Recommended Reading

[Joe Banks]

I wondered if people might recommend books that have helped them understand the issues that the Dark Mountain Project is concerned with. Or books that embody that 'uncivilised' quality that Paul and Dougald have been talking about. I've just finished reading this:

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Requiem-Species-resist-climate-change/dp/18...,

Clive Hamilton's newly published book 'Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change'. Anyone interested in what's going on here MUST read it. It's a ruthless but compassionate account of the historical circumstances that have led us here; the political, economic and psychological forces at play in the present moment; what the likely outcomes are going to be; and how we cope with that reality. "Despair, Accept, Act", he says. "These are the three stages we must pass through." 

 

Interestingly - on a sidenote - his references reveal that a joke he quotes as an example of the role humour will play in coming to terms with our situation has its provenance in the comments section of the 17th Aug 2009 Kingsnorth v Monbiot debate on the Guardian website - from someone calling themselves 'bloggerdave'. This was the 'Basingstoke on a saturday night' gag that George used himself on stage at the festival. 

[zoe young]

zoe young said:

Martin Porter said:

Caitlin Matthews, now there's a left field candidate for Dark Mountain.
Excellent author on the subject of Celtic Pagan/Early Christian spirituality. Not too big on the end of industrial civilisation though is she?

maybe not big, but wise. the great reconnection of which she speaks - and offers to share in practice - maybe more useful to some of 'us' now than the doom and gloom and look at me with which a lot of DM voices just rattle our sorrowful souls..

[Martin Porter]

I've another left field candidate: the historian Arnold Toynbee.

His school of grand narrative history is somewhat unfashionable in the modern world of Post Modernism, and a lot of his ideas about the genius of civilisations being religious and cultural are frankly wrong, but just as Freud is good literature but poor psychology, Toynbee is good philosophy even when he's poor history.

Toynbee preferred ancient history to modern, and his main interest was the rise and fall of civilisations. Falls he saw as inevitable once a civilisation had stopped expanding and put up barriers to keep out the 'barbarians'. In other worlds the spirit collapsed long before the body.

He was also interested in what he termed Renaissances, which he defined as 'communication between civilisations separated by time'. He died in 1975, but he saw the then burgeoning environmental movement as just such a renaissance; the spirit of the ancient pagan world being revived in modern times.

Recommended reading: Mankind and Mother Earth, A Study of History (the shorter illustrated version - the other is about 12 volumes long)

[Peter Jenner]

Yeh, Straw Dogs is a good one as is Gray's Black Mass. One Robe, One Bowl by Zen monk and poet Ryokan is also a fovourite.

Here's a poem by him -

I watch people in the world
Throw away their lives lusting after things,
Never able to satisfy their desires,
Falling into deeper despair
And torturing themselves.
Even if they get what they want
How long will they be able to enjoy it?
For one heavenly pleasure
They suffer ten torments of hell,
Binding themselves more firmly to the grindstone.
Such people are like monkeys
Frantically grasping for the moon in the water
And then falling into a whirlpool.
How endlessly those caught up in the floating world suffer.
Despite myself, I fret over them all night
And cannot staunch my flow of tears.

[Arthur Johnson]

Much of what the Dark Mountain Project is about is the nurturing of Uncivilized writing--Uncivilized language--as a counterweight to the civilizing project. In that vein, I highly recommend David Abrams' "The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World". The book is about a lot of things, but the primary theme is how language--spoken and written--fundamentally shapes our perceptions of the more-than-human world that we're all embedded in. Why is Western civilization driven to ecocide? The stories we tell ourselves are partly why, but it goes much deeper than that. Abrams is really onto those deeper answers, I think. I'm not going to say much more, because I really want all of you to read the book for yourselves--particularly if you're involved in any way in Uncivilized writing. "The Spell of the Sensuous" is a profound work; it certainly changed the way I think about language and perception.

[Antony Tyson]

Arthur Johnson said:

The book is about a lot of things, but the primary theme is how language--spoken and written--fundamentally shapes our perceptions of the more-than-human world that we're all embedded in.

Sounds excellent – one of my personal favourite subjects. I am just starting to read Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski which is also about language. It comes highly recommended and is the precursor to many forward-thinking ideas.

I am yet to follow up on most of these suggestions (I have just started to read ‘A Matter of Scale’ suggested above), but most seem to be factual, non-fiction, books. I would like to add some fiction to the list. It’s mostly sci-fi, which I generally find to be richer in ‘outside-the-box’ thinking and explores more often territories beyond our civilization:

There are two by Samuel R Delany I think are very UnCivilized. First, Babel 17 deals with the place of language in the control of the ways we can think. The other book by him is Dhalgren; I don’t want to give anything away, but it is most definitely an UnCivilized society and a cult classic.

