The Expat's File

Books of 2009

2010-01-08T15:26:00.011Z

A little late, but I thought I would run down my favourite books of last year, actually my favourites that were new to me for 2009.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Wells Tower

A collection of short stories from Chapel Hill, South Carolina's Tower, full of flawed but human characters struggling with the modern world. Even the title story, which concerns a group of Vikings going on a rape and pillage expedition, is (and this is my reading) about that most modern of concerns: trying to achieve a work/life balance. There has been a lot of noise about how the short story is back—I'm not sure of that (this has only sold 2,000 copies in the UK)—but Tower is worth seeking out. The B Format paperback is due in April.

A Gate at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore

Speaking of short story writers...Lorrie Moore is probably the best short story writer working in English today. But this is her first novel in about 15 years, and she brings to it that same chiseled prose, same perceptive insight into her characters. The only drawback is that there are some places in the book that it feels like it has been written by a short story writer and not a novelist; the pace of the narrative drags a bit. But there is all that beautiful writing, so that it's worth slogging through the odd rough patches.

The Lazarus Project
Aleksander Hemon

As I said, new to me. This was published in 2008, but I only recently picked it up on a visit to the States. It's a dual narrative: in early 1900s Chicago, Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch is shot dead in the home of the Chicago police chief and 100 years later another immigrant to the Second City, a Bosnian writer named Brik, starts researching and retracing Lazarus' journey. It's original, funny, poignant and the whole alienated outsider, stranger in a strange land thing appeals to me greatly. Hemon is Bosnian, moved to the US in the early 90s, wrote his first story in English only in 1995, the clever clogs.

Hard Rain Falling
Don Carpenter

This novel was originally published way back in 1966, but has unaccountably been long out of print, and has been resurrected this year, part of the New York Review of Books' list of bringing back 'lost classics'. It is set in Portland, Oregon in the 1950s, in the milieu of petty crims and pool hustlers, but it's not really a crime novel. There are pulpy, potboiler elements, but it is more about living on society's margins, challenging conformity and the system, and there is much compassion in the tough and terse Hemingway-esque writing.

That's my top four. I was going to do a top 5, but number one is still far and away Wolf Hall, which I have praised to no end previously.

Awwww

2009-12-30T15:05:00.003Z

My cat has taken to sleeping in the bookcase...

Noted

2009-12-29T14:12:00.007Z

I'll begin with a oft-repeated refrain: boy it's been a long time. But, I've been busy, so lay off, will ya.

Anyway, your Expat is shaking off his autumnal blues and post-Christmas weight gain to re-enter the blogosphere. Even tweeting. All in preparation for some exciting projects in the new year - stay tuned.

I spent Christmas in the usual way (the whisky, the shotgun, the sense of futility and dread) and lately have been kicking back reading and writing and relaxing. Relaxing, that is, until I read "The Dead", which is of course the final piece in Joyce's Dubliners. I read this every year around this time; it's snowy and takes place on the feast of the Epiphany - the 12th day of Christmas.

I used to have a lovely orange Penguin paperback edition, yet it seemed not to have survived my latest house move. So off to Oxfam to pick up the Penguin modern classics edition (sorry for screwing you on royalties, Joyce estate!), edited by Terence Brown, Trinity College Dublin.

What grated was that, unlike the orange Penguin, old Terry seems to want to stick his oar in and comment on almost every part of the story. Twice a page on average: the Dead is 49 pages long, yet there are 98 footnotes. The problem is that each of the notes are numbered and each time you interrupt your reading turning to the back thinking, 'Well this must be important,' and you are invariably disappointed. True, some are essential: a bit of Irish translated, the fact that 'Adam and Eve's' was Dublin slang for its Church of the Immaculate Conception. But many are interpretive and break the flow of the story. Naming the maid Lily may indeed be significant because it is the flower associated with the archangel Gabriel (the name of one of the main characters), but that could be told in an afterword.

What truly irritated was that so many were unnecessary, it seemed like Prof Brown was struggling to hit a word count. 'Dumb-bells' are 'weights for callisthenic exercises'. Glasgow, apparently, is a 'Scottish industrial city.' Who knew?

The solution for this is for Penguin to footnote like OUP does for their classics: not numbering them, so that they break up the story, but just having notes at the back which readers can refer to if stuck. Yet I suspect footnoting will become ever more intrusive going forward as traditional classics publishers strive to 'add value' to their books to combat the glut of free classics that are available on the internet.

The second biggest street party in the world, don't you know

2009-09-01T20:25:00.007+01:00

To the Notting Hill Carnival on Sunday for my first time, and it sort of encapsulated everything about London. Up from the Central Line at Holland Park station (not Notting Hill Gate; Whitehall, my friend and guide said, that's for Carnival virgins) and meandering through tony, posh Ladbroke Grove, with its whitewashed Victorian townhouses, Chelsea tractors parked imperiously just inside vine covered gated drives. Richard Curtis London.

Then: turning into the Carnival, and the speed changes, a needle scratching along a classical LP and replaced by booming hip hop. Rammed shoulder to shoulder with a mass of multi-coloured, multi-cultural, multi-this-and-that humanity, accompanied by the thump-thump-thump of drum n bass, Afro beats, steel drums, a new sound around each corner and dancing, drinking, dancing, drinking. Zadie Smith London.

Then: sampling dubious looking but delicious but overpriced jerk chicken, several anxious waits in a port-a-loo queue, idly wondering why there are no bins and who the hell is going to clean up this mess, and finally the inevitably delayed, sweaty fug of an overcrowded tube ride home.

Friday bits and bobs

2009-08-28T15:39:00.004+01:00

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

2009-08-24T15:16:00.007+01:00

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?

2009-08-21T14:44:00.008+01:00

I'm not easily shocked, but I did do a little double take today when word reached my ears that a sex toy company called Tantus is producing a Twilight-themed dildo. Allow those words to sink in: Twilight-themed dildo. Isn't that more than a wee bit off, given that the Twilight target audience is, well, children? And even more so since, and this is my reading, that the underlying message of the series is sex is evil, you'll die if you do it, and, hey, why not try Mormonism?

Just to be clear, "The Vamp" isn't official Twilight merchandise, with a picture of a smiling and satisfied Stephenie Meyer giving a thumbs up on the box. But I think you get the message from the copy on the site (my emphases):

"The Vamp is a realistic form dildo based appropriately on our Sire's design but with a deathly pale flesh tone reminiscent of the new moon's glow. Don't be surprised if this toy seduces you, its long sleek shaft and deliciously ridged head calling to you in the twilight. But don't save this for just nocturnal escapades, try taking our Vamp out in the sunlight and watch him sparkle.

The Vamp is a web only exclusive offering through TantusInc.com for $39.99. We are currently taking pre-orders for this one of a kind toy. We will be shipping them first come first serve starting 9/1/09. Don't let this eclipse pass into the breaking dawn, place your order today."

"Don't let this eclipse pass into the breaking dawn"? If you didn't know your Twilight and you were just perusing the Tantus for a new lady's friend, would that make any sort of sense?

True lies

2009-08-18T08:52:00.007+01:00

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

2009-08-14T17:54:00.005+01:00

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

2009-08-12T10:08:00.008+01:00

"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

2009-08-08T13:07:00.004+01:00

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

2009-08-03T09:01:00.007+01:00

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.

Chimp and wolf

2009-07-31T13:51:00.005+01:00

So Me Cheeta has garnered most of the Booker longlist headlines, which I think is no bad thing. The prize has shown an increasing commercial nous since Ion Trewin took over as administrator; throwing a curve ball like this into the mix in order to make people who usually wouldn't give a rat's ass about literature notice is just good PR. Like Child 44 last year, Me Cheeta has no chance of winning, or even getting on to the short list, but it has generated so much extra coverage (if only because sub-editors could write headlines like 'Chimp can be Booker top banana').

I have not read all the books on the list, but I would be surprised if any are better than Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. It is simply one of the best books I have read in quite some time, a wholly realised depiction of the Tudor court, focusing on Thomas Cromwell and his rise to power. I read it quite quickly, the re-read it two times in a row, because I just did not want to leave it.

Many historians seem to portray Cromwell - the man who paved the way for the break with Rome in order for Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn to marry - as corrupt or utterly ruthless. In literature, of course, he is the baddie who hounds Thomas More to his death in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Mantel goes some way to rescuing Cromwell reputation. Her Cromwell is brilliant and utterly compelling; a brewer's son (his low birth is often remarked upon by nobles), linguist, warrior, statesman, lawyer who is "at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." Cromwell's humour contrasts with More's priggishness, hypocrisy and fundamentalism.

Death haunts this book. There is the fragility of simple daily life of the early modern period (Cromwell's wife and daughter are carried away in a day by the plague-like "sweating sickness") and the brutal, dangerous realpolitik at that fat bully-boy Henry VIII's court, where the axe or the stake were the end for so many. There is a poignancy that we know the main character will eventually go the way of More.

But Mantel's greatest achievement is to make an era which has been gone over time and again seem fresh and new. She has obviously done her research, but she wears it lightly, perhaps helped by her use of modernish dialogue.

East ender

2009-07-24T09:34:00.006+01:00

I've crossed Old Man Thames by foiling the border guards at Tower Bridge and have moved into my new flat in Shoreditch, East London. "Trendy Shoreditch" I say to everyone as if that was the full name, though I'm not sure if the trendiest have moved further afield to Dalston, London Fields or somewhere else. Still, there is an abundance of directional hair cuts, tragically hip clothes and 2kool4skool fashion victims who have obviously not seen Nathan Barley.

Yes, many of the folk are walking clichés, but I love living here, I must admit. There is art and creativity everywhere, some of it having been spray painted on my building in the week or so since I have moved in:

But in just this week, I have fallen in with a group of filmmakers (your ExPat's first long dormant love is filmmaking), have been introduced to a new writers' group and, well, drank a lot of tequila and ended up falling asleep with sombrero on (it ain't all arty-farty).

Shameless plug

2009-07-12T14:51:00.005+01:00

The new Writers' & Artists' Yearbook is out, the essential tome for all publishers, writers and aspiring writers out there. I urge you all to get a copy. Particularly useful this year is the insightful guide to the book trade, beginning on pg 316, by, er, me.

That's it for us, boys

2009-07-08T09:09:00.005+01:00

The news today that scientists at the University of Newcastle and NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute have created human sperm in the laboratory will, if anything, lead to much religious and gender-role hand wringing in the press. It had me immediately thinking of a dystopian future where men, redundant of their only true biological purpose, are treated as second-class citizens and subjugated as sex slaves by a repressive matriarchy. Of course, that is one of my long-held fantasies, so fingers crossed.

It did lead to a rather fruity exchange on Radio 4's Today Programme which brought out my adolescent giggling inner-Beavis ("heh, heh, heh... he said sperm"). To be fair, presenter Evan Davis was not exactly taking it all that seriously, either. Asking another scientist whether the Newcastle team had actually created viable sperm, the scientist was unsure. "I've been looking at sperm under the microscope for every day of the last 20 years..." he began. "Well, somebody has to," interrupted Davis.

Seriously, the punditocracy's poring over the issue will be completely justified as it does raise a number of weighty issues. One, which rarely gets addressed, however, is why we need all this reproductive science in the first place. Last time I checked, the world's population was teetering on the unsustainable. Surely, there are enough babies to go around for barren middle class Westerners. Madonna and Angelina's much-derided third world baby shopping sprees are not so sinister after all; maybe it is much more responsible to get a child from Africa that to concoct it in an IVF clinic.

Boom boom

2009-07-06T09:29:00.004+01:00

I worked out that Saturday was my 10th of the last 11 Independence Days that I have celebrated outside the the US of A. Or rather not celebrated; some years, particularly when I had to work, the day just passed me by. I did have a BBQ this year with some other ex-pats, a number of them working some vague jobs in the embassy that probably involves spiriting people away to Gitmo in the dead of the night, who kept complaining in their twangy Southern voices how shit living abroad was. Well, Cletus, get your ass back to the States, then.

Being a former East Coast liberal (East Coast former, not liberal former), the holiday wasn't really for me in the way that Christmas isn't really for the adults. As kids enjoy the Yuletide more, the 4th of July is more for guys named Jim Bob who drive pick-ups with gun racks and get misty-eyed belting out the opening words of The Star Spangled Banner.

Still, I did enjoy the Fourth as a kid, because it was the one time of year in fireworks-prohibited Massachusetts when we could readily get our hands on some ordnance. The names of those fireworks still trigger some sort of illicit giddiness, and I can practically smell the cordite: Roman candles, quarter milers, cherry bombs. A favourite was Chinese hoppers, the size of a AAA battery, which shot a jet of flame out of a hole on the side when lit, causing them to spin and bounce merrily. We used to throw them at each other. What larks!

