The Books of My Life: The Office

Drawing on interviews with creators and production personnel and historical and cultural analysis Ben Walters (The Office (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2005)) explores the origins of the BBC Two docusoap The Office, a television which was transmitted for two seasons and a two part Christmas special between 2001 to 2003.

Like any social and cultural phenomenon The Office, as Walters notes, did not originate in a vacuum. Walters argues that on one level The Office is a product of the dog eat dog world of neoliberal corporate capitalism and the fears, anxieties, alienation, and absurdities of clerical office work in that brave new postmodern world of neo Ebenezer Scrooge capitalism. On another level, as Walters notes, The Office is the product of the merging of situation comedy and the documentary, a trend that can be seen in the rise of narrative form reality TV stretching back to An American Family (PBS, 1971) and its British cousin The Family (BBC, 1974) and the impact of these docudramas on films like the mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (1984), situation comedies such as The Royale Family (BBC, 2006-2012), and and mock news shows like Brass Eye (C2, 1997, 2001). On still another level, as The Office co-creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, note in interviews, The Office is the product of the movies of Woody Allen--one presumes Take the Money and Run (1969) in particular--and American situation arc comedies such as Seinfeld (NBC, 1989-1998).

Though The Office has always left me somewhat cold Walters books is an interesting book on an interesting TV series. I recommend it to anyone interested in documentaries, situation comedies, the history of television and film, and the impact of neoliberalism on the media.

The Books of My Life: Edge of Darkness

Between the 1970s and 1980s British television drama changed, writes John Caughie in his book Edge of Darkness (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2007). The 1970s saw the decline of the single play with its theatrical look and which had been a prominent part of British TV since its beginnings and the subsequent rise of the quality television serial with its more filmic look. Among these new dramatic quality serials was Troy Kennedy Martin's Edge of Darkness.

Edge of Darkness was first transmitted between 4 November and 9 December 1985 on BBC Two and almost immediately rerun on the more popular of the BBCs channels, BBC One. Caughie's book explores the production contexts of the serial and what writer Kennedy, director Martin Campbell, producer Michael Wearing, designer Graeme Thomson, musicians Eric Clapton and Michael Kamen, and the actors, among them Bob Peck, Joe Don Baker, and Joanne Whalely, brought to the show.  It explores the broader political and economic contexts of the show including Thatcherism, worker strikes, tensions between the great powers, anti-nuclear activism, environmental activism, and ecological theory. It explores the generic contexts of Edge of Darkness noting that the show novelly mixes the spy thriller with the ecological theory of Gaia and its almost magical conception of the planet.

For Caughie Edge of Darkness is, as the name of the series of which Caughie's book is a part, a television classic. Edge, Caughie notes, has been a critical favourite and was listed by a panel of TV professionals as the "third greatest TV drama of all time". The response of viewers at the time, including Caughie, to Edge, claims Caughie though with little qualitative evidence and no quantitative evidence, was one of telephilia. The show had an emotional and intellectual impact on viewers making it memorable to them in the process, so memorable that Edge carries with it the political tenor of its time in the minds of those who watched it when it was first transmitted and who rewatch it on DVD or in rerun.

Caughie's Edge of Darkness is an interesting book about a very interesting television serial. Recommended to those interested in the history of British television, quality television serials, the spy thriller, and the impact of great power tensions and the environmental movement on television.

Picaresque Adventures Among the Amazon Slag: The Trials and Tribulations of Buying from Amazon

Until recently I shopped at Amazon and Amazon UK almost exclusively. I bought CDs, DVDs, Blu rays, and even shoes from Amazon. Now all of that has changed.

There are a number of reasons why I broke my Amazon addiction. I used to sell on marketplace and over the two years I was there Amazon raised the percentage they took from each sale, they added an additional straight fee charged to each seller on Amazon Marketplace, and they mandated that all sellers provide invoices for the goods they sold, something easier for large sellers than small sellers selling used items often bought many years before like myself. To top it off Amazon even refused to accept their own invoices for items I had bought from Amazon years earlier and was reselling on Amazon Marketplace.

