2025 Favourite Non-fiction Part 1
I know it is late to write another list of 2025 books, but I feel the need to exhaust some thoughts so that I don’t have to think them any more. I am thinking this blog will continue to be a hybrid of dumb lowercase writing alongside more serious reviews and criticism. I am considering doing a monthly book report depending on whether I find the time.
10. RD LAING - THE DIVIDED SELF (1959)
A book about people who suspect they don’t exist. I find the idea of ontological insecurity poetically interesting, and relate to this feeling to some degree, but like most psychoanalytic writing, I never know how much of it is written as a thought experiment and how much of it I should take seriously. Ontological insecurity is really just an extreme form of social disconnectedness. In non-psychotic form, OI can manifest as schizoid personality disorder, and in psychotic form, schizophrenia. Laing developed this theory from his psychiatric practice, in which he revolutionised the way people with psychosis were treated. He was also a minor poet of the 1960s counter-culture, publishing slim volumes of uncommunicative dialogues in the vein of Beckett and Pinter. The writing in the book is quite beautiful, but really depressing. The second half of the book, consisting of client case studies, can probably be skipped entirely. I really do wish the book offered any self-help solutions, but this is not a self help book. Laing basically implies that empathetic talk-therapy is the solution, which is common sense now, but wasn’t in 1959. For me the greatest takeaway was Laing’s quotation from Jung: “the schizophrenic ceases to be schizophrenic when he meets someone by whom he feels understood”.
9. GUY DEBORD - SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE (1967)
“Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”
A foundational treatise on why modern life is rubbish. I’m glad it was written, but it sure has made it harder for me to enjoy things. The book is all about the colonisation of free time by consumption. Raves, rooftop bars, concerts, festivals, immersive experiences, shopping, exhibitions, frozen yogurt- basically anything you can do for the instagram picture. Events are fun. We all need entertainment, but the problem is that spectacles have become the only social possibility. Meeting up with friends or going on a date, it is difficult to step outside structured, manufactured, pay-to-play experiences. Even when free, the spectacle is what sucks up your attention.
“The spectacle brings separate individuals together but brings them together as separate”.
The Situationists were cool in that they were the only socialist movement (as far as I know) to emphasise the importance of unstructured play. Creativity is so often rezoned as bounded creativity. Most adults find that their only creative opportunities are through Minecraft, paint-n-sips, Warhammer, colouring books and tiktok craft tutorials. One could take an improv course or enrol in an arts degree, but the real struggle is to reenchant one’s stupid daily life. Why should you bother? To get outside the spectacle. The Situationists used different strategies - going out with friends for aimless walks, relocating traffic cones, fucking round with billboards, jumping and slapping signs. I know I am just describing being boisterous in public, but there is freedom in behaving aberrantly. They called this detournement.
This leads me to the question: is a flash mob a situation or a spectacle? If you asked me 15 years ago, I would have said spectacle. I was sick to death of party rocking. Now I look back more kindly. Flash mobs were just misguided situations. But it depends. A viral flash mob with perfect choreography and a hundred dancers? Spectacle. A poorly executed flash mob in a food court with less than 10 dancers and 35 views? Now thats what Guy Debord was talking about.
The first flash mob that ever went viral was the music video for Praise You by Fatboy Slim, directed by Spike Jonze. Poorly shot on a camcorder, the video shows a rec centre dance troupe doing a badly rehearsed performance outside their local movie theatre. None of the onlookers look impressed. The video fills me with wonder and excitement. So what if it was voted number one in MTV’s greatest videos of all time. I will pick and choose what I consider a spectacle.
8. THE PENGUIN BOOK OF THE PROSE POEM (2018)
What is a prose poem? Why is a prose poem? Is it just a short story without any story? According to my favourite definition, a prose poem is “a small justified block of text where weird shit happens”. Prose poems are writing for writing’s sake. They are writing at its best, and my favourite written form.
This anthology is really good. It was my smoking book. Over hundreds of cigarettes, I slowly made my way through it. Now I have given up smoking, so the smoking books have been downgraded to bathroom books. My copy of this has a hundred folded corners - thats a hundred good poems. You can dip in at random and find something specky, or read start to finish, the poems going back in reverse chronological order. I very much recommend finding a copy of this book.
7. JONATHAN WILLIAMS - BLUES AND ROOTS (1971)
Aunt Creasy, On Work:
shucks
I make a livin
uncle
just makes the livin
worthwhile
I love the way appalachian mountain folk speak. I caint get enough of it. Jonathan Williams felt the same way, and published several collections of ‘found poetry’ derived from handwritten signs and overheard speech. I have a framed poster of one of his poems in our sharehouse toilet, in which he lists in different fonts the names of 50 or so towns in Kentucky:
VIPER
SHOULDER BLADE
HARDSHELL
VIRGO
PIG
ZAG
CHICKEN BRISTLE
ICE
I stare at the poster every day and am overcome by a feeling of the Sublime. The rest of William’s poetry shows a real love for folkloric expressions and language as it is spoken in far-out communities. I have huge love for the folklorists. Since the advent of telly and the internet, there is an increasingly standardised way of expressing oneself in any english speaking country. It makes me sad. That is why I love reading the writing of children and people without much english. As a teacher of the language, I do want them to become proficient readers and writers, but I truly love the aesthetics of not-quite literacy.
Just look at this beautiful gravestone:
Loney Ollis
age 84
died jun 10 1871
grates dere honter
wreked bee trees for hony
cild ratell snak by 100
cild dere by thousen
i nod him well
Jonathan William’s books are near impossible to find in Australia, but the pdfs are there on Annas Archive.
6. JONATHAN WILLIAMS - WALKS TO THE PARADISE GARDENS
This book is one of my great treasures. It is a collection of photographs, anecdotes and interviews with outsider artists of the American south. (Note: I know outsider art/music is a loaded term, and that many prefer the term ‘folk art’ in the south, or self-taught or visionary elsewhere - but for the sake of vibes-based clarity, I’ll stick to outsider).
What I love about outsider art is how the life stories behind the artists often have a real mythic quality. You can’t say this of the insider contemporary artists, who, no matter how diverse, are mostly always just people who went to uni and/or wear cool clothes.
Almost all of the artists in this book have passed away, but through words, Williams was able to capture their likenesses. Here is an example of a description:
Anybody with half an ear and the top half of an imagination already knows that a person called Georgia Blizzard has to be someone very special. And, then, just consider some of the names she gives to her pottery vessels: “The Wish Pot,” “The Preyers,” “Rattler on the Ledge,” “A Frolic in the Grouch’s Meadow Could Make the Grump a Better Fellow,” and “Sweet Is the Blating of the Ewe and Lamb in the Meadow.”
Williams is a great noticer and cataloguer of amusing language. You wish you could have met all these people. Some of the frontyard-galleries of famous artists such as Howard Finster and St EOM can still be visited today, but many of the artists in this book lived and died in obscurity, their works thrown away or their front-yard palaces destroyed by the elements/
Before I got a BFA education, I thought outsider art (when real) was the only real and interesting art to be found. I still partially think this, but reading about these people on wikipedia years ago, I felt an overwhelming urge to see as much of their art as I could - so after I finished my teaching degree, I flew to Atlanta and hired a car to do a figure 8 loop of the deep south, visiting as many folk art environments as I could. I saw about 15 front-yard environments and several museum exhibitions and met a couple of the artists who were still alive. Later I turned my footage into a video essay for a class, and although it is roughly edited and cringingly moralistic at points, I think it does a good job in explaining outsider art as a concept and breaking down some of the myths. You can watch the video here.
Thank you for reading!