...mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita...

a.k.a, recent reading, as follows:

Victorian

Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Aurora Floyd (1862-3)
Classic Victorian sensation fiction – I actually enjoyed it more than the one for which Braddon is now best-remembered, Lady Audley's Secret. The plot centres around bigamy (it's also a canonical work in the 'Victorian bigamy novel') and so, as you can imagine, is of interest on all kinds of levels, but gender and sexuality especially.

Margaret Oliphant – Miss Marjoribanks (1866)
A delightful tale (part of the Chronicles of Carlingford) which bears resemblance to Trollope's slightly preceding Barsetshire Chronicles, of which I'm also a fan. Lucilla, our heroine, is determined to behave sensibly, and also to resolve the lives of everyone around her. Here there are echoes of Austen's Emma (1815), but unlike Emma Woodhouse, Lucilla's management is not wholly unsuccessful. Subversive to an interesting degree yet still moralistic in the classic Victorian mold. I must read the rest of the Carlingford novels.

George & Weedon Grossmith – Diary of a Nobody (1892)
For someone who's got a Victoriana obsession and also a research interest in the rise of the modern bourgeoisie, Diary of a Nobody is perfect. Of course, it's funny, and also a nice counterpoint to more 'serious' Victorian novels (see above) which are yours truly's usual diet.


Assorted Novels

Elizabeth Bowen – The Death of the Heart (1938)
These days I'm not much into 'writerly' writers but I'll gladly make an exception for Bowen, who I hadn't previously read. Her modernist prose makes you want to use clichés like 'crystalline,' and I'm also always a fan of the English novel of manners. In some ways she reminds me of Janet Malcolm (or vice versa) in that both have an exquisite sense of human frailty, but they also like to slyly slip the knife in.

Cornell Woolrich – Rendezvous In Black (1948)
Compared to Chandler and Hammett, Woolrich these days tends to be forgotten as an important noir figure, but the films based on his works are still remembered – Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, Night Has A Thousand Eyes (one of my favourite titles) among others. Actually, though, his work is much darker, less procedural-driven and even more psychological than the aforementioned, full of dread. Rendezvous In Black is a revenge narrative following a man whose fiancée has been killed (bizarrely) in an accident with a low-flying plane and an empty liquor bottle. I have two other novels of his waiting, but I'm worried that it'll be too traumatic a reading experience…

Shirley Jackson – The Sundial (1958)
I'm a huge fan of Jackson's fiction, especially the stories other than 'The Lottery' (which is over-proscribed) - and of the great novels The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived In The Castle (1962). I've been slowly making my way through her lesser known work, which I find uneven. In The Sundial, as in We Have Always…, we find ourselves in a crumbling mansion on the outskirts of a village, both filled with eccentric characters. Aunt Fanny has a vision, delivered by her dead father, of an impending apocalypse, and preparations begin. I didn't warm to this novel though it was interesting, and in some ways could be seen as a test run for some of the themes of We Have Always… I wonder, too, if there is an influence on Stephen King's The Shining (King wrote about The Haunting of Hill House at length in Danse Macabre), particularly in scenes set in mazes.

J. G. Ballard – The Drowned World (1962)
It's impossible not to recognise in Ballard one of the twentieth century's great prophets – which is why I'll reiterate. The Drowned World, an early novella, tells the story of a dystopian Earth on which the ice caps have melted, the seas risen, and the entire planet become tropical. The slow impact of this on the psyche of the survivors – the opaque excursions into psycho-evolutionary biology – along with the tropical/aquatic gothic setting make this a fascinating and prescient piece, if not always compelling.

J. G. Ballard – Crash (1973)
Again, although Crash's reputation preceded it, it didn't do anything to dint the pleasure of reading the work. Like a lot of Cultural Studies and pop culture research people, I find that 'body horror' area/era particularly interesting in which the body-machine complex starts to be overtly represented in forms both erotic and monstrous (note to self: Men, Women and Chainsaws is still waiting to be read). Ballard, Burroughs, Cronenberg, Lynch, and so on. I'm ashamed to admit that Crash (and Dead Ringers) are the two Cronenberg films I've yet to see, but I'm glad to have read the book first – and, like a few other of the works I describe here, it is every bit as stunning as one has heard. And amazing to imagine that it was written in 1973. The blank erotics and stark futurity, the sharp vision of the city and technology, the mutual violation and traumatic inseparability of body and machine and body-as-machine… it's all there. See also Mark Seltzer (thanks again for the recommendation Dr Swan) and also, of course, Donna Haraway.

