Jim ‘Shaft’ Ryan is a famous house music DJ from Birmingham who along with his brothers, Mick and Dermot, and their mate Lee, responsible for the seminary U.K. and global nightclub brands, Miss Moneypennys and Chuff Chuff. Jim is also my mate.
I knew that Jim had trained as a Catholic priest before becoming entangled in the acid house movement and I know he does quite a bit of academic work. He’s not stupid, for sure. I was pleased to hear about the release of this poetry book on Black Country Radio and surfed over to Amazon and picked up a copy. I wasn’t expecting wonders but to be honest, after reading the collection of poems that Jim has produced here, I can say that I am pleasantly surprised. The collection is well-balanced, covers a wide range of life topics and the poetry is neat, punchy, with excellent meter and range of vocabulary and a lot of it even neatly rhymes. We delve into religion with a bit of his Irish Catholic roots shining through, there is a great poem about Jim’s father covering family life and for the DJ and clubber there’s even some great little poems dedicated to his life as an electronic musician, ‘12” Single’ being the highlight. Some of the poems ask questions about contemporary life and values and often there is a dark insight into morality and values, with Jim not shying away from exposing human frailties and the dark undercurrents of modern life. My personal favourite poem and the one which I most identified with was ‘Fear Panic and Chaos’. I think that Jim’s work as a professional DJ helps his poetry in the neat rhyming and its meter. The reader is treated to the insight of a veteran DJ with a rich tapestry of life experience behind him and the book is a well-presented offering to British culture. The collection leaves you in a pleasant mood and I would recommend going out and treating yourself to a copy.
Thomas Paine is an important writer at an important time that bequeaths us in his ‘Rights of Man’ a fundamental shakeup of what our democratic rights as citizens should be, drawing especially on the French Revolution and also American Revolution and the fundamental rights that their new revolutionary societies produced for their citizens. Paine delivers during the Enlightenment a wake up call to those in countries that are yet to adapt to revolutions, where traditional Royal power and political representation in not so clear democratic institutions abide. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his ‘Social Contract’ fanned the flames of the French Revolution of 1789 and his words rang in the ears of revolutionaries right down the the last blood spilt buy the Guillotine. It was a period of political pamphleteering and Paine was no stranger to this. He was in essence the Rousseau of the English-speaking world. The thinking behind his work and through other similar political philosophers of the Enlightenment was that the American and French revolutions were no anomalies and that they were just the precursor of more to come and that like dominoes, the Monarchies of Europe were destined to topple and follow suit, paving the way for more liberty and Bills of Rights and written constitutions that would empower the masses across the globe in the dawn of a new age. It is indeed quite bizarre that the predictions of Paine et al never actually materialised. Indeed one of his main target audiences, here in the U.K., has remained almost identical politically to the present with a dual chamber of elected representatives and hereditary peers behind an historical monarch as head of state. Paine explores the rights for citizens as laid out by the French and also details the new American constitution and what it means to the general citizen. The points he makes and the evidence truly is eye-opening and remarkable and it does seem appealing. He directly contrasts the new legal rights in these revolutionary societies with the lack of actual rights we have in places like Britain. Paine elucidates a very powerful argument against hereditary political empowerment, reaching up to the King or Queen themselves. He often attacks his rival Edmund Burke who in his own literary offerings, is critical of both revolutions and defends the merits of the British system. Indeed his obsession with Mr Burke somewhat detracts from some of the points about the Rights of Man that Paine is attempting to transmit. When weighed up it isn’t as crystal clear as an obviously biased Pain might suggest and indeed he, is his complete acceptance and as
a disciple of the new systems, almost suffered some of the more bloodies and brutal aspects of the new revolutionary societies as he only escaped being guillotined in Paris by the skin of his teeth during the height of The Terror. I am surprised that Paine managed to write this in the first place at such a tumultuous period of history. Indeed in his native Britain his work must have been viewed by the authorities with treasonous contempt. It is a controversial and powerful book to readers today and I can see why it is celebrated as a cornerstone work for human rights and politics. I dread to think just how controversial and revolutionary it must have been to the many readers of the ‘Rights of Man’ during the period from whence it sprung.
