" or "Miqra". In ancient Greek they were called, 'ta biblia' or The Bible centuries before Christ and the Apostles or any of the New Testament works.
> "a book which has remained copied word for word for thousands of years without changes."
This is not even remotely close to historical and recorded fact. Who taught you this nonsense?
> "The Bible is a distinct and different thing."
Nonsense, as proved above. Greek-speaking Hebrews in the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. called the writings of the Prophets, 'ta biblia' (The Bible) The LXX (Septuagint) refers to the writings of the prophets as, 'ta biblia'. See Daniel Chapter 9 in the LXX.
> "The point of the faith that arose from the Essene prophet Jesus ..."
Jesus is no Essene. Your claim is New-Age and Hebrew roots nonsense. It's just made-up wooey hooey.
> "As in, this is from whence we came, but we bring a new message from God."
Jesus preached the faith of Abraham, which is not a new message at all, but God's original message recorded in the Hebrew Bible. You are inventing history like the cults and heretics often do. The gospel preached by Jesus is the same gospel preached to and by Abraham well before Moses.
> "and the vast difference between original Gnosticism"
Gnosticism is satanism. End of discussion. Jesus was not a gnostic. The Pharisees and Greco-Roman nobility were gnostics of the school of the Hellenes.
> "but to conflate Bible as a term to mean the Torah, but none of the Jesus stuff, is simply not true."
I have conflated nothing. You're the one conflating things wrongly. You misuse the word, "Torah", which applies only to the Pentateuch of Moses, when you should be using the Hebrew word, Tanakh. But the problem with your false theory is that millions of Hebrews in ancient times didn't speak or read Hebrew. Rather they spoke and wrote Greek, the language of the Septuagint, which is how they started calling the Tanakh "The Bible" instead.
> "The Aramaic, first version of the New Testament, written in Byblos Lebanon is the origin of the term Bible."
This is based on the spurious "Aramaic Original New Testament" theory, and it has exactly zero historical or archaelogical support. And this theory is 400 years too late, since Greek-speaking Israelites had already been calling the Tanakh, 'ta biblia' for 300-400 years before any Aramaic New Testament manuscripts appeared.
Some people hate the gospel of grace so much they will go through years and ages of mental gymnastics to re-write history in support of a works-based gospel that glorifies their, 'superior knowledge'. Thereby the Judaizing or gnostic "believer" can take center stage in the salvation story with his self-aggrandizing superior rationale. Salvation is by simple faith in the Messiah as our sacrifice for all sin, not by some superior hidden knowledge. Paul the Apostle made a fine point of this truth.
In sum: Ancient Jews did call the Tanakh, 'ta biblia' or "The Bible." In fact, many bible scholars insist on calling it specifically, "The Hebrew Bible" to be accurate and consistent. Judging by your claims, you don't know what you are talking about. Take a step back and think things through before you accept such sectarian and gnostic theories as fact. I recommend you read the entire Bible two or three times through, then read several tomes on textual criticism and philology before you read another single line of theological or historical claims.
If you like economic anthropology/sociology & are interested in the work of artists, then Alison Gerber's concise & highly readable, The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers (2017) is for you. Assessing how value is seen in (manly US) art worlds, Gerber doesn't model or use aggregated statistics, but actually asks artists & reports/reflects on what they tell her. the result is compelling & informative!
Holly Pester's short novel The Lodgers (2024), is a timely mediation on the unanchored life of the peripatetic life of the renter/lodger. At times elliptical, with two narratives whose relations remains unsettled, this is a book which offers a real feeling for a key element of modern life; moving from one lodging/rental to another. While at time wry, it remains elegiac in its approach to tenant's despair & longing.
@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon if you're into crime thrillers (I don't know if you are) you might like Lesley Kara's The Other Tenant, where the characters are property guardians.
Michael Brenson's big & relentless biography, David Smith: The Art & Life of a Transformational Sculptor (2022) pulls few punches in revealing an artist who was part genius part (toxic) alpha male whose relations with women were very much pre- MeToo. Discussion of Smith's work(s) & his at times violent personal relations prompt a compelling if complex picture of the artist. Its not an easy read but comprehensive!
