The School of Life

This is for You: We All Need Words on Dedications and Acknowledgements.

When I was five, I lied.

I told friends at my primary school that an author had dedicated a book to me. In print. And everything.

This white lie got me in a bit of hot water. “Bring it in and show us then”, they said. “OK.”

Except the book didn’t exist. One fib led to another and I decided to write my own dedication in a way that (I thought) looked like type: For Molly Mackey.

(I wrote it in pencil, because I wasn’t old enough to write in pen.)

The book was Terry Jones’s Fairy Tales, which included a story called ‘Brave Molly’, so it made sense to me that it would be dedicated to a real life Molly. I wrote it on the inside page, hoping my friends wouldn’t get to the actual dedication: these stories were written for Sally Jones in the summer of 1978.

I still have the book. And you can see my hand-written ‘dedication’, along with the very faint ‘for’, rubbed out after my super sleuth friends quickly discovered the truth:

It’s a laughable forgery. I think I knew it at the time, but I really, really wanted to have a book dedicated to me. I thought it was the Best. Thing. Ever. That someone could write a book and say, “here, this is for you” blew my mind.

 It still does. The first thing I do when I pick up a book – any book – is look at the dedication in the front and the thanks at the back. If I’m in a bookshop, browsing the three-for-two mounds, I don’t read the blurbs. I head straight for the names, the little bit where the author writes in their own voice.

Sometimes they tell you how they’re connected to that name on the first page (for Kate, my mother). Mostly I have to settle for the bare bones. For… but then my brain goes into overdrive (“must be his partner/wife/sister/mum/best friend”). I swiftly make up my own stories about how the name in print is connected to the name on the front cover.

Sometimes authors give you a little more, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous Once again to Zelda. In Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love, the dedication reads: for my grandparents, who taught me the opposite of disappearing, next to their four photos, as well as and for Jonathan, my life. You don’t have to be a Nobel prizewinner to know that’s Jonathan Safran Foer. Ahhh. Lovely! Two authors! Together! In love!

All the time I search for scraps of information. Something, anything, about the author. Why? I don’t know for sure, but what I do know is that I spend a lot of time with an author when I read their books. I hear their voice. I’m in their head, and they’re in mine. Even if it’s outlandish fiction, their book becomes like a familiar friend. And as the book goes on I want to know more. So much so that I feel a bit of disorientated when I pick up a book written by someone else. And although it’s exciting to read a new book, I have to get to know the writer’s little wordy eccentricities and foibles all over again. And each new dedication gives me a teeny tiny glimpse into their real life. 

And then there are the acknowledgements. Tucked away at the back, it’s often where you can find out where the author put pen to paper (thanks to such-and-such-research centre, writers’ retreat or Starbucks), who helped them get their facts straight, who edited their book and who they relied on to look after the kids while they wrote it. I love these sneak peeks into an author’s real life. There are books I’m just not interested in reading, but I’ll always have a look at their acknowledgements. Just a few little words, but they’re a story in themselves – admittedly one that’s often made up by me.

Three years after my playground dedication debacle, I finally got what I’d boasted about. My mum’s friend was writing a book and her illustrator needed some children to photograph to help her draw the pictures. If by any (small) chance you have a copy of Rose Impey’s Scare Yourself to Sleep, you’ll see it’s For Tom, Molly and Alice (me, my brother and my best friend). Too late to prove my point to the five-year-olds, but a fib come true all the same.

We All Need Words dedicate this blog post to the people who’ve come to our Words for Life class at The School of Life (there’s another one on 3^rd December).

John-Paul Flintoff on Being Consumed by Ruskin

Have you caught on to the Ruskin revival yet? All of a sudden, it seems that the Victorian artist, critic and revolutionary thinker has become interesting again.

Emma Thompson is making a film about Ruskin's five-year marriage to Effie Gray, who ran off with Ruskin's protege, the pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais (who painted this portrait  of Ruskin before that unfortunate turn of events).