But, ultimately what appealed most was the pure destructive power of the M-80, which was a quarter stick of dynamite. My brother and I used to tape four together and giggle "Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?" whenever we blew something up. We did once attach 20 M80s together, ringing them around Mr Arroyo's abandoned shed. I do remember thinking as we watched the fire department hose down the wreckage of the burning shed a little later from our hiding place in the woods, that maybe, just maybe, a fireworks ban is a good idea.

Don't fuck it up, Jonze and Eggers

2009-06-19T09:09:00.009+01:00

Where the Wild Things Are is the first book I remember reading on my own, the first book I got obsessed about. I would pester Miss Paine to have me read it aloud during show and tell to our first grade class almost daily (I also have a clear memory of on Columbus Day unashamedly singing an a cappella version of 1492 to the whole class at my own insistence - I've changed a bit since then).

Last time I was back at my parent's house, I was rummaging around in the basement and in a dusty box of my old things had a discovery that made a catch in the throat, a tear come to my eye: my old hardcover copy of the book, now about 40 years old, still with the bite marks when Sligo, our beloved Saint Bernard/Lab mix, got a hold of it, and the chip in the corner from when I bashed it over my sister's head (literature does have its practical uses).

So I was delighted to hear a while ago that Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers were teaming up for a movie version. But I was appalled at the rough cut trailer they released at the beginning of the year. It looked rubbish. But I think I was a bit premature; the new trailer looks brilliant and I am more than a bit excited about Eggers' novelisation, particularly the fur-covered edition. Yes, you read that right.

Salinger and doughnut holes

2009-06-18T13:42:00.006+01:00

So, JD Salinger wins round one in his fight to stop "John David California" from publishing the unauthorised sequel to The Catcher in the Rye. I've not read the book, a friend has, but mining someone else's characters seems the laziest sort of writing. Still, it is an interesting legal question of how much you can use a character without authorisation, and how much of that character you can copyright.

But once again, I am struck by how much being a a recluse seems to grip the public's imagination, if only because it seems counter to the prevailing mood that fame is life's most desirable goal - and how journalists in particular obsess about this. I remember an Esquire article ages ago when the writer traveled to Salinger's home in the tiny town of Cornish, New Hampshire in order to try to run him to ground. I can't remember the writer's name and it isn't on their website, but I was able to track this illustration from the article down on a Salinger fan-site. The Esquire man eventually sees Salinger in a coffee shop, eating some doughnut holes. The piece was illustrated with this pic and for some reason it has haunted me. He's just a poor old man who wants to be left alone to enjoy a few doughnut holes. Leave him alone, already.

By the way, The Onion has the best take on the whole Salinger/California thing.

The Sherminator

2009-06-03T08:35:00.002+01:00

My man Sherman Alexie (Expat's Files passim) has taken a chunk out of the Kindle, calling it elitist at this year's BEA (for those not in the book business, that's Book Expo America, not some organisation dedicated to the memory of my personal favourite Golden Girl Bea Arthur). Like anything that mentions the book trade's 500-pound gorilla Amazon, this has set the blogosphere alight. There is a good interview with Alexie on Edward Champion's blog where he clarifies his remarks.

I don't agree with all he says, but his central point that a device that costs $249 is exclusionary is spot-on. As a kid who grew up dirt poor on the reservation, I think Alexie could probably relate to the technology gap. There is a constant chatter about how wonderful the digital age is for the book industry. But it this mostly propelled by the self-perpetuating onanism of the blogosphere: because it is new, because it is fresh, and because I am writing about it, it must be on everyone's minds.

But the connected seem to forget how many are not connected. Between 60-70% of British people use the internet at home (reports vary). That is a lot of people, but that means least 18 million or so that don't, and most of them are obviously from poor backgrounds. The internet in and of itself is, if not elitist, exclusionary.

Another point that Alexie makes is the lack of emotional connection with an e-reader. I love my iPhone, and have tried reading e-books on it. But there is something that is just not right about it, something that makes me not engage with the text as I do a print book. Over the weekend I was reading a tiny, battered copy of Sentimental Journey that I purchased from Oxfam, which someone named James had given to Susan for her birthday in 1953 according to the inscription in the inside cover. When I put it down, I was able to keep my place with a bookmark a friend had made me for Christmas. The emotional connection is not just about the text.

This doesn't make me a Luddite. The digital age is a visual age and it just doesn't suit a black and white only e-book reader. I have read, and enjoyed, a number of graphic novels on the iPhone. And I do see a future for an enhanced e-book with music and moving images that will be seen and addition to the book.

Back by popular demand, or the demand of my one follower, anyway

2009-05-28T08:36:00.005+01:00

'So, you'll have a wee dram, then?'

I'm on a press jolly up to Aberdeen, half for a book festival, half to tour the delights of North East Scotland. We've pitched up to Glen Garioch (pronounced 'Geery' for some unfathomable reason) distillery in Old Meldrum and Kenny, the witty and sharp fella who runs the place, is offering us some whisky.

It is 10.00 a.m.

Conscious of the time, Kenny serves us the eight-year-old as it is much smoother and will have less of a kick. It's so smooth, I end up having two or three as we watch a DVD of the history of the distillery, which puts me in a rather merry mood and I think of a new slogan for the brand: "Glen Garioch: The Breakfast of ex-Champions."

Kenny then leads us on a tour through the imposing granite distillery itself,which has been producing whisky since 1797, apart from a few years off when times were lean. It is an impressive series of buildings, and the process still seems very wonderfully Industrial Revolution: it is all gears and cogs and shiny vats and heavy solid machinery with Willy Wonka-esque coppery stills; in the entire tour I see only one computer.

Yet though the process on the surface has not changed, the industry has. Kenny tells us when he started there were 25 guys here, doing heavy, physical labour. Most of that is done off-site now under the auspices of its parent company Morrison Bowmore, and with increasing mechanisation, there is only need for a skeleton crew: 5 employees, one of which is full-time in the visitor centre, another is a cleaner. But you can tell Kenny himself has spent at least some of his working life using his brawn; he is square jawed and squat, a sort of Soviet Realist ideal of the working man, his hands bashed and mashed from years of moving hundredweight casks of whisky around, though one has an incongruous, tiny, delicate Sailor Jerry sort of swallow tattoo near the base of his thumb.

Glen Garoich used to have a peaty flavour, but when it was bought up by Morrison Bowmore (who themselves are owned by Japanese drinks giant Suntory), they were made to change to a sweeter more accessible drink. It is a strange thing. The whisky industry prides itself (and sells itself in a Mockintosh, tartan tat way) on tradition and how processes haven't changed in 200 plus years, but there are almost no independent distilleries in Scotland anymore. I couldn't help feeling as I left Glen Garoich some vague sense of loss, that in time past decisions might have been made in Old Meldrum for the benefit of the people living and working in the town, and now they are now being made by be-suited men in a Tokyo boardroom.

100

2009-04-16T08:07:00.005+01:00

I haven't blogged for a while, for a number of reasons maybe due to being busy at work, but maybe more to a spate of having difficulty with London life; one can always find a few moments to dash off some nonsense - I just haven't been able to rouse myself. Of course maybe I was nervous - this is my 100th post (which accounts for the pealing of church bells and parades you may have noticed around the country today) and perhaps I wanted to do something special.

I started to write this blog to talk about books, my oh-so-acute thoughts and reflections, but also about living in Britain. A few years ago I remember first actually feeling part of this country when I was listening to Radio 4's Just a Minute and thought 'Oh, brilliant, Clement Freud is on today.' For my American readers, Just a Minute is a panel show where celebrity folk have 60 seconds to speak on a subject without "hesitation, repetition or deviation" and is as British as Marmite, binge drinking and horrific public transport.

Clement Freud was an institution as well. Grandson of Sigmund, brother of Lucian, Clement was an MP, broadcaster, trailblazing celebrity chef, writer and apparently as I listen to the eulogies on the radio - also famous at one point for a series of TV adverts for dog food with his bloodhound Henry. But I only knew him from Just a Minute, where his laconic, deadpan drawl would work nicely against Paul Merton's rapid-fire delivery or Ross Noble's Geordie surreal flights of fancy. I liked him because though he on the surface would be the more establishment figure on the show, coming from emigree royalty, being an MP and set against the young whipper-snappers comedians - he often was the most subversive.

He died whilst working at his desk, aged 84, which the writer in me thinks is how I would like to go. Of course, the pirate in me would like me to die from a bellyful of grapeshot whilst trying to board a frigate on the Spanish Main.

Hear, hear

2009-03-27T15:45:00.003Z

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

2009-03-22T13:45:00.004Z

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

2009-03-16T21:43:00.004Z

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

2009-03-09T21:05:00.005Z

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

2009-03-04T16:39:00.003Z

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

2009-03-02T20:40:00.003Z

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.

America: the new black

2009-02-26T21:53:00.007Z

I went to a screening of the documentary America Unchained the other night at the Clapham Picture House, followed by a Q&A with the film's star, comedian Dave Gorman (this is the cover of the companion book). It is sort of a 'set yourself a Morgan Spurlockian task' type doc: Gorman and a director try to travel across the US from California to the East Coast without buying anything from a chain store or big corporation. It is, as you might imagine, a difficult task. Filling up the gas tank proves most daunting, particularly on the highway, so Gorman ends up driving along the back roads through small town America.

The film is a trifle contrived, of course, but compelling, and it shows how in many ways Western society has lost a lot of its soul with corporate homogenisation. I say Western because this McDonaldisation is not just an American disease; just look at any UK high street.

A thing that struck me, though, was that the film was respectful, if not positively flattering, of most of the Americans in it. Small town Americans are easily caricatured, and often are, as thick-set, guileless, gun-toting, bible-bashing loons. But the people in Gorman's film are friendly, decent, curious and overly generous (for example he is invited to a family Thanksgiving dinner by a guy who runs the mom and pop hotel he is staying at).

There seems to be some sort of thawing of at least British attitudes towards Americans. The BBC's North American editor Justin Webb recently brought out a book eulogising how brilliant America is. This is a new, and slightly disconcerting experience for your Expat. I've not experienced much overtly hostile anti-Americanism since living abroad, except once having a pint of beer poured over my head by a fat, mustachioed Serb in Budapest during the height of the Kosovo conflict. But this was the sort of place where knife fights would occasionally break out, so I got off lightly. Mostly any anti-Americanism is subtler; people think I must be stupid and irony-free, speaking to me slowly and rather patronisingly.

The has gone by the board with goodwill from the Obama honeymoon continuing without abeyance - people are excited to talk to me about the US, ask me if I'm upset to be away at this historic moment, etc. There are smiles and thumbs up from my normally sour, scowling neighbour who once told me whilst we got talking at the recycling bin that the US was responsible for all the evil in the world and he hated all Americans ('you're not too bad, though').

Can't wait for the author tour

2009-02-22T20:52:00.004Z

I was thinking of Thomas Pynchon yesterday in the news agent's, which was a shrine to Jade Goody, her bald pate plastered on every paper from the red tops to the broadsheets.

Being able to live your life on screen and in print is the most cherished goal of our narcissistic age; Goody choosing to have her death in front of it perhaps the pinnacle of that. Her publicist says now that she won't actually die on camera, but I am unconvinced. I suggested to colleagues that she will sell right to a camera installed in her coffin so viewers could see her body decompose. They thought this in bad taste, but surely it is the logical conclusion.

I don't begrudge Goody whatever money or fame she has found from, well, doing nothing apart from being a reality TV celebrity. If magazines and newspapers are willing to fork over cash to take photos of a cancer victim as she wastes away, she would be stupid not to take it. And complaining about it in a blog which is itself some form of narcissism would be a tad ironic.

But there was perhaps a balancing out of the universe when Pynchon's new book was bought by a UK publisher in the week Goody announced she had a month or so to live. Pynchon, choosing to live his life out of the public eye, is the matter to Goody's anti-matter; if the two ever met there would probably be some rent in the time space continuum, destroying life as we know it. He is often called a 'recluse' in the press, but that is just journo-speak for not speaking to the press. He apparently lives in New York City, has a family, gets out to gigs and is a fan of at least one indie rock band. He obviously has some sense of humour about the whole thing as well, having sent up his whole image on The Simpsons twice.

But I find it comforting that there is still someone out there who lets the work speak for itself. His next book is to be a detective novel and though it assuredly won't be like most of the genre, it may be more accessible than his other books. I once read Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow back-to-back, which I do not recommend. It was difficult, not Finnegans Wake difficult, but I felt blinkered, bludgeoned and beaten up, and couldn't read anything more challenging than Heat magazine for about a month. But the crime novel might lead to more fans. His last book Against the Day sold 10,500 copies in the UK. Jade Goody's first autobiography: 130,000. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about what that says about the times we live in.

On the bus 1

2009-02-18T09:18:00.004Z

The cattle car closeness of London transport means it is difficult to even open up a tabloid, so many folk read books. I find this comforting; the world might be a more sane and safer place if people ignored the constant shriek and wail of the daily newspapers. Trade magazines should still be read scrupulously, though.

