Photo (cc) chotda

A book per week for a year. Yeah maybe I’ll give that a go some time, when I have some time maybe. I had a whole bundle of excuses at the start of 2010, most of them still valid, but none of them any longer convincing. So four months into the year I’m still just about on track. Here’s the listing.

1. News from Nowehere, William Morris (1890). What if instead of turning right during the first half of the 20th century, the UK turned left. Rid itself of the monarchy and all forms of government and ascended into a communitarian utopia. Morris puts down the scissors and safety glue and answers just that question.
2. The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien (1940). Alice in Wonderland with whiskey, porter and bicycles. Genius.
3. The European Union as a Leader in International Climate Change Politics, R. K. W. Wurzel and James Connelly (2011). Okay, back to reality with a bang. If the EU can be described as reality. This is a book I have wanted for the past year, the ultimate primer on what the governance institutions of the EU are doing about climate change, along with chapters on major nation state players such as Germany, the UK and France.
4. Mao II, Don De Lillo (1991). If you’ve read nothing by De Lillo read Underworld. If you’ve read Underworld go get Mao II. Typically “Great American” in its vantage point, De Lillo takes two of that continent’s most enigmatic artists, J.D. Salinger and Andy Warhol, and uses them as inspiration for a contemplation on individualisation and the crowd at the end of the 20th century.
5. The Story of a Hedgeschool Master. Eugene Watters (1971). Educating catholic children was illegal in 17th century Ireland. This didn’t stop the emergence an estimated 8,000 hedgeschools, which are exactly what they sound like. This is the story of such a school and its European trained teacher.
6. How to Win Campaigns, 2nd ed, Chris Rose (2010). Chris did a lot of work with us at 10:10. You can take or leave his approach to value based campaigning, but there’s lots here of value to campaigners or indeed anyone working with public opinion.
7. Chasing the Flame, Sergio Vieira de Mello, Samantha Power (2008). Speaking of change, Sergio was a guy who made a difference in a big way. Total hero who one suspects was not your typical UN aid worker.
8. Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. David McKay (2009). Solid numbers on where the UK’s energy demand is and where that demand could be met if we were to go all renewable.
9. State of Fear, Michael Crichton (2004). A slightly less believable thriller than Jurassic Park.
10. White Shroud. Poems 1980 – 1985. Allen Ginsberg (1986).
11. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1913) James Joyce. “If only we knew”, the refrain repeated across Ireland as Catholic abuses were uncovered throughout the Eighties and Nineties. Seems like Joyce was well aware of the huge amount of power
12. Poke the Box. Seth Godin (2011). Godin sold this e-book for $1 if you bought before the release date. Great model, great value and one important lesson; your idea is nothing until it ships.
13. The Net Delusion. How not to Liberate the World. Evgeny Morozov (2010). Morozov urges his readers away from a reductionist viewpoint that would give Twitter and Facebook credit for Arab revolutions this Spring. But in doing so he’s guilty of employing plenty of technocratic reductionist arguments himself. Which is a shame, because this is one of those books that could truly be labeled “important”.
14. Communication Power. Castells (2009). A great follow-up to Morozov and one which illustrates just how important a role our communications systems play in shaping and aggregating power in society. To change society we need to understand it, this book’s going to help.
15. Memoirs of a Minor Public Figure. Des Wilson (2011). Three reasons to read: 1) Wilson was one of the originators of the single issue campaign in the mid-sixties. 2) Wilson created and saw success on a huge number of campaigns over four decades. 3) Oh, and he was also a key protagonist in the SDP, Liberal Party merger. He doesn’t often admit fault but provides interesting background nevertheless.
16. The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing (1962) currently reading…

I’ll update this as I go through the year. And I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on the books themselves. So if you have an opinion, or a suggested book, let me know.

Photo (cc) Laura Appleyard.

From  today’s Guardian. Some things don’t change.

“My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.”