Nobody has ever quite understood what caused the marriage to fail. Some argue, not without evidence, that Ruskin was unable to accept his wife's having pubic hair. It remains to be seen how Thompson, and her husband Greg Wise, who plays Ruskin in her film, will handle this mystery. But to suggest that Ruskin's failed marriage is the most important thing about him is like saying that the point to remember about Socrates was that he wore sandals.

Ruskin was an extraordinary thinker whose ideas were influential throughout the British empire and beyond. He championed many great artists – not just the pre-Raphaelites but also – at a key point in his early career - William Mallord Turner. He substantially inspired the arts and crafts movement founded by William Morris. His observations about the natural world opened the way for environmentalists.

And he wrote and lectured widely to lecture on social justice. Tolstoy described Ruskin as one of the most remarkable men, “not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times”. And not long after Ruskin died, Gandhi read one of his essays on a long train journey - and said it cast a "magic spell" that changed his life.

 

Join us for our next Conversation Meal: Dine with Ruskin on Monday 12 September 2011 19.30-22.30. The evening will be hosted by writer and faculty member John Paul Flintoff and will take place at The Saatchi Gallery.

 

Mark Vernon on the Rules of the Group

 The last couple of nights, we’ve sat in the house – watching the blogs, exchanging texts – as our part of London operates a virtual curfew. The looting and arson is rightly condemned. I’m glad about that. But the moment is arriving to try to understand what has been happening on the streets of the UK’s cities too.

It is complex. However, one concept might be particularly useful. It’s the psychological phenomenon of group conscience.

The modern world teaches us that we are individuals. I make my own choices, attend to my own interests and strive to be self-sufficient. Autonomy and individual rights are the moral ideals that shape our age.

In truth, though, no-one is an island. We are social animals, as Aristotle observed, meaning not that we like to socialise, but that our identity is primarily collective. My family, my gang, my team, my nation are where I feel most fully myself and we will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain that sense of belonging. This is what group conscience protects and enforces. It keeps you in, even if that means keeping others out.

It can be likened to the way birds flock in the air, making the most extraordinary patterns as they wheel and swirl. The science suggests that the birds obey just one or two rules. Head for the centre. Mimic your neighbour. They are the rules of the group. We humans are driven by similar compulsions. We long to know our place.

What, then, of the rioters? There is a lot of outraged comment about why youths don’t know the difference between right and wrong. But criminologists point out that this is necessary but by itself also misses the point. Like the birds, the looters are not primarily acting as self-autonomous individuals. They are copycats – doing what their mates are doing; doing what other gangs are doing. This also explains why the violence spreads, and why that is so alarmingly hard to control.

As journalists interview rioters, this is what you hear them say. ‘It was fun.’ ‘We show we can do what we want to.’ ‘It’s time for payback.’ These are collective sentiments. The morality these guys obey is that of the group. And unsettlingly, it can be half good as well as bad. Some of their values, it seems, are driven by a sense of rage and injustice. Others are driven by the culture of greed that opportunistically puts its hand in the till – a value embodied in many other groups too, it should be said.

In fact, we are all the same. The difference is that our groups probably follow values that are mostly, thankfully, pro-social. Group conscience has been heart-warmingly demonstrated by #RiotCleanUp: ‘It's a movement’ declares Dan Thompson, the organiser of the broom army. It has also been on display amongst the vigilantes seeking to protect their property – though they must be careful to monitor the rules they obey.

Heading for the centre and mimicking your neighbour are powerful urges that can lead anyone astray.

Mark Vernon is a philosopher, author and faculty member of The School of Life.  Follow his blog www.markvernon.com

Image by illustrator Emmeline Pidgen see@emmelinedraws

John-Paul Flintoff on #RiotCleanUp

I’m typing this quickly, to get it out before I hear that any more rioting has started, and before setting out to run a class this evening at The School of Life for any intrepid learners not scared to venture out too.

So: #RiotCleanUp. I have been very excited since first seeing this combination of words last night, while the riots were still going.

