Understanding Brecht - Walter Benjamin

Brecht, Brecht, Brecht. The name appears everywhere, in my reading, in my life, in day-to-day thumbing through periodicals. People refer to him with brevity and sadness and seriousness. He plays a role which is beyond my understanding in European culture and somehow his presence is still felt across European literary circles today, even though he passed around 50 years ago. This book provides something of an insight into where Brecht came from but through the eyes of another wonderful writer, taken early by the menace of Fascism, Benjamin grapples with the meaning and thought of Brecht, the power of what he was trying to do in early theater and the world he was seeking to change. I think this, more than anything else, influences my thinking here. Brecht was writing poetry and plays, alongside staging them himself, but the purpose was greater than the simple act. This was not about money or fame, it was about changing the world. Catching the last great rush of socialist belief before it was crushed by Stalin and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Looking into writing from Jewish authors of the 1930s, it breaks, it breaks the feelings which these worlds, crashing in on themselves as the world closed in around them, must have experienced and how Brecht, in his vantage point, was able to navigate better than Benjamin who was not. This is a book of literarcy criticism but set against the backdrop of a collapsing world. The world falling in on itself as it hurtled towards what seemed certain fascist takeover and unending misery, which was then replaced with a war which destroyed most of Europe and left a split between two worldviews which divided the continent and the implications of which still echo through our collective minds.

Book Review - I am Dynamite - A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche - Sue Prideaux

Thus Spake Zarathustra, an impenetrable work which I started on too young and which left me with a feeling of confusion. What was this that I had read? What did it mean? Why did it feel like I had watched a film starting half-way through, where everyone else knew who the characters were except me? Thus I was introduced to the genius of Nietzsche as a young man, selecting the book on the basis of its weird cover, a 1970s penguin classic, well thumbed by my parents or taken from a second hand bookstore. I knew that the theories in the book delighted me, but I could not fully understand nor grasp the enormity of what was contained therein. This spaking Zarathustra looked somewhat like my father! What fun, but then what eye opening wonder once I started to read. With the backdrop of not fully understanding his work, this book acts as a wonderful foil, explaining the man, his life, his family. You follow his journey through a difficult world and his arrival at a place which brought the most wonderful illumination but at the same time, sent him to a place from which he could not recover. The journey is the story in this book and the author, Sue Prideaux, does a wonderful job of taking you through Nietzsche's life with the right amount of historical digging. While retaining a Mantell like narrative with a familiarity and tone which brings the character of Nietzsche to life through the page. This somehow humanizes the otherworldly figure of Nietzsche, who roams through the pages as in his life. The narrator moves from place to place, bringing down the records where they exist such as through the diaries of Cosima Wagner, but filling in the blanks where they do not. I found this approach wonderfully effective in maintaining the record. Nietzsche is not a polarising character, because there is not much to polarise around. He is neither a figure of the right nor the left, much to his hideous sisters chagrin. His thought is so profound but, as Prideaux quite wonderfully surmises at the end of the book, there is no final guiding thought within it. He simply sets out how the ship can now sail, but does not tell us where.

Book Review - Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers - John Nichols

 I like a good polemic, especially when it talks to my side of the fence, you can warm your hands, metaphorically at least on the roasting of people who all to often escape opprobrium through their deployment of the defence of decency or through the deflection of debate to another venue or topic; the Rude Pundit remains my first and best example of this.  

The bastards that warrant John Nichols ire are those same people who took us through the first year of the pandemic so incompetently.  I almost forgot myself, and thus it was wonderful to read this nicely crafted and narrated book to remind myself of just how much these people took from us and how badly they treated their own people in pursuit of their own political interests or in their belief in the malign politics which had served them so well.  

The book is a nice take down of a number of parties, primarily right lurching wing-nuts of the Rand Paul assortment, in a fairly scientific and robust manner, pointing towards their multiple failings, rejection of science based evidence and appeal to the baser elements of their collective dementia.  The challenge I had was that I did not see within the book, and particularly within the rambling 30 plus page conclusion where it lost its way a bit, a true ideological take down of just what the defining features of these failures were.  Given the stake of what was lost, the millions who died and the lives ruined, it just does not go far enough in determining what the ideology was which brought us to this point.

In a book which from a polemical perspective does not hold back, Nichols does slather blame on the miscreants and does so with erudite aplomb, I found this final step somewhat unsatisfying. Maybe it was the writing of the book so early in the pandemic (as it turned out) in 2021, when we still had around a year to go, which made it more difficult to draw these conclusions or maybe it was the fact that the Biden - Trump circus was distracting everyone still, whatever the circumstances, this is not the definitive history of COVID and it does not begin to really draw the conclusions we need.

Speaking on the first day of 2025, as the forces of reaction and stupidity have gained strength partly through the dislocations created by the pandemic, I can see that there is much history to be written on the COVD crisis topic.  As Trump hurtles forward into whatever onanistic chaos he is going to create in his second term, I can feel we have forgotten so much of what happened in 2020 and we have unlearned so many of the lessons we learned back then.  We are careering towards a combination of economic crisis, environmental crisis, social crisis and a tail spin into ever more hideous conflicts lead by a political class so weak and craven or stupid that no one is actually in charge any more. 

We gave it all up to the market, but as GFC 2.0 approaches, what are we going to do when the market fucks it all up again?