For Joyce, “paralysis” represents a moral failure resulting in the inability to live meaningfully. It appears on the first page of the first story, “Two Sisters”, in a sentence that offers a key to the whole book:

“Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word Simony in the Catechism.”

From A brief survey of the short story part 32: James Joyce | Books | guardian.co.uk.

‘Don’t buy clothes for six months. Then you can buy some of mine.’

It’s always refreshing, but all too rare to hear an A-List fashion icon say something sensible, and be anyway self aware, but Vivienne manages to just about pull it off. Brilliant.

The 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) kicks off in Denmark’s capital city tomorrow. And I won’t be there. Until Friday. Here’s some background as to why keepingitfake.com will be in town, and what we’ll be doing when we’re there. And before you ask, yes, we’re going by train.

There will be 15,000 delegates at the ‘Glastonbury of Climate Change’¹ with a straightforward mission: save the world from ourselves. Well that’s the idea. No doubt there will be plenty of coal lobbyists, developed world special interest groups and lots of other nefarious characters there trying to spoil everyone’s fun. But let’s pay attention to the good stuff.

First off the KFI itinerary. We get into town late on Friday and we’ll be staying across the water in Malmö*. Mornings we’re going to be pounding Copenhagen pavement with @danielvockins filming segments for The Stupid Show, a daily internet TV show brought to you the Age of Stupid team. More details on that later in the week. Providing we manage to stay out of harm’s way there’s a tonne of things to be doing in the afternoon. We’re still trying to sort accreditation for the Bella Centre where the actual negotiations are taking place. TckTckTck are running a bloggers/media centre nearby in any event so that’s going to be HQ for the week.We’ve also promised a colleague a short video for kids. That scares us more than the toughest Danish police tactics (YouTube).

KlimaForum is the global civil society fringe event running in parallel to the main event. It will seek to influence proceedings across town. Whether it does or not it has some big hitters in attendance and be a focal point for non-delegates in town for the 12 days. Timetable here.

It’s impossible to say at this stage what the day-to-day mix is going to be at the Bella Centre. We know the world leaders fly into town on the 18th but what, if anything, they’ll have to talk about remains unclear. Provisional negotiating are supposed to be finished by the 15th but we’re a long way from getting a short form document ready for high level debate so that’s unlikely.

Future:Media:Change lists four media hubs on which you can follow all the action. As if Keepfakingit.com won’t be able to keep up.

Special shoutout to oneclimate.net. The full social/multi media experience.

Here’s some background on the science which should in theory be supporting the whole thing. If it wasn’t for clowns like this.

Lots of talk about numbers. Remember folks, some of these countries will try to confuse the issue by comparing carbon apples with carbon intensity oranges. So if you want to see how 17% reductions against 2005 levels compares with 20% on 1990 check out this great tool from Sandbag. And if you don’t know your IEA from Perfluorocarbons check this out.

Nick Stern, when asked last week by Dr. Mary Dengler what the two greatest barriers to a real deal at COP15 were, replied succinctly; trust and finances (video here). Let’s see how that pans out. He’s probably right.

With that in mind Nelson Mandela and his crew of oldies but goldies, the Elders, have sent letters to 192 heads of state laying down some serious smack. The Elders team includes Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Gro Brundtland, Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson [big KFI shoutout and RESPECT to Mrs. R!!!]. Here’s the press release.

Lots of art and culture going on over the 12 days. Rethink Climate is doing a great job of pulling a lot of it together, short review with with photos here.  Arts4COP15, put together by the RSA’s Arts and Ecology team, is also doing a great job. As mentioned right here a couple of weeks ago, Ghost Forest will be in town. With any luck keepfakingit will get in front of all of this stuff and blog it up.

The scale of Twitter activity coming from the Bella Centre and environs is going to be truly epic. Here’s some a nice handy list I’ve put together. If you want to be added to this list gimme a shout.

Okay, that’s the brief overview. We’ll be back during the week with more detail on the negotiations themselves.