You see, I’m trying to finish writing a book about changing the world (I know!), but am struggling with the dense horror of the term “non-violent action”. I love the idea, but the words are so off-putting.

I think that #RiotCleanUp more or less conveys much the same idea: it’s dramatic, but also wholesome. There’s a bit of yin and yang going on, as my Chinese doctor might put it: a hint of the liveliness of “riot” that was relished by, among others, the “Riot Grrrrrl” punks, but also sober helpfulness and putting-things-right.

I’ve been a fan of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh for some time, ever since reading one of his books opened my eyes to the possibility of (momentary) enlightenment while washing up. So any movement that takes as its logo a yellow washing up glove is a movement I want to belong to.

(Not that I usually wear washing up gloves, as it happens, because they don’t seem ever to fit my big hands. And washing up gloves are hardly what you need when gathering the broken shards of glass after a riot. But they’re immediately identifiable, and I like them.)

Anyway, am off shortly. But before I go, I’m going to make a trial badge using this image and a make-your-own-badges kit that my brother gave my daughter for her birthday a couple of years ago.

If it’s any good, I might make lots more, the industrial way, and even try to get retailers to sell them.

Would be glad to know what you think.

John Paul Flintoff is a faculty member of The School of Life.  Follow his tumblr here and keep your eye out for #RiotCleanUp badges coming soon........Join the clean up at www.riotcleanup.co.uk

Chris Johnstone on Resilience

Imagine a child tugging at your arm and asking “what is resilience and how do you get it?” Our reply expresses our ‘story of resilience’, our inner understanding of what resilience is and what it is based on. Because that story powerfully shapes our response to adversity, reviewing it and identifying ways we can develop or strengthen it is one of the keys to becoming more resilient.

When I worked for many years in the addictions treatment service, my clients would often describe how, as children, they’d watched family members use alcohol or drugs as a way of dealing with stress. We learn by watching others, and the story they took in was that resilience is based on chemical props. A big part of my work involved teaching ways of dealing with crisis and adversity that didn’t involve alcohol or drugs.

When our story includes a good understanding of how we can develop resilience, then we carry this into every situation we face. A strong story of resilience is more than the sum of its parts; it can become a source of strength within us. So what I teach is how we get to know this story, have a clear sense of the shape of it, so that whatever we face, we can ask ‘what would a story of resilience look like here, and how can I play my part in it?’

There is good research evidence that teaching resilience skills to adults and children reduces their risk of depression. Strengthening our capacity to cope with adversity also liberates us to pursue more exciting goals, because we’re less likely to be put off by the inevitable bumpiness that journeys of significant change involve. That’s why I love teaching resilience. It is a life skill that brings us more to life.

Dr Chris Johnstone is author of 'Find Your Power' – A Toolkit For Resilience and Positive Change' (2^nd ed, Permanent Publications, 2010). He is teaching this week at our Summer School and will be running the Resilience One Day Workshop at The School of Life on Saturday 24 September.

We All Need Words go Jackanory in our bibliotherapist’s chair

Dear Bibliotherapist,

Bam! Just like that, the summer holidays are upon us. Six loooong weeks of paddling pools or rainy days on rotation. Story time crops up more often in the summer nine-to-five, so which picture books are at the top of your list?

 

Dear Audio Book (as your kids see you),

Yours is a common ailment. Luckily, We All Need Words are obsessed with kids’ books and they’ve rustled up this picture-book prescription just for you. The dosage? Again. And again.

TO ANSWER LITTLE ONES' BIG QUESTIONS:

The Lost Thing

“So you want to hear a story?” It’s just an ordinary day in suburbia when the little boy finds the lost thing. Where did it come from? Where will it go? What does it mean to belong? What’s happiness, anyway? This story mixes the surreal and the everyday to ask - not answer - some of life’s big questions. The answers are up to you… by Shaun Tan

 

The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes, illustrated by Laura Carlin
“Where did he come from? Nobody knows.” This is a new version of Ted Hughes’ classic with brilliant illustrations. It tackles belonging (again), fear, war and, eventually, peace. Good to give Dr Who fans their first taste of science fiction.