Lew McCreary – The Minus Man (1991)
I have a long-neglected sideline interest in serial killers, and Mark Seltzer's eponymous work brought a number of references to my attention, including this novel. Generally, I tend to find serial killers a tiresome subject for fiction (particularly as they are now so implicated in crime fiction and television, and don't require a motive, hence obviating the plot work that writers would otherwise have to put in), but The Minus Man (Lydia Lunch has also named a song on her most recent studio album after the phrase) is much more of a psychological work (and, unlike my favourite serial killer novel, Joyce Carol Oates' Zombie, or Dexter, that other tale of a killer hero, uninterested in satisfying gruesome voyeuristic fantasies). While the controversy around the novel (which was also filmed) centred around the sympathy that the reader feels for Vann Siegert, the serial killer from whose perspective the story is told, in fact this seems like a ridiculous over-simplification; in straightforward prose, McCreary sets out a cold but very human psychological study of the killer as a human inhabiting a lifeworld which happens to include the compulsion to destroy others. A work which, as Seltzer pointed out, is thought-provoking both in terms of its original approach to its content, and when considered as a symptom of the violence and trauma at – and reflexively considered to be at – the heart of the modern social-technological complex.


Assorted Non-Fiction

Jessica Mitford – The American Way of Death Revisited (1998)
As is evident elsewhere, although death has been an ongoing theme – as it is for all of us – my recent Death Studies sojourn has been the locus around which various reading has centred in recent times. Mitford's revised version of her classic work takes us through the usual hideous juxtaposition of the biological and the consumer banal (as well as the institutionalisation of capitalist profit-making on the backs of the bereaved). Little of the older material will be news to anyone who's read Waugh's classic, The Loved One – but what rankles and intrigues is the extent to which, despite her original revelation, the deeply cynical corporatisation of the funeral industry has continued unabated. As with any good piece of muckraking – and Mitford's up there with the best – the indignation and disgust flow unabated (to take just one of myriad examples, the fashion for expensive 'double coffins' in which the outer layer is intended to be impenetrable by the elements - causing a build-up of gas inside the coffin due to anaerobic bacterial decay and leading to explosions - the solution being 'burping coffins,' which vent the gas so as to avoid the former, and presumably greater, indignity).

Simon Reynolds – Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction To Its Own Past (2011)
There's so much that could be said about this book, but that will have to await a more thorough review. I loved Reynolds' work on post-punk, Rip It Up and Start Again, but this one is a bit more personal, also more theoretical and coming from a position of critique, which is interesting but at times fails to gel or seems a little like a mid-life crisis. What I will note here, which others have before me, is that the irony is that Reynolds' thesis - that we now create music which does not attempt to be new, and that this is a bad thing - actually looks back to the time when music saw itself as new (Reynolds thinks '65 was the turning point) as an original golden age. Definitely worth reading - both enraging and engaging.

Scott Carney – The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers (2011)
This book is as gruesome as the title sounds, but it's necessary reading for anyone interested in necro- or thanatocapitalism and the reification of the human body on the unequal playing field of the global 'free market' – while not being as heavy a read as any of that sounds (it's written in an easy journalistic style). Carney's interest in the area began when one of his students, on a group tour to India, committed suicide and he was in the position to supervise the treatment and return of the body. From that point, he explores the various areas mentioned in the subtitle, including the fascinating nexus between holy or ritual head-shaving and the hair industry. For those who enjoyed Mary Roach's Stiff, there are many more interesting explorations to be had into the 'afterlife' of the human – or human biological material. Particularly recommended for the Death Studies cohort (Tim and Pia – also Meredith, you may find this one interesting if you haven't seen it already).

Jon Ronson – The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (2011)
I'd really enjoyed Jon Ronson's Them, and so I had high hopes for The Psychopath Test, particularly since, as you're now aware, it deals with a subject I have a deep interest in. But although, as always, Ronson uncovers various near-unbelievable histories and anecodotes, and employs his typical and typically entertaining strategic deployment of his own awkwardness and his unique style of reported dialogue, I found the book a little all over the place. Ronson isn't quite sure what he's interested in (Psychopathology itself, as a concept and as manifest? The 'madness industry' and its pernicious allies in other state and corporate institutions? Institutions and their impact on mental health?) and there is a particularly problematic chapter in which he interviews a former Tonton Macoute, trying to apply his new knowledge of psychopathy checklists – whereas those of us who know much about the area of organised mass violence know that it's precisely necessary not to employ sadists or psychopaths as violence workers because they're too unreliable and anti-systemic - you would think a book on psychopathy, even if not an academic work as such, might pay attention to this kind of thing. Still, all in all a lot of fun.


India

Rohinton Mistry – A Fine Balance (1996)
Just as good as I'd always heard it was – a Dickensian (I'm not always a huge fan of Dickens, but that's another conversation), addictive narrative set during the massive upheaval of Indira Gandhi's Emergency. In terms of other great recent English-language novels of India, I didn't love it as much as A Suitable Boy, but although Mistry's writing is less exquisitely fine-tuned than Vikram Seth's, the story itself grows powerful very early on.

Gita Mehta – Karma Cola (1979)
A good corrective to the neo-orientalist New Age view of India as a source of wisdom, particularly prevalent in the '60s and '70s – there are some great anecdotes of gurus and devotees, and the intermesh with capitalism, but I found Mehta's 'flip' style to be a bit casual and offputting.