Today on the 176, I'm uncomfortably sandwiched in my seat in the wilderness of the back row, upper deck. A large woman opposite, her thighs spill over into the next seat, is reading MacSweeney's 24. I have a finely tuned Ameri-dar - the ability to pick out my countrymen by sight - and even before she speaks into her mobile and I get the flash of tell-tale American pearly whites when she smiles, I know that her voice will have the metallic twang of those square wheat producing states out west.

A teenage black girl is next to her, almost edged out of her seat by the American woman's ample thighs. The girl has a long scar over her face, a diagonal slash from right eyebrow down to her jaw. I try to imagine what caused it, and the pain. She probably doesn't think this when she looks into the mirror, but the scar gives her a haunting beauty. She is rather furtively reading a library copy of Black Lace Quickies 1, her eyes darting around as if expecting someone to catch her.

Across the way a pink cheeked jolly looking woman - I imagine her being an enthusiastic, if inexpert karaoke singer - is chuckling at Stuart Maconie's Pies and Prejudice. A tough looking, blocky fellow with a ruddy face that looks like it has seen its share of bar fights, is nearing the end of Elizabeth George's What Came Before He Shot Her.

A large, floppy haired indie boy - think Jack White's beefier brother - next to me is engrossed in the The Brothers Karamazov, a hardcover edition with yellowing pages, from Oxfam, I notice approvingly as he flips to the front page with the price. For some reason I hope desperately that he is reading on his own and not for some course. And me? Well I'm writing this all down in my Moleskine and I notice that Brothers Karamazov is surreptitiously looking at what I am writing. Can you read my scrawl, O Jack White's beefier brother? Can you?

Southern gothic

2009-02-13T15:41:00.009Z

Since the New Year I have not read anything new, going back to old favourites (A Fan's Notes, A Confederacy of Dunces, Tropic of Cancer) and things I have never got around to reading.

One of the 'never got round to' books is Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. About ten years ago, I went through a phase of Southern American literature, but I got burnt out reading about the freaks, idiot man-children, moonshine-soaked pastors, whiskey priests, redneck racists, eccentrics, hucksters, con men and other grotesques who seemed to make up the entire population of Dixie in the first half of the twentieth century.

Lonely Hunter does have the freaks; two of the main characters are a deaf-mute and an out of control alcoholic communist. But they are more sympathetically drawn than the characters in, say, Flannery O'Connor's stuff. What the book is really about is being an outsider. Four alienated people - the alcoholic; the repressed, possibly gay owner of an all-night cafe; the tomboyish teenage girl who dreams of becoming the next Mozart; a black doctor who chafes at the South's racism and the plight of his people - are drawn to the deaf-mute Singer, impelled to spill out their stories to him.

Singer doesn't answer, of course, but by reading lips, he listens, and maybe that is what people really need, someone just to acknowledge their story. With an overriding theme of loneliness and that much of the action takes place in a 1930s cafe at night, I constantly thought of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, of how we are often cut off and isolated from the world, even when sitting next to them at a greasy spoon counter.

McCullers was 23 when she wrote it which seems well-nigh impossible; it is far too wise to have been written by someone so young. But she had a short, sickly life (three strokes by the time she was 30, dead at 50) and perhaps she sensed innately that her time was short. There is something poignant about this photo, her peculiar avian beauty augmented by the haunted, vaguely troubled look in her eyes.

The death of Stewie

2009-02-08T20:42:00.003Z

Life is so transient, is it not? Here is Stewie, one of the snowmen I created on Monday. Look at him in the first flush of youth at the beginning of the week, all smiles with a future as pure and white as Arctic landscape ahead of him. Just a couple of days later he is slumped into decrepitude, and there he is today, an ex-snowman.

It was a heart rending sight to come home from a weekend away to see all that remains of Stewie was his leek nose (I had had no carrots), his Ireland scarf and a blob of snow. Though Stewie's life was brief it flashed across the firmament, touching so many of us. It was but a week, but what a week, what a week.

I had a quick memorial service over Stewie's remains with Brutus' words on Cassius inevitably coming to mind: 'I owe more tears to this dead man than you shall see me pay.' Then I scooped the remaining snow into a pitcher and with the help of my liquor cabinet turned Stewie-that-was into a strawberry margarita. It was what he would've wanted.

Live from Television Centre

2009-02-04T20:58:00.002Z

Here's my spot on Working Lunch on BBC2 this afternoon, spouting off about how to get a book published. My bit is 21.49 into the programme, if you fancy a gander. I've tried to embed it but I can't figure out how to crack the iPlayer's DRM. I know doing so would not be entirely legal (or legal at all), but what the hell do I pay my licence fee for if I can't rip off copyrighted material from Aunty? So if any of the Expat Files many followers who are experts in illegal downloads want to lend a hand...

It was a rather nerve wracking experience beforehand, knowing I would be live and worried that I would say something stupid, inadvertently drop the F-bomb or decide to do an impromptu strip-tease. But I seemed to settle down once I got on that fuschia couch, helped by the warm metaphorical televisual embrace of Declan Curry and Naga Munchetty. I especially enjoyed near the end when they superimposed the "Tom's Tips" graphic.

No business like snow business

2009-02-02T20:06:00.005Z

The snow that paralysed South East Britain today was what we native New Englanders would call a dusting. True it was the biggest snowfall in England in the last 18 years, but I am always amused at the havoc relatively mild weather events create in London and I found myself wondering today, as I frequently do, how these people once managed to conquer most of the globe.

I had a grand old time, a productive day working from home (the boss may be reading this), followed by snowy fun. I created a snowman and snow woman, then a snow tree of knowledge, and told them not to eat the fruit from it. Then off to pelting the neighbourhood kids with snowballs - the trick is to pack the snow down really hard so it's almost ice, then go for head shots.

Walking around, everyone seemed so friendly and happy. My neighbour, a large forbidding Jamaican woman who heretofore had only acknowledged my greetings with a scowl, stopped to chat, all smiles and twinkly effervescence about seeing her first snow. The grandmother, single mom and two daughters who live a couple doors down - my relationship with them is more courteous, we give each other slight nods of recognition when we pass on the street - effusively showed me their snow woman, complete with pink scarf and hat. It was if the storm had melted that icy urban wall between us that makes London such an unfriendly place. In the midst of all this snow the city finally became warm.

2009-02-01T19:46:00.003Z

Here's my swag...

...and a few of photos from the excellent Alternative Press Fair , which I went to today (incidentally I advise caution to any of the Expat File's many epileptic followers wishing to click on that hyperlink; there is some sort of strobe effect going on across their banner). The fair was at the St Aloysius Social Club near Euston station, wonderfully no-frills, slightly down at the heels, not seen a lick of paint since the 1970s. It seems like an actual working social club. There is a bar at the end of the hall and in one corner sat four old fellas who looked like ardent News of the World readers. It was obviously their local and they seemed bemused at the collection of art school hipsters and comic book nerds, although they were quite appreciative of the comely girl with the pink hair and 1950s cocktail dress as she sashayed past them.

As I make my coin serving mainstream media masters it was refreshing seeing all these folk who are scribbling, drawing and crafting away, just for the love of it. And it is inspiring, and makes my own project [see resolution 2 in previous post - ed.] seem a bit more manageable and less daunting.

It was a bit disconcerting going through the stalls, with the creators eyeballing you expectantly as you leaf through their work, work that because of small print runs and niche-within-a-nicheness is so intensely personal. That did put a bit of pressure; Khaled Hosseini or Dave Eggers don't hover nearby in anticipation as you peruse their books in Waterstone's. I did look up from reading Skinny Bill in...Bill's Birthday, half-smiling at its funny/sad tone to see the author staring at me intently. It was a slightly awkward moment, and to fill the silence I asked her if it was strange watching people react to her work. She said yes, it is like having a conversation with someone but they're not answering back.

Resolutionary road

2009-01-31T07:59:00.004Z

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

2009-01-28T18:54:00.004Z

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

2009-01-26T10:06:00.002Z

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

2009-01-23T15:46:00.003Z

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

2009-01-22T21:53:00.005Z

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

2009-01-20T19:23:00.004Z

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?

2009-01-16T23:24:00.003Z

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

2009-01-12T21:45:00.007Z

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

2009-01-08T22:13:00.004Z

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?

2009-01-04T16:14:00.008Z

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.

3...2...1...1...Happy New Year

2008-12-31T13:41:00.006Z

Did you know that 2008, the year of highs - Obama, Tina Fey, Fleet Foxes, the Boston Celtics winning the NBA title, the On the Road manuscript making its way to the UK for the first time - and lows - economic meltdown, Sarah Palin, Mumbai terrorism, Boris Johnson's election - will last a little longer this year? Apparently there will be a 'leap second' added to official scientific atomic clocks around the globe to account for the Earth's varying rotation. Even Big Ben will be adjusted. I haven't yet figured out how I will spend that extra second. If past New Year's Eve midnights are any guide, projectile vomiting.

I see Big Ben almost every day, and every time I pass I think of my brother. For a number of years when we were growing up, if you happened to ask him the time, he would refuse to tell you saying with a NYC accent, 'What am I, Big fuckin' Ben?'

I do find myself getting a bit soppy at New Year's when I read those 'celebrities who kicked the bucket' annal round-ups, feeling inexplicable pangs of sadness for people who don't mean anything to me at all. I mean, god rest Eartha Kitt, but I probably haven't spared a thought about her since catching one of her Batman reruns ten years ago (and, quite frankly, I preferred Julie Newmar's Catwoman), but there I was, feeling all blue about losing her on Christmas Day. I guess death unites us all.

But there are other folk that I think the world is poorer for their absence. So adieu David Foster Wallace, Paul Newman, Studs Terkel, Bo Diddley, Bettie Page, Albert Hoffmann and Harold Pinter. Still, there are others who stuck around far too long: hope you're roasting in hell, Jesse Helms. Incidentally, I was in the National Portrait Gallery yesterday and expected to see a crowd paying homage to Justin Mortimer's rather sombre Pinter portrait. Alas, he was competing with the nearby Sam Taylor-Wood video installation of David Beckham sleeping; I was the only one venerating the great playwright.

As for your Expat, well it was a great year professionally and I am looking forward to 2009 with confidence, hope and optimism (but the ketamine is just kicking in). But I hope all y'all are too.

Twilight

2008-12-30T17:09:00.006Z

Yes, I went to see the teen paranormal romance blockbuster hit Twilight. Let's set the scene: The Peckham Plex cinema for the 6.30 showing. There was me, my friend (like me, a strapping adult male), and the rest of the audience either groups of teenage girls, or younger girls and their mothers. I was feeling a trifle uncomfortable in these pedo-sensitive times. I felt that the mothers' were looking askance at us like we were Latvian sex traffickers about to ask: 'Hey, how much you want for the little girls?'

I did largely enjoy the movie, it has to be said, even though if it plays like a long, third-rate Buffy episode where Joss Whedon decided not to write any jokes. But even third-rate Buffy is good as vampires are always sexy, and longtime Expat File readers will know my heart melts at any star crossed lovers story.

Still things a few things irritated. 1) It takes Bella about 45 minutes into the movie to figure out that pasty-face, Elvis pompadoured, can't go out in the sun, skin cold as death, superhumanly strong Edward is a vampire, when even the dullest person would know off the bat. More importantly, all of us in the theatre know it going in. C'mon Catherine Hardwicke, cut to the chase! 2) Bella is the new kid in this piss-ant town in Washington State, and the high school is so multi-cultural it makes a Benetton ad look like a Klan meeting. I've been to many piss-ant towns in the US and they are invariably full of toothless, inbred rednecks. And all of the kids must have been sired by supermodels and champion athletes because even the geeks are beautiful and buff. Most unbelievable of all: not a zit to be seen. 3) Edward the vampire, though looking 17 (well he actually looks about 25), is 100 years old. The deal is, he and his vampire siblings (they are good veggie vamps, only subsisting on animal blood) keep moving about going to new schools every four years. The question is, why? What kind of fresh hell would it be to have to repeat high school over and over - worse than being the undead, that's for sure. He was turned into a vampire in 1918, so I reckon this is his 22nd go-round of doing pre-calculus and elementary biology. Why not go to university and study interesting things? By my maths I reckon he could be on his 12th PhD. Maybe put that big vampire brain to use researching Alzheimer's or finding something new to say about Emily Dickinson.

There has been a lot of chat around the books and the film that author and yummy Mormon mummy Stephenie Meyer has basically made stories that are right wing propaganda and adverts for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That is a view about as spot-on as when born-again idiots say Harry Potter promotes Satanism. I've not read the books but the film is just a PG version of a vampire story with sex verboten and the violence off-camera. I am troubled by the central theme that sex equals death, but anyone who has, say, been brought up Catholic or has lived in a post-AIDS world has probably had similar stuff shoved down their throat. So to speak. Anyway, kids will work it out for themselves. Look how well I turned out.