What’s a grown 45 year old male doing reading a little Bosnian girl’s diary you might ask yourself. Well, it cropped up as a recommendation in a documentary on the war in the former Yugoslavia, a subject to which I have passionately researched from its genesis. The Balkans conflict is (to date) the worst conflict that has taken place on European soil since World War 2 (although Ukraine must now be heading to take over that mantle, perhaps? Let’s hope not!). There was some pretty brutal stuff going on and a complete breakdown of society, the break up of a nation and all the murky, dirty traits of war nationalism, ethnic division, race and religion, all went up in smoke and Sarajevo was the epicentre of the whole mess, where little Zlata was a carefree little schoolgirl, and had her life turned upside down, directly experiencing the day to day hell of living through war. When you think of war, you think of soldiers, tanks, battlefields, munitions, generals and lots of death and injuries. The history books are full of tactical analysis of military commanders’ strategies and details of who won and who lost and what the politicians were doing. Often it is the collateral damage that is the worst in the war. The inhabitants of London’s East End felt the blitz more than the pilots of the Battle of Britain. Zlata is a normal girl, with a normal family, just getting on with a normal life. She is a civilian. When the bombs start raining down, Zlata is right there on the scene. Her neighbours are affected. It is her streets that are the battleground. Her school is closed and her friends are either killed or flee the terrible tragedy that is unfolding on her doorstep in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This is where a lot of the worst of the ethnic divisions are apparent with Bosnian-Serbs fighting Bosnian-Croats, Muslims and a previous harmony among the population is cast out for some terrible tragic results, well-documented later in war-crimes cases such as the Srebenica massacre. Zlata is the Anne Frank of the Balkans War. She notes in ‘Mimmy’ a primary account that no historian should ignore. Ye, it’s sad, yes, it’s heart-breaking and war is something that nobody should have to live through. But when war does happen, the importance of documentation is critical and Zlata leaves her testament as a warning for future warmongers and future victims of war and survivors. It wouldn’t hurt some of the politicians and war industry profiteers involved in the current Ukraine crisis to pick up a copy of Zlata’s diary. It’s a kid’s book, written by a kid. It’s not long, won’t take up too much of your time. But by heck it could transform your thinking and opinion to the betterment of all of society. Daily struggles for water supply and gas and electric are sounding to me in 2023 as quite realistic possibilities for my own future in the U.K. (I’m told as a result of war) – Coping mechanisms are great. Zlata does get upset, but rarely depressed. She has a transcendental philosophy and sees in the most simplest of basic provisions or freedoms a ray of sunshine in the midst of the dirty tragedy that is unfolding all around her. Ultimately, her writing work is not in vain. French journalists pick up on the diary and TV crews start popping in to see her and ultimately after securing a publishing deal for the diary, Zlata and her family are flown out and repatriated in Paris, thus escaping them from further direct immediate harm from the war. Not every young diary writer was perhaps so lucky as Zlata, bhut it’s amazing that she did manage to get the book out there and it is a bestseller. I just wonder how many little girls are hiding in the blackened ruins of apartment blocks in Mariupol, their only lifeline and hope being pencilled into their own diaries. Adrian Mole talked about pimples. Zlata has a more grown up conversation but she also likes cats and playing the piano. I remember first seeing the live story about Zlata on Blue Peter. It’s taken me a while to get around to reading Zlata’s Diary but I am glad that I have now done that.
I read ‘Eating Smoke’ some time ago, Chris’ autobiographic story of descent into Crystal Meth psychosis while working for the Triads in Hong Kong. It was a great story and I loved that book. I noticed that Chris was appearing regularly on the BBC as an ‘expert’ on a; sorts of drugs stories etc so I guess the book did well and got him a high profile. After reading and reviewing ‘Eating Smoke’ I hooked up with Chris online and we’ve stayed in touch on social media for some time. He’s a real, op, friendly bloke who will bend over backwards to help you out. He’s got stuck right into assist me with some of my darker mental health calamities over the years and he speaks sense. In a social media world which has turned antisocial it’s nice to actually make genuine online friends who aren’t bots or scammers. When Chris released this follow up book ‘Forty Nights’ I felt obliged to get a copy and check it out. So here we go….
