Resolutionary road

As January draws to a close, thought I would update the progress of my New Year's Resolutions:

1. Finish the novel. Well, I am scribbling away, though have retrenched and changed focus and rather than being 3/4 the way there, am now probably half way there, which seems like some sort of Zeno's Paradox of novel writing. And I have also bashed out a few short stories lately for which I am currently awaiting rejection letters from top-flight literary magazines. So I'm relatively happy, though this resolution has been my top priority for the last three years.

2. Get my 'McSweeney's for the UK, but warmer and with a little less nudge, nudge, wink, wink knowing irony' thing off the ground. Slightly hamstrung, at least by my lack of design skills and that my friend the web designer for some reason is taking paying gigs rather than working for the love of literature. Content rolling in, though, and it looks on course for a 2009 launch. Any Expat File fans wishing to contribute are free to send me ideas.

3. Washboard abs. Yes, this is rather vain; a friend rolled her eyes when I told her this resolution saying 'Well, that's worthwhile.' But there is some vanity to doing a blog, isn't there? Anyway, I do go to the gym frequently and have largely been eating well - even an Actimel of a morning which apparently keeps Sir Bobby Charlton full of jizz. So I am in reasonable shape. But washboard abs need that little extra bit of sacrifice, and will probably require me stopping boozing and refraining from the occasional cod and chips at The Frying Fisherman on Camberwell Church Street, both of which may not happen.

4. Learn the guitar properly. There my guitar sits as I write this, in the corner of the room, dusty and untouched. I did however, download an application to my iPhone that is a guitar tuner and has lists of chords. Next month!

5. Get back into German. Ach, mensch, Ich bin so faul gewesen. Im nächsten Monat!

5. More do-gooding. Though I am still doing my tireless Amnesty work, I have not contacted Shelter, Oxfam or any of the vast number of organisations that I was planning on volunteering for. Next month!

All and all, not too bad. Writing on schedule, literary project coming on, body fascist vanity project OK. Personal development and helping out my fellow man, not so much.

Rabbit at rest indeed

I was at a party last night for venerable publisher John Murray at its former headquarters on 50 Albemarle Street. It is a grand Georgian house, the upstairs kept essentially as it was during John Murray II's time in the early 1800s. Original portraits of golden age Murray authors like Robert Southey, Walter Scott and Byron grace the walls. The book-lined main room is kept almost exactly as it was when shortly after Byron died, JM II burned the manuscripts of the poet's undoubtedly scandalous memoirs. I stood by the very fireplace last night and wondered if Murray later ever stared at the grate, regretting what disappeared up the flue.

Towards the end of the evening I got to talking to an author and she said, 'And what do you think about Updike?' I did what I do whenever I am caught unawares by breaking book news: I furrowed my brow and asked: 'What do you think?'

Though I had missed the news that John Updike had died, I'm not sure I would have spared too much time regretting his passing. I have always been ambivalent about his WASPy upper-middle class preoccupations. I could always feel the cold patrician in his books; above all, he lacked empathy. However he did have one saving grace: he was a Boston Red Sox fan and wrote a piece for The New Yorker in 1960 about Ted Williams' last game at Fenway Park. The essay encoded a mythology about the team and Fenway Park ('a lyric little bandbox') that in the 80-odd years without a championship, enabled Bostonians to sneer at those vulgarians from the Bronx: We may not win anything, but at least Pulitzer Prize winners write about us.

Some of the language may be incomprehensible to The Expat Files' non-American readers: 'The Orioles were hitting fungos on the field', for example. But the main theme is about youthful infatuation with a star, and anyone who ever obsessed about a film, music or sporting hero will relate to it. The denouement is perceptive about the star/fan divide. Williams has gone out with bang, hitting a home run in his last at-bat. He leaves the field and the crowd chants his name wanting him to come out of the dugout to wave goodbye (Williams was a bit of cock, it has to be said. He never acknowledged the fans no matter how loudly they cheered). Williams doesn't come back onto the field, but Updike is sanguine: 'Gods do not answer letters.'