William Dalrymple – The Age of Kali (1998)
Edward Luce – In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (2007)
I'd already read, and mostly enjoyed, Dalrymple's book on practitioners of different spiritual traditions in India, Nine Lives. But reading Western travel literature on India is difficult in that the writers often haven't caught up with post-colonialism, and that's unfortunately the case both for Dalrymple, who at times appears something of an imperialist nostalgic (I'm also finding that in the work of his I'm presently reading on Delhi, City of Djinns); and for Luce, bureau chief for the Financial Times in South Asia (and now Washington), who is too sympathetic to anti-statist freemarketism for my tastes (not saying that there aren't any problems with the Indian state as such). Nonetheless, Dalrymple's descriptions are gorgeous (and his encounters with Benazir Bhutto particularly stick in the memory), while Luce had access to some very interesting people and the anecdotes, situations and interviews he lays out are both hilarious and chilling, the latter particularly in relation to Partition and inter-communal violence (again, a theme of City of Djinns). I now intend to read some specific Partition histories, which I think may also be helpful for my mass violence research…

Creature Feature: In Brief

Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza - REC 2 (2009)

The first REC, while by no means a masterpiece, was a solid and original piece of horror film-making, doing something a bit different with the zombie genre and making unwontedly welcome use of the hand-held camera – and indeed, managing to extend on the technology and hence the mise en scène. The second, to my lights, is even better – though straying outside the confines of the sealed-off apartment block in a way which breaks the claustrophobia which worked so well in the first instalment, the inclusion of further back story and character diversity makes for a more complex film without losing the simple momentum of the first (and now, with a twist…)

George A. Romero - Diary of the Dead (2008)

A disappointing Romero vehicle in which, unlike the aforementioned, the use of digital hand-held disappoints and irritates, encompassing all the typical flaws of these genres (i.e., severe frustration with the camera holder who however remains untouchable due to their status as such; unrealistic failure to put it down in life-threatening situations). Meanwhile, the internet themes fail to cohere into meaningful social commentary a la Dawn of the Dead. Watch Zombieland instead.

John McTiernan - Predator (1987)

Another in the ‘I can’t believe I’ve never seen this’ canon, this was a surprisingly atmospheric film, with the shadowy South American jungle as the main character – striated shadows dappling the blazing sun and the sweat and blood of the action film. The USA redeems its sanguinaceous Cold War interference in its ‘backyard’ through the trope of the pursuit of Latin terrorists (managing to allay the inhumanity of this killing and also feminize the victims even as we fear their violence by leaving alive the lone female terrorist as a prisoner who ultimately becomes an ally), while nodding to 80s political correctness, such as it was, in the black characters and, naturally the native American who has an intimate connection with the ways of the jungle (all of these sacrificeable, naturally). The ‘reveal’ comes surprisingly late in the piece, and the strangely honourable predator, before he (?) is revealed as an overgrown dreadlocked insect, segues in with the natural world as a ripple in the trees (with effects which haven’t dated too badly, unlike the technology he uses). Apocalypse Now, filtered through the lens of an unironic Schwarzeneggerian (gubernatorial?) all-Americanism.

Jon Harris - The Descent 2 (2009)

Another film in which the environment is the protagonist – in this case, the same cave system in which the protagonists of the first Descent (Neil Marshall, director of the original, returns only as executive producer) found themselves trapped – again, we spend somewhat more time outside the closed environment, here becoming a flaw, and there is also the somewhat unrealistic, but effective, choice to send the sole survivor of the first film back into the tunnels. Essentially we are re-exploring old ground in a less effective rehash of the first film, which was an entertaining diversion with some early moments of fear and claustrophobia before ‘descending’ into a fairly typical monster gore hunt (colour-coded, a nice touch) – here, without the benefit of that unfamiliarity, while the caves remain an original and atmospheric setting, despite a final twist there is nothing here which adds meaningfully to the film’s predecessor.

Wes Craven et al – A Nightmare On Elm Street 1-4 (1984-88)

