Friday bits and bobs

A few things that have caught my eye over the past week or so.

A nice freebie here. A journalist, Max Millard, interviewed the great and the good in New York City during the 1970s whilst working for a variety of newspapers, and he is giving away a free ebook of the interviews here and here. It is fascinating mostly for the wide range of people from Stan Lee to Betty Friedan to George Plimpton to Isaac Asimov.

Sony is launching a new eReader in the UK. I only mention this in order to post a gratuitous photo of the lovely Sadie Jones, who was at the launch at the British Library.



And, my little spot on BBC Radio 4's "You and Yours", yukking it up with Peter White about Potter-less Bloomsbury and the state of the trade.

How the dead live

So a touristy London weekend. On Saturday, propelled by Wolf Hall besotted-ness, I went to Hampton Court. It is an impressive, if schizophrenic palace, half Tudor, half Baroque. I love the Tudor bit most. Built by Cardinal Wolsey who gifted it to Henry VIII in order to forestall the good Cardinal's downfall (that didn't work so well), it's all about solidity, power, cowing and wowing guests, and it is so easy to imagine Henry stamping down the halls. Most of the exhibitions are done well, but there are some rather irksome 'let's engage the kids' sort of touches, like the ghostly whispering "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, died" piped into one of the stairwells.

The clean lines and Versailles-lite of the later Baroque stuff I don't find as appealing. And something puts me off about the (admittedly impressive) wide expanse of formal gardens. They are two boxed in, regimented, controlled. It's all a-flower but it doesn't seem alive. Still, I did get to see the oldest and biggest grape vine in the world, which is something to tell the grandkids.




On Sunday, to Highgate Cemetary, which curiously felt so much more alive than the Hampton Court gardens. Sure, there is the box office draws of Karl Marx's and George Eliot's grave, but what I loved was the verdant, unchecked undergrowth creeping over tombstones, angel statues poking out through trees, vines above a group of graves with the ripe grapes dropping down so you squish them as you walk, the sweet smell of blackberries in the air, butterflies flitting amongst tombstones. It is not a place of death so much, but to celebrate the dead's lives.







The artist Patrick Caulfield's gravestone is quite frankly a work of genius...



...but this tiny aspirational inscription was my favourite of all.

The question is, will the Vamp be stiffer than Robert Pattison's acting?

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True lies

One of the more cherished lies the English tell themselves is that they are good sports, they never cheat, 'just not cricket' and all that. This particularly manifests itself in football, a sport which has its fair share of gamesmanship and cheating - Maradona's Hand of God which beat the English in the 1986 World Cup maybe the most famous example.

The subtext in the way the media here treats cheating in sports is that it is those swarthy foreigners — greasy South Americans and garlic eating Continentals in particular — who will do anything to gain an advantage. Not our brave boys: we're honest and true. Which is, of course, self-delusional bullshit as anyone who has watched the English national team in recent years, particularly the stamping, poking and gouging thug John Terry and Wayne 'goes down quicker than George Michael' Rooney.

This past few days we've had a couple of examples of true English sportsmanship. In a game featuring Crystal Palace and Bristol City, a clear goal by Palace was not allowed because the referee and his three assistants were the only ones in the stadium who failed to see it. Palace lost 1-0, which sent boss Neil Warnock, who tends to bleat like a fishwife even when things are going well, into near apoplexy. He rightly called the Bristol City players and coach 'cheats' for not saying something to the referee.



Then on to rugby, which has seen Dean Richards the coach of Harlequins (which apparently is a Rugby Union team - as opposed to Rugby League, I am unsure of the difference, it's all just beefy men in short-shorts to me) banned for three years for making his players fake injuries to get fresh players on the field. These were 'blood injuries', so the players had concealed blood capsules in their socks, as if canon fodder extras in a Hollywood shoot 'em-up, to pop into their mouths at the opportune moment. But the brilliant thing is that Richards' mea culpa was anything but, sure he held his hands up but, it was farcical because "it didn't pan out particularly well on the day." So, it's not really cheating if it doesn't work, then?