Leaving the theatre, my friend's bus came by immediately and he hopped right on. I decided to walk, as it is only about 15-20 minutes back. Peckham is the only place in London that I have felt threatened in daytime. Now I was left to negotiate the gauntlet of its streets in the dark, my senses all a-jangle after seeing a vampire movie. After a moment, though, I was cheered by imagining that if a vampire swooped down to get me, he would probably be set upon by one of the roving gangs of knife and gun-wielding hoodies who would shout as they hacked him to pieces: 'Peckham Boyz, innit! South side!'

Christmas: The Aftermath

2008-12-29T16:58:00.009Z

"I have lost the will to live."

I made the mistake of going to the nearby 24 hour Sainsbury's on the 23rd December. I usually eschew supermarkets and shop locally. Still, I was buying an unconscionable amount of food and booze (particularly for these straightened times) so I bit the bullet. It is one of these supermarkets which sells everything and it was the busiest shops I have ever been in; the aisles were clogged like a Mumbai rush hour. It was after watching some old lady bash her cart repeatedly, bumper car style, into a man's cart that was in the middle of the aisle, that another woman near to me said she had lost the will to live and abandoned her cart, strode purposefully out of the store, to presumably down a dozen whiskies at the nearest pub, while absently toying with the loaded pistol in her hands.

Forced to meander in a slow zombie stroll through the shop I witnessed heaps of shopping stress. A couple argued violently over the turkey or goose conundrum. 'No sprouts this year,' a man said defiantly, then started meekly filling a bag, cowed by his wife's thunderous face. The best was a middle aged man and his frail elderly mother, unsteady on her feet and seemingly barely in control of an overstuffed cart. 'Just keep going, Mum,' the man implored. 'Keep going?' she wailed, 'I can barely walk!'

Still, I had quite a fine Yuletide, chock full of my famous nut roast, a rather tipsy Christmas Day featuring a few spirited games of Cranium (the cheaters won), and the briefest of moments where I contemplated going to Midnight Mass. The five hour time difference between here and the States once again proved to be a Christmas Day minefield. I called home at about 9 pm GMT after drinking steadily since about 11 am. Sure I may have said a few injudicious things, but I have no regrets; my five year old cousin would have eventually found out that Santa isn't real.

Merry Christmas, Binyam Mohamed

2008-12-17T09:45:00.004Z

I spent last night with the other do-gooders of the Amnesty International Southwark group taking part in the AIUK Christmas Card Campaign. Excuse me, greetings card campaign - this is an important distinction. The idea is to send cards expressing solidarity to prisoners of conscience and those unjustly imprisoned across the globe. Given that a good portion of these people are in Africa, the Middle East and Asia many of them would be bemused at receiving a card with a manger scene of the Baby Jesus, Mary and poor cuckolded Joseph (and that's a bitch to be cuckolded by God, isn't it?).

Someone also brought a couple cards that showed a boy with a Santa hat scrunching up his face in disgust at the Xmas dinner table with the caption underneath: Bloody Sprouts! I'm not sure that bit of British culture would translate to the seven October Protesters student activists currently detained in Laos. Even the 'Happy New Year' cards might be in bad taste, as Earnest French Girl pointed out, to someone like Patrick Okoroafor of Nigeria who has been jailed since he was 14 in 1995 on trumped up charges: yeah, another year in Aba Prison is going to be just ducky.

So most of the cards we had last night were tasteful, 'Season's Greetings' type things. At some level it is a touch incongruous - there we were lawyers, journalists, accountants and TV people, sitting around in Sweet Steph's plushly appointed high-rise flat with its views of the London Eye scarfing mulled wine, mince pies and canapes (the spring rolls were delish!) writing cards to people who have gone through hell. How can we relate to what Binyam Mohamed (tortured at Guantanamo Bay), Ferhat Gercek (shot and paralysed by Turkish police for selling a left-wing magazine, awaiting trial), or Francois-Xavier Byuma (Rwandan human rights lawyer jailed after a show trial) have experienced?

Yet I quibble. If I was rotting away in a rat infested cell in Karachi or forced to wear orange pyjamas (surely worse than the waterboarding) in Gitmo I would be cheered to think that some people besides my friends and immediate family were thinking of me. And it is a little thing to do during the season whilst we wallow in drink and food and rampant commercialism.

In other AI news, on the 6th December all the London groups gathered near Tower Bridge for a little celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the end, we held glowsticks and arranged ourselves into the Amnesty logo. Here's the shot from the top of City Hall, which looks cool, I think.

Festive fun

2008-12-15T10:10:00.005Z

The Yuletide has come to the Expat's part of London. The Barrister and I bought a Charlie Brown Christmas tree on Saturday (short, a bit sparse and rather pathetic looking), but we adorned it with baubles and fairy lights from the 99p shop, transforming it into a magnificently festive Tannenbaum. Then to a mulled wine and mince pie party on Saturday night, complete with homemade Aberdonian shortbread from The Daily Wail Sub.

Later on, after a robust sing-a-long, there were Festive Olympics, including the 7 metre dining chair hurdles and the women's sock wrestling championship. I was previously unaware of the rich tradition of sock wrestling, the sport where competitors each don an ankle sock, and then wrestle to try to rip the socks off of one another using any means necessary. We fellas spent most of the time watching, mouths slightly agape, The Ad Guy videoing it on his phone. Women grappling on the floor in shortish skirts and dresses? Nothing says Christmas more, does it?

Yesterday a few friends, perhaps thinking I needed a bit of Americana, took me to The Big Easy on the posh King's Road. As the name suggests, the food has a Nah'lins flavour - Cajun BBQ, jambalaya, with some Mexican and burgers thrown in. It's like an American bar and grill and more so - American football on the television, Bud on tap, free popcorn served at the bar, massive artery clogging portions. It reminded me of "Irish" pubs I have been in in places like Stuttgart, Rome and Hamburg, a hyper over-imagined version of the thing place it was trying be. Still, stuffing my gob with shrimp fajitas, washed down with margarita pitchers. Nothing says Christmas more, does it?

The Gathering

2008-12-05T16:16:00.005Z

Despite having won The Booker Prize last year, I have avoided this book. Everyone I know who read it told me they hated it or that it was hard going, and even the Booker Prize chair called it bleak. I notice on Amazon it only gets 2 1/2 stars from readers. I also find Anne Enright's occasional Guardian Review column rather pretentious. But a friend gave it to me recently, so I thought, OK I'll have a go, and it is brilliant.

It is, however, unquestionably bleak. The narrator is angry, dissatisfied Veronica, one of a dozen Hegarty children. A Dublin housewife and mother, she is mourning the recent suicide of her beloved brother Liam. Liam was an alcoholic and a “terrible messer” who put rocks in his pockets and slipped into the sea at Brighton. In trying to deal with Liam's death, her relationship with her "vague" mother and her collapsing marriage, Veronica begins drinking heavily and thinking obsessively back to some dark secret in her, and her brother's, past.

So, yeah, on the surface bleak. But the whole thing doesn't crash down on the reader's head, mainly because of Enright's prose, which is merciless, hard, yet there is tremendous beauty in the spareness—and humanity.

Despite what Derridean deconstructualists might say, we don't read in isolation; when in your life you read a book is just as important as anything. I read this just after I came home from the States visiting the home of my two elderly parents. I could almost feel death there, sitting on one of the side chairs at dinner, hovering while my father watches TV. A clear-eyed, unflinching yet ultimately full of compassion book about love and death and dysfunction quite frankly floored me.

15 seconds of fame

2008-12-02T21:40:00.002Z

Here I am at the end - the very end, I mean the very, very end - of the BBC1 10 o'clock news, giving my thoughts on misery memoirs. Giving my thought is more accurate, as it is literally about ten seconds.

I found myself obsessively looking at this over and over today, wondering why in the hell they chose this particular snippet when I was so much more witty and articulate during the 45 minutes or so they were filming at Organ HQ. And doesn't the camera just add a few pounds? I thought so, I was on the running machine for a good wee while today.

Quite a few people were tuned in; I got a number of emails and calls today about it and they all were fulsome in my praise. For example, my flatmate The Barrister said I had 'expressive eyes and a manful confident demeanor with bags of sex appeal'.

OK, I made the last couple of things up. But, this confirms my theory that it doesn't matter what you do or say on the TV, it only matters that you are on it. I am reminded of Dana Carvey (yes, Garth off of Wayne's World) saying ages ago that if you put a grapefruit on television 24 hours a day and then after a few weeks brought that grapefruit out to, say, a shopping mall, people would scream 'Hey, isn't that the grapefruit on TV?!' and clamor to get their pictures taken with it. And he said this years before Big Brother.

South-bound train

2008-12-01T20:48:00.006Z

In one of his Guardian Weekend scribbles the excellent David Shrigley had a cartoon that was just text saying:

Heaven

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Hell

You'll have to take my word for it; I can't for the life of me find the cartoon on the web, or on his quite frankly poorly catalogued website. The above is a pic from one of his exhibitions, a pretty nice sideswipe at that charlatan Damien Hirst, I think.

Anyway, I was thinking of that cartoon as I trundled down south from Edinburgh today after a dissolute weekend. I'll be kind and assume Shrigley was perhaps talking just about the scenery. If so, hell probably starts sometime just outside of York. It is a beautiful train ride, through the Borders and the Yorkshire Moors and then: hundreds of miles soulless out of town shopping, the same shops, the same indentikit buildings, the same neon nothingness. It is like in a Hanna Barbera shows when, I don't know, Hong Kong Phooey is speeding along and the same background whizzes behind him over and over. Oddly comforting, though, to the American; the sprawl looks like home.

Turkey day

2008-11-27T13:12:00.002Z

Thanksgiving is by far my favourite holiday. Free from the religious or patriotic claptrap that engulf most American holidays,, it is just about eating, drinking and making merry. Like any fun holiday, it is almost pagan, despite being only made a national holiday in the 1930s by FDR to help folks forget about the Great Depression (it has always been a holiday in Massachusetts).

There are some folk who are not so wild about it. A day that commemorates the Pilgrim's first sucessful harvest - and by implication clearing the way for more white settlers - is not celebrated so much in the Native American community. I'm fact, Native American protesters usually go down to Plymouth Rock each Thanksgiving to throw blood on it. I don't know whose blood it is, actually. A slaughtered whitey, one hopes.

Yet where am I spending the day? In the bosom of family and friends stuffing my face with pumpkin pie until immobile? No I am on a train to Edinburgh called the Highland Chieftan eating a Marks & Spencer Mexican three bean wrap and some Kettle Chips. It is the first Thanksgiving I've not celebrated since I've been abroad. Usually I whip up my famous nut roast (secret ingredient: grated green apple. And semen. Not my semen, mind). My vegetarianism has waxed and waned over the years, but one thing that turned me was cooking my first (and only) turkey and having to remove the euphemistically named gibblets. Gibblets sound like a children's board game. What I discovered was that they are the poor beast's internal organs. Incidentally, Benjamin Franklin propsed the wild turkey as the US national bird. Would American history have been different if we adopted the comical, ungainly and skittish turkey as our national symbol rather than the war-like bald eagle? Discuss.

Media whore

2008-11-19T16:21:00.003Z

I have become, it seems, some sort of voice of authority, declaiming from my observation deck atop Endeavour House. Here is me giving my thoughts on BBC Radio Scotland on the impact of Amazon.co.uk (available for 6 more days, I think). And here I am quoted in the Hootsman on misery memoirs.

On Monday, I hit the Holy Grail, BBC TV. I'm ready for my closeup Mr DeMille.

Twickers

2008-11-10T13:44:00.003Z

So I went to my first rugby match on Saturday at Twickenham, which is, according to billboard's plastered all over the place and the adverts that run on the big screen incessantly during intervals, "the home of rugby". Here's a shot from my seat, to get the blood stirring for those interested in the pageantry of an international sporting match, the astonishing athletic prowess, the rampant homo-eroticism.

It was interesting going to a rugby match; I have only been to football matches here. In football, fans are corralled, like the animals they are, into separate sections, where they bray for each other's blood, hooting like baboons, perhaps hurling piles of excrement at each other. In rugby the crowd mixes together pleasantly, people applaud for the other team and don't call even them cunts! Alcohol is served (real ales, for goodness sake) and you can even buy it in bottles. I have seen pies at Easter Road, the Hibernian ground, turned into deadly weapons (they do have the density of granite), I can only imagine what Neds with glass bottles could do.

And yet, I couldn't really warm to the rugby. The game itself was boring, a rather pointless to-ing and fro-ing of territorial acquisition, much like a Balkan war. And there is something somehow false and oh so terribly middle class English about the whole thing. These people are watching what it is essentially a blood sport; why are they sitting down as if at a terribly straightened Sunday roast at their granny's in Maidenhead?

A long national nightmare is over

2008-11-05T07:02:00.007Z

I've been up since 5.00 watching the results, scarcely believing it, my glee rising with each passing moment, each state falling to Obama, each gain in the House or Senate. I cried as I watched Obama's acceptance speech, maybe more from relief than anything else. Maybe this for Britons is analogous to Tony Blair sweeping into power. And let's bask in it before the cynicism seeps in, which it undoubtedly will. There is so much to be done - a horrific economy, two ongoing unwinnable wars.