I wasn’t actually sure if I’d seen the first, but I’d certainly never seen the sequels. And what pleasant – or should that be unpleasant? – surprises were in store! Unlike other the other classic protagonists of the genre – Jason Voorhees & Michael Myers – these films did not have the stigma of having given birth to the rather unnecessary slasher genre, but instead of playing an important role in the development of the blockbuster horror comedy (not to mention the ongoing horror-queering of the all-american dream suburbs) – and we love ‘em for it (and I’m not just saying that because we’re inhabiting here my favourite decade of the twentieth century – the 80s)! Camp as all get-out, with absurdist, ‘body horror’ pre-CGI special effects (reminiscent of other films of the era such as the unjustly neglected Society, or even Videodrome) which invoke a great deal of nostalgia – and a twisted, Burtonesque atmosphere to boot – not only the initial NOES, but also, unusually, the sequels, are extremely worthwhile. Part 2 is noteworthy really only for the extremely overt (and apparently intentional) homoerotic elements (with just a touch of B&D in the shower room), but 3 kicks into high and rather dark gear – featuring Freddy’s intended teenage victims in a mental institution as a result of their belief in the reality of their dreams, and the unexpected appearance of Patricia Arquette (not to mention Laurence Fishburne) - a punk edge, and rather nasty addiction and sexual violence themes (these latter in the development of Freddy’s backstory), also creep in. Part 4 can’t quite live up to the claustrophobic institutionalization and traumatic edge of the third film, but nonetheless it remains a romp, featuring particularly memorable scenes in which Freddy inhabits a roach motel and a pizza (!), as well as an extension of the theme, used to brilliant effect throughout the series, of the indistinguishability of the line dividing reality and fantasy, in a time-loop sequence. Oh, and I was forgetting, we also have a soundtrack showcasing Sinead O’Connor with MC Lyte performing the ultra-catchy I Want Your Hands (On Me) – not to mention the Are You Ready For Freddy rap by the Fat Boys featuring Robert Englund. Dark comedy of the absurd, accompanied by nostalgia for the tainted eighties.

Catharine Arnold - Bedlam: London and Its Mad (2008)

Catharine Arnold has already taken us through the history of burial practices in London, in her fascinating earlier work Necropolis; here, she explores the treatment of the mad – and theories of madness – through a history of London’s Bethlehem Hospital, better known as ‘Bedlam,’ a byword for unwanted disorder and uproar. Bedlam doesn’t reach the high standard set by Necropolis; given that this work is more closely focused, the early part of the book, in which we wade through the a maze of dates and figures tracing the early history of ‘Bethlem’ from its establishment as a priory in 1247, is heavy going at times. Also, in contrast to her earlier book, histories of Bedlam, though more scholarly than this work, are already in circulation – so what we have here is an at-times frustrating mélange of the straight history of a single institution, a broader history of ‘madness’ and institutionalisation in English history, and a narrative of the evolution of concepts and treatments of ‘madness’ from roots in Greek thought and the theory of the humours,through to the bifurcation of models and of treatment into an organic-psychiatric model, as opposed to a psychoanalytic-therapeutic understanding, and the failures of so-called ‘care in the community’. Cultural history is also engaged in looking at representations of madness including Hogarth and the Victorian sensation novel. We meet a great number of significant (and often tragic) characters here, including Richard Burton, George III, Richard Dadd, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

The later part of the book – that dealing with the Victorian era onwards (or is that just me?), takes off, exploring subjects such as gender, sexuality and inequality, institutionalisation by husband or family as a form of control, to the unexpected phenomenon of shellshock in the First World War and the ways in which it changed both theories and treatments of mental disturbance – for the most part, for the better. The rise of bureaucracy and institutional culture casts a constant shadow over the work, and those with an interest in other authors who’ve been concerned with these questions may find this interesting, though not necessarily new – in particular, there is an obvious resonance with the more scholarly themes of Michel Foucault, although Arnold doesn’t share his interest in the (identity of the) subject as the locus of the processes taking place here. The constant swing of the pendulum between sympathetic care (often characterised as ‘moral treatment’) and brutal violence, neglect and corrupt mismanagement is an ever-present theme. Arnold doesn’t treat some of the more interesting aspects of twentieth century mental treatment – for example, later developments in electro-shock therapy, the infamous lobotomy, or the development of Freud’s ‘talking cure’ – although these may extend beyond her (admittedly rather unclear) remit.

Although the work is endnoted, here more than Necropolis, the lack of a thorough scholarly framework for the work peeps through at times – for example, one wonders about undocumented claims such as that that the beauty marks of the seventeenth century were designed to hide syphilitic sores. More seriously, I was extremely disappointed by a coda in which Arnold trots out the damaging and hackneyed argument that antidepressants are overprescribed for the slightest lack of happiness, whereas ‘some of us’ (presumably those both wiser and more admirably fortitudinous) prefer to ‘endure melancholy in its various manifestations’ and ‘accept it as part of … identity,’ to embrace and welcome it as a teacher. Anyone who has actually experienced depression or other forms of mental illness recognizes the complete absurdity of this argument, which, though based on a soupçon of truth in its criticism of the modern self-help industry, is nothing more than a deeply self-congratulatory myth perpetuated by those fortunate enough not to have encountered serious psychic disturbance, who mistake unhappiness for mental illness, which is hence conflated with weakness, self-absorption and self-pity. One would hope that an author who had done enough research into the subject to write a book on it would have recognized this fallacy for what it is.

Despite these criticisms, however, Bedlam is an interesting work, one which I found worth persisting with, and one which, if not a thorough treatment of any one subject, is nonetheless a pleasure to dip into and an excellent collection of fascinating anecdotes and characters.

