Project Attempted Deck Clearance

A few years ago the loft looked like this:

 

 

14 - FOURTEEN - boxes of books, as detailed on t'other blog, with five full sets of shelves downstairs. 

Clingy! And unfathomable now. I mean, we've moved house, actually AND figuratively. 

Them boxes is well gone. Now, after reading, books are either integrated into the shelves or moved on with gratitude (cf Marie Kondo etc).

Still, after quite a sea change, and although engaged in a quite modish regimen of micropiling, there remain, nonetheless, quite a few piles of books. 

So in an attempt to accelerate this particular reader, and to inaugurate this blog recommencement, I'm working through a strict regimen of No New Books* Until All The Unread Books Are Read.  The great Attempted Deck Clearance Project!

And you can read all about it here! 

 

*possibly scuppered by deep-seated affection for second-hand books

Dust covers

Hi 

 This is the third recommencement of a blog. It's concerned with books, and words, mainly how they're contained in books, but also how words show up in other places as well. 

 It's a place where I can keep notes on responses to tomes, favourable and not, mine and other people's, as well as general notes on writing that is non-bookular. 

Mainly books, though. It's a blog I've set going previously, then promptly forgot about in the busyness of keeping up different interests. So, this time, the dust covers are intended to stay off the furniture. 

 THIS TIME! I tells ya...

...because you can't smell a Kindle

Well, this is nice. Sort of like sitting down in an old but familiar room... In my mind,  the room looks sparsely  decorated -a wing-backed chair with a sheet over - and it's echoey from the floorboards, but we have high windows and it's quite bright. There are some dusty books left on the mantelpiece, and it has the air of a room that will make a good library. I write about book-related things here. There y'are.

Despite having other blogs that I don't pay enough attention to, I have been inspired to revive this unused bookish corner of my interweb and hit the keyboard by a recent trip abroad. I always find travel a useful fillip for writing. Whether it's a quick jaunt on the train to see some music, or, as it was in this case, a proper leaving on a jet plane kind of actual week in a different country type of thing, I get excited by and about the entire process. This even includes all the meandering round airports - driving travelling partner J to distraction the while by singing 'Airport' by The Motors, specifically just the synth riff and the word 'airport!', and then later any two-syllable word to the same tune (e.g. 'suitcase!', 'postcard!', 'kittens!'). How we laughed. Then it was Eggs Benedict and Guinness at 4am, because, well, you know, hols.

Anyway, the reason for this airport jaunt was a couple of friends' wedding, and the jaunt was to the south of France ('L'aeroport!'), where they work. A whole bunch of people made the journey. It was a lovely party. The friends live in a village called Le Somail, which is right on the Canal du Midi and a deeply beguiling port of call. While there, I was urged by fellow bibliophile guests to seek out the Librarie.

I'd already had a sneak preview of this bookshop/archive from J's tales of a previous trip. The Librarie Ancienne du Somail, to give it its full French fancy name, is superbe. It has around 50,000 books and has been in place in Le Somail since 1980, occupying a disused wine cellar (essentially a giant barn... from when Le Somail gave priorité aux raisins), and just the sort of place one might spend a happy hour or so just running fingers over the spines and murmuring 'Oh la la'. 

The selection is boggling. Everything... comics (bandes dessinées, "BD", for which substantial numbers of French readers have an admirable penchant), antique editions of Rabelais, magazines from various epochs and subject areas, postcards, art books... Although the majority of the tomes are, of course, French, they have large sections of other language books too. I flanned about for an hour or so, picking up and putting down a three volume set of May 1968 writings and trying to justify spending €15 of tightly-budgeted holiday money on Asterix & Cleopatra. In the end, I sated my addiction with three books from the '€1 each/ 6 for €5' section outside, and a bookmark. I left to mop my chin and start plotting my return with improved French and more money. 