By the way, Bush apparently called Obama to tell him he had an 'awesome night.' I'll miss W's stirring, Jeffersonian rhetoric.

There will be a lot of talk about America finally living up to its all men created equal credo. To an extent that is true, that so many rednecks and crackers apparently managed to vote for the black guy. But I think it is just another tiny step on a long road to America ever having any kind of racial equality. Obama may be in the White House, but most blacks still live in poverty, the divides are still deep.

And something that nobody seemed to have mentioned at all during the campaign is that America has already had a popular black president: David Palmer in 24. I'm joking but not entirely. I honestly believe that seeing a black president battling terrorists with Jack Bauer for five years perhaps subliminally helped Obama's profile with the dumb-asses who make up the majority of the US electorate.

But the big news, of course, is the people of Massachusetts voted overwhelmingly to decriminalise marijauna. Hey, I might move back!

Obama

2008-11-04T22:38:00.002Z

I come home tonight oddly unsettled. Not because I have just seen Daniel Craig's second go as the moody, brutal, muscular kick-ass Bond - which is not terrible, but is a second or third rate Bourne film. And not because I walked back through Peckham.

No, I sit here a few hours from the polls closing on the East Coast, hoping but wary. I know all indications are for Obama in a cake-walk, but there is this horrible nagging feeling that something (such as, I don't know, racism) is going to go wrong. In the past few days, I have become a surrogate pundit for friends here, as the real American, asked to give my take on which way it's going to go, and also to explain the intricacies of the electoral college, why the Cuban vote matters in Miami, etc. I've found that I can lie outrageously and most people will believe me: "In the event of an electoral college tie, it will be settled by a game of horseshoes between the candidates. That's how James K Polk beat Henry Clay in 1844."

The headlines repeated on almost every outlet about this being "an historic election" are starting to grate. Well, aren't the all, for Christ sakes? I'd prefer a the more honest: "Hey, A Black Guy Might be President!"

It'll be a long night. Fingers crossed.

This is so funny, so painful

2008-11-02T17:53:00.005Z

I do despair that people on Tuesday will actually be voting for this woman. Listen as "Caribou Barbie" is pranked by a couple of Montreal DJs.

Flight

2008-10-30T17:48:00.005Z

Here's the book I just finished, Sherman Alexie's Flight, given to me by the writer, ornithologist, photographer and digital archivist Michael J Bennett during my stay in the US.

In fact, it was Mike who first introduced me to good old Sherm ages ago with The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, a collection of interweaving stories about the hard life on the reservation. Alexie's writing is a bracing antidote to most fiction about American Indians, which seem to be either hippy dippy stories about vision quests or isn't the white man a bastard, Dances with Wolves-esque type stuff. Alexie doesn't turn away from hard life of the modern day Indian, or the horrific past, but he does it with dark humour and without self-pity, making it miles better than the sanctimonious claptrap about the Indian experience that white writers seem to churn out.

Flight is narrated by teenager Zits (he has a lot of them), a half white, half Indian orphan who is continually in trouble with the law. He is befriended by an anarchist named Justice, who convinces Zits to go into a bank and shoot the place up. As he is standing there weighing whether or not to open fire, Zits time travels through American history - jumping in and out of the bodies (a la Quantum Leap) of various people: a white FBI agent involved in murdering Indian activists in the 1970s; an Indian child who witnesses the battle of Little Big Horn; his own alcoholic father, long since dead; an elderly Indian tracker named Gus in the 1870s. The plot is a bit thin, but the novel is carried by Zits' bitterly funny voice and Alexie's ability to be breezy yet poignant and provocative.

By the way, here's Alexie on the always excellent Colbert report promoting his newest, a YA novel.

Random pics

2008-10-29T21:39:00.004Z

A few shots from the US. My friend, the writer, ornithologist, photographer and digital archivist Michael J Bennett with Tundra (Mike is the one with the cap) in the wilds of Petersham, MA; pumpkins for sale in New Braintree; what my skilled hands did with one of those pumpkins; the Granary Burying Ground in Boston; and, this is not actually the US, but a clear shot of Greenland from 37,000 feet in the air on the way back.

You can go home again

2008-10-29T20:34:00.003Z

Keen Expat File observers will note a lapse of 15 days from the last missive. Not, because, a la my last post that I have blog fatigue, but that I went back home, in the welcoming bosom of family, and off grid. I had to work for the first few days I was there - slavishly so, I might add, for a publisher did pay my flights over to Boston. All right, slavishly might be the tiniest bit of exaggeration. But the time went too quickly and I didn't get to see as many people as I thought I would.

As always with return trips to the States there are mixed feelings. There are so many people I miss, of course. And so many little things: the home fries at the Boulevard diner; Fenway; Sam Adams on tap; the view from the top of Mount Monadnock, Jeopardy! with Alex Trebek; the love notes etched into the window pane in the Old Manse in Concord MA by Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne; that people in shops apparently really, truly want me to have a nice day...

But I left for a reason, I guess (I mean apart from the murder charge). And some of those things kind of make me break out in a cold sweat during most trips back: the shrill, strident tone of the news reporting; crawling, sprawling suburbanisation; the blinkered unthinking patriotism of most of the country; Simon Cowell...

Those things I object to in America exist in the UK, in one form or another. But the beauty of being an ex-pat is that you can tune them out to some extent. If you don't really belong somewhere, you don't ever have to care as much. But then, do you ever feel at home?

Blog fatigue

2008-10-14T19:31:00.005+01:00

I read somewhere that people start up blogs, are all gung ho, but then in a few months just lose their mojo. So a look at my postings - a paltry six in September, this is the first in October - seems I've hit the wall. True, I have been busy, but it doesn't take much to dash off a few lines, now does it? And it's not like I am doing this for the amusement of anyone but myself.

But then again, I am doing it for other people - in that this is a public facing diary if I can't just write whatever stuff that comes to my head like I do in my regular diary. Or, ahem (voice deepening) my journal - the old fashioned one kept with pen and ink and a Moleskine notebook (I do have a bit of a Moleskine fetish it has to be said. Have you seen the new Volant range? And the soft cover notebooks - oh yeah, baby, 'get in touch with your softer side') Sorry, drifted off there. Anyway, I made the mistake of re-reading an older diary, and the overwrought stuff within brought a flush of embarrassment to my face. And that was stuff I wrote just a year ago. Hate to look at my teenage diaries.

Anyway, let's get back to the blog; my life filtered, cleaned up and suitable for blog-cast.

I have mentioned before that I live next door to a mental hospital and have on occasion come across some of its patients. Tonight, there was a big black fellow outside the hospital, clinging to a lamppost as if a lover, yelling in a West African accent: 'I didn't kill any individuals' over and over again. And as I came closer swivelling his eyes on me, trying to make me understand that he didn't kill any individuals.

Now, that gives one pause. The Bedlamites I come across are usually rather benign, bumbling around in just their dressing gowns - confused more than anything else. I found myself nodding to this man, though he seemed like he might have killed individuals and maybe even entire villages of people in some child soldiering past in Sierra Leone.

The Clerkenwell Group

2008-09-24T14:33:00.002+01:00

I went to a creative writing group last night at the hip, funky, comfortable Three Kings pub in Clerkenwell (they have Deuchar's IPA on tap, always a good sign). I found these folks online, as we live in that kind of world these days, don't we, and didn't know what to expect. There is always the possibility going into one of these things blind that you might end up having to listen to some old biddy's five cycle epic poem on her allotment plot called The Tyranny of Slugs - and then try not to be too mean when you have to say what you thought of it.

But it was brilliant and all the work was strong, diverse work. In a way meeting by the web is beneficial. I suspect in creative writing programmes you have much of the same people. Middle class folk writing about the drudgery of the suburbs and marriage.

There was a lovely 74 year old lady there, a Hungarian who has lived in Paris for 40 years and recently come over to London. She is a web writer, putting her diaries, kept since a child, on her various blogs, along with photos and other musings. There was a funny exchange when she was talking about her diaries someone asked 'are you going to try to get these published?' And she said, 'But I publish every day.' Which I thought was quite a progressive, web 2.0 way to think. I noticed she posted some pics on her Flickr site of our meeting in a folder called Dare to Share.

I left the meeting inspired to finally round the bend and finish my long gestating and much-hyped novel. It was good to share it with some others - I have only shown it to one or two people whom I care about and trust. Strange that about 60,000 people read what I write every week in The Organ, yet creative stuff, I keep that close to the chest.

Infinite rest

2008-09-21T21:58:00.002+01:00

Busy days at The Organ and too many boozy nights mean I have been neglecting you, gentle Reader.

I was deeply saddened last weekend when I heard that David Foster Wallace hung himself. I had come into his stuff late, only getting into him after reading his story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I was put off when Infinite Jest originally came out, not because of its heft, but because I thought that all those footnotes and endnotes was nothing more than clever-clever post-po-mo jiggery pokery. When I finally read it, I discovered that underneath this stuff is heart and optimism. And it's also a mammoth book of ideas, boundary-pushing, brilliant.

I was talking about DFW with a friend from home and he said that he couldn't believe that someone could write Infinite Jest and top himself. But then I was thinking how can you write something like that and not kill yourself? You write something like that, maybe your work is done. And maybe if you are optimistic, yet clear-eyed you will be continually let down by the world. Suicide becomes the logical option.

Dreaming of Bernie Goetz

2008-09-17T21:38:00.002+01:00

Another day, another bout of low level violence on London's public transport. I'm on the way home from a publishing 'do on the number 12 from Oxford St. Am feeling blue, because of a number of things, but mostly because that's just me. So I'm listening to the folder on my iPhone I've cleverly called 'wrist slitting music'. So I'm engrossed in that in my it-would-be-amusing-if-it-wasn't-my-life way, when I'm tapped on the leg by the guy sitting opposite.

'The fuck you lookin' at, Boss?' he asks.

I stare for a long second or two, weighing my man up. He's up for some sort of scrap I can see by his eyes. I've been threatened and/or brought into some kind of Travis Bickle bullshit three times in the last few days. The worst incident when I was threatened with a stabbing at the fucking Camberwell Library amidst the graphic novels section. Tonight, I'm tired, I'm fucked off, don't at the moment care if I live or die, to be utterly frank. And I say, 'Looking' at you, fucko.'

This takes him aback, cause this thing is all about power. He wanted me, the middle class white boy to crumble. And I can see his eyes calculating. And they slide over to this older, dumpy East Asian woman and he says, 'the fuck you looking' at?' and she just gets up and walks away. And that leaves me and him, and we sit back and don't look at each other for the rest of the ride home.

Mmmm...Bacon

2008-09-14T20:43:00.005+01:00

I went to Tate Britain this afternoon to see the Francis Bacon centenary exhibition. It was a bright sunny day, just a bit of autumn bite in the air. Fall is my favourite time of year, and I sauntered down Millbank to the museum with a spring in my step, an ain't life just fuckin' grand smile on my face.

Then I went inside and was bludgeoned by Bacon's paintings, my spirit crushed by their unrelenting bleakness and unyielding brutality. In Bacon's work there is no hope, no humanity - life is just suffering and violence and horror. It is his portraiture that disturbed me most, his subjects scream (as in the famous reworking of Velazquez' Pope Innocent X), their faces are blurred or partially erased or distorted. They all made me feel hollow and despondent.

There was an interesting room which with collected ephemera from Bacon's studio. Bacon, apparently, always claimed his paintings came out in a spontaneous rush. But this archival room showed that he obsessively planned, made lists of potential subjects and worked and reworked preparatory drawings. That Bacon self-mythologised in this way probably says more about how the public believes an artist produces his stuff - it all must be in a mad spontaneous rush, Mozart dashing off the Jupiter symphony in an afternoon, say - not about grit and hard work.

Of course, the Tate being a modern museum, it has to be down the the kids, and I mean little kids. In the middle of the exhibition, they had a table with paper and art supplies so that little children can doodle and paint. This is in a room called Apprehension with Bacon's work from the 1950s which, according to the exhibition notes, is fuelled by "a sense of dread pervading the brutality of everyday life" and has "an air of personal menace" due to his violent affair with lover Peter Lacey. In one painting, a distorted, grotesque baboon wails, in another two naked men grapple in what could be construed as a rape scene. And today, there was some little girl at the table drawing a golden sunset with a box of Crayolas.

It gets more bizarre. The events around the exhibition include a session for kids aged 5-12 called, I shit you not, Bend it Like Bacon, where the little shavers get to "re-enact the lying, crawling, bending, standing, turning and falling figures you can see in Bacon's paintings." Ooh, that'll be fun. Especially if they get to pretend to be the half-human, half-cow eviscerated carcasses of the Crucifixion triptychs.

Istanbul, not Constantinople

2008-09-08T17:19:00.003+01:00

A few pics from my recent Frankfurt Book Fair jaunt to Istanbul.