* Big shout out to Billy and Cecilia who are opening their home to KFI for the duration. Thanks!

¹ Anonymous RHUL Lecturer

I was at Angela Porter’s Ghost Forest installation outside of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square this afternoon. Brilliant. The 10 Ghanaian tree stumps really made an impression, not easy in such a space. Here are some photos and I’ve copied the official blurb below. Show’s over now but it moves on to Copenhagen in time for COP-15.

[BTW, hit the full screen on the bottom of the player below, they look a lot better that way.]

Ghost Forest is an original and ambitious project by Angela Palmer that seeks to raise public awareness of the connections between deforestation and climate change. It involves taking a series of 10 rainforest tree stumps, most with their buttress roots still attached, from a regulated, commercially logged tropical rainforest in Ghana.

The tree stumps will be presented as a “ghost forest” firstly in Trafalgar Square in London, and then in Copenhagen to coincide with the UN Cop15 Climate Change Conference in December.

Ghost Forest is a carbon neutral project – following input from Climate Care, Ghost Forest’s carbon footprint will be offset, see here for details.

Ghost Forest Art Installation – Trafalgar Square, London, U.K. 16-22 November 2009

Ghost Forest Art Installation – Thorvaldsens Plads, Copenhagen, Denmark 7-18 December 2009

I learned to knit last weekend at the Electric Picnic festival in the Irish midlands. The wool used was made from tents discarded at the end of the festival the year before. Check it out:

Or view the set here on Flickr.

Big shout out to Re-Dress and Cultivate who made it happen.

Not sure what A-List artists and pro-wrestling has to do with bears. Here’s what the WWF website says:

For over three decades, our army of sturdy panda collecting boxes stood outside shops and offices around the UK, but were all recalled in 2007.

Rather than recycling the lot, we got together with specialist curators Artwise and challenged top British artists to reincarnate them as innovative and memorable artworks, to communicate the importance of our work in a truly inspirational way.

“Back to nature” is not a trip to the country-side. It’s a total realignment of humanity’s place in the encyclopedia. That realignment, or rather that correction of a categorization that should never have happened in the first place is one of the core treatises of the Dark Mountain Manifesto. And within the manifesto is as strong a call to action for writers, musicians and artists of all hues, to embrace a new thinking of our place in the world as Keepfakingit has seen for an awful long time.

The Manifesto is the work of Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth. My involvement in the project is slight. I answered a crowd-sourcing call for funding over Twitter and donated a small amount towards the publication of the first edition. The attraction at the off was simple. Here’s a project that seeks to address climate change through a wholly fresh literary/artistic prism. At least that’s what the pitch said, and that was good enough for me and my PayPal account.

The meat and potatoes of the slim hand-stitched 18 page tome as I see them:

Thesis 1.
Civilization is built on little more than beliefs. As beliefs fail, so too does civilization.

Thesis 2.
We are not apart from nature, from the world around us.

Climate change is the ultimate clash of civilization versus nature. Things won’t be fine. We’re not even sure if we want it to be fine.

Thesis 3.
What if we looked down? We believe it’s time to look down.

Thesis 4.
Artists are the only ones who can uncouple mankind’s ego from the blinkered view that separates us from nature.

Thesis 5.
Ecocide demands a response.

So Hine and Kingsnorth clearly aren’t overly concerned with telling us to change the lightbulbs or put a brick in the loo. In fact they don’t give a shit about that sort of middle-class-doing-my-bit-to-waylay-my-guilt approach and I’ll warrant the organic field-reared Spring lamb on offer down at Waitrose isn’t top of their shopping list either.

And why should they be. The time for small actions is over. This Manifesto is about the big stuff. The fragility of our social fabric and how that fabric, due to the wear and tear being inflicted upon in by climate change is about to rip right in half.

Bertrand Russell and Joseph Conrad are both quoted on the way to the assertion that

Our civilisation is built on little more than the belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.

