East ender

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.