Funny signs in Ireland

2008-09-01T21:00:00.007+01:00

Yeah, I could show pictures of rolling hills, etc of the trip to the Old Sod. But you've seen them all on posters, the Rough Guide and Guinness adverts. So here are a few of the signs that made me chuckle during the holiday.

1: I kept looking at the figure in the top sign, taken at Rosses Point, Co. Sligo - he looks like the victim of foul play rather than stumbling off a cliff. Shot in the back, just how they do it in those parts.

2: Everywhere on the streets in the rather salty district of Stonybatter, Dublin are signs imploring the locals to pick up after their damn dogs, some in Irish. They don't seem to work.

3: I sure hope this dog from the Maynooth area gets founded.

4: I wasn't able to take a snap of this road sign because we were trundling by at speed, but found one on the interweb. I could not for the life of figure out what it meant; I eventually guessed, 'No Tie Fighters in squadrons of three.' Apparently it has something to do with car or truck axles.

Ancestral home

2008-08-26T10:23:00.002+01:00

Taking a pause from my jaunt to the west of Ireland to blog from a lovely little cafe in Galway city. This is either a brave new world web 3.0 isn't the digital age just grand kind of thing, or very, very sad.

Dr K and I were in Sligo town, the Land of My Fathers and Mothers. A lot of it is very inspiring, all rolling hills punctuated by the odd sweep of a cliff face. We visited Yeats' grave in the dramatic little chapel in Drumcliffe on a misty, wind swept day with flocks of swifts coming out of the steeple, swirling around our heads. And later traditional music in small, dark pubs of an evening. All very Irish Tourist Board approved.

The big disappointment is that apart from the scenery and the town's geared up for tourism, there is a brutal ugliness to the architecture to the west of Ireland. The landscape is scarred by new build McMansions and property developments, all built in the 10-15 years of the economic boom. I understand people have to live somewhere. But why, if you had a wad of cash to spend on a new home (and a lot of these are second homes from Dublin folk), would you pick an area of astonishing natural beauty, and build a home that could be indistinguishable from those in the soulless suburban hellholes of Essex or Bakersfield, CA?

So we've tried to avoid those places, going off the beaten track as much as possible. Dr K is a new driver, not yet passed his driver's test (you can drive in Ireland with a learners if someone else with a license is in the car). He, like many new drivers, follows the road rules to a T. Yesterday, we turned the corner of a back road and found a cow in front of us, blithely chewing its cud. Dr K slowed, applied the handbrake to see if it would move. It was a sort of Mexican stand-off, our car and the cow on an empty stretch of road. When the cow didn't move, he decided to overtake, signalling as he did so. Just so the cow should know.

Swifter, Higher, Stronger....skimpier

2008-08-17T17:09:00.004+01:00

I was at the gym yesterday, forced to watch the Olympics because that is what was being shown on all the TVs in front of the cardio machines. It was rowing, a sport the UK - excuse me, 'Team GB' - is good at. So the commentary was insufferable, full of exhortations to yell at the TV screen to urge the coxless fours on. As I was thinking what kind of twit would do that, the pixie with the blond ponytail next to me on the treadmill started screaming 'come on, guys, come on!'

So I was getting fed up and was about to leave when they switched over to the women's beach volleyball. Suddenly I thought, well, perhaps I should take a little while to enjoy this acme of athletic competition, where sporting endeavour bridges the gap between cultures. I did watch for a bit, but ended up being annoyed at the fundamental dishonesty; the announcers were treating it like a normal sport, and not that the only reason it was on was that there were incredibly hot chicks in bikinis falling about in the sand.

The American broadcaster NBC is far worse - this slide show supposedly explains the rules of the game, but is there only to show some incredibly toned backsides. This is utterly gratuitous, yet, somehow when I look at it, the mind doesn't stay focused on the gender politics.

Since nobody cares about 95% of these sports, I want to hear announcers being more forthright about the sordid reasons we watch. Maybe Gabby Logan could say, "Here comes Usain Bolt in tight fitting Lycra - check out that package, ladies" or even "Welcome home, Gary Glitter - just in time for the 'women's' gymnastic finals, exclusively here on the BBC."

The Lace Reader

2008-08-13T23:08:00.002+01:00

In a couple of months, I will be flown out to a secure, undisclosed location (OK, Salem, MA), to interview Brunonia Barry, the author of the this tome.

When I got the proof, my heart quailed. The Lace Reader. Doesn't make the pulse race, now does it? My spirits were lowered even further when I read the first page, which contains cryptic instructions for lace reading set down by the main character Towner's great-aunt Eva. I thought I would be subjected to a few hundred pages of How to Make an American Quilt-level guff. But thankfully, it is far more interesting than that.

Lace reading is predicting the future through lace patterns, and all the women in Towner's family can do it (and read minds): Eva, her estranged mother May, her twin sister Lyndley. The novel opens with Towner returning to Salem because Eva has drowned swimming in Salem harbour. The police can't prove anything but it seems not to have been an accident. Malevolently hovering around the periphery is Cal, Lyndley's adoptive father (he didn't adopt Towner, it's complicated). Cal, a former drunk who abused his wife and Lyndley and who may have killed Lyndley, has now turned to God and is the leader of a fundamental Christian cult who call themselves, wait for it, 'Calvinists.'

It is a deeply feminist book. The Calvinists are patriarchal and are played off against Towner's family (including her agoraphobic mother May who runs a home for abused women on an island in the harbour) and the modern day witches in Salem. In less deft hands, it could have been preachy. But Barry handles it with humour, which she manages to combine with page turning suspense, throwing in an ending that I did not see coming (turns out Vader is Luke's dad!).

I'm looking forward to meeting Barry, not least because she calls her blog The Bru-haha.

Edinburgh pics

2008-08-11T21:07:00.004+01:00

Just a few shots from my iPhone of my trip to Edinburgh - have I mentioned I have an iPhone? Yes, I believe I have.

There's the Royal Mile hoachin' with tourists. The courtyard at the Pleasance. The view from the bridge at Dean Village near to where I used to live - the Water of Leith, according to the warning sign posted by the council was 'running in full spate.' Finally, that's me sampling a Rollover, advertised as the world's best hotdog. It wasn't.

The 1900 to Kings X

2008-08-10T19:36:00.004+01:00

Chugging along back from Edinburgh on the east coast mainline train service - facing the opposite direction from the way the train is going which always makes me feel queasy. National Express's very slow wi-fi means it is taking ages for each page to load (and National Express must use a Swedish server - I was invited to 'Logga in med ditt Google-konto' just now). Might not be a bad thing; I can do useful things like read or write my novel rather than facebooking, watching the Tudors on the BBC iPlayer or, well, blogging.

Haven't yet crossed the border; this part of the trip first hugs the coast, the train skipping along on the top of cliffs and through tiny fishing villages. Then inland a bit, through farmland, with lots of sheep, cattle and the odd bit of wildlife. A flock of crows mobbing a bird of prey catches my interest.

Caught up with friends in Auld Reekie and 'did the festival' as much as I could. Since I have been away for so long I loved every minute of it and was not so fucked off at the air kissing theatre luvvies or embarrassed by the Americans who bark inanities to the locals like 'I'm Scottish, too. One sixteenth, on my mother's side, my great-great grandmother was from Carlisle."

I did see Gordon Brown chatting with Ian Rankin at the book festival. El Gordo is brainy, well read, an intellectual and absolutely screwed. He talks to people as if they are reasonable and as smart as he is. This is noble but misguided. He fielded questions from the crowd and one lady had a very tart comment about the Labour goverment meddling with everything in people's lives. He answered her by talking - for a long while - about the Calvinists in John Knox's Edinburgh. Now there was a group of people who meddled in people's lives! And I was thinking, you just don't get it, do you Gordon? This is not, even in the more cerebral setting of a book festival, what people want to hear their PM talking about.

A sort of homecoming

2008-08-07T18:56:00.004+01:00

Shortly after lift off, the plane banks sharply, pinwheeling south to north. The large Glaswegian lassie sitting next to me takes the opportunity of the shift in gravity to lean over and ask me if I want to shag in the toilets. My ears are popping and the air conditioning is blasting. I'm not sure I've heard correctly. I say 'excuse me' and she repeats the question, slurring her words a bit more this time. I politely decline. She nods and smiles then nods off.

I had seen her with her pals, who looked like they had just had a heavy week in Tenerife or Ibizia, outside of security. Near the entrance there was a pile of discarded bottles and cans which people realised they couldn't take through, including a full Fosters. 'Gie's tha can, girls,' she said, downing it in a few greedy gulps. My kind of woman.

Outside Edinburgh airport, it is raining and cold and it feels so refreshing. My journey to Stansted began with getting stuck on the Central line just before Liverpool Street for about 15 sweaty and suffocating minutes.

In central Edinburgh, the festival is in full swing. My friends are talking about how busy town is, but I just smile - it is far less busy than even the most sedate days in the West End. Late at night, I look out of my room at my friend's flat, listening to the cars clumping over the cobblestones, watching the swollen Water of Leith rush by, the river lit by the yellow street lamps. There is only one brewery left inside the city - but you can still smell the malt and hops when the wind is right, like tonight - and it smells like home.

Geeking out

2008-08-06T00:47:00.001+01:00

At long last I have fallen in love again. With my brand new iPhone. How did I ever live without this beautiful little device? It's after one on a school night yet I am up downloading stuff. I just installed this app which makes the phone sound like a light saber. It's so cool.

Dasvidania, tovarisch

2008-08-04T15:32:00.005+01:00

I have a trump card whenever people start rolling out stories of famous writer spotting: I once saw Alexander Solzhenitsyn playing tennis.

It was the end of the 1980s. Bush Senior was still in the White House, we could fill up our cars for about $1 a gallon. Even though perestroika was breaking out all over Eastern Europe, Solzhenitsyn was still living in exile in a tiny town in the US state of Vermont.

I was at university at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst at the time. One October day, a few of us took the hour or so drive up north to visit a friend in Vermont. Also, frankly, to stock up on beer; Massachusetts had a drinking age of 21, in Vermont it was 18. After meeting the friend, he casually said, ‘Hey want to see Alexander Solzhenitsyn play tennis?’

A question I never thought I would be asked. But apparently the Nobel laureate was a keen player and was regularly seen at the town’s public courts. We duly went to the town centre and sure enough, there was the great man – bearded like a prophet, patrolling the baseline. He couldn’t move too nimbly, but his form was impeccable. Say what you will about the Soviet system, it instilled athletic discipline.

His death has meant that I might go back and try to reappraise his work. We were force fed his books in the high school – because the Commies were, you know, evil. Maybe they aren’t the turgid pieces of anti-Soviet propaganda that I remember them as.

In praise of Clark Rockefeller

2008-08-03T13:01:00.004+01:00

I've been watching with some interest the case of 'Clark Rockefeller' and his abduction of his child, Reigh Mills 'Snooks' Boss following a court-supervised custody visit last week.

Obviously kidnapping children and lying to your wife about your identity for 12 years is, well, a trifle naughty. But I am fascinated by people who are able to make up their own past. On one level it is so bizarre but on another perfectly logical: don't like who you are? Why not pretend you are a scion of one America's richest oil and bank families?

In a way, it must be oh so liberating, to cast away whatever the accident of birth made you and remake yourself in your own image. I takes a bit of gallus as well, but it must be exhausting. Remembering your stories and keeping them straight must be exhausting (various reports say Rockefeller said he was an economist, physicist, mathematician and 'working top secret for the Pentagon'; police say he had at least 4 aliases).

One of my favourite novelists, Patrick O'Brian, writer of the Aubrey/Maturin stories, reinvented himself. He was born in England as Richard Russ, yet after WWII rid himself of his first wife and a dying spina bifida plagued child, concocting a phony patrician Irish-Catholic lineage, then married Countess Mary Tolstoy. The Maturin character in the books is a spy, and there are a number of passages about how he finds it difficult to constantly lie to everyone. Re-reading these bits with the knowledge of O'Brian's life adds a bit of poignancy.

I wonder how common this is? Obviously in today's retina scanning, ID card culture, it is far more difficult, but Mr Rockefeller shows that it isn't impossible. But how much do you have to hate your life, and yourself, to do it?

The Queen's English

2008-07-31T08:59:00.004+01:00

I stood stock still in the street yesterday as a woman walked past pushing her baby along in a pram. I was rooted to the ground (and disconcerting the woman as I stared) because I realised I couldn't think of the American word for pram. It took a few hours before it came to me: stroller or buggy.

An ex-girlfriend, who is German, used to say when she went back to Germany after an extended stint in the Anglophone world she couldn't speak German properly for about a week - forgetting even rather elementary words and phrases. It is sort of like that for me; British English has become my mother tongue. And because I write for a UK magazine, I spell British, throwing in those unnecessary 'u's and replacing 'z's with 's's. I even think in British; when I was writing that sentence I was thinking 'zeds' not 'zees'.

