Paper Towns

 (Read this one in March 2025)

Another bit of a "quick read", picked up I think from a supermarket charity shelf. I didn't realise John Green was the Fault In Our Stars John Green until talking about it after, and I haven't read that so won't say anything else about it.

My initial note (four or five pages in) was "first person American quirky, Wes Anderson vibes". By this I mean earlier Wes Anderson, recognisably Americana-ish, Salinger eccentrics vibes. Talky high schoolers in unusual situations? John Hughes another flavor note.

 

The book is from 2008 and does a lot of pre-ubiquitous-internet internet references, that sort of date it and sort of create a weird nostalgia snare: combined with the bookish self-consciousness of the rest of the novel, it evokes a now possibly wholly-dissolved membrane between digital mediation and analogue solidity, which perhaps is me retrofitting an ill-considered cultural notional something more to the book than might have been intended.

 

As the book itself seems to suggest, maybe now we're processing things differently (he drafted into a phone) we lack something that used to be offered by well-thumbed page corners turned down, highlighted connections and margin notes. Stuff literally hidden in doorways. Maybe those memories are as simultaneously there-and-not-there as the title conceit.

As a novel, though, it's deeply novelish - a manic pixie American dream girl (Margo) is quest object for the massively square Quentin, in a slightly old-fashioned (even for 2008) follow-the-clues road trip romance, complete with tokenistic support ensemble (also: too much dialogue). It seemed particularly frustrating to have a support ensemble that then just evaporates for the denouement, even as the now squarer-than-square narrator foregrounds them, and the "real" life they represent, as part of his justification for avoiding any sort of commitment to the joyful abandon signified by Margo.

Thusly, the Narrator wades squarely through Whitman, Woody Guthrie and various modes of wanderlust 'til he finally recognises his shadowy anima... and walks away from it? An apparent acceptance of enduring alienation, from true-but-too-eccentric love, or self, or something, seems yet another dumb decision made with all the dumb, square certainties of youth. 

 

Which, of course, resonated. Probably I would have loved this in my late teens/early 20s, though would even then have compared it unfavourably to early Douglas Coupland. 

 

What I got most from it now was a reminder of what it was like to find depth and power in books, music, and those cross-references that mattered more than everything else when that age, in that age. 

The Paris Notebooks

"We'll always have Paris."

"...as long as you have a notebook with the word Paris in it, right?"

My Holidays Are Short

Last posts here were a moment ago... busy, busy. This was written in half term break, October 2024.

This volume was bumped up the pile on the - as it turned out correct - assumption that relentless pulp action would be just the ticket for a brain reset.

Spillane was a master. Not having read any Mike Hammers before, I had a vague notion of plots and preoccupations, and was entirely hooked from the opening pages of I, The Jury onwards. Once started, that foot hit the pedal and it was easy to roar through all three books in about the same number of days. 

These are the first of the Mike Hammer titles, and one gets a feel for the style quite quickly. Solipsistic and simple from the titles in, it's sex-and-death-wish fulfilment with the kicker that no one gets their wishes fulfilled adequately, least of all the first person who rages his way through the tales without a damn given. 

 

One can correctly predict the deaths of most of the characters, mainly broads and hoods, by dint of the fact that literally everyone dies except Hammer, Pat Chambers (his NYPD foil) and Velda (the smokin' hot, also tough-as-lacquered-nails secretary). 

 

Sex and violence, Spillane reasoned, were in combination irresistible, so, well, here you go. There are intriguing contextual ideas of post-war nihilism and self-abuse to consider, but these are not ideas explored in the texts so much as set on fire then stubbed drunkenly with angry fingers into ashtray shreds. It's as unsophisticated and cartoonish as a character called Mike Hammer would suggest. I lined up those triple shots and drank them down in greedy gulps.

Hamster Dam

 Hamster Dam - Quentin S. Crisp

Unsettling is the word that came to mind when making book diary notes for this one, and the nib was hovering above the page for quite some time. Hamster Dam is quite the perspective shifter. 

In the book, Hamster Dam is a sort of Gordon Murray/Oliver Postgate kids' TV series from the 1960s or 1970s, set in a community of anthropomorphic hamsters. Or it is according to the memories of Gary, who is taking leave of absence from psychiatric work. His story is narrated by Brian, a colleague and case worker, and he seems uncertain if Hamster Dam ever existed in reality, and, increasingly, what reality even means for Gary, and him, and everyone else.

The writing has multiple hilarious (to me) moments that leaven a weird horror/science tone. There's nothing like a finely-timed bit of whimsy to take the sourer edges off a sober and fairly intense gaze at modern life. The narrator's uncertainty also provokes a constant sense of discomfort about how events might unfold. 

So, yeah, unsettling.

I don't know much about Quentin S. Crisp other than what I've gleaned from various interviews that have popped up with him, including this super effort from the Kulchur Kat blog, and the other bits and pieces of his work that I've scoured dutifully since reading Hamster Dam and being mighty impressed with it. He's definitely now one of those writers where I'll be 'just getting their stuff'.