The straw that broke the proverbial camel's back, however, was a Russian classic. Earlier this year I purchased the Alma Classics translation of Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time from Amazon. When I got this item through the mail, however, there was a clearly noticeable weirdness about the book. First off, it was larger than the typical Alma Classic. Second, there was no title page. Nor was there a table of contents page. The chapter list was right above the beginning of the book on the very first page of the novel. Third, on the last page of the book I found a barcode (3797508R00049) and a statement notifying me that the item was "[p]rinted in Poland by Amazon Fulfillment Poland Sp. z.o.o Wroclaw.

It took me awhile but with the aid of the publisher I discovered that Amazon had sold me a pirated edition of their book and had even blocked the Alma Classic of A Hero of Our Time from Amazon's website preferring, apparently, to sell the pirated version of the book rather than the book as published by Alma, the original publisher. The book Amazon sold me as the Alma Classic of A Hero of Our Time translated by Martin Parker and Neil Cornwell is not the Parker and Cornwell translation of A Hero Our Time. In fact, there is absolutely no information about who  the translator or translators of this pirated edition are, though it is clear it is neither Parker or Parker/Cornwell. According to the electronic version (which can be found here) this reprint is an adaptation of the Parker translation (which was originally done for the Soviet Foreign Language Publishing House) that Americanises the text and corrects, or so the unknown translators claim, the translation though who the translators are ("we have") is unclear. Additionally, the translators claim that the Everyman version, an earlier revision of the Parker translation by Cornwell, was not copyrighted, an assertion one might find questionable given the evidence of the Alma edition and revision of the Parker translation. What is not questionable is that Amazon is selling a cover copyrighted by Alma and this is not only a questionable practise but likely a violation of copyright. By the way, the Amazon faux version has some excellent notes presumably by the anonymous translators. 

I had read in The Atlantic, Forbes, and in the New York Times that Amazon sold pirated goods. This was the first time, however, I had ever seen one in the proverbial flesh. I immediately wrote a review of the item on Amazon noting that the version of Alma's A Hero of Our Times Amazon was offering for sale was a fake. Then I contacted Amazon to tell them about the scam. When I did this, however, I discovered that the scammer was not some Eastern European scam artist but was Amazon itself. Amazon's poorly paid chat clerks denied that I bought the book from them--something the empirical evidence noted above shows is a lie--and they refused to explore the issue further. Once again I was reintroduced to that well known and well worn phrase caveat emptor, a phrase I was quite cognizant of thanks to buying items from Amazon Marketplace where descriptions of books for sale are often misleading at best and which Amazon does nothing about thereby allowing flim flam con sellers to fleece consumers again and again.

Given Amazon's intransigence and its elimination of evidence that showed that customers were sold a pirated version of a Russian classic I immediately cancelled any preorders from Amazon including the Beatles deluxe edition of Abbey Road and I began searching for alternatives which, compared to Amazon, are ethical and moral giants (something not very hard to do). I began buying books from Blackwell, an old brick and mortar store, and highly recommend buying books from Blackwell. I bought Abbey Road and other items I originally intended to buy from Amazon from Walmart, a corporation that, compared to Amazon, is  akin to Perceval. I started buying classical CD's from HBDirect and Presto Classica and can recommend both to potential customers. Additionally, I still have the pirated A Hero of Our Time with its Amazon Fulfillment statement in the back of the book and I intend to present this data to the New York State Attorney General. Amazon, it really hasn't been nice getting to know what a slag and skank ye truly are.

Speaking of Skankazon, I recently discovered that Amazon also sold me three other Alma Classics (Bunin's Dark Avenues, Chekhov's The Woman in the Case, and Turgenev's Faust) that are Amazon reprints (printed in Delaware) rather than the Alma Classics themselves. I assume Skankazon makes more monies off of these fake books--they are printed by the Amazon owned CreateSpace--and this is the reason they sell reprints like these. I would, by the way, return all of them if I could-- I was only able to return Faust (which they sent with a different cover than advertised on their site)-- because first, I ordered the Alma Classic not the Amazon knockoff, and second, I don't trust Skankazon. I will thus only be buying Alma's from Powell's or Blackwell's in the future.