It was a slow process - which I started dropping words and phrases into my speech ironically, almost with quotation marks: 'Fancy' another round, pal? Gradually, I dropped the quotation marks and now it has become second nature. There were practical aspects as well with pronunciation; such as saying 'chew-na' for tuna when I lived in Scotland because no one at any sandwich place seemed to be able to understand my American accent.

When I go back to America friends take the piss - or give me shit, rather - for both my accent and words I use (incidentally - the British take piss, the Americans give shit - indicative of the national characters? There's a phd thesis in there somewhere). And I find myself feeling uncomfortable using American slang. 'Bucks', for example, just sounds wrong and when I say it, I do so with quotation marks.

Perhaps I was affected so much when I saw the woman with the pram, because I realised I am no longer really American. But I'm not British, either. I do have an Irish passport as well, but have never lived there so saying I'm Irish would be something of an affectation. So what am I then? Stranger in a strange land, man without a country, rootless, homeless.

Summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirty and gritty

2008-07-28T21:28:00.004+01:00

It is one of those humid days, hot, oppressive in the way that only London seems to get - something about concrete and steel that seems to both reflect and refract the heat back at you. And there is little respite, most places aren't air conditioned, are built to keep the heat in not out. On the way home from work at a traffic light, I was the victim of a drive-by. A guy in a white van peeled by and blasted a bunch of us with a super soaker. 'I wish the water was cooler,' a girl next to me giggled, dabbing at her top. 'Let's hope it's just water,' I said.

I miss the sea. It has been a big part of my life in Boston, Edinburgh, Brighton. Even the other river cities I have lived in - Glasgow, Hamburg, Budapest - were all on working rivers. You never felt trapped because there was constant activity, goods being docked, things being ferried away. When I lived in Hamburg whenever I felt down I would go to the Elbe and watch the container ships - these hulking, boxy beasts waddle downriver. I always found something beautiful in their ugliness, maybe because psychologically, there was always this feeling of movement and freedom, always the possibility of escape.

A stroll on the Southbank today and the Thames seems sluggish and hemmed in, the only river traffic garbage scows and party boats, a clogged, constricted vein.

This Thing of Darkness

2008-07-26T08:01:00.003+01:00

I stumbled upon this a couple of weeks ago in Fopp. Since joining The Organ, I rarely buy books as publishers bombard us with them. Yet I have a penchant for anything about the Age of Sail and Harry Thompson's fictionalised account of Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos looked interesting. And it was £2.

The main character is actually Robert FitzRoy, the captain of HMS Beagle. He is by far more compelling than Thompson's Darwin: intelligent, manic depressive, a holy roller whose beliefs are put to test by Darwin's emerging theories. FitzRoy's downfall - he butts heads with his superiors because he does the morally right thing no matter what the consequences to his career or bank balance - is poignant.

The problem is the bulk of the book (and what bulk - 744 pages) is largely discussions between Darwin and FitzRoy as they wrangle over transmutation of the species. This is an argument that was cutting edge in the 1820s. Now, excepting the born-again troglodytes who live in America's Deep South, it is old hat. Darwin and FitzRoy's arguments become tiresome quickly; I felt like I was trapped, forced to listen to two super-keen 18-year-old university students who just read Nietzsche for the first time. Judicious editing of about 400 pages could have saved this book.

Thompson was a TV writer and producer, known for his work on Have I Got News for You and his part in creating the Ali G character. He died in 2005 after, according to his bio on the book, "a brave fight" against cancer. No one seems to ever have a cowardly fight against cancer, do they?

To Moro, to Moro, always a day away

2008-07-23T09:04:00.004+01:00

To Moro, the Spanish - North African restaurant in Exmouth Market with good pals P and M, the folks who let me crash on their sofa bed when I first moved up to London and was between flats.

It was a proper summer night, one of those rare London evenings where it doesn't actually cool down. We sat at an outside table, looking out at the beautiful people strolling down the pedestrianised walkway, lit by the rows of fairy lights that are strung across the market. Some worries and ructions in my personal life were washed away (momentarily at least) by laughs and copious amounts of rosé wine. I usually consider rosé an abomination, but I can swing with it in the summer.

The food was excellent. Moorish cuisine? I say it's more-ish! I don't often go for goat as I'm a vegetarian (but not at restaurants - which is a bit of a fudge, really). But the slow roasted kid was tender with this tingly spicy-sweet sauce. The saltiness of the mojama (which sounds to me like a Spanish curse word) was set off by the eye-poppingly fresh salsa.

We went to Cafe Kick afterwards, this retro 70s pub with old fashioned table football (or foosball as we say in America). I was beaten on the foosball pitch in succession by P, who said he spent most of his university days playing so that's not too bad; M, who is a girl and said, 'I've never beaten anyone before!'; and a one armed man. Let me repeat that. A one armed man, some other pub patron who rocked up and asked for a game. For those readers who are unaware, I have the use of all four limbs.

Cultivate one's own garden

2008-07-21T09:00:00.005+01:00

Some photos from our luscious garden in lovely Camberwell. We have tons of herbs, vegetables, some flowery things I take no interest in. There's cannabis and coca leaves to sell to the neighbourhood kids. When I say 'our' garden I mean my flatemate's as she does all the work. I usually sit out there of a sunny day reading, saying, 'You ought to do more weeding near the tomato plant, Anna. Now pick me a couple of courgettes, would ya? And get me another beer next time you're in the kitchen, that's a good girl.'

Aging rock star leaves wife for young woman shocker

2008-07-19T13:38:00.004+01:00

An old rocker getting back on the booze and a fling with a 20 year old girl is, if anything, just a bit cliche and tiresome. Yet I do have some measure of sympathy for Ronnie Wood, or "the drink ravaged guitarist" as The Sun would have it.

I met Ronnie last summer in Budapest to write a piece for the Organ. He was genuinely nice and gracious seemingly grounded without rock star airs and graces. This is strange to say since I met him in his dressing room amidst the sprawling Stones encampment. I think it was because there was a feeling of domesticity and normalcy, probably due to his wife Jo, who was just lovely and kind. I have, obviously, more sympathy for her.

Yet you could just tell that he was an addict. He was sober then, but fidgety, jumpy. He seemed like he was clinging on for dear life - and it was his wife he was clinging to.

Still, every cloud and all... Ronnie's autobiography has gotten a nice bump in sales because of his fling with "Russian doll" Eka. No such thing as bad publicity.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust

2008-07-15T23:19:00.002+01:00

PN is no more. A little old skool Naughty by Nature TuPac tribute sums up my feelings. LT - ain't no shame, you were beaten by the best. Mourn you till I join you. Word is bond.

Magical mystery tour

2008-07-14T17:50:00.006+01:00

A friend, a Londoner, told me that to survive in The Big Smoke, you should exploit it rather than letting it exploit you. It can get to be a grind if you let it, but there is so much to offer, so many quirky things to do.

On Saturday I went on a Beatles walking tour with GD and RG, two rather cynical Scots (if you take my cynicism and multiply it by a factor of ten, then you might be near GD's). It was hilarious, actually. The obsessive anorak who ran the thing was brilliant and just happened to own a Beatles memorabilia shop that we ended the tour at. He obviously lives and breathes all things Beatles. Which isn't that bad, I suppose; he could be an Oasis obsessive. He had this weird automaton delivery, with pauses in the wrong places - that I am sure he has done three times a day for the last 15 years or so. He met Paul in 1982, which he showed us a photograph of.

Still it's odd going to these places that once featured in the lives of the great and the good and pretend they still have resonance. We started at Marleybone station where the opening scenes of A Hard Day's Night were filmed; the main bit is now a Marks & Spencer. A place where John Lennon was busted for drugs 40 years ago is an estate agent's. I kind of found myself shrugging my shoulders a lot, trying to figure out why I should care.

We did go to Abbey Road and walk across the zebra crossing, annoying tons of motorists. A lot of doggerel was scribbled along the wall at Abbey Studios, including the bit above by Amanda from Canada. 'Which poet, Amanda?' I wondered.

They said I had to go to Rego, I said yes, yes, yes

2008-07-12T08:49:00.004+01:00

A week of dissipation. Two leaving 'dos at The Organ - the lovely Nat from ads, who will be much missed. And Mr Schmooze, Snake Hips, Big Hands, The Face of the Organ, Joel. The magazine has been running for 150 years but Joel has left a huge thumbprint on it; he knows just everything about publishing and the book trade and was the go to rent-a-quote for the national newspapers and broadcast outlets not only because he is glib and articulate but because he knew his stuff.

Also a couple of publisher lunches, a day of judging for The Organ's award show at alarmingly trendy Shoreditch House; the upstairs bar rammed full of Nathan Barley types. Best of the week, though, was a launch for a Phaidon book on Paula Rego and how she works. I'm a big fan of her stuff - beautiful, disturbing, all about power games and gender and how childhood can be both charming and sinister. She was at the launch, but I was too star struck to approach her. An added bonus was I got to go to the launch with K, the smartest and coolest person I have ever met - and she is cool in a completely unaffected, so money and she doesn't even know it, way.

Foxy lady

2008-07-06T20:51:00.004+01:00

For the second time in about three weeks, I have rescued my cat Soze (above) from the clutches of a fox. Both were late at night - the first I was coming home from the pub and as I rounded the corner to my flat block, Soze scampered out with the fox in hot pursuit. On Friday I came home from the pub (hm, a pattern is developing) and Soze was perched on our garden shed, with the fox below, trying to scramble up.

I'm not sure if the foxes were really trying to eat Soze - vulpes Londinium is famously well fed and there are more than enough chips and kebabs strewn on the ground in my neighbourhood to keep them fat and happy. But the Sozemeister is an easy mark, not much of a fighter.

I cannot convey how much I worry now, though. She is in the garden as I write this and I keep peering out just to make sure she is OK. She has been with me for near to six years now. She is reliable; unlike humans she does not dissemble, there is a constancy with her. True, she often treats me like staff, her meows could probably all be translated to 'Feed me, you bastard' or 'Open this door, you bastard.' She has pretty much destroyed my flatmate's couch.

But then I like to pick her up by her front paws so she is standing on her back legs and pretend she is dancing (I particularly like making her do that Travolta in Pulp Fiction thing) which she bears with much grace. And when she is sleeping I put things on her like sunglasses and my Red Sox cap. So we both win. It's a give and take thing.

Bug house

2008-07-03T20:12:00.003+01:00

I live across the street from a mental hospital. It's not a full-on bars on the window, McMurphy and the Chief playing basketball kind of place. There is a Victorian frontage, but most of it is smooth hermetically sealed modern office block look - which I find more unsettling than some ancient Bedlam.

As I write this I can see about ten people taking a smoking break outside. They seem part of the same therapy group. An even mix of men and women in their forties and fifties, they crowd close to one another, rarely speaking, sucking greedily on their cigarettes. They all look rough, not necessarily poor, but used and beat, dazed. And I wonder, what do they talk about? Why can't they meet each others' gazes outside?

The proximity of the hospital means I often come across people raving to themselves and at me. When I first moved here I thought an inordinately amount of people were using the hands-free mobiles. But no.

Leaving this morning I came up to this woman in the street. She was a large black lady, wearing a pretty summer blue polka dot dress. She was standing in the middle of the sidewalk and I as I tried to get by she placed a hand, lightly, on my chest. 'Why are you here?' she asked, wide-eyed and staring. Before I could answer, she said again, lower, 'Why are you here?' Then she laughed, a long deep laugh and she was off, crossing the road to the hospital.

I watched her go into the building, the glass door swinging behind her, thinking, why indeed, why indeed. After a moment or two, I finally moved, trudging slowly towards the bus and work. And I looked back once, thinking, did that really happen?

99 problems; Beyoncé ain't one

2008-06-29T08:50:00.005+01:00

By most accounts Jay-Z did the business at Glastonbury last night - giving two fingers to the nay-sayers, most prominently mono-browed has-been Noel Gallagher.

The visceral reaction to the announcement that Jay-Z was headlining was more than a bit troubling, with its obvious racist undertones. "Glastonbury's always been about guitars," was Noel's reasoning. And white folks playing those guitars to mud drenched white folks in the audience. Having Negroes with baseball caps prancing about on stage - why that's a bit much, isn't it? Still having Jay-Z there (and Ms Knowles in the VIP section) meant there was at least a handful of the black folks at Glasto this year - I mean apart from the ones cleaning out the port-o-loos.

Perhaps we should leave the irony that Noel's guitar music was invented by black people so that a few decades later white people could make money playing it. Still, Noel has every reason to thank Jay; whatever reason would we have heard Wonderwall at this, or any subsequent, Glastonbury?

Festivals are mainly for white, middle-class tossers. I, of course, will be hitting the Green Man later this summer and just been invited to Latitude mid-July. Really want to go to Latitude but have some previous commitments - and it was one of those things that a group of friends got tickets, didn't ask me initially and one has pulled out. Having been slighted, not sure if I want to grace them with my presence. Still, Latitude seems like how festivals should be, a mix of music and culture and comedy. Death Cab for Cutie, Omid Djalili and Irvine Welsh all on the same bill? Genius.

