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.

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. 

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.