Books: 

Music on Record (Volumes 1& 2) by Peter Gammond. Charmingly obsolete guides to essential recordings of orchestral music for 'anyone who wants to get the best out of gramophone records'... However, worth  80p each (keep saying it) for the non-obsolete handy sketches of composers and their works.

Pelican Guide to English Schools, also completely obsolete (all three published 1963), but useful to see how much 'plus ça change' applies to my new profession ('A lot.'). 

Music:

Voyage Voyage - Desireless

Airport!

Books and all that jazz (part one)

To pass the time on Bank Holiday Monday, I thought I'd have a nice walk through the Goldington bit of Camden to Holborn to see - just on the off-chance - if the cycle repair shop wherein my bike do have been dwelling since last Thursday was open. The signs on the way were moderately promising. For every shuttered establishment there was an open cafe next door, suggesting that if people didn't have urgent financial matters to attend to they could at least get someone else to knock them up a lunch.

I was particularly disappointed that Judd Books was closed, as they usually have some quite good-looking stuff in their bargain bin. Recently it had a couple of The Spokesman essay collections for a pound each. One of those contains a hard copy of Lord Steyn's excellent commentary on the Guantanamo holiday facilities.

The bargain bin is my favourite place to stop at a bookshop, on the feeble premise that it'll stop me seeing something more desirable yet correspondingly dearer inside and 'save a few quid'. Primrose Hill Books had one in the shape of a great little set of shelves on wheels. It looks like it was liberated from a school library. Every time I go there I find something apposite, usually contributing to my burgeoning collection of Latin poets in translation. Last time it was Catullus, and there was some Petronius the time before that. I acknowledge that I am collecting mainly the dirty dog Latins.

Also, memorably, after my pal C and I had been on the next street looking at the plaque on Sylvia Plath's old house ("Not the death house, that's round the corner...") there was a bargain copy of Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, which was so apposite as to make one give more importance to the cosmic implications of synchronicity (with a nod to WB Yeats, also a former tenant of the death house in Fitzroy Road, and other North London/Golden Dawn/ley line botherers).

Back to the Bank Holiday Monday. I was scant metres from the Judd Books disappointment when I happened upon Skoob Books in Marchmont Street. Gloriously open and full to the rafters with books. I managed twenty minutes in the reference section before dragging myself past the sci-fi and the shelves full of orange-jacketed Penguin Classics to have the briefest of browses in the fiction. Fortunately, I was distracted en route by a shiny copy of The Best of Jazz, a new cash-in edition of a couple of books by the late and immense Humphrey Lyttelton. It was only £5.00, and what do you know? There was a crumpled fiver in my wallet. Excellent news.

Stepping up to the till, the man behind the counter made noises to suggest that he'd either wanted to buy it or had something important to say about it. In fact, he actually just asked who I thought could replace him. Either he was involving me in trying to run the shop, I thought, or he was referring to the recent news that Radio 4's planners have decided to make some more 'I'm sorry, I haven't a clue', with a new host to "replace" Humph. I considered for a moment before responding that Stephen Fry nears ubiquity and would probably spoil it a bit, and that Jeremy Hardy's reported suggestion of Jarvis Cocker taking part was quite a splendid one. (Although I also agree with Barry Cryer who suggests that a female presenter might be a better move. Not Pam Ayres, though, pretty please...) We agreed happily on the Jarvis point, then passed a few idle moments in Humph-related banter (an unusually cheery bookshop attendant!)

The Indie article linked to above quotes this great example of the dry Lyttelton delivery. At the end of one faux-turgid round on ISIHAC he remarked: "Nietzsche said that life was a choice between suffering and boredom. He never said anything about having to put up with both at the same time." Which is my new motto.

Emerging with a little smile of discovery from Skoob, I wandered up the road to discover Bikefix was indeed enjoying a fry-up in another part of London entirely. I cared not! Sauntering back home with a satisfied Bank Holiday air and a book, I finally settled in with a bowl of ice cream, Humph and newly-alphabetised-for- research-purposes records to advance my knowledge of all things jazzular...