TO REMEMDY FEARS:

Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears by Emily Gravett
Whatever your children are afraid of, Little Mouse can top it. Sciaphobia (fear of shadows), ablutophobia (fear of bathing) and even panophobia (fear of everything), he’s one fretful, scaredy-mouse. Part story, part therapy (“everyone is scared of something”) and part diary for kids to write, doodle and record the things that scare them. 

The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark by Jill Tomlinson
“I don’t want to be a night bird…I want to be a day bird.” Plop is a little owl who hates the dark. Over seven chapters he learns that the dark is exciting, (you can’t have fireworks without it), wonderful, beautiful and kind. An oldie (it was first published in 1968), but a goodie. Especially for kids who insist you leave the light on.

TO BREAK THE HABITS OF A LITTLE LIFETIME:

The Boy Who Hated Toothbrushes by Zehra Hicks
First off, we should point out that we know this author and we wrote the biog on her website… Billy will do anything to get out of cleaning his teeth. Until the horrified tooth fairy sends him a toothsparkler and things get interesting (and his teeth get cleaner). Good for adding a bit of magic to the daily toothbrush tussle.

The World Champion of Staying Awake by Sean Taylor, illustrated by Jimmy Liao
Stella’s toys are wiiiiiide awake. So she invents adventures to cure their insomnia (and fingers crossed, insomnia everywhere). A story where kids step into their parents’ shoes – you never know, it might prompt some empathy.

TO BRING BRECHT TO BABIES:

Brecht demolished that fourth wall, and these books have a go too. Ok, we exaggerate. But these stories play with the idea of what a book is.

Limelight Larry by Leigh Hodgkinson
Meet Larry, a peacock with more attitude than most. He wants to be the star of these empty pages, but other animals keep appearing to spoil his fun. A cautionary tale for any prima donnas in the making…

There Are No Cats In This Book by Viviane Schwarz
Tiny, Moonpie and André are three cats who are desperate to get out of this book to see the world. They push, they jump and they ask for your help. Perfect with its sister book, There Are Cats in This Book (they’re very friendly and they want to play).

TO GET UP TO SPEED WITH WHERE BOOKS ARE GOING NEXT:

If your kids are kissing goodbye to a good old-fashioned book in favour of the computer, fear not. Here’s a book that’s an app, and one that most definitely isn’t.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore by Moonbot Studios
An app that lets you play the piano, flick pages, change the colour of the sky, read books-within-books and screams: PLEASE TOUCH to small hands… Created by a designer who used to work at Pixar, this ‘book’ will get kids used to the idea of interactive tales in a jiffy.

It’s A Book! by Lane Smith
It doesn’t scroll. It doesn’t have a plug. It doesn’t need a password. IT’S A BOOK, silly. A media-savvy donkey questions an old-school monkey about the relic that is the book. (We have a sneaky feeling that this book is actually best for parents who are surgically attached to their Blackberry.)

 

We All Need Words run the Words For Life weekend workshop at The School of Life and children’s books crop up in one of their lessons. Join them next term, in October or December. Click here for further details.

Invitation to The School of Life Open Day

Saturday 5 September 11.00 - 18.00

If you've been curious about The School of Life and would like to meet the people behind it, this is your opportunity! 
 
Staff and faculty will be on hand throughout the day to tell you about our five essential courses on Love, Work, Family, Play and Politics. Our bibliotherapists will offer taster sessions.  There'll be a Virtual Travel Clinic where you can find out about our upcoming holidays, and our Life Lessons stall will dispense philosophical ideas on matters as eclectic as telling the truth, finding the right job, making resolutions and falling in love.
 
The School of Life’s Open Day is part of the Marchmont Street Festival.  Entry to The School of Life is free. 

 

Alice Rawsthorn on Good Design

Ahead of her secular sermon for The School of Life on Sunday June 28, International design critic Alice Rawsthorn, puts out a call to arms for young designers.