The dawg hisself

Seasick Steve - A Take Away Show - Part 2 from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.
I'm going to see Seasick Steve this week. Here he is on the excellent La Blogothèque. Go on the site and that's you for about a few hours. The Vampire Weekend one is brilliant.

Even less cynical

That Obama has reacted so quickly and decisively in reversing Bush's unlawful security apparatus has taken me aback. I had thought he would tread a bit more cautiously.

Last week in my Amnesty International Southwark group we wrote letters to Obama urging him to look into the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. Ali al-Marri is a Qatari national and legal US immigrant, who had the unfortunate luck to enter America on September 10th 2001. He was arrested in Illinois in December 2001, and was to face trial on fraud charges and making false statements to the FBI. But he was named an ‘enemy combatant’ by Bush, transferred to a military base in South Carolina, where he has been held without charge or trial ever since. He was only allowed access to a lawyer in 2004, the first contact with his family on 29th April 2008.

Obama's executive order makes direct reference to Ali al-Marri, ordering the attorney general to look into the case and that is to be applauded (Obama must've received our letters). Ali al-Marri may indeed be a terrorist, or he may not be. To hold him, however, a legal US resident, without charge for so long, unable to prove his guilt or innocence goes against the grain of everything that America is supposed to stand for.

Maybe, just maybe, justice and a bit of common sense is returning. When historians look back at the Bush presidency, I imagine they will liken it to the McCarthy era where the civil liberties were trampled for political expediency and innocents paid the price for largely ineffectual witch hunts.

Wise Children

Despite being an admirer of Angela Carter - Nights at the Circus and The Bloody Chamber are two of my favourite books - this, her last novel, had completely passed me by. I was recently drawn to its lurid cover at Foyle's and, as a resident of tube-less, downtrodden South London, the joke it opens with sold me: "Q: Why is London like Budapest? A: Because it is two cities divided by a river." Narrator Dora Chance goes on to explain the "bastard side of the Old Father Thames": "If you're from the States think of Manhattan. Then think of Brooklyn. See what I mean?"

The North and South London divide is a good device to start with. Dora and twin sister Nora are from the wrong side of the tracks in a way; they are the illegitimate, barely acknowledged daughters of an Olivier-like grand old man of British theatre. The book begins on the sisters' 75th birthday, and their father's 100th, with Dora looking back on their lives. The story's main arc covers the glory days of British music hall (Dora and Nora followed their father into the show business) and Hollywood.

It is a bit more linear and grounded than a lot of Carter's stuff, but still there are coincidences and improbabilities, flights of magic realist fancy. But you are not necessarily supposed to believe Dora, she acknowledges herself a number of times that she is an unreliable narrator. Reading it is like sitting down in a slightly seedy London boozer to listen to a tispsy, jolly old bird tell her tale. You know she is embellishing it, and she knows you know, but you go along for the ride because you are enjoying it so.

I first came upon Carter in university in one of the many courses in the comparative literature department which seemed to have the phrase "the feminine" in the title, preceded by a verb like exploring, unleashing or concealing. I gather Carter remains a darling of the academy as some people still are apparently able to make careers wittering on about intertextuality. I admit I often still read with my theory hat on (like Catholicism, once drilled into you, it is difficult to shake) and I can spew po-mo lit crit bullshit as well as any one. The other day I went to Hitchcock's Notorious at the BFI Southbank with an art house film group. Afterwards we were having discussion about the Freudian overtones, how it has Hitchcock's auteur fingerprints, whether it is an allegory for US post-WWII policy towards West Germany, etc. And this woman at the end of the table with this broad Glaswegian accent piped up with: 'Och, isn't it just a really good story? What are you all on about?' And that, was the wisest thing anyone said all night.

My country tis of thee

I am not a cynic today.

I watched Obama with a catch in my throat, eyes welling up and for the first time in a long while felt connected to my homeland. For those twenty minutes that Obama spoke, I felt a thrilled by the promise of America, of immigrants toiling for a better life, people of all races, creeds and religions coming together.

Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote 'all men are created equal' in the Declaration of Independence, which underpins American political thought, of course owned some 200 human beings (he freed his slaves only after dying). This is the irony of the nation, espousing liberty in theory, but often not in practice for a large number of its citizens. Maybe with Obama, the US has finally reached its potential.

But that is a putting a lot on his slender shoulders: being the face of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic tolerant America, whilst having to rescue the economy, pull out of two intractable wars and reverse the unmitigated damage to civil liberties created by the cabal of cowboys and criminals who ran the country for the last eight years.

The rather sober speech reflected the challenge. Half 'ask not what you're country can do for you' and half 'only thing we have to fear'. You wonder how Americans will respond. We have lived off the fat of the land, become lazy, have been unencumbered by the need for sacrifice since the Second World War. It is human, not just American, nature to want someone else to do the work and suffering for you. Witness how climate change is being tackled with the buying of carbon credits by rich countries from the poor and the absolute nonsense of off-setting. Normally, I would despair that my fellow Americans would have it in them for the sacrifice and difficulties that lie ahead.

But I am not a cynic today. Today, I think Obama can change the world. And Aretha sang at the inauguration. How cool is that?

What are you lookin' at, bub?

Is it sad to be looking forward to this? Is it also sad that I still have my Wolverine fancy dress costume-the black movie style, not that rather outre yellow one from the comics-that I painstakingly sewed over seven days (perfecting the claws was the most difficult thing) from a few Halloweens ago in my drawer, neatly folded ready for when Professor Xavier comes a-callin'? The answer is probably yes, as I'm not 12 years old.

It'll be a long wait till the first of May.

Working class hero

I don't have a television. I'm not trying to be smug; I never say: 'Oh, I didn't see the Britain's Got Talent finale, I was reading Proust, nibbling on Madelaines, as I usually do of an evening.' But I do think I get more done, read more, write more. Yet I surf the net more, and when I go to pubs and friends' houses with the TV on I tend to stare slack-jawed and rapt, prepared to watch any old crap. Case in point, New Year's Day over at friend's, between a couple of Muppets movies (which you'll agree are genius) we managed to watch a marathon of Dog: The Bounty Hunter, a reality TV show which follows ex-con Duane "Dog" Chapman and his family of bounty hunters as they chase down Hawaiian crims, the point seemingly to lecture to the perps about how they should get their lives together after they are run to ground (Dog and family are born-agains, and it is all about redemption, blah, blah, blah).

Round about way to say that I am often unfamiliar with what is going on in telly-land. So I was more than a little surprised when I read in the paper to discover than Scottish Socialist Party founder Tommy Sheridan is currently in the Celebrity Big Brother house alongside C-listers and has-and-never-really-beens like Mini Me, Coolio and that Swedish woman who shagged Sven.

Tommy essentially spearheaded Scottish opposition to Thatcher's poll tax, got jailed a couple of times for protesting the nuclear sub base at Falsane, was elected to the new devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999 (a feat in then Labour dominated Scotland) and swept in with five other SSP MSPs in the next election. So an all around right-on socialist. I met him a couple of times in Scotland and he was charismatic and unquestionably committed to the cause, enough so that I voted SSP twice.

Then the fall: a scandal in which the News of the World claimed he had cheated on wife Gail led to a rupture of the SSP, with colleagues testifying against him in the libel trial after he sued NotW. The NotW's main case rested on witnesses saying Sheridan had group sex in Cupid's swingers club in Manchester. The women who were said to have shagged Tommy were all rather unattractive, wife Gail exceptionally pretty. I mention this because during the trail I was living in Glasgow and an old woman came up to me as I was standing at a bus stop and we had a wee blether as you do in Glasgow. 'Ya ken this Tommy Sheridan rubbish, son?' she asked. 'I dinnae believe it. Why go out for mince when ya have steak at hame?'

Anyway, Sheridan won the case - mainly on Gail's testimony that he "had more body hair than a gorilla" and none of his supposed paramours mentioned it. His exultant, tub-thumping speech outside of the courtroom about beating part of the Murdoch empire was brilliant.