The Books of My Life: The Likely Lads

In 1964 The Likely Lads, written by Dick Clement and Ian La Fresnais, was first transmitted on BBC Two. Later, when it was rebroadcast on BBC One, Clement's and Le Frenais's realistic and naturalistic comedy about two Northern working class best mates, Terry Chambers (James Bolam) and Bob Ferris, (Rodney Bewes), became, according to Phil Wickham, one of Britain's best loved situation comedies running for three series, ending in 1966. The likely lads, in fact, became so popular with TV audiences that BBC One, Clement, and La Fresnais brought Terry and Bob back to the small screen in 1973 in a second programme, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, which ended in 1974. In 1976 the lads made their last appearance in the film The Likely Lads.

Phil Wickham's The Likely Lads (London: BFI, 2008) explores the Northern setting of The Likely Lads and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, the depiction of class and the dramatic changes that impacted class throughout the the 1970s in both shows, the representation of gender in both shows, the structure and form of both shows, and the reasons why The Likely Lads and became so successful. Wickham argues that class is portrayed sympathetically but not sentimentally by Clement and La Fresnais, that Terry was more of a fatalist when it came to class status than Bob while Bob was more of a striver trying to achieve a middle class life, something he achieved to some extent in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, that both shows were more fair in their depictions of women than critics historically have been willing to admit, that the show is character driven, and that the success of the The Likely Lads and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads was due to both shows mix of realism, fatalism, sense of place, drama, and comedy, comedy that audiences could laugh with rather than at, comedy that worked in such a way that viewers recognised themselves in the show.

Sadly half of the 20 episodes of The Likely Lads--two were found recently--are missing due to the BBC policy of wiping. I recommend Wickham's book for anyone interested in television, television situation comedy, British comedy, class, and best mateship in 1960s and 1970s England.

The Books of My Life: Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema

Tom Ryall's Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986) explores the history of British--British film historian Charles Barr prefers to call it English--cinema in the 1930s and 1930s. Ryall also uses the films of British or English filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock to explore the economic, political, cultural, and geographic contexts of English cinema in the 1920s and 1930s.

Ryall explores the development of a bifurcated film culture in England in the 1920s and 1930s, a divide that, as Ryall notes, only a few crossed, between the English entertainment cinema, a cinema heavily influenced by Hollywood, and the English art cinema, a cinema heavily influenced by German, French, and Soviet films and film theory with its network of film clubs, film journals, and art film houses. Ryall explores how the Quota Act of 1927 gave impetus to the development of an English cinema heavily influenced by Hollywood studio techniques and practises and drawing on English popular culture (the English music hall, the English theatre, English literature, English crime and spy novels). Ryall explores how the growth of the English cinema was limited-Britons continued to prefer Hollywood cinema--and its inability to regularly break into the American market, something necessitated by the small size of the English market compared to that of the United States.

Ryall places the films of Alfred Hitchcock into all these contexts. Ryall notes that Hitchcock was one of those few who straddled the divide between the entertainment cinema and the popular cinema, something evidenced, Ryall argues, in his films, films that are often simultaneously influenced by Hollywood and aimed at a mass audience, while also characterised by aural and visual experimentation that Hitchcock drew from Germany, France, and the Soviet Union. Ryall explores how Hitchcock's career benefited from the Quota Act and how the decline of the English film industry in 1937 led Hitchcock to move to Hollywood to make films. Ryall explores how Hitchcock's films reflect the popularity of certain British genres, particularly the thriller and spy genre, a genre with which Hitchcock became synonymous from the 1940s on, and explores how the theme of ordinary people impacted by extraordinary circumstances, a theme that became central to his thrillers, also became central to Hitchcock's auteurist image.

Ryall's superb book is essential to anyone interested in the relationship between society and film, culture and film, English society and culture in the early 20th century, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. It offers an approach to culture and film that is more sociological than psychoanalytic and is far the better for it and should be emulated by other film scholars far more than it has been.