 

The numbers seem nutty. There are 6.5 billion people on this planet, 90% of who can’t afford basic products and services. Half of them, nearly 3 billion people, don’t have regular access to food, shelter or clean water. Yet whenever we read, or talk, about design, it’s invariably about something that’s intended to be sold to one of the privileged minority – the richest 10%.

 

The £1 million chaise longue. The super-smart phone. The fast car. The beautifully bound book. The elegant typeface. The cute digital device.  Museums, books, magazines, and blogs are stuffed with them. Tens of thousands of designers devote their working lives to producing more.

 

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that. No one forces billionaires to pay £1 million for chaises longues at gunpoint, and I can’t pretend to feel the least bit guilty about loving beautiful books. But when you look at the bigger picture, doesn’t it seem odd that so much time, energy, talent and resource should be devoted to creating luxuries for relatively few people, when so many more people are in desperate need of designers’ skills and ingenuity?

 

More and more designers, mostly young ones, are addressing that need by designing everything from emergency housing, water purification devices, cheap forms of transport, educational resources, to new business initiatives for “the other 90%”. They are also tackling the problems of mature economies like our’s by working in collaboration with other disciplines such as anthropology, economics, ethnography, psychology and the social sciences to develop new solutions to acute social problems in areas like crime, education, healthcare, housing, joblessness and ageing.

 

At the same time, the combination of the economic recession and environmental crisis is prompting designers to re-assess the value of their conventional projects. Many of the values that underpinned design in the 20^th century are now redundant. Technology is no longer seen as a panacea. New things aren’t necessarily better than old ones. Big isn’t always best. Why buy something when you can borrow it for a time, before passing it on? Then there is the realisation that most designers’ work will end up rotting – or worse, failing to rot – in landfill sites? And that the design phenomenon of this year, iPhone apps, was dreamt up by amateur designers, not professionals.

 

If you look back historically, design has always flourished in periods of change. It is an agent of change that can help us to understand the changes in the world around us, and to interpret shifts in science, technology, culture and the economy into things that can help to make our lives more efficient and enjoyable. This is a time of unprecedented change, when those shifts are accelerating as are the extremes of speed and scale that confront us daily, while the social and political systems that once ran our lives are collapsing.

 

All of this creates extraordinary opportunities for designers, if they embrace a new approach to design – one that is more fluid, responsive, collaborative and inclusive. They will have to win over an increasingly demanding and knowledgeable public. They will have to design intangible formulae, as well as things, and then devolve responsibility for how them. Designers will also have to accept responsibility for ensuring that their work can be disposed of as responsibly as it should have been sourced, manufactured, sold and shipped. And they must focus on the needs of the under-privileged 90%. If they succeed, we will have a new definition of “good design” – one that has less to do with chairs, and more with the aspects of design that really matter.

 

To book tickets for Alice Rawsthorn's sermon on June 28th, click here.

 

Simon Jenkins on the lure of the live

Simon Jenkins' comment piece in Saturday's Guardian exploring the extraordinary public appetite for live performance highlighted by the success of the Simón Bólivar Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall last week, is certainly borne out by our experience at The School of Life. Our Secular Sermons on Sunday mornings now draw a crowd of over 500, eager for good ideas delivered with palpable passion. When most churches can barely scrape double figures for their weekly attendance, and media experts tell us the future is all on online events, what exactly is going on?

Jenkins calls it the “magnetism of human congregation..... which invites the audience to speak, to think, to make up its mind and to vote.  .... The more leisure we have, the more we want to escape the tyranny of screen and earpiece, the now ubiquitous workstation. Theorists seem unable to handle this want, because its technology is old-fashioned, that of live sound heard by a live community of enthusiasts in real time and place."

Read his full piece here.

Maurice Glasman on why Orwell got it wrong

It is sixty years since George Orwell published 1984. Maurice Glasman asks whether it has really been as prophetic as it’s cracked up to be.