Firstly, let me say that if you want the exotic glamour of Hong Kong and Triads and even Crystal Meth, Forty Nights could lead to disappointment. This is Devon’s answer to Irvine Welsh’s ‘Trainspotting’ – It’s not so glamorous. Lots of dingy council estates, messed up dead end jobs, a full-on quite nasty amphetamine injecting habit and promises to sort it all out. The book is set right on the margins of society and Chris just sort of floats there, does his own thing and I cannot comprehend how he managed to write such a big book with so many words with such little obvious material. I mean Wordsworth and Coleridge had the Lake District. Chris just regularly paints dodgy murals on his wall when he’s experiencing the regular insomnia speed addicts are accustomed to. I don’t mean this as a criticism of the book. I think it’s amazing to be able to work with such a blank canvas. The language is not high brow. Its accessible, but some of the best writers have this trait. Think Hemingway: he rarely used long words. It was simple and in its simplicity he managed to evoke great beauty and particularly strong images in the imagination. You feel like you are there with Chris as you go through the chapters. Nothing every really happens. It’s same shit, different day and it sort of spirals. But this is reality. Our generation are pretty oppressed and lack opportunities. The rave generation of the 1990s do have a different ethos, our views on lifestyle choices such as drug use, our general rejection of capitalist materialism, our ability to be creative and opportunistic and just crack on with life. Chris’ story shows he is clearly on the margins. So many ex-military people struggle in civvy street. It’s not straightforward holding down a job and living with 2.4 children, a washing machine and a mortgage. Drug use and abuse is widespread and a hidden problem in that people outside of the social circles have no real clue about the actual realities and the pandemic that is really happening on the streets of Britain. Yes, we partied in the raves and clubs to banging dance music back in the day but the firm heel of the jackboot pretty much stamped everyone down to heel in the real world. Society is oppressive. Try dealing with the dwp on a regular basis, or getting exiled from your family inner circle due to a lack of understanding, or just a casual journey into the patient’s perspective of mental health issues. Any dealing with the police are just negative for anyone no matter what. So many people can luckily skate through life avoiding them totally but once you get on their radar you’re going to have a negative experience and Chris has the odd brush. It’s a story of progress, a self-reflective philosophical work of literature. I can’t imagine how valuable this book would be to drug addicts seeking a working tool for recovery. It can’t have been easy for Chris to admit his problems so publicly. But I bet it helped him to do this. You can see him trying to fight and change all the way through the story – he wants to keep his personality and values and just cease stuff which he knows is bad in life and is harming him. Ultimately we see him head off to training for voluntary work with an African charity after pretty much getting the speed problem under control. So in that sense it’s a happy ending and there’s the possibility of future books.
The characters Chris encounters are real people, real issues and who are pretty much in a similar situation to him. A lot of the time the core support of friends is noticeably absent and often when he is with friends it’s sort of a bit of a nightmare session that doesn’t really help with life progress but is fun nonetheless. Chunks steals the show – he’s like a council estate pirate with his own language and a completely happy-go-lucky we can do it mentality. Chunks merits a whole book unto himself. He’s a superhero really. Other mates end up in nick or are running dodgy criminal operations like baccy smuggling which Chris gets roped into – but the trips across the Channel seemed quite exotic really compared with life at home in Devon. The book can also read a s a manual for ways to deal with TV License Inspectors and Chris is bang on, creative and off the cuff in his successful approach to this. He is a good neighbour and the local kids love him and he keeps their active imaginations firmly engaged. He is a genuinely nice bloke.
I really liked the book – and perhaps I’m showing my age – as I found it nostalgic about a period of time where life was so radically different. It was pre internet and pre social media and the friendships and societal values of the 1990s dancefloors bound us together as a society. Although today we have shiny mobile phones and are ‘more developed’ in many ways we now don’t get out and about as much and we also don’t have as many adventures or fun. Yes, life back in the day wasn’t perfect but it was still pretty damned good.
I can’t do the book justice really in this review but I would seriously recommend it. It has a sort of addictive quality and you get drawn into the story and just enjoy it. On social media I’ve seen that Chris must have move on leaps and bounds and totally transformed his life since writing ‘Forty Nights’ – He does ultramarathons which frighten the life out of me. I can relate to life on a Devon sink council estate right on the margins of society and ‘Forty Nights’ is eminently more readable for me than any future work on sweating and jogging silly distances. But it’s good to know there’s a happy ending and a possible way out. Get onto ‘Forty Nights’ folks and spread the word!
Although by the time I finally finished reading this book it was perhaps over a decade old and hence due the hi-tech nature of the subject, perhaps dated, I gained a lot of new knowledge about the robotics industry, technological progress in society and in particular, the application of robotics to warfare. Nowadays everybody from kids to adults play with their minidrones and they’ve become a regular sight in our modern lives. Drones in warfare have had a tremendous impact. The modern theatre of warfare benefits from technological advances where non-human robot systems can conduct some of the most dangerous activities and hence save the lives of soldiers and civilians. Unmanned bomb disposal robots or remotely flown drones have changed the battlefield. A US Army drone pilot can sit in the Arizona desert at a desk and pick up his kids from school and return home to dinner with his wife, all whilst commanding frontline missions against Taliban insurgents in the Afghan mountains. The whole concept of robotics is very much a new phenomenon and is changing the way military and political chiefs act and think. Aasimov’s laws of robotics, although fictional are philosophically analysed and the author spends a lot of time focussing on the whole ethics of non-human combat. The book is very well-researched and is enlightening and I gave it a five star rating. I’d be keen on any follow up work that the author may do in this field.