The Books of My Life: Russian Writers and Society in the Nineteenth Century

As Ronald Hingley notes in his Russian Writers and Society in the Nineteenth Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, second edition, 1977) one can read the classics of Russian literature between 1825 and 1904 without knowing much about Russia economically, politically, culturally, and demographically. It helps, Hingley rightly argues, to know something about Russian economics, politics, culture, and demographic to truly understand and appreciate the classics of nineteenth century Russian literature.

Hingley's Russian Writers and Society in the Nineteenth Century does just that. It gives interested readers an understanding of Russian geography, communications, ethnic groups, the economy, its estates--its monarchy, its aristocracy, including landowners and the gentry, its peasants, its middling crafts people and merchants--its religion, its towns and cities, its legal system, its officials, its military, and its censorship apparatus, all in brief and straightforward compass and often with examples drawn from the classics of nineteenth century Russian literature.

Hingley's introduction to Russian society and Russian literature in the nineteenth century is an excellent guide, for the educated reader, to the interrelationships between Russian literature and Russian society and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to know something about the broader contexts of Russian literature between 1825 and 1904. Not everyone will agree with Hingley's canon of the greatest of Russian literature during the era--Pushkin's Yevgeny Onegin, Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, Gogol's Dead Souls part one, Turgenev's Rudin, A Nest of Gentlefolk, On the Eve, Fathers and Children, Smoke, and Virgin Soil, Goncharov's Oblomov, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons/Devils/The Possessed, and Karamazov Brothers, and Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Some might want to add further "classics" to Hingley's list.

The Books of My Life: The Red Flag

Most people of a certain age, particularly in the West, when they think of communism today,  think of it as an utter failure, as the evil empire, and as something that defeated by the capitalist and democratic West, and particularly by America, during the Cold War from the late 1940s to the 1990s. Communism was, however, more than the demonic force of polemicists and more than the last great hope for humankind of its apologists. It was a social movement that was at the heart of global economics, politics, and culture during most of the twentieth century.

David Priestland in his The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove, 2009) explores the history of communism from its beginnings in the late 18th century to today. Just as sociologists of religion have tried to escape the iron cage of orthodox and heretical polemics and apologetics via dispassionate typology, Priestland tries to escape the iron cage of polemics and apologetics about communism since the 19th century. Priestland delineates several ideal type forms of communism. There is, he argues, the romantic communism of the barricades with its romantic revolutionary hero. There is the science and industrialisation as progressive and history as teleological modernist communism. And there is pragmatic communism or socialism with its compromises with bourgeois "democracy" and nationalism, another very prominent cultural meaning system in the modern and postmodern world.

These varieties of communism are, Priestland argues, ideal types--an approach Max Weber pioneered in--varieties of communism that can be isolated in theory but often succeeded or proceeded one another, interacted with, and were often interrelated in practise, something Priestland nicely shows in his explorations of the history of communism in all its varieties from the 19th century on. Needless to say the empirical fact that there were multiple forms of communism and socialism was lost on many anti-communist polemicists and pro-communist apologists, like the Bolsheviks, who argued, similarly to the Catholic Church when it maintains that it is the only true variety of Christianity, that there was only one true variety of communism, For the Bolsheviks and for those who demonised Bolshevism, the only variety of communism was Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism.

There are a number of points about communism that Priestland makes in his synthesis that I wholeheartedly agree with. Priestland rightly emphasises that war played an important role in the rise of revolutionary, modernist, and pragmatic varieties of communism and that communism was a reaction to the hierarchies and inequalities of the modern world.

Priestland notes that communism was and is a meaning system and that as a cultural meaning system it has similarities to religious meaning systems that originated in the Mediterranean world and which are still with us today, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Revolutionary communism, for example, whose cultural or meaning system developed in the context of war, initially the French Revolution and the European revolutions that followed, in the context of great economic change--the advent of mass capitalism and mass industrialisation--in the context of political change--the coming of mass politics and mass bureaucracies--and in the context of cultural change, created a social movement around a culture opposed to hierarchies and inequalities associated with industrialism and capitalism (and later imperialism) along with a cult of the romantic hero manning the revolutionary barricades a la Hugo. Modernist communism developed a culture that saw industrialisation and science as progressive and the triumph of communism as historically inevitable, a triumph that would result, modernist communists believed, in the end history (teleology). Revolutionary and modernist communisms even had their own catechism, Stalin's Short Course, for example.