And it saddens me that he is on Channel 4, being filmed 24/7, debasing himself, not back out there fighting for the workers' rights. Maybe he believes he can get his message out to a wider audience on CBB, but that doesn't work and he will end up looking like a fool. I mean, didn't he see George Galloway in that cat suit last time? He may need money - the NotW are appealing. But maybe it's more about being in the centre of things that politicians crave, that the old dictum that politics is show business for ugly people is true. Or, at least, show business for people with extremely hairy backs.

Overheard today on the 171 to Catford Bus Station

Rather camp fellow, a homburg about three sizes too small, perched slightly askew on a think coif, sitting next to me. The upper deck of the bus, full of tired, cold looking people on their way home. About 6.30 pm. He is shouting into his mobile, the only sound on the upper deck as we near Waterloo.

"No, no, no. Oh, no. It is not about me, not about me. Don't turn it around. Why do you always have to turn it around? It is about you, sweetheart. It is all about YOU. I'm not the one smoking 30 a day. I'm not the one with the three heart attacks. I'm not the one who went out and had to get fucking lung cancer. You are so selfish, so goddamn selfish. So go ahead and die for all I care, go ahead. What? What? You have to go? OK, bye, bye. Love you, Mum."

He turns off his mobile, looks around a bit, then cheerily asks if I am finished with my London Lite.

What is the people?

I have been reading Duncan Wu's excellent biography, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man and today I was walking through Soho, doing some shopping (you know, the usual Soho stuff, whips, chains and the like), when I came upon this sign on Frith Street. William Hazlitt actually died in the building I was standing in front of. Remarkable. I have walked down the street many times (it is next to the brilliant Frith Street Tattoo where Hazlitt himself got his 'Winona Forever' and 'Fuck Tha Police' tattoos) and never noticed it. Perhaps because the sign is rather high on the wall. The slum building where Hazlitt died in near-forgotten penury at the age of 52 is now a posh hotel trading on his name. You can have one of the Georgian suites in the Hazlitt Hotel for a mere £325 a night. "It's like stepping back into the 18th Century," breathes the hotel's website. Hm, is that Soho of the 18th Century? So then: rats scuttling about the rooms, lumpy lice-infested straw mattresses, some spotted dick for dinner, gin-addled and pox ridden strumpets outside, your own chamberpot to empty out the window to the street, about a 75 percent chance of catching tuberculosis or cholera.

But this is what I love about London. Not the gin-addled, pox-ridden strumpets, though they are a dime a dozen in the Big Smoke, let me tell you. At least that's what those adverts the NHS runs in movie theatres are having me believe, and I do go to a lot of publishing parties. No, it is the chance to randomly stumble upon some place with rich historical, artistic or literary associations that the city, so overrun with those associations, presents to us with an insouciant shrug and an offhand blue plaque. If Hazlitt had died in some hellhole like Swindon, I am sure that city would make a big hoo-ha about it.

Hazlitt has been more than a little neglected. He is rarely read today, and that is a shame. Mostly, I think, because he wrote no fiction and to be attuned to his essays you have to know a little more about the period than you would have to reading, say, Jane Austen. Yet his essays are profound and still able to shake me to the core. I love him because he was able to marry cynicism with an affection for humanity, which is a tricky thing. Gore Vidal and Christopher Hitchens are two contemporary writers I admire in varying degrees and would perhaps think of themselves as heirs to Hazlitt, yet they write with acid pens but flinty hearts.

Hazlitt was far from perfect, perhaps why he makes such a compelling subject for Wu. He had a misogynistic streak, was a raging whoremonger, had a soft spot for that despot Napoleon. But I didn't have to live with him. Instead, I can read 'The Fight', ostensibly an account of a prizefight (in those days it wasn't Marquess of Queensbury rules - you battered a man until he couldn't be revived), but more a poignant look at the lengths humans will go to inflict brutality on their fellow man. Few people as perceptive as Hazlitt are writing today, and we are poorer for it.