John Hillcoat - Ghosts of the Civil Dead (1988)

I hadn't watched this film since I was a teenager, when I'd seen it mainly as a Nick Cave fanboy. I'm not sure I really 'got it' at the time, because it didn't leave a huge impact, whereas on reconsideration I was deeply impressed by this film - much more so than the more recent Hillcoat-Cave collaboration, The Proposition.

The story takes place in the close future, though this is by no means a sci-fi or even a futuristic film, in Central Industrial Prison, a maximum-security facility in the middle of the desert. The narrative conceit is a report detailing the events leading up to a total lockdown. There is not a strong narrative; rather, we follow the development of individual characters through periodical scenes of events in which they are involved. However, the film is neither boring nor slow-moving; and the violence, while at times extreme, is not presented in such a way as to make the viewer ethically complicit in voyeurism.

As the film opens, the prison seems a place of violence and oppression, but where camaraderie and humanity are nonetheless present. The focus is the degeneration of this state of affairs into one of complete dehumanisation, in which both prisoners and guards are caught up, as the management turns the screws for their own political purposes. The soundtrack was created by Blixa Bargeld and Mick Harvey, as well as Cave himself, and though minimal, plays an important part in the creation of a suffocating atmosphere of meaninglessness, inhumanity and extreme violence. Unfortunately, the character Maynard, played by Cave himself, is the only one which doesn't 'ring true,' being a psychopath-without-a-cause of fairly typical filmic derivation; whereas the other characters, however minimal their roles, are all complex and ring psychologically true. Cave's character introduces an element of melodrama into an otherwise realist, though extremely dark, piece, whose disturbing quality hinges on the reality of the world it creates.

Indeed, the characters are shown neither as devils nor as rough-hewn angels, but as complex human beings whose actions are determined not only by their character but by the system(s) which exert control over their environment; an important point in a society like ours, which would prefer to judge every action as being the result of individual disposition rather than situational factors.

According to Wikipedia, the film is partially based on the true story of Jack Henry Abbott; it is also based on the testimony of David Hale, a whistleblower and former prison guard in Illinois - the soundtrack features a number of interviews with Hale, who witnessed events very similar to those in the film in terms of management provocation of violence. In addition, apparently, the cast involves only a few professional actors, the rest being made up of real ex-crims, prison guards, etc - if this is in fact the case, it certainly works.

Thematically, a Foucauldian reflection is made (consciously referenced in the 'Foucault authority') on the modern prison as a place of surveillance, where regulation takes place through the psychologically-driven efforts of those within the system, rather than being a system where violence is institutionally inflicted from the outside in an organised fashion. This is emphasised by filming techniques like surveillance camera footage and the framing of shots through surveillance windows. There is also a heavy political critique of the system of imprisonment in itself, and of the political use to which an imprisoning justice system is put by politicians and other demagogues.

For an Australian in particular, the film seems eerily prescient of the barbed-wire concentration prisons in the middle of the desert into which refugees in the Howard era were abandoned, and left to self-mutilate, inflict brutality upon one another, and otherwise succumb to brutalised insanity, a situation created entirely for political ends. I also appreciated the uncompromising 'Australian-ness' of the work, in the dialogue and the few external shots, particularly unusual both for a science fiction film, and for a film which could have been easily set in a geographical 'nowhere' so as to highlight the universal aspects of the narrative.

This is not an easy work, but it's one which is both a stunning film as a film, and one which continues to be vitally relevant in the current political landscape.

Errol Morris - Standard Operating Procedure (2008)

I'm not sure what it is about Errol Morris. I'd previously been disappointed in his doco Mr. Death, on US execution technician and Holocaust denier Fred Leuchter, because it was so filmic that it destroyed any sense of reality regarding some very serious events - execution in the United States, and the Shoah. I had the same disappointment with SOP, his documentary on the American torturers at Abu Ghraib. It's very slickly made, but it doesn't really tell us very much in the end, while the technique distances us from the reality of events. As an audience, we're so used to slick filmmaking that, to my mind, in order to have some impact a different technique is necessary. At one point, when one of the soldiers involved was telling of the way in which Iraqi prisoners hated pop music more than hiphop or metal (blasted at deafening volume continuously into their cells) the audience started laughing. And this is an audience who presumably were already sensitive enough to the issue of torture and prisoner abuse to come and see the film in the first place.

There are a number of important issues floating around the film, but none of them really got an in-depth exploration.

The film itself consists mainly of interviews with the soldiers who appear in the notorious photos, as well as with Janis Karpinski, the prison commander of Abu Ghraib at the time of the scandals, since demoted. However, there are no interviews with the two men who seem to have been at the very centre of the abuses, Charles Graner and Ivan 'Chip' Frederick; nor any interviews with the Iraqis themselves. Apparently, Morris attempted to, but could not find any to give testimony to their experiences; but this is simply never mentioned in the film, thereby once again 'disappearing' them as people. This means that, rather than the viewer realising that anyone might act this way in such a situation and that it is created purposefully by a system involving much higher powers, it is still possible to think that these two were sadistic monsters, at least to some extent; and to have no sense of the actual suffering involved in such abuses as 'stress positions,' sexual abuse, drowning short of death, and so forth.

