Viva Lewes Issue #134 November 2017

BOOKS AND BOBS
LOCAL LITERATURE
Lewes resident Mark Perryman,
a very active member of the local
Labour Party, has edited a collection
of essays about the sudden and
meteoric rise of Jeremy Corbyn,
and its implications. It is called The
Corbyn Effect.
I nearly gave up on the book during
the second essay, The Absolute
Corbyn, when academic Jeremy
Gilbert managed to shoehorn the
words and phrases ‘collectivism’,
‘democratisation’, ‘pluralisation’,
‘condition of responsibility’ and
‘radically participatory and deliberative
mechanisms of self-government’
into the same sentence. Thankfully I
read on, because the rest of the book
isn’t hostage to such demoralising
clusters of jargon.
There are 16 essays, in total, written
by journalists and academics from
across the country. Almost all of
these commentators write from a
left-of-centre perspective, but the
book is far more than a triumphalist
celebration of Corbyn’s recent
power surge. Some writers question
what compromises Labour will
have to make if they want to win
the next election; others ask why
it took the party so long to offer
up a robust antidote to Thatcher’s
neoliberal policies. If you’re interested in the state
of play of the Scottish Labour Party in the face of
the SNP’s recent decline, this is the book for you;
ditto if you’re fascinated by the age demographics
of Labour’s target seats in the next election.
Meanwhile, Lewes-based popular science writer Dr
Michael Brooks came into the office the other day
announcing he had just written not one, but two
books ready for the Christmas market.
The more immediately approachable
of the books, which he co-wrote with
Rick Edwards, is called Science(ish) 1 and
subtitled The Peculiar Science Behind the
Movies. It’s a reworking of a successful
podcast by the pair, examining some of
the ideas thrown out in sci-fi movies
and questioning whether they could
actually occur. Perhaps you’ll recognise
the films, if I precis a handful of the
ideas: Are we living in a digital simulation?
Can we resurrect dinosaurs from
their fossilised DNA? Is it possible to
go back to 1955? It’s not as science-lite,
actually, as you might imagine, designed
to couch complex ideas within a demotic
framework to help wash down all
that knowledge. Dr Brooks’ other book
The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook,
which I’ll review at more length in the
next issue, is a more serious proposition,
a novelistic exploration of the life
and times of maverick sixteenth-century
Milanese polymath Jerome Cardano.
Another book you’ll be hearing more
of in the December issue is In an Old
House, the fruit of Peter and Sally
Varlow’s journey of discovery when
they investigated the history of the
medieval house, on the outskirts of
Chailey, that they bought and caringly
renovated in 1982. Full of illustrations,
diagrams, and short, headed paragraphs, it’ll be of
great interest to anyone interested in architecture
and/or local history.
Finally, a mention for the latest Frogmore Papers
quarterly poetry collection - their 90th edition
- with over 40 contributors, and a fine cover by
Viva regular Neil Gower. At a fiver, it’s a thoughtprovoking,
emotion-triggering snip. AL
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