What people were reading today on the upper deck of the 242 from Shoreditch to Holborn

Lanky guy, mid-20s, hair cut close to disguise his receding hairline. Sat cross-legged taking up two seats, sighed loudly when someone had the temerity to ask if they could sit next to him: A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Tolz (Penguin).





Squat Asian woman, salt and pepper bun pulled back tight, mouthing words silently as she read: A battered, heavily annotated pocket sized leather editor of The Bible, I think NIV, couldn't see the publisher.





A well-fed City type, man in his early 50s, blue suite, powder blue shirt, self-satisfied rather punchable face: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson (Quercus).






Raven haired petite woman, olive skin, coal-dark eyes, next to me, her perfume something like lilacs and fresh cut grass: La chica que soñaba con una cerilla y un bidón de gasolina, Stieg Larsson. Incidentally, this is the second time in about two months I have seen someone reading this in Spanish. It's the second book, The Girl who Played with Fire in English and this translates to 'the girl who dreamed about a match and a can of gasoline.' Maybe it rolls off the tongue in Spanish.




Me: The Good Soldier Svejk, Jaroslav Hasek (Penguin Classics).







Everybody else: The freakin' Metro.

Revealed at last

"It is, in fact, Thomas Pynchon."

So that's the admission from a Penguin US publicist about the narrator for the YouTube trailer to his new stoner detective novel Inherent Vice, after some fine detective work by the WSJ's Speakeasy. Pynchon is all over the shop these days, putting together a music playlist for the book on Amazon.

Don't you forget about me

Well, R.I.P. John Hughes, chronicler of my generation's adolescence, the man who launched a thousand 80s catchphrases - "Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?" "Wha's happenin' hotsuff?' etc - and the careers of so many actors whose stars will never dim: Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson. I do remember getting in umpteen Sheedy versus Ringwald debates in high school (I was firmly in the Sheedy camp).

Happened to walk by the Breakfast Club cafe in Soho yesterday, who appear to be in deep, deep mourning...

Triumph of the will

Less than a few hours after my grandmother was buried some 20 years ago, my cousins rolled up to her house with a moving van and cleared out some of the more precious family heirlooms, some that had not been itemised in my grandmother's will. We all deal with death in our own way; some grieve, some think 'what's in this for me?'

I thought about this the other day when I read the news that a judge in Florida has deemed there has been some dodgy dealing in the estate of Jack Kerouac. A forged signature coming to light on the will of his mother (who controlled his estate after he died) after a lengthy court battle.

Besides the issue of who should own the estate - the legal wrangling was begun in the early 1990s by Kerouac's daughter, who died in 1996 and had been excluded from it - the handling of the estate has not been without controversy. Strictly on a monetary level John Sampas, the brother of Kerouac's last wife who has run the estate since Kerouac's mother died in 1973, has turned it into quite a gold mine. Kerouac had $91 in his bank account when he died; now his estate is worth about $20m.

Sampas has been deft commercially, making Kerouac into a marketable brand, increasing the publishing output, licensing Kerouac's image, famously to Gap in order to sell khakis. But what angers most fanboys and girls, is that he has sold various Kerouaciana piecemeal: Kerouac's rain coat to Johnny Depp, the original scroll manuscript for On the Road to Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts (for a cool $2.43m).

To be fair to Sampas, all his commercial operating has arguably kept Kerouac's literary star shining, both among academics and regular folk. But the estate has not been so forthcoming about some things, keen to keep some of the more, shall we say marketable, aspects of Kerouac's life, such as his bisexuality, out of the spotlight. Does this matter? Maybe a writer's life should be about the work. Yet I am not so sure. This may be the voyeur in me, but when I connect with a writer, I do like to know what makes them tick, and an unexpurgated version of their lives helps. I would have liked to have seen a lot of those letters that Cassandra Austen destroyed. Or Byron's memoir that John Murray burned.