The fact that the abuse situation was purposefully created by higher powers, up to the very top level of the US administration, is certainly foregrounded; but despite the title, the structure of the military, and the involvement of non-military bodies including the CIA and private contractors (that is, 'outsourced' civilian torturers) is not explored in any detail. Nor is there any real investigation of the nature of the military as an institution, the dehumanisation that soldiers themselves go through in order to be able to do what is demanded of them, the fact that the US army recruits from the poor and uneducated because it's the only way these people might have an economic chance in the current state of American class affairs.

What the soldiers themselves have to say is initially interesting; in my view, because of the fact that they have been punished, they have been able to create a narrative which ignores the entirety of their culpability and the human impact of their actions on their victims, given that higher-ups have gone unpunished, as if it must be the responsibility of one or the other only, a narrative in which they themselves are pitiable victims. But they are not particularly articulate or reflective, and after half an hour we have essentially heard what they have to say about the events beyond describing particular incidents, leaving an hour and a half or so which becomes quite repetitive.

Finally, there's an interesting issue about photographs themselves which could be explored. The given narrative about photography is that it has an aura of authenticity, but in fact what it shows is not real. This is the line the participants themselves keep putting to the viewer, unconvincingly. But I came out thinking that what I had seen in the Abu Ghraib photos, unlike many photographs, did in fact truly capture the essence of what had happened; there were no imagic illusions here to be disabused of. The point is made, and it's well-taken, that for reality to exist there must be images; if these images had not existed, then the scandal would not necessarily have been such (think of the relatively low profile of the illegal US 'ghost prisons' in Europe and elsewhere), and those involved were being punished, essentially, not for the actions which took place, but for the existence of the photos and particularly for appearing in them.

None of the information is new to anyone who had a passing acquaintance with the case, including the connection of Rumsfeld, the military cover-ups, and other ways in which the scandal was in no way the action of a few 'bad apples at the bottom of the barrel'. The film may demonstrate that the people involved were not sadistic, inhuman monsters as such, but it doesn't get across the vital point (discussed in detail in Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect) that almost all of us would behave the same way in the same situation. I tend to think, in any case, that these points are likely accepted by people who choose to see the film in the first case. I can't imagine those who think torture is justified, or who think that the torture was the work of a few psychos with no connection to the military as a system or to the Bush administration, would choose to watch this film. Given all of this, in an overall sense, I'd call this film a massive missed opportunity.

Timothy J. Gilfoyle - A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of 19th-Century New York (2006)

A Pickpocket's Tale is a non-fiction account of the life of George Appo (1858-1930), a small-time pickpocket, opium addict, and confidence man. The tale of Appo's life gives a fascinating picture of the changes which took place between a Victorian and proto-contemporary criminal underworlds, and the changing understanding of and approach taken by the authorities to the 'problem' of 'crime' over this period.

Appo was in many ways an unlikely and atypical character, which may be part of the reason why records of his life (including his autobiography) survive in enough detail for Gilfoyle to produce a book such as this. His father was a Chinese immigrant, who was at first very successful, but would later be imprisoned for murder (Appo and his father would meet for the last time in prison). Appo himself, despite periods of contact with the licit and illicit areas of Chinese culture, would find a home as a 'good fellow,' a crook who practiced by skill rather than through violence and pre-emptive brutality (both of which Appo was often a victim of), and who took prison time rather than betraying even an enemy to the official forces of policing. Finally, however, Appo would be rejected, unjustly (according to the author) by this world after testifying before the Lexow Committee on police corruption, and would attempt, with little success, to 'go straight' in conjunction with various organisation and individuals working for the purpose of reforming criminals.

Gilfoyle weaves a fascinating story. Appo's experience evokes a New York which in part is more familiar through English Victorian imagery, but from which at the same time can be seen the emergence of a more particular American, noir-ish world of corruption.

Appo's experiences chart the 'evolution' of penitentiaries, from Houses of Refuge for boys, to prison ships designed to instil a working ethic into young male criminals, on which same-sex sexual activity was more or less taken for granted; from the festering conditions, murderous brutality and casual torture of Sing Sing, where the lines between the external world and the prison were always highly nebulous, to Eastern Penitentiary where total isolation was practised, intended to reform the prisoner by allowing them to do nothing but reflect upon their wrongdoing.

Gilfoyle's book contains so many interesting facets that it's hard to list them; for example, the emergence of bohemian culture and the way it brought the middle and upper classes into the ambit of crime (though many bohemian opium dens strictly forbade clientele of Asian origin); common confidence tricks, particularly the highly profitable and highly bureaucratised 'green goods game' in which the con man offered to sell forged currency to the mark, before substituting the cash-filled bag; or the casual, monumental inequity of the 'justice' system throughout the period, and the often naive or counter-productive efforts of organised reformers. A particularly memorable episode is Appo's period on the stage, as sensational plays depicting the criminal underworld became huge popular successes.