Hamster Dam is also among the books that tilted me and a fellow tomehound into doing a podcast, watch this space. Crisp and Hamster Dam will almost certainly feature in the inaugural episode.

Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?

 Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?

Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Alain de Botton, Malcolm Gladwell

An almost definitionally shallow sixth form debate level exploration of a feeble motion. This transcript from 2015 presents four riff-heavy bigwigs trading sententious barbs, book-ended by a self-important introduction and reflection sections that add nothing.  

The book is a particular snapshot of a particular moment in time where "71% of people view progress as a continuing thing". Such vague  optimism seems particularly anachronistic in 2023. 

I think I might have enjoyed this more if John Gray and Thomas Ligotti had participated.
 

The Night Clock

The Night Clock

Paul Meloy

 Another book picked up at a library sale. I liked the look of it. It seemed to fit in with other stuff I'd been reading or had on the pile. 

Unsettling from the opening, the horror/sci-fi of The Night Clock presents psychological dreamscapes jostling with grimy urban sink estates. Escape hatches between the two shift and clatter. It has several memorable characters and set pieces: the bit where a mobility scooter gets a diabolical chop shop makeover worked especially well. Also, Meloy does a fine line in dry dialogue.

With cosmic automachy, psychopomps and an uber-villain known only as the Junction Creature, it's got a lot of mass beneath the main narrative. This is to its detriment on occasion for me: a fair few "the what now?" moments with back stories, parallel mythologies and new characters. Sometimes it seemed like it was part of a greater whole, but in a kind of sketch-like, unfinished way, where the ideas might have suited a more leisurely unfolding. I can see it working as part of a comic series, for example - it reminded me of something from Vertigo I might have devoured.

Having said that, the dislocated and weird fragmentation aspects are part of the appeal. They suit the dream themes and ideas of fractal mirrorball otherwhens behind the fabric of what we call reality.

Definitely a thumbs up from me, though a volume that has now moved on from the stack.

 

...and it's goodnight from him

The Authorised Biography of Ronnie Barker
Bob McCabe (2005)

Ronnie Barker was an actor who made the step into 1950s radio, and then 1960s TV performance, specifically mostly comic roles in popular shows like The Navy Lark and The Frost Report. He then became a bit of a legendary character actor across various mostly hugely successful series, including Porridge, Open All Hours, and the at-one-time seemingly-inescapable sketch show The Two Ronnies

He was also a prolific writer, often selling sketches to the shows he was in without the production teams being aware, which is pretty sneakily cool. 

 As to the book, I found this in a charity shop. As a biography, it's not in the slightest bit "warts 'n' all", with a focus on Ronnie Barker's professional life. As McCabe points out in his notes, this was apparently a precondition of Barker's cooperation, perhaps understandably, given Barker's lifelong aversion to personal celebrity, as well as some family laundry he did not wish to air any further than it already had been. 

It's quite vanilla, in many respects, then, and the BBC Books imprint does give it a sort of, "well done, thou good and faithful servant to the Beeb" air. 

However, it has some genuinely interesting insights on theatre, 1950s radio, 1960s-80s TV, ye Ronns, of course, and Barker's writing ideals.

One thing I Did Not Know was that the Ronnies made their long-running shows in advance, dumping any sketches that flopped and "recording their entire series before any of it was broadcast so they could edit and arrange each week's show to make it as strong as it could be". 

In the days of entire seasons of shows being buffed to a high sheen to "drop" in a one-er on Netflix, this is perhaps nothing so amazing, but in 1970s BBC terms, it must have been quite revolutionary. This, with comparable nuggets in the book, reveals a quietly experimental spirit at odds with a cosy reputation, and keen critical eyes behind the famous spectacle frames. 

(The biography was originally published in 1999, then reprinted in 2005 after Barker passed - I read this version in March 2023.)

Beastly

 Beast  - Paul Kingsnorth

Having read a lot about Kingsnorth's writing, getting approving nod from various directions, I was pleased to pick this up in a library sale for a pound or something. 

When it came to it, I was underwhelmed. It seemed a pretty obvious journey of midlife crisis, dressed up with some haunted landscape psychodrama. Completely unsympathetic narrator wandering the flanks of a dark mountain looking for their anima. A "Northern Lights" inversion for ageing fans of Morrissey. 

After the first 20 pages or so I pretty much skim read it, yawning like a big cat. 

Storyland

 Storyland - Amy Jeffs

While on a pile, this was a library book I picked up and whizzed through enthused in a couple of days. Myths and legends of Britain re-told, plus lino cut art - just my jam at this moment. 

The book pieces together a sequence of tales from antiquity for "A New Mythology of Britain". It takes special care to note the political expediency embedded in mythic traditions. 

Jeffs was particularly adept at representing the ways in which each story, complete in itself, was interpolated and adapted by people (rulers) into succeeding myths, self-forming into a coherent sequence creating their own truths. The journey of the artist-author, explored in part in the intro etc,  was also of great interest.

One of those volumes where I immediately start scouring abebooks for the hardback version...

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.