By looking at communism as a social movement with a culture that creates a sense of identity and a sense of a community with a mission, it is clear that communism shares a lot with Western Christianity and Islam. Looking at communism in this way also allows us to see how communism shares a lot with a Weberian understanding of the sectarian process. Weber argued that most religious groups or culturally oriented social movements began in charisma, the charisma of a charismatic leader. As a result a sense of identity arose out of a common perception of that charismatic leader, and a strong sense of community with a mission to evangelise the message of that charismatic leader arose. Over time, Weber argued, particularly with the death of a charismatic leader, the charismatic sect morphs into a paternalistic church or denomination, and eventually, with the coming of modernity, into a rational bureaucratic church or denomination. With bureaucratisation, however, Weber argued, came dissent and the claim that the bureaucratic church or denomination was only a shade of what it originally was. As a result new sects seeking to capture the primitive or original spirit of the charismatic sect arose setting in motion the sect/church/denomination cycle anew. As Priesland makes clear communism of the romantic and modernist varieties with their conviction that they and they alone had the truth (ethnocentrism) and that others needed to be told of this truth (evangelisation) led to periodic purification or inquisitional campaigns, periodic renewal campaigns, and periodic sectarianisation within the communist movement. Think of all the varieties of Trotskyism over the years.

Ironically, as Priestland points out, this sense of ideological purity, the need for renewal, and evangelical fervour, is not only found in Christianity, Islam, and communism. It can also be readilly discerned in the neo-liberalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Like Christianity, Islam, and communism neo-liberals, particularly in their revolutionary and modernist forms, claim to have a monopoly on the truth--free markets as god's or nature's economic system--tend to be exclusive and purificationist thanks to their I'm OK, you are not OK, if you want to be OK you need to be like me mentalities, and tend to have a belief in the necessity of bringing their one truth message to the rest of world via evangelisation. Neo-liberals, in other words, as Priestland notes, are somewhat inverted communists.

Priestland rightly notes that communism in comparison with capitalism was more transparent. Capitalism thanks to its almost occult and magical take on the workings of the market, was and perhaps is a more powerful ideology and opiate than communism. Those in the communist world could more readily see, particularly after the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, that the equality and radiant future that communism preached seemed at odds with the realities of inequality, perks for the powerful, and the seemingly endless putting off of the utopia at the end of the communist radiant rainbow. Neo-liberalism, in other words, with its ideology that inequality is inevitable thanks to the workings of the free market and variations in how hard one works and its messianic utopianism--everyone will benefit from the free market--is a more difficult drug for the masses to see through, claims Priestland. It is so difficult to see through that many believe, despite the oligarchic republicanism present in the West to varying degrees, despite inequalities and increasing inequality between rich and poor in the West and particularly in the US and UK, that individuals are responsible for their own destinies, that individuals make their own beds and must, as a result, lie in them.

While there are other equally dispassionate ways to typologise communisms--one might distinguish between utopian, scientific, and communal forms of communism--Priestland's approach is not only helpful but, and this is critical, more dispassionate than the capitalist "democracy" versus evil godless commie approach, an approach that parallels the religious orthodoxy versus religious heresy typology that has has dominated popular and even intellectual and academic approaches to communism. As Priestland notes it is absolutely essential to put the polemical and apologetic approach to rest if we are to truly understand the "nature" of socialisms and communisms of all types and communist dynamics.

Priestland's book doesn't, by the way, simply give us a glimpse into the social movements of the left. It also gives us an analogical glimpse into the social movements of the right. We currently live in an era of vast inequalities, of periodic conflicts, and of hardening hierarchies, all of which have led to the revival of the romantic capitialist nationalism of the American, Polish, Austrian, British, Hungarian,  Philippine, and British varieties. Given this reality, Priestland's superb book should be self-recommending not only to those interested in social movements of the left but to those concerned about the revival of the romantic right and who are interested in social movements of the right. The more things change...