In terms of flaws, Gilfoyle becomes perhaps a little too sympathetic to his subject, despite the hideous injustices of his life and the fact that, given his social circumstances and the nature of society at that time, he had little opportunity to become anything else. Due to the nature of the sources, gender relations in the period are little explored. Finally, Appo's testimony is more or less accepted as fact by the author (though he notes that it is substantially corroborated wherever other records exist; but this, of course, applies only to major events). Overall, though, this book is a depiction of a fascinating individual, as well as casting light on the nature of criminal subculture and its interactions with the 'licit' social world, the practices of criminal justice and policing, penitentiary systems, illegality and popular culture, as well as giving an engrossing cultural and social portrayal of life in New York for the underclasses, whether criminal or working, in a period of massive social change.

Jeffrey Masson - Against Therapy (1990)

Though I read them some time ago, I was a big fan of Masson's books on emotions in animals, Dogs Never Lie About Love (despite the fact that I'd be lying if I said I was a dog lover), and When Elephants Weep. However, when I got to The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats, I felt that he was relying far too heavily on the, in my opinion dubious, claims of evolutionary biology to explain the emotions in animals. What I didn't realise was that Masson has a whole other history in the field of psychoanalysis (not to mention Sanskrit studies).

Masson is a fascinating character. A youthful savant, he was originally a sanskrit scholar before moving into the field of psychoanalysis. He quickly rose to the heights of editing an archive of Freud's letters, which had until then been kept from the public, held by Kurt Eissler, a man devoted to maintaining Freud's posthumous reputation; but Masson soon became disillusioned with Freud as an admirable person, and with psychoanalysis in general, and a massive falling-out ensued. Janet Malcolm describes this in her wonderful book In The Freud Archives, originally a New Yorker article; but, when she quoted Masson as having aimed to change the archives into a place of "women, sex and fun" he sued her for libel, and the ensuing case took a decade before finally being found in Malcolm's favour. Masson, disappointed by the lack of purchase gained by his work on therapy and psychoanalysis, then turned to writing about emotions in animals.

All this is by way of introducing Masson's self-explanatorily titled work, Against Therapy. Masson's position is that all one-on-one therapy is inherently deeply flawed, and that one-on-one therapy should be abandoned as a practice. This is because the therapist is inevitably in a position of great power, as an expert and as someone with the social power to determine sanity and insanity, normality and abnormality, while the patient (or client) is inherently vulnerable; because the therapist imposes his or her own belief systems on the patient in order to shape the patient into a more 'healthy' person, and in doing so, the individual is always considered the problem in need of change, rather than the nature of the society around that individual. Anyone who says that they have been helped by therapy (or by other psychologically-aimed interventions such as electroshock treatment) is either deluded, having been brainwashed into accepting the therapist's understanding of the world (a view which in itself could be seen as denying these individuals agency and telling them that 'the expert knows better' about you than you do yourself); or else has been helped in the same way that conversations with a close friend would help someone in distress, but at a much greater financial cost in a much less equal relationship. In order to expose this, Masson traces individual abuses by therapists, from Freud to modern feminist and radical psychoanalysis.

In some ways, Masson's points are well taken. Classical psychoanalysis is indeed a repressive institution, as its history demonstrates; to my mind, it is a fascinating and productive system of understanding, but of little use as a therapeutic tool. The abuses he details are indeed hideous, and difficult to believe, particularly those which take place in more recent times; and they do indeed support his thesis, that the role of the therapist is to force the individual to submit to the norms of society (particularly with regard to gender and sexuality), as dictated by the therapist, whose own prejudices are shaped by that milieu. Masson rejects the argument that the examples he gives represent a few 'bad apples'; rather, he says, power, of the kind possessed by a therapist, is almost always abused. As well as this, he notes that the psychotherapeutic establishment has done little or nothing to publicise or decry such abuses, and that it has a tendency to protect and make excuses for its own; and that therapists have an interest in maintaining good social networks (given that they rely on other therapists for referrals), and a financial interest in the general practice of psychotherapy, and, on the individual level, of not turning away clients who they might feel they are unsuitable to work with. All of these arguments are well received, and hold some truth.

Nonetheless, Masson's work is problematic. His argument, as outlined above, is never really clearly established; rather, it is pieced together over the episodes he describes. He fails to distinguish between people who are functional but who have issues around their own identity and behaviour that they would like to address, people who are functional but have mental illnesses, and people who are non-functional (to be fair, the lines between these states can be very difficult to draw). Rather, he takes the extreme position that 'mental illness' is nothing more than a label used for those who do not fit into social norms (another well-known exponent of this concept is Thomas Szasz, whom Masson mentions often, though not always, with approbation). Furthermore, although he mentions modern, non-psychoanalytic forms of therapy (which, of course, have their roots in psychoanalysis inasmuch as they involve a one-on-one 'talking cure'), he fails to clearly distinguish between psychonalytic and non-psychoanalytic forms; rather, the sins of psychoanalysis, which are many and varied, stand for the whole.

