Riley's Commie Book Club: The Amateur

TRASHFUTURE

Comedy

4.6 • 851 Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2018

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome to the second installation of RCBC. Today I'm talking about yet another book off Verso, The Amateur by Andy Merrifield. While Merrifield is currently a fellow in Human Geography at Cambridge, he's spent much of his life as an independent thinker outside the system. This book serves as both a memoir of his life and an argument against "professionalism as ideology." As the market creeps in to more spheres of life, an obsession with box ticking and targets posing as hard nosed realism limited not only what could be done, but what could be thought. Life, therefore, is not made better by rigorous systematisation, but crueller and dumber. Like Psychopolitics before it, The Amateur informs a lot of how we see society on TF. Here's the link to the book: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2405-the-amateur Here's the link to the Non Linear Borefare article:https://newsocialist.org.uk/the-stuplime-object-of-ideology/ Here's the link to vote for us for the British Podcast Awards, which we totally don't care about: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/vote/ xoxo Riley

Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness gracious me. It's almost that time again.
0:22.0	Yep, that's it.
0:25.1	Riley has had at least one beer.
0:26.8	In fact, I'm going to get a beer.
0:34.1	And it's going to record another commie book club.
0:38.3	Because you know me.
0:41.7	I love commie-ass literature.
0:50.0	This is what I'm going to be talking about today is another one from the geniuses at Verso Books.
0:51.1	Geniuses, that seems a little fawning.
0:52.7	I literally call people geniuses, and I think they're
0:54.4	really dumb. From very able publishers, Verso Books. I call it Annie Maryfield. And the title of the
1:01.7	book is, I'm just going to grab it from the sofa over here. It's weird, right?
1:11.1	It's a weird, it's a weird book because it's called the amateur, the pleasures of doing
1:18.0	what you love by Andy Merrifield.
1:20.4	And it sounds like it's a self-help book, right?
1:22.8	Honestly, that's what a self-help book would be called.
1:26.3	But it's, even though I actually found, I myself, found it very helpful.
1:30.7	It is not a self-help book by any stretch.
1:33.7	Rather, it is what I think of as a pretty scorching critique of the ideology of professionalism.
1:42.0	Now, Maryfield's an interesting character.
1:47.6	He is a sort of an amateur himself. He has dabbled in a number of subjects. He talks a lot about, you know, urbanism and economics and history
1:52.3	and all this. And he refers quite a bit to people like Jane Jacobs, who was an urbanist,
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