Mortification

Writers' stories of their public shame, edited by Robin Robertson.

I didn't believe in schadenfreude until I read this. For example: even though it's the funniest show on earth, I have to force myself to sit through an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm: I don't get any pleasure from other people's misfortune.

But most of these stories of awkwardness, disappointment and embarrassment gave me a warm feeling inside, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's jealousy? These authors have 'made it', so they somehow deserve it. Maybe it's optimism? If these idiots can make it, so can I. Or maybe it's recognition. These particular neuroticisms are mine as well! I've certainly picked the right ambition.

There's another pleasure here, besides schadenfreude: I love reading about writers. I read about writers all the time, but those accounts are usually about very successful writers, or newly practising writers, and are sometimes fictional. The writers and poets in Mortification cover the wide gamut of success, but are mostly from the obscure middle: they write, do tours and do readings, but they are not well-known.

For someone who wants to be a writer but is scared of success, it's great to know that this strangely obscure middle exists, and functions, and is even fairly well-populated. It's less great to realise how few of it's members I've ever heard of -- and I am a representative of the bookier end of the public spectrum.Maybe I do want success.

Still. It's good to know writers spend the times between writing getting fully immersed in mortification, over-analyzing the minutest moments in their lives, and honing every minor event into a perfectly sleek anecdote. Once I sell a novel, I'm there. I won't have to change at all.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thompson

I know they made a film out of this in the 90s, but I can't get my head around that. Not because it's an unfilmable mess; I have no trouble imagining this as a film. Almost the opposite. I can picture the film exceptionally well, because I've already seen Withnail & I half a dozen times.

Two drugged and drunk friends go on a crazy roadtrip and mourn the passing of the 1960s, and all those years entailed. Yep, that's the same story. As Withnail and Fear and Loathing are both at least 'based on' true events, though, I'm not calling plagiarism (except in the way that all non-fiction is plagiarism, by stealing bits from real life.)

The fictional truth/factual nonsense angle is undiluted in Fear and Loathing. This is, after all, the textbook example of Gonzo journalism (it was only in the Post Script material in this Harper Perennial edition that I learned that Gonzo journalism wasn't Thompson's own coinage.)

Maybe the lure of Gonzo journalism was contextual to its time. From my perspective, though, there is little that is surprising or original in it. I'd be massively surprised if it really did only take hold in the late 60s -- it's a fundamental tool of storytelling (or truth-telling, whatever) -- just having an identity crisis.

That's not to say Hunter Thompson's own take on the mongrel approach is not frantically exciting and readable. Fear and Loathing paints a very different picture of the end-of-the-decade malaise than that found in the rain-filled English Withnail. Thompson is looking back, mourning the loss of the bigger thing; the movement, the intangible moment when everyone who was there was part of the same cresting wave. Withnail's journey is a much more personal one; looking forward, but not with positivity. He is staring down the barrel of a hopeless life, the decade after Hope reached an all time international high.

How much of that difference in perspective is genuine, and how much is some Gonzo insinuation from the weather the two stories both fight and embody, I wouldn't care to say.

:59 Seconds

Richard Wiseman

The world of self-help is thick with urban myths and intuitively reasonable claims, and it's easy to find yourself nodding along to something that, under less emotive inspection, is fatuous.

Wiseman clearly loves that sort of inspection. In :59 Seconds he takes us on a guided tour through all the big names in folk psychology; happiness, persuasion, motivation, creativity, attraction, stress, relationships, decision making, parenting, and personality. And as he guides, he rigorously evaluates, with a big grin on his face.


Through a mixture of wide research and his own often unusual experiments, he comes up with a few surprises.

Positive thinking is a mixed bag; rewards make people work less hard; two minds are not better than one; playing hard to get is counterproductive; taking out anger on a punch-bag (for example) makes you angrier; and many more. Wiseman unmasks these fallacies with infectious zeal and smirky humour (and he is very funny: I first knew of Wiseman by seeing him perform magic/psychology/stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe.)

It's not all debunking, though. The book came about when Wiseman was asked by a friend about happiness; when Wiseman launched into an essay-length answer, his friend interrupted him. I'm busy -- are there any tips that take less than a minute to tell me about?