To my mind, however, the biggest problem with his argument is his solution to the problems of individuals who do not like or accept oppressive social norms and structures: that they should work to change them. This is very much in the vein of seventies radical politics: 'don't change yourself, change society' (and the introduction to the work, by Alice Miller, also champions this idea). In theory, this concept has a lot going for it. However, it ignores the fact that there are many aspects of society which change very slowly. While we work against patriarchy, for example, in our lifetimes we cannot escape a patriarchal society; even separatists must work with the norms and issues instilled in them from childhood. Given this, we need both strategies to change society, and strategies to deal with our encounter with a hostile and oppressive external social reality. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Despite these flaws, however, this work is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in psychoanalysis, therapy, concepts of sanity and insanity and their relationship to power and social control, or gender politics. Not being au fe with developments in therapies since 1990 (when this book was published; there was also a revised edition, published in 1993) I can't say whether they address any of the criticisms made by Masson; however, given his stance against any kind of one-on-one therapy, I'd think the answer would be, for the most part, negative. It's also inspired me to hunt down another work of Masson's, Dark Science: Women, Sexuality and Psychiatry in the Nineteenth Century. Overall, for all its problems, this is a compelling and often-horrifying work which is a welcome, if over-extreme, riposte to the grandiosities, hypocrisies and cruelties of psychoanalysis in particular, and therapy in general.

Stephen O'Shea - The Perfect Heresy: The Life and Death of the Cathars (2000)

As someone whose field of study deals with the worst elements of human behaviour en masse, I often think that, much as I wouldn't want to be, I've become inured, at least to some degree, to the acts which people will perpetrate upon each other in the name not only of power, but of abstract ideology. This book was a reminder of how capable of being shocked and filled with incomprehension I remain.

TPH is perhaps one of the best-written works of popular history I've come across - by no means a doorstop, it reads easily and compulsively without losing its usefulness as a detailed historical account with useful academic references.

The narrative deals with the Cathars, a heretical Medieval Christian group, their ascendancy in Languedoc in what is now southern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Crusades organised by the Pope to destroy them and, in the process, the region, and the aftermath of their destruction. This episode (now incorporated in works such as Eco's The Name of the Rose, and, lamentably, the mythology of works like The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code) is fascinating for its exploration of Catharism, something like a mix between Protestantism and Eastern religions. This was a more-or-less dualist belief holding that life on Earth was in fact Hell, and that the material world was a creation of a dark force, identified with the false God of the Old Testament; and that, therefore, the Catholic Church itself, in its materialism and power hungriness, was an extreme manifestation of evil. Reincarnation eventually allowed the person who lived a good life to escape this Hell-as-earth. Cathar 'perfects' could be female as well as male, and renounced the material, including monetary wealth, meat, and sexual relationships; while 'credentes', or believers, were free from the restrictions placed upon individuals by the Church (sex only within marriage, the paying of tithes, the threat of excommunication, and so forth).

Understandably, Catharism (similar believers included the Bogomils in Eastern Europe, from whom the term 'bugger' eventually derives due to Church descriptions of their proclivities) gained a growing following, strongest in the Languedoc area. And this is where the subject begins to shape the present. Successive Popes, (the first, ironically, Innocent III, followed by Gregory IX) organised Crusades from Northern Europe to crush the Cathars and their regional strongholds. This included hideous mass mutilations, burnings, and the mass murder of entire towns. The Cathar wars shaped the states of Europe as we know them today, defining Languedoc as a part of France as it fell under Northern control, rather than, as could otherwise have been, an area incorporating Languedoc and Aragon in Northern Spain. The aftermath of the ultimate victory of the Catholic Church played out in the establishment of the Inquisition, and of both the Franciscan and Dominican orders; and, argue some, instituted the same 'persecuting society' in which we live today.

The senselessness of the wanton destruction and murder, the crushing of a relatively benign and culturally flowering feudal troubadour culture as well as a decentralised system of governance, and the chillingly relentless persecution of a sect which seems, to modern eyes light years ahead of other belief systems at the time, brings one to ask how anyone could believe that this would be what the biblical Jesus wanted, and to meditate on the fact that the content of systems of belief is not particularly important; the nature of human society ensures that they will be used for the same ends, that is the violent establishment of domination. Nonetheless, despite not being much of a Francophile, this book incited in me the desire to visit the landscapes over which the narrative roams; and so, as a reading experience, horror is tempered with romance and fascination. Recommended for anyone interested in the medieval period, in organised religion and dissent, in French or Western European history... or simply for a work which is at the same time edifying, horrifying, and fascinating.