Hear, hear

Strangely, I have never tried an audiobook, but after interviewing an audiobook publisher recently, I decided to give a couple a go. It helped that this publisher gave me some downloads gratis - I cannot be bought, but I am shameless.


Of course, I am not totally new to spoken word. There is a lot of stuff on BBC Radio 4 I listen to like the Saturday Play or Book at Bedtime. But those have either a number of actors speaking the parts or are in short bursts. An audiobook reader's ability then, particularly if you are going to be with him or her for 100-200,000 words, is crucial. This was originally a problem with the first I listened to, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, read by Rupert Degas. Even before I checked his profile on IMDB which confirmed my suspicions, Degas sounded like an Englishman putting on an American accent, overemphasising every syllable like a the voice over of a Hollywood blockbuster trailer.

Yet that abated as the book went on, his voice becoming more in tune with McCarthy's spare, hard as granite prose. It perhaps helps that the novel is basically a two-hander—a man and a boy who are walking through a post-apocalyptic America—so he doesn't have to put on too many other voices for the dialogue.

Overall, the experience is enjoyable, but I couldn't really stop feeling that I was somehow cheating: I should be reading the book, not letting someone else do the work. I wonder, too, whether the next time I read a McCarthy book will I hear Degas in my head—which would be rather annoying. And here are some practical concerns. Trying to listen as I walked through London, with double-decker buses roaring by meant that I constantly missed things and had to rewind.

Rugger-buggers

As discussed earlier I have never really gotten into rugby, the second most popular sport over here. In the States, the only people who play it are annoying upper class frat boys, as a means to while away the idle hours between attempted date rapes. Which, actually, is pretty much rugby's constituency over here. I do appreciate the rampant homo-eroticism of the sport, though; the grappling and the outfits are not unlike what you might see walking through the streets of Soho at night.

Still, I got caught up watching the Six Nations this year (to the Expat's American audience: this is a yearly tournament between Europe's rugby powers: England, France, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and, er, Italy). There is something in that Orwellian dictum that sport, particularly on the international level, is essentially "war minus the shooting". My interest was piqued more on a vague patriotic, nationalistic and ancestral level; my Irish roots (and passport) mean I always cheer for the boys in green and it was nice to see them romp home with the Grand Slam (beating everyone else in the tournament).



The final Wales-Ireland game was enthralling, nevre-wracking, back and forth. I was swept up, found myself getting overly emotional at the end for a sport I don't really care about and a country I have never lived in. Thrilled for Ireland, but I also felt sad for the poor boy from Wales (didn't catch his name, but I'm betting the surname was Jones) who missed the kick at the very end which could have won it.

Walking in a Weegie wonderland

Up to Glasgow for a long weekend of visiting friends, heroic drinking and consuming a vast amount of deep fried food. I love the city and it compares favourably to other places I have lived recently. It is Edinburgh without the pretty buildings yet more smiles. A drunker yet more inhibited Hamburg. London's slightly cynical, less successful younger brother who is much better to hang out with.

It has a fearsome reputation as a haven for shell-suited criminal hardmen and sectarian football violence. There continues to be some truth in it - a headbutt isn't called a Glasgow kiss for nothing. There was a Celtic-Rangers cup final on Sunday and there was a bit of frisson in the air as I walked by groups of green and white hoops and blue tops, taking care not to make eye contact. And downtown you do see low-level dodgy crims, the junkies, the winos, neds looking for a score.

Yet Glasgow also crackles with creativity, punching above its weight with its artists, architects, writers and indie rockers. Walk around the West End and it is all arty and boho, chock-a-block with vintage clothes shops, funky little galleries, second hand bookstores.


One of my favourite places is Voltaire & Rousseau, a book shop on the banks of the Kelvin. To say it is a shop is a bit of a misnomer because you are not exactly encouraged to shop, but dig, rummage, excavate. The books are in no discernible order, piles about waist high obscure half the shelves, as you can see in the pic (which is also a rare snapshot of the University of Manooth's famed Irish Romanticism scholar and Charles Maturin expert Dr Jim Kelly). Cats scamper about, when you go to pay for books you feel guilty for interrupting the owner's reading time. But it is great, there are treasures if you look hard enough and is somewhere I can pleasantly while away hours, at least until the dust allergy kicks in.