Jason is a Welsh Musician, and in this short book, he details his most recent Camino de Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage experience. He takes the Camino Portugués from Porto, a follow up to his previous encounter with the more traditional, and more widely known and popular, Camino Frances. We find Jason alone in his hotel room in Porto in a dusky predawn, a crazed band post-gig, having departed, and left the protagonist with little money and equipment and a pipe dream to escape yet again on pilgrimage to Santiago. This book is a modern pilgrimage, a journey to self. We are not sharing the voyage of a medieval religious monk, we share our modern chav hobbit’s punk desires. He needs not mass, blood wine and body bread, but wifi, bocadillos and plastic auberge mattresses. Our modern day pilgrim needs not God’s guidance, but is savouring the beauty and tranquility of a rustic, muddy countryside, as his mind ventures into the pilgrim spirit and devours itself in questions of self-exploration. A host of characters is met and through the hero’s transcript of muttered profanities as he describes the lurid animals he meets en route we make friends with a myriad of personalities from dotted around the globe. Most notably, German astronomer-theologian Thomaas and later, Irish reveller and journeyman Eoin. Interspersed with Spanish natives and kind Portuguese innkeepers and waiters, our bubbly hero sounds off his thoughts and shares in the rich tapestry of life of his fellow men, all the time progressing his own mind’s journey and in a self-revelatory manner, touching our soul with more profound deeper and wise philosophy. Jason loves his woman in Wales. He never quite transcends and escapes his homeland of Wales. From the murky sacred Ulla river reminding him of his hometown, Newport, to thinking of his absent grandfather having disappeared to Australia on his journey’s End, nostalgia is always a containing force to Jason, preventing him from moving on and getting the success and desires he so craves from life. Is it money he seeks? He answers and affirmative no and sees it as a means to an end in life’s great journey. He does seek Broadband and Wifi, yet after we lose communications and move out of the realm of technological contact with the outside world, our hero is not lost but finds himself again and can let his hair down properly in the taverna and hostels, enjoying more ancient revelry, wine and brandy, guitar-laden five star meals and the warmth of traditional hospitality so frequented by the tourists of these ancient routes over the Millennia. The language of Jason’s book is often shockingly coarse, but equally it is a direct language and the best philosophy succeeds in its directness. We move with the writer along the pilgrimage and as you read the book you can feel the rain pelting down, the books brevity comforting us as each night draws to a close and we settle down for the night on the auberge mattresses. Blankets or not, Chav Punk Hobbit reveals to us our own conflict in a modern age, where religion matters little and journeys of self are replaced by instant gratifications.I feel jealous, having not directly journeyed the route myself, green as I cannot feel the a priori mental revelations that resound in between the fast-flowing narratives. We must all strike out in this world and go on personal journeys to reveal our deepest thinking and to share with others the pleasures of life. Chav Punk Hobbit is an adventure and to overlook the beauty in the book’s touching simplicity means that you are not grasping the Welsh Hemingway’s poetic raison d’être. It is modern day philosophy in its most rawest essence. ENJOY!
The philosophy of Jacques Derrida keeps cropping up on my reading in Translation Studies. I’m getting a vague idea of deconstruction but really need to tackle the works of the man himself to truly understand his philosophy. I thought I’d try this short introduction as a taster to better familiarise myself with his ideas. I think that Derrida is slightly more complex and difficult to understand than more traditional philosophers. He gathers poles of thought within the philosophical movement. It seems that either you love or hate Derrida. I think the fundamental precept of Deconstruction is to reevaluate one’s ideals, to tear apart more traditional modes of thinking and to analyse a subject from a completely different, new perspective. This introduction left me, at times, feeling as though I was beginning to understand Derrida, yet at other times things went flying over my head and removed what knowledge I thought I had gained. I think the Derrida work on language is more accessible and I look forward to tackling ‘On Grammatology’. His work with words and language seems more logical and accurate and easier to digest than some of the less direct musings on philosophy or the nature of animals. From reading this book I can see why some people could easily dismiss Derrida. His ideas do provoke strong reactions and nowhere more so can this be seen than the reaction to his honorary degree at Cambridge University. think that what is certain about Derrida was that he was a true intellectual, a clever man with original ideas, who wasn’t afraid of ruffling the feathers of the established ways. The twentieth century was an era of vast change and there is no reason why new ways of dissecting the world should not arise. I anticipate building a deeper relationship with Derridean philosophy once I enter into his actual works. This introduction was enlightening in a sense but can be deconstructed into equally maintaining an illusion of confusion about this complicated man.
Wez G Books 
You must be logged in to post a comment.