The Night’s Dawn trilogy by Peter F Hamilton is on the face of it a usual, though brilliantly written, space-opera and a proponent of the ‘technology-and-innovation-will-overcome’ philosophy that is so detrimental. However, there is an underlying message that contradicts this superficial view (as in the real world) by pointing out that it matters not how advanced technology and science is if we do not develop and mature intellectually and emotionally as a whole society.

Schrödinger's Cat trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson was (I believe) described by the New Scientist as ‘the most scientifically accurate sci-fi novel ever’. Set in the 80s, it threads a series of story lines through different quantum possible-realities. This gives him freedom to explore some wildly different models for how society could work; some quite utopian and some quite dystopian. He also uses the novel to try and alert the reader to the fact that they are a primate animal – something I think far too many people hide from – and he does it in unusual and imaginative ways (I would describe one or two, but wouldn’t want to spoil the book). One of my favourite parts of the novel is a conversation about the ‘Extra-terrestrial intelligence game’ where one person imagines/pretends they are an ET and the other asks them questions...

[zoe young]

am intrigued to see that I seem to provide the only female voice on this thread, and my sole suggestion of a female writer was immediately marginalised as 'left field'.

how very, um, 'civilised'..?

Paul Kingsnorth has emphatically stated, in response to my abiding critique, that 'Dark Mountain is not a masculine project', so here's a challenge:
how about some of you nice chaps recommend some writing by people who are 'notman', but woman?

[Catherine Lupton]

Hi Zoe

I did step up here a while back and pitch for Jay Griffiths ... now I'm going to put my pink clichéd thinking hat on and come up with some more women ...

XX

zoe young said:

am intrigued to see that I seem to provide the only female voice on this thread, and my sole suggestion of a female writer was immediately marginalised as 'left field'.

how very, um, 'civilised'..?

Paul Kingsnorth has emphatically stated, in response to my abiding critique, that 'Dark Mountain is not a masculine project', so here's a challenge:
how about some of you nice chaps recommend some writing by people who are 'notman', but woman?

[Antony Tyson]

zoe young said:

how about some of you nice chaps recommend some writing by people who are 'notman', but woman?

I do not choose books based on the gender of the author, but would be happy to receive advice on good female authors. The problem is that there are more published male authors (not something to be proud of) and so lists are likely to be biased towards men simply by chance. Another point is that there are clear differences between the types of book that get published written by men or women - again not something to be proud of, but a fact none-the-less. It is certainly something that should be rectified, and maybe the DMP is the thing to do it.

That said, one of my favourite female authors is Naomi Klein, who writes with conviction and authority on subjects usually male-dominated. But she is very much a writer chronicling our Civilisation, not moving on in to UnCivilisation.

[zoe young]

sorry for missing you and Jay, Catherine.. hello :)
I suspect that there may even be more women writing on DM relevant issues than men. but the discourses of an abiding archetypal feminine focus on the hearth and on small scale creativity and care, nurture, grace, healing, enhancing grassroots communicative and unassuming collective values, are so assumed that their narrative once brought forward is unfamiliar, so alien to that which most people are used to reading in the context of olympian top down visions for society, that they are not recognised, or are perhaps perceived as ancient history, unimpressive, marginal, leftfield, boring or irrelevant.
until, as noted here, such voices step up and out with the supreme confidence of a Jay Griffiths or a Naomi Klein.
Most of the time, it is the very quiet or strange invisibility of these stories that has sustained their humble power even during the overt rule of the uninitiated boy... imho ;)
I'll say Caitlin again, obviously Ursula le Guin, Marge Piercy, maybe also Starhawk, Glennie Kindred, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who else? kids books maybe Susan Cooper and Joan Aiken and Diana Wynne Jones.. these are some that led me at least to see things differently from the 'ordinary'.
and yes, the public gender of the author is a mere short hand for the values and wisdoms that maybe embodied in the story, but a useful one none the less for reminding ourselves what DM is really doing here,,

Antony Tyson said:

zoe young said:

how about some of you nice chaps recommend some writing by people who are 'notman', but woman?

I do not choose books based on the gender of the author, but would be happy to receive advice on good female authors. The problem is that there are more published male authors (not something to be proud of) and so lists are likely to be biased towards men simply by chance. Another point is that there are clear differences between the types of book that get published written by men or women - again not something to be proud of, but a fact none-the-less. It is certainly something that should be rectified, and maybe the DMP is the thing to do it.

That said, one of my favourite female authors is Naomi Klein, who writes with conviction and authority on subjects usually male-dominated. But she is very much a writer chronicling our Civilisation, not moving on in to UnCivilisation.