These tips range from the practical (put a picture of a baby in your wallet, and it is much more likely to be returned if you lose it) to the common sense (stop procrastinating by starting the task you want to finish) to the stupid (grip a pencil between you teeth without touching it with your lips, so you smile, so you feel better) to the creepy (touch someone on the upper arm and they are more likely to say yes to whatever you ask).

There are dozen more tips in :59 Seconds to statistically improve your chances of success in various fields. There are even one or two I might use. Wiseman writes smartly enough to hide the fact that many of his offerings are a little underseasoned, though, and require at least a pinch of salt to be palatable.

Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down

Tom Dardis

Buster Keaton's life follows a similar curve to that of Charlie Chaplin, though never in quite the same way. There is trauma and vaudeville in childhood, a few years of excelling in early films, until the artist is recognised and indulged.

There follows a short period of Golden Era: each is completely in charge of their own films, creating every aspect, and making films that are still regarded as masterpieces 80 years on.

This period is exceptional, in both lives. For In Our Hospitality, The Navigator and The General, Buster Keaton has complete control of every shot. He writes as he shoots, directs as he acts, and frequently risks his life. This singularity of vision, unmatched anywhere outside of an author's relationship with a novel (and even then...) is what pushes these films into greatness.

The fall happens to them both in different ways. Chaplin, having cashed in, spends the rest of his life trying to be accepted by critics. Keaton, who always had a more esoteric, less-monied appeal, cannot afford such a luxury, and is forced to become a studio man; then a bit-part man; then a gag-writer.

The fundamental difference between the two, that made Chaplin the more succesful and Keaton by far my preferred choice, is simple. Chaplin was a comedian who wanted to be an artist. Keaton was an artist who wanted to be a comedian.

Chaplin always had popular appeal, but his pretentions could never be truly fulfilled; his story ends, career wise, with him still coming down from that long-ago peak. Keaton always made a unique and timeless product, but his aspirations were harder to fill when he had to compromise on method, for reasons of economy (read: shortsighted studios).

Buster's lifegraph does turn up again at the end, as he is rediscovered and critically hailed. He cannot return to that Golden Era of film-making, but that same Era is now, looking back, eminently justified.

Ad Infinitum

Nicholas Ostler

This history of Latin is a lot more than just that. The changing role of  language in a tribe, nation, empire and church is the perfect window through which to view the growing pains of civilization's teenage years.

There is a tangible tipping point in Ad Infinitum. Before that point, the Roman Empire, standing united and unconquerable, becomes an animal of two halves. The Latin-speaking west, in which the heart of Rome beats, and the Greek-speaking East; this is cellular division, one creature becoming two, before our eyes.

There is a last moment of hope, as this fragmenting empire is united again, perhaps as it has never been united before, by the spread of Christianity and the establishing of the Catholic Church. Catholic, of course, being another word for united.

But then the tipping point. The Church spreads, and with one eye perhaps on the causal crack in the proceeding empire, it actively spreads the use of Latin. And suddenly, it becomes obvious. Language, across barriers, borders and oceans, makes the most natural sense of the extent of a community. More than the economics of trade, or the ideals of religion, the pragmatics of who you can understand is the real divider and uniter.

So when that red shading on the map that represents the (Holy Roman) Empire doesn't match up with green shading of the Latin-speaking empire, there's only one of those that are going to win.

This is a biography as much as a history, because Latin grows and changes and ages. And as such, the massive success story is underpinned with a bittersweet tug of Ozymandias, and this too shall pass. We know where Latin ends up (although whether it is the end remains to be seen), in the backwaters of select English private schools and botanical naming classes.

A Display Of Lights (9)

Val Gilbert

You've got to have a system. I can't imagine going through life without one: simply 'buying' books when I decide to buy them, and 'reading' them when I decide to read them? It's implausible, to say the least.

Having said that, I don't think systems necessarily help; they're just a lot of fun. In fact, if you completely reinvent your system every few months as I do, you're most likely making yourself far less efficient. But: fun.

The last couple of years, my reading has been largely dependent on serendipity. Book fairs, vouchers, spur-of-the-moments and heartfelt recommendations have taken me, non-linear and unshaven, to strange and inconsistent places.

The latest system is a reaction to that. Book-buying was frozen as of 1st January 2011; the To Be Read shelf was edited/pruned/decimated; the rejects were carried (pallbeared) to the nearest Oxfam; the survivors stand in line, waiting to be devoured.