The post is really only an excuse to show Hardknock Life. Still his best. Although maybe the Dr Evil/Mini-Me version tops it.

sketchy characters

2008-06-27T15:29:00.003+01:00

Even more wining and dining - I am feeling rather bloated, even a trifle gouty, after three slap up meals this week. Last night it was to Sketch, the uber-trendy Conduit Street eatery and club, with the fine folks from Mills & Boon.

The building used to be Christian Dior's house and it is a hodge-podge of wildly, screamingly camp and kitschy touches. Leather walls, mismatched lamps, random sculptures, one of a diamond zircon woman squatting on a ball, another of a dog eating through an overflowing rubbish bin - complete with chomping noises. The loos are space age pod type stuctures and the gent's urinal is this rather off-putting waterfall feature.

And, oh yeah, they serve food there. And it's pretty decent, a nice crab stuffed ravioli to start and tender beef with satay sauce. We were there to celebrate M&B's 100th anniversary, the Organ's 150th, though we were forbidden to clap by Sketch's rather authoritarian wait staff.

Fun night, though, not even ruined by the cocktail waitress at the end of the evening dumping a tray full of mojitos on me. Incidentally, isn't it interesting that the overiding smell of a lot of London clubs early on (before the sweat and cheap cologne kicks in later) is mint.

Ivy league

2008-06-23T23:15:00.008+01:00

To the West End celeb-haunt The Ivy for an S&S sponsored dinner with Richard and Judy. For our North American audience: R&J are essentially Oprah manqués - day time chat show hosts with a Book Club of their own.

Richard has a book coming out, Fathers & Sons, due out in October. If you only know him from his motor mouth TV persona, you are in for a shock. The book is extremely well written. It is part memoir, part family history, and the bit about his grandfather is truly affecting.

I talked to Richard for a good while and felt at ease. Mostly because we talked - about our fathers, football. You know, stuff. For a long while afterwards, though, I was next to the S&S PR girl named, inevitably, Emma. At least an hour, I think, I had to small talk. This I am not good at and we sat in occasional lapses of uncomfortable silence. Mostly because she seemed incapable of talking about anything that didn't have to do with S&S and publicity.
Of course, maybe it was we just didn't click and she was also thinking how dreadful it was sitting next to me. After a few glasses of wine I asked her where she lived in London. 'Crouch End,' she said wearily, and I realised that was what I had asked her maybe 45 minutes ago.

I have so much difficulty schmoozing. I am not good at the theatre of publishing and bookselling, this party-hearty sort of 'hello, darling, how are you?!' Air kiss, mmmmh, mmmmh. In fact I despise it.

I do have publishing people I love to see, but I realise I have met all of them one on one or in very small groups and built a relationship. And they are people I would like as friends if I cannot indeed count them as friends yet. At the Organ's 150th, there were quite a few of these people there.

But I realised why I like certain people. AG came over late-ish in the evening. I am actually really jealous of him because he is brilliant and speaks five languages fluently. He has a sexy Italian wife. He and EM own their own indie publishing company, produce beautiful literature (both content and physically - the production and design they use is top-notich).

Here is why I love him. The first question he asked was not - what do you think the Christmas number one will be, what about the latest PFD gossip - or any of that publishing insider bullshit. It was, what are you reading? And when I told him - Mansfield Park, actually - he was able to talk about it, and not in a how many units did it shift, is there a good marketing buzz around it, but about the book itself.

150 years young

2008-06-22T12:18:00.002+01:00

The Organ is 150 years old this year and we just put out our super-duper special issue, which you can access online here. Look for the eight page spread of classic adverts and editorial beginning on page 62; a genius bit of editing by whoever did it.

We had a celebratory party the other day in the courtyard of the V&A. Most of the movers, shakers and deal makers of the business were there; a bomb going off would have decimated the industry.

It was a beautiful evening, the weather perfect, the champagne flowing, the canapes circulating (although I only was able to get one of these tiny bite sized burgers). The patron saints of publishing - which according to the Saints Index there are five of (!) - must have been smiling down upon us. Alas, my plans to either steal some antiquity or spend the night in the Adam Interior were rumbled by security.

I wrote the book 'cause we're all gonna die

2008-06-18T21:37:00.002+01:00

Whenever I'm feeling down, I turn to four books: A Confederacy of Dunces, A Fan's Notes, Bartleby the Scrivner (OK, it's a short story) and On the Road. Got a bit panicky because I was looking for them this evening and only On the Road seems to have survived my last house move.

But maybe On the Road is the effervescent blast I need just now. It is continually dismissed by critics - Truman Capote's 'it's not writing, it's typing' jibe seems to have stuck. And it is very primitive, the kind of book you read as an adolescent. But at its core it is about restlessness, searching for the essence of life. Something that we lose when we grow out of adolescence (and become pinched, cynical and wizened as Truman Capote). And that is a shame, and perhaps why we should read it into our dotage. We forget to live, don't we, hunkered down in the 9 to 5, even those of us who do something that is on the creative side.

This is great. Jack on the Steve Allen Show. His Massachusetts accent makes me a trifle homesick.

Gay magnet part deux

2008-06-16T20:44:00.004+01:00

I was at a launch for this - Tessa Codrington's book of photographs of Tangier put out by Arcadia. The launch was at Christie's and it was all very North African - large photos of the book's images lined the gallery walls, the canapes were chicken tangine and hummus. I half expected to see Paul Bowles smoking hash in a corner.

I met GP, our evening's host, as I came in. He was talking to an Uncle Monty type (Withnail & I Uncle Monty, not Lemony Snickett), an older well-fed gent, tweedily dressed, carefully arranged thinning white hair barely covering his head, his round face blotchy with eczema. GP, Uncle Monty and I chatted for a bit, until we were interrupted by D, GP's assistant. GP had to go and schmooze with the author.

'Perfectly ghastly,' Uncle Monty said, as GP and D dove into the scrum of the party.

'I'm sorry?' I said.

'How she interrupted. Perfectly ghastly. Women are good for nothing.' Before I could respond he grabbed my hand - grabbed my hand. 'Come, let us look at the photographs. They are exquisite.'

'I guess they are good at taking photographs, then,' I said as he led me away.

He didn't seem to hear. We went around the gallery looking at the photographs of Tangier street scenes, the beach, and yes, Paul and Jane Bowles in their flat taken from the 70s. As he led me along I was trying to think of a way to get my hand back without being rude. He was still clutching it, squeezing it ever so slightly. He asked me if I had ever been to Tangier, I said no.

'I have been many a time' he said. 'Very permissive there.'

He squeezed my hand a bit tighter. It was just then that the 'perfect ghastly' D came over and asked me to go and talk to the author. D, incidentally, is lovely, smart and always smells of jasmine. I thanked her as we stole away, leaving a poor Uncle Monty on his own.

I guess I am not necessarily a gay magnet - just one for older, repulsive fellows. It does give me pause - why don't good looking gay guys hit on me? I work near SoHo. Surely my rough-hewn masculinity and fresh-faced good looks should go down a storm.

Fitba

2008-06-15T09:52:00.002+01:00

The worst of the English comes out on the football pitch. Actually the very worst comes out in the football stands for the national team where hordes of fat-bellied men can shout xenophobic, racist and misogynistic rants at full belt.

Yesterday, I was at The Organ's annual five a side tournament, and had to deal with the worst of the English. Our side (Mr Schmooze, The Haymaker, Stoner, SiCo, and Hannah's Steve) took the competition in the right spirit; a nice kickaround, if we won a few games, grand. Of course, we are a bit shit, so maybe that explains the laissez-faire attitude.

But I really despaired at the majority of the people there, fighting for the the cup as if it was, well, the world friggin' cup. Yelling at the referees, getting into fights, getting sent off, watching other matches and yelling at opposing players. My half-assed theory is that in modern life we don't hunt or gather and thus have to channel aggression out on meaningless competition. Still that doesn't excuse you calling the referee of a five a side tourney a 'cunt' after you get sent off.

Gay magnet

2008-06-12T22:02:00.005+01:00

So I was in the shower at the gym today. Now, I'm not particularly that self-conscious about my body, but showering with strange men is a trifle weird. It is odd to think that the couple of, shall we say, adornments on my body have been seen only by a few lucky ladies - and almost any guy who happens to be in the Oasis Sports Centre changing room of a weekday lunch time.

Anyway, for some reason the changing room was almost deserted and I found myself sharing the shower (there are about 10 communal showers) with one other guy who was across the way. I didn't look at him - because as you know, the first rule in Shower Club is: don't make eye contact. The second rule of Shower Club: don't make eye contact. So I was merrily showering away, but I soon felt the weight of his stare and turned around.

I'd seen him before. He is one of these people who have a malevolent presence as if sirens are going off around him saying, 'Warning, warning, avert your eyes, there's a psycho here.' He is massive, about 6 foot, maybe stretching 300 pounds, both muscly and fat. He is heavily tattooed and all of them look home, or prison, made. Most have football or England motifs, the one on his head - yes, covering his shaved head - says 'Skins' which I take to be some sort of hooligan casual group.

I looked across. He was staring at me with what I can only describe as intense longing. This dumbstruck sort of panting look. I quickly looked away. Maybe I had imagined that. Then he came over as I was soaping up, to the shower just next to me. I will reiterate: there was no one else in the shower room. 'Can I help you with that, mate?' he mumbled.

No, I guess I hadn't imagined that. I said, 'thank you, no' and quickly left. Later, I was sort of chuckling over it. Not just because of the comic possibilites of a moment of tendresse between me and some guy whose perfect weekend probably involves beating Millwall supporters to a pulp. But also - do you try to seduce someone by calling them 'mate'? Is this what gays do (or in the States do they say - Hey, you're looking pretty hot, dude?')? Is it me or is mate, even in the context when it means to copulate, a really unsexy word?

If he had started quoting Baudelaire - then I would have been his.

The big crow-like one

2008-06-11T16:15:00.003+01:00

Went to gay Paree the other day on the Eurostar (first class, don't you know), for a jolly paid for by the good folks at Phaidon. The trip was for this book on Le Corbusier, a snip at £100, which is an overview of Corby's career with a lot of photographs, documents and artwork that have only previously been seen by scholars. Actually, it is a snip - it is one of these massive coffee-table sized luxury books and for what you get, £100 is not that bad.

We got to tour around a few Le Corbusier designed houses, most of which are off limits to the public. I do appreciate Corby (which is what one of the heads of Fondation le Corbusier kept calling him) as a theorist - this whole idea of creating better living conditions in crowded urban environments, in one house he separated body from mind: it was two connected bits, the library and art gallery in one half (mind), eating and sleeping quarters in the other (body).

But I don't know if I ever would want to live in any of his buildings. They look austere, almost brutal. He often didn't think of comfort. We went to the Pavilion Suisse, student housing at the Cite University and the rooms were just boiling because of the use of single glazing for the massive windows and over reliance on concrete (the woman at the Pavilion said it was also very cold in the winter). It was all about theory and nothing to do with the people who were living there - the university has had to make a number of adjustments to improve the students' lives. Putting in places to eat, for example.

He wasn't the best builder. 'Here's another miscalculation by Le Corbusier,' our tour guide would point out frequently, showing us a bit that had to be replaced because the wrong materials were used. For example, the staircase at the Pavilion (above) is lit by natural light from a unique kind of glass tiles. Problem is, these tiles explode in the sunlight and constantly have to be replaced.

I was with a number of architecture journalists who didn't seem to share my views. 'When one walks into this space,' one intoned in a plummy Oxbridge accent as entered the Pavilion lobby, 'one feels the presence of genius.'

A lovely family tableau

2008-06-08T22:00:00.004+01:00

Spent the day with my laptop in Dulwich park. Before I go on, what's the point of the 'w' if it's not going to be pronounced? It's Dull-itch, apparently. Not Dul-witch. I live in the London borough of Southwark (Suth-ick). And so on throughout the country - Berwick is Bare-rick. And yet sandwich is sand-witch, though the Scots seem to say sang-witch.

Anyway, beautiful day, about 80 degrees, sunny. Not a cloud in the sky. And there I was with my damn laptop, not kicking the ball around, eating ice cream or throwing rocks at the swans (which one young scamp was doing - must be a South London thing). I had journo work to do, my novel to write - and still do, yet here I am blogging away.

I did get this pang of, well, broodiness. I was sitting next to a family and the father was teaching four very small kids how to play cricket. It just looked so sweet and wholesome and that just seems completely unattainable for now.

Of course, after a while it went a bit pear shaped for Dad as I kept hearing things like, 'Maggie don't hit your brother with the cricket bat.' Then there was a lot of crying and carrying on and the father stopped the game and had to shut everyone up with Pringles and sandwiches. Or is it sand-itches?