[cricket 7642]

I’m not a chap but I can suggest an excellent book (by a female author) to recommend to the DM reading list:
How It Is by V. F. Cordova.

From the publisher’s website:
"In three parts, Cordova sets out a complete Native American philosophy. First she explains her own understanding of the nature of reality itself—the origins of the world, the relation of matter and spirit, the nature of time, and the roles of culture and language in understanding all of these. She then turns to our role as residents of the Earth, arguing that we become human as we deepen our relation to our people and to our places, and as we understand the responsibilities that grow from those relationships. In the final section, she calls for a new reverence in a world where there is no distinction between the sacred and the mundane."
( http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/BOOKS/bid1863.htm )


zoe young said:

sorry for missing you and Jay, Catherine.. hello :)
I suspect that there may even be more women writing on DM relevant issues than men. but the discourses of an abiding archetypal feminine focus on the hearth and on small scale creativity and care, nurture, grace, healing, enhancing grassroots communicative and unassuming collective values, are so assumed that their narrative once brought forward is unfamiliar, so alien to that which most people are used to reading in the context of olympian top down visions for society, that they are not recognised, or are perhaps perceived as ancient history, unimpressive, marginal, leftfield, boring or irrelevant.
until, as noted here, such voices step up and out with the supreme confidence of a Jay Griffiths or a Naomi Klein.
Most of the time, it is the very quiet or strange invisibility of these stories that has sustained their humble power even during the overt rule of the uninitiated boy... imho ;)
I'll say Caitlin again, obviously Ursula le Guin, Marge Piercy, maybe also Starhawk, Glennie Kindred, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who else? kids books maybe Susan Cooper and Joan Aiken and Diana Wynne Jones.. these are some that led me at least to see things differently from the 'ordinary'.
and yes, the public gender of the author is a mere short hand for the values and wisdoms that maybe embodied in the story, but a useful one none the less for reminding ourselves what DM is really doing here,,

Antony Tyson said:

zoe young said:

how about some of you nice chaps recommend some writing by people who are 'notman', but woman?

I do not choose books based on the gender of the author, but would be happy to receive advice on good female authors. The problem is that there are more published male authors (not something to be proud of) and so lists are likely to be biased towards men simply by chance. Another point is that there are clear differences between the types of book that get published written by men or women - again not something to be proud of, but a fact none-the-less. It is certainly something that should be rectified, and maybe the DMP is the thing to do it.

That said, one of my favourite female authors is Naomi Klein, who writes with conviction and authority on subjects usually male-dominated. But she is very much a writer chronicling our Civilisation, not moving on in to UnCivilisation.

[zoe young]

thanks Julia, a good direction..
by the way my maternal grandfather, a naval fellow, used to call all his 7 grand daughters and 1 grandson 'little chaps'..

Julia Macintosh said:

I’m not a chap but I can suggest an excellent book (by a female author) to recommend to the DM reading list:
How It Is by V. F. Cordova. From the publisher’s website:
"In three parts, Cordova sets out a complete Native American philosophy. First she explains her own understanding of the nature of reality itself—the origins of the world, the relation of matter and spirit, the nature of time, and the roles of culture and language in understanding all of these. She then turns to our role as residents of the Earth, arguing that we become human as we deepen our relation to our people and to our places, and as we understand the responsibilities that grow from those relationships. In the final section, she calls for a new reverence in a world where there is no distinction between the sacred and the mundane."
( http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/BOOKS/bid1863.htm )

[Catherine Lupton]

Okay, I'm not going to pretend to have read all these (I'm catching up slowly), so this is more of a mini round-up of women authors who've come up in the Dark Mountain context, or who seem to be twitching on my radar in connection with it:

Jay Griffiths (can't mention her enough ;))
Sharon Astyk
Carolyn Baker - a member of this network, no less!
Jacquetta Hawkes A Land - was suggested by a commenter on the DM blog, independent of Christine Finn's talk about her work at Uncivilization
Joanna Macy - in the sphere of healing / reconnection - maybe too 'left field' or not 'uncivilized' enough ;)?

A good case is made for Ursula Le Guin among uncivilized sci-fi writers in Dark Mountain 1, which also adds Mary Shelley and Mary Oliver to the uncivilized roster. I have recently read Alice Notley's long narrative poem the Descent of Alette - very dark & shamanic, not at all civilized.

Also keep thinking of the urbanist Jane Jacobs - I'm sure she's an extremely ambivalent candidate for inclusion here, but I still think about the impact of The Death & Life of Great American Cities (which I read so long ago I no longer honestly remember whether I actually read it, or just read about it) in terms of the case for small-scale self-organising urban communities, and her last book (according to Wikipedia ... ) ponders whether North American civilization is showing indicators of decline.

I'll keep thinking ...