Green green grass of home

I used to have a lot of time for Simon Schama as he wrote two of my favourite pieces of popular history, Citizens and The Embarrassment of Riches. But then around his BBC series History of Britain he went off the beam, morphing in a supersized twat, sashaying about the country in that ridiculous leather jacket. A painful misjudged attempt to be Rock n' Roll Historian, he came off like a "cool" dad throwing ten years out of date hip-hop slang into conversations with his teenage kids.

But he has clawed back a bit of respect for his pretty decent Radio 4 series on baseball, the first episode of which is about his (and my) team, the Boston Red Sox. Schama taught at Harvard in the 80s, and that is when he fell in love with the sport and the team. He has a convert's enthusiasm, so you can forgive him some lapses of detail - he says at one point that the Green Monster (above), one of Fenway Park's walls, is in centre field when it is in left. There are also some inaccuracies which a bit of judicious editing should have rectified. At one point he tells us that Fenway has the only old-time manual scoreboard in baseball. Then a few moments later he interviews the guy who runs the scoreboard who says that Wrigley Field and Fenway are the only two manual scoreboards in the league.

Still he gets the overall feel spot-on, particularly about his first encounter with baseball, which is not about the game per se, it is about the senses. One of my abiding memories of childhood is my first trip to Fenway, aged about five, up the stairs from the bowels of the stadium, dazzled by the field with grass the richest and deepest shade of green I have ever seen. And the smells: roasting peanuts, hot dogs, frying onions; and I could even smell the grass itself, which reminded me of the lawn at my grandmother's house. And hearing the jaunty tunes of the organ over the PA, vendors calling out in deep, thick Bostonian: 'Pahpcahn heah! Hot dogs heah!' I do not know how long I really stayed there, but when I think about I seem frozen forever, awed, hand in hand with my father, one of the few times I can recall him touching me.

Two Johns and a Dick

I stumbled upon this Dick Cavett post on the NY Times website the other day, with the video of a complete episode of Cavett's talk show from 1981 where he chatted to those poets of the suburbs, John Updike and John Cheever. As keen Expat File observers are aware, I do not hold much truck with Updike. As for Cheever I have only slightly more admiration, for much the same reason: that upper middle class WASP-y stuff just never moved me.

But what astonishes about the episode is that shows like this—a half-hour intelligent discussion with literary heavyweights—not only used to be shown on prime-time US television, but was actually relatively popular. I'll forgo any 'where have we gone' hand-wringing - Dukes of Hazzard, Love Boat and Bosom Buddies were more popular that year. TV has always largely been shit, but there always has been some brilliant stuff.

I was actually speaking about Bosom Buddies the other day at a party for some reason, and the guy I was talking to thought I was making it up because the premise sounds so improbable: a young Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari (no, you really shouldn't know who he is) play friends in New York City who can't find an apartment so they dress as women to be able to live in the female-only Susan B Anthony Hotel. Oh, the hilarity and hi-jinks that ensued as they tried to keep their identities secret from their hot neighbours!

Anyway, take a look at the Cavett show, the somewhat uncomfortable banter between the Johns is illuminating. Or treasure it for the quaint set design alone; you don't see many Persian carpets on chat shows these days.

America: not such the new black

Apropos of the previous post. I was in the locker room at the my council-run gym, the deteriorating spartan facilities of which resemble a sports club in some post-Ceauşescu Romanian parochial city about five or so years after the Soviet money dried up. The staff at that Romanian sports club would probably be cheerier than my gym's.

At any rate, these two guys were next to me, completely ripping into their incompetent colleague who had "cost the company shedloads, shedloads, mate." I couldn't follow what kind of business they were in, it was something financial or insurance which made my eyes glaze over. But my ears perked up at the last word, spoken with Olympian finality: "Yeah, well, he's American. From the American Hawaiian Islands, so you know he would be a bit dim."

I was mildly irritated, partially at the off-hand received wisdom that an American would be stupid. But what really galled was this bozo had emphasised that their co-worker was from the American Hawaiian Islands. As opposed to what, the Russian Hawaiian Islands? Obviously he had conflated some of his Pacific islands and doesn't know shit from Samoa.