Books: The Best of Jazz (five chapters in).
Music: Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke (To be continued in part two...)

Bachelor padding

September has been the first month of the rest of my life, as my most recent relationship foundered on the rocks of discontent... there has been a lot of drinking of alcohol and smoking of cigarettes, both of which are conducive to exacerbating an air of being hard done by.

However, there is nothing like adversity to fire the neurons, and as well as getting back on it with my blogs and other items of keyboard-related venting, I have of course been cycling throughout - I can't not cycle, it's a joyful thing. As exercise, as pursuit for amplifying the happiness and diminishing the perceived importance of negative feelings relative to their counterweight.

It's also the only way to get around London. The cycle, my saviour and means of locomotion, the runabout that facilitates me leaving the bachelor pad at 8.20 am and arriving at work just off Fleet Street after a thrilling whizz through Barnsbury, Amwell St, Farringdon Road etc, at 8.40 am. And not a penny squandered. Except on the ciggies & drink. Well, it's all about balance, eh? I guess I can justify the aled up ['And now I feel soiled...'] Mississippi Fried Chicken £4.95 Bargain Bucket, to myself at least, with forty minutes of the Lance Armstrong Plan every day.

Reading matter this week has been Identity Crisis, which is a crime thriller/examination of relationships and what they lead people into, only with comic book superbeings displaying ambiguous and unheroic traits, beautifully drawn; I'm still finding my way through Matthieu Ricard's book on training the mind, Happiness. Comics are, like the drink, short cuts I guess, but then so is music, and as I write this there's a riot goin on and you can't say fairer than that.

So THAT's what's going on.

Uptown - that's where I wanna be

The number 17 bus from Caledonian Road goes past King's Cross, around and up onto Gray's Inn Road and then on to Holborn Circus, which unlike the other two points noted here does not have an apostrophe, so let me state that the Circus of Holborn is a fine and gaudy affair, where a man might spend many a pleasant hour flanning and bidding good morning to the comely legal lads and lasses... City types glued to their BlackBerry devices because there must have been, HAS TO HAVE BEEN a message arrive in the ten seconds between stepping off the bus very slowly in front of me and wandering onto the pavement... Sainsbury employees... cyclists crossing the pavement next to the HSBC...

One might, were it not for the impatient taxis bipping their horns at us, my fellow Hollowavians and I, as we stand between bus lane and centre island waiting to cross to Fetter Lane and beyond, in a kind of pedestrian purgatory, rudley honked as if unaware that there are hundreds of cars we have no intention of walking in front of bearing down on us. Sometimes people in London are frantic for no reason at all, they just feel, perhaps, that they should get their retaliation in first and out-brusque you pre-emptively. There's really no need.

"White, Black, Puerto Rican, everybody just a-freakin'..."

This week the music has been funky, and I have read Hellblazer: Haunted, which might put a man in speculative mood about our glorious capital, but I haven't stopped dancing yet.

Sudden scale shift at Collier Street almost causes a pile-up

Much poring over the map of North London and much wheeling of the bike up sudden one-way streets in Islington, Barnbury, Holloway, King's Cross and the adjacent areas reveals that the fabric of North London, like space-time, can be deeply incomprehensible even given intense study. How do the roads bend back on themselves, like Romanian gymnast children? Possibly emigré trainers. Probably misreading the maps.

Easily in my top ten favourite books ever, and certainly this week:
The London A-Z.
I've been using the spiral bound AA version from 2006 since I arrived in The Village... it's looking a little dog-eared, it has to be said. I may replace it with something from Geographers' A-Z Map Company, in tribute to the originator of the concept, the magnificent Phyllis Pearsall, may her name be sung by all bemused mid-century party-goers and lost cyclists, getting honked at the lights as they stand in the road frowning and thumbing between pages 75 and 9.