And it is in the belief that mankind is apart from nature that the problem starts.

The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won.

So it is nature that will suffer the ravages of climate change. But as luck would have it we (humanity) are outside of that nature. Yes Katrina and her bad tempered companions will occasionally give us a good going over but we’ll come up with solutions, “solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius.”

In the Guardian last week George Monbiot debated Kingsnorth on the merits of this viewpoint. It’s a debate that every climate change activist should read, one which should, if only for a moment, make all of us who consider ourselves part of this movement question what it is we’re trying to prevent. Is it nature’s destruction, the destruction of our own civilisation or something else entirely? And isn’t even the term “nature’s destruction” rather missing the point if we are after all joined at the hip.

During the debate Monbiot accuses Kingsnorth of actively longing for the other Eden, the post-fabric-ripped Mad Max visage. After having re-read the Manifesto it is more apparent that Kingsnorth does indeed seem to come out in favour of the nuclear option. But what of it? As a society, a civilization, surely we must once in a while look in the mirror in an effort to see of what sort of stuff we’re made. And if we don’t like what we see what is wrong with having the balls to put another vision on the table.

And this is a crucial point. Those ascending the Dark Mountain would have us believe we’re scared even to do that, to imagine. In their words scared to “look down”. And scared the economists, the priests of mono-theism and the politicians should be because this reflection offers them only an end to their way of thinking, doing and controlling.

So to the Manifesto’s ultimate cry. Our “leaders” won’t allow us to look at ourselves with a clear gaze. They won’t allow us examine ourselves and build that metaphysical bridge back to nature, the logical response to a diagnosis that is writ large by the Manifesto.
But ecocide demands a response they proclaim.

That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilization itself? What gallery mounts an exhibitions equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord?

We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.

[Checklisted as Uncivilised artists before their time are Robinson Jeffers, John Berger, Alan Garner, Wendell Berry, WS Merwin, Mary Oliver and of course, Cormac McCarthy]

This is the call for Uncivilised Art. Art that offers a non-human perspective. Being literary types Hine and Kingsnorth’s concern is writing in particular. They insist that this Uncivilised writing

comes not, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation, but from somewhere on its wilder fringes… from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we’re not keen on hearing.

Ah, so these guys are hippies in disguise, looking for this century’s Watership Down, or Call of the Wild. That’s the cynical conclusion, one which is fended off immediately:

It is not environmental writing, for there is too much of that already… it is not nature writing, for there is no such thing as nature as distinct from people…and it is not political writing, with which the world is already flooded, for politics is a human confection, complicit in ecocide and decaying from within.
The shifting of emphasis from man to notman: this is the aim of Uncivilised writing.

You can bring an artist to the Dark Mountain…

One doesn’t have to travel all the way down Kingsnorth’s Damascene highway of civilisation to appreciate the value of at least daring to look at the map. If we are to fight the almost unwinnable fight against the ravages of climate change we had better know what we want the win to look like. And it is the job of our artist to start painting what that looks like.

The Dark Mountain Manifesto may be be considered a preparatory sketch in this regard. If so, only one question remains, do our artists have the imagination to use it?

Mark Leckey’s “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore” is a trip down memory lane for anyone who has every got dressed up to go out and regretted it when they’ve seen the photos. And it should be compulsory viewing for 16 year-olds; this is how ridiculous you’re going to look in 10 years.

It’s also a superb work of cultural anthropology as art. From the Guardian music blog:

There’s a loose chronology – northern soul, soul weekenders, casuals, acid house – but the two defining themes of the film are timeless.
Firstly, what deeply strange places nightclubs are; hundreds of strangers, all as high as kites, crammed together in a deliberately disorientating space. And secondly, how much poignancy there is in something ostensibly celebratory; the idea that “the best days of your lives” will be wiped away by a change in fashion.

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Leckey) from Anon. on Vimeo.