George Orwell’s 1984 has failed to stand the test of time.  Twenty five years after its projected moment of realisation, the type of totalitarian repression he envisaged may help us grasp the condition of a Chinese Communist Party functionary who has fallen out of favour but does not give us the conceptual resources to capture the type of threats to liberty and integrity that confront us in Britain today. 

 

As a conservative patriot working in a socialist tradition, Orwell was concerned with threats to the type of society Britain was becoming.  ‘Big Brother’ is a scary concept but it is not at the heart of what is at stake here today.  The booing of Andy Burnham at the Hillsborough Memorial at Anfield yesterday expresses a rage and contempt that people feel towards politics and politicians that is nowhere captured in 1984.  The threats to society that people fear, such as environmental degradation, market failure, immigration or Islamic contestation do not feature. 

 

It is true that millions of people live a life of atomised powerlessness when confronting forces that are definitively beyond their control.  The force which confronts them, however, is not a Single Party Prison State based upon constant domestic surveillance, common activities and Supreme Leader devotions all co-ordinated through a central government of such integrated omnipotence and knowledge of each citizen’s secret fears that resistance of even the most personal type is met by the slavering jaws of wild black dogs that attack you in the night. 

 

The force is something very different.

 

There is indeed a culture of almost constant surveillance and most of it is carried out by family members and friends who record as many moments of one another’s lives as they can.  The police are held to account by a citizen’s army of mobile phone cameramen who document every moment.  The State cannot hit its targets for teenage pregnancies or literacy, political participation or tests for cervical cancer.  Even the might of the Great Hegemon’s Army is made to jump around Afghanistan by a bunch of enraged peasants with Kalshnikoffs.  Blowing away three teenage pirates is heralded as a great success in a whole array of global wars.  Meanwhile the State finds itself subordinate to the demands of finance even to the extent of using its own resources to keep them in their position of dominance. 

 

The most effective forms of public manipulation and mobilisation are not to be found in the public sector, or politics at all, but in advertising campaigns and branding.  The State is more than capable of losing personal data, but only the private sector will sell our most intimate financial details on to unscrupulous fraudsters for a profit.  Totalitarianism is found far more forcefully in private sector team bonding sessions in which you either commit yourself publicly to obvious bullshit or risk losing your job.  The obtrusiveness of line management and the risks associated with not being a team player are forged most furiously when making money is at stake. 

 

The type of closed society that Orwell envisages is also inconceivable in a society characterised by internet access, satellite television and immigration.  The black dogs that attack you in the night are far more likely to belong to people traffickers or drug dealers than the secret police.  Orwell’s failure to envisage the power of the market, the incompetence and subordination of the state and the increasing insignificance of political parties in people’s lives deserves some reflection. 

 

Orwell’s conceptual imagination was shaped and formed by the dreams and nightmares of the Left.  From Wigan Pier to Catalonia, from Animal Farm to 1984 the concern is the same. If the problem for Conservatism has always been that of how to stop the market undermining the family, the locality and integrity of inherited institutions, then the problem for socialism has always been that of how to stop the State nationalising society and then making it redundant.  Orwell envisages an entirely monopolistic state,  a supreme leader leading a single party through the repressive apparatus of a dominant State with collective coercive power over all its citizens.  Any form of Hard Left politics that had this type of political arrangement as a vision of the good is now only of any consequence in public-sector teaching Unions. 

 

Orwell was right that society would become atomised and sedated, he was right that abstract forms of communication would feed a permanent sense of displacement and powerlessness and he was right in 1948 to observe that Statist socialism was the biggest show in town.  Where he was wrong was in his assumption that capitalism had been beaten. 

 

Maurice Glasman will be discussing the failure of such a dream for the Left and for our society as a whole with Phillip Blond in Red Tory vs Blue Labour, a debate organised by The School of  Life next Wednesday 22^nd of April at Conway Hall, London WC1. Find out more here.

 

Maurice Glasman will also  be teaching the next Politics course at The School of Life starting Thursday evening 30 April. Find out more here.