Et cetera

Drawing the line

Steven Poole's non-fiction choice

Lines: A Brief History
by Tim Ingold
(Routledge, £19.99)

Here I sit, fingers poised over my laptop, assuming a colonial mastery over the (virtual) blank page. The words I type, and the words you read, contain no trace of manual expression. For Ingold, this is cause for lamentation, although it must be noted that he has not chosen to handwrite thousands of copies of this wonderful and eccentric book, which is printed in the normal way. Ingold draws fruitful distinctions between threads and traces, cracks and creases, wayfaring and transport, inhabitants and occupants; he notes the derivation of modern punctuation marks from the notation of Gregorian chant; compares mappings of the caves of Crete with shamanic labyrinth-designs. Here is a parallel between family trees and circuit-board diagrams, and there a chart of ownership patterns cut into reindeer ears, which did cause me to wonder whether they couldn't give the poor beasts earrings instead, as I am sure Father Christmas must. There is throughout a slightly sentimental valorisation of archaic ways, and some of Ingold's theories are weird - as when he claims that "for Plato and his contemporaries, music was an essentially verbal art", when Plato rather notoriously thought certain modes of music should be banned owing to their nonverbal effects. Still, the author's ambition, to take a virgin piece of interdisciplinary territory and "write on it a bit", has been fascinatingly achieved.

Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiography
by Régis Debray, translated by John Howe
(Verso, £19.99)

From studying under Louis Althusser, to shooting off AK47s with Fidel Castro in the mountains, playing chess with Che Guevara and spending three years in a Bolivian prison, to working as François Mitterrand's special adviser on international affairs in the 1980s, philosopher Debray has had, to say the least, an interesting life. This brilliantly sardonic account of his enchantment and subsequent disillusion with each leader is studded with lapidary judgments. "Fidel was a very sympathetic but not very admirable man, Che an unlikable but admirable one." Che died at the right time, while Castro became an "ogre" and "clownishly sad"; Mitterrand's silky tactics obscured the fact that behind the tactics were no principles. Along with colourful gossip and musings on the vacancy of the "videosphere" or on history, Debray also offers epigrammatic advice to the young politician: "Reality is a technical category that changes with our machines"; "Think celebrity, not excellence"; "Opinions are reversible garments, just as warm inside out". Throughout, the book builds a merciless portrait of the political leader as type. We should not, Debray says, despise him, for he knows not what he does: "A man of power is physiologically incapable of recognising that he has contradicted, criticised or repudiated himself, or that he has taken us over, or that he has lied."

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