(Once the survivors are gone, I will return to the new favourites the last two years of exploration have unearthed, and a few older favourites, read new works by each and every, discover what my taste actually involves.)

I'm working through the surviors now, and they are a strange breed. They are books I have bought over the last couple of years but never read, but, come crunch-time, they are the ones too interestiong or enticing to be dismissed. They are books like A Display Of Lights (9), an enthusiast's biography of the six most influential cryptic crossword setters in the history of The Daily Telegraph.

When I call the author an enthusiast, I don't mean he is an amateur -- only that he loves his subject and ends many, many sentences with exclamation marks! Val Gilbert (!) was in fact Crossword Editor at the Telegraph  for 30 years, and a good number of the select six he writes about were colleagues of his at some time or other. But it is the cryptic crossword, not its setters, that is his real passion.

And who can blame him? Take this (apparently contraversial) gem from Douglas Barnard:

Burns 'em in boxes (8)

Cremates! 'em in boxes = EM in CRATES = CREMATES = burns 'em in boxes!

It turns out you can't write about crptics without getting enthusiastic. I will leave you with two items:

1. The title of the book is itself a cryptic clue, and the answer is, unfathomably, CROSSWORD. Answers on a postcard.

2. I made my friend a cryptic crossword for his last birthday, and here is my favourite clue: Be agile without me, I'm a dog (6) Can you answer?

The Blind Eye

Don Paterson

It's right to do something a bit different, today: this is my 100th post, and I've just passed my 100th follower. As one of nature's premiere Giver-Uppers, I'm pretty happy to have got that far.

So here's what I'm doing differently: this is a review of a book I haven't read yet.

Haven't finished, anyway.

But that's okay; it's not a novel. The Blind Eye is a collection of aphorisms by the poet Don Paterson, and you're not meant to read it start to finish.  (Even I, who grew up reading books of quotations and one-liners as if they were novels, prefer to dip in and out of this one.)

The aphorisms stretch from sentence fragments to an entire page, and from flippancy to the murky depths of self-analysis (the obsession is not of his self, as one aphorism points out, but the self; he could be just as easily obsessed with yours, if it was as readily available for study). Often, the flippancy and intensity are, gratifyingly, one and the same; occasionally, left to their own, they become see-through or obtuse.

I love these varying fractions of anti-wisdom, but I must confess love for the form alone. I've already mentioned that I used to (still do) read books of quotations or jokes; starting from page one; with a bookmark; vainly searching for a plot. It's a pipe dream of mine to write a novel that is presented as a book of quotations. The Quotable Edward Awful, or something. What a great gimmick that would be, and I'd only have to write the killer lines! (Vainly searching for a plot...)

I guess I really should quote The Blind Eye, it being a list of the best bits to quote already. And as this is my blog-centenary, I know which one:

You've made a blog... Clever boy! Next: flushing.

The Fry Chronicles

Stephen Fry

This book is in turn a frank and amusing conversation with an old friend, an in-depth picture of a world I am fascinated by (Cambridge Footlights and the Britcom scene that stems from it), and a warning-by-example for my own future. I expected the first two, but not the third.

The examples cuts both ways. There's a Do and a Don't.

The Do:

I'm positively not alone in joining Stephen in the battlefield between self-indulgence and self-disgust, nor the similar setting for brutality that lies between needing to be liked by other people and not always liking yourself.

The author states that pretending to be confident and smooth and okay and at ease with yourself can form the habit that leads to a pretty good simulacrum of those same states. But his example speaks more strongly still; pretending to be these things is the same thing as being them. However false that looks from the inside.

The Don't:

Among the many things Fry lambasts about himself, one stuck out to me like a sore thumb on a hand with no fingers. If only I was more focused! he cries. If only I didn't try my hand at everything!

It's no surprise to me that his earliest ambitions were in the direction of novels; after all, his novels are the best thing he's done, without Hugh Laurie's help. And it's no surprise that, lacking boringly singular focus, he is not known primarily as a novelist. It's no surprise that his (excellent) novels never reached the heights he is capable of. If only he was more focused!

When I learnt that he was in his 30s by the time A Bit Of Fry & Laurie started, I was struck by how much time that gave me. Having missed out on Footlights, I've always thought myself far too late to get into comedy writing, but it turns out I have 6 years+.

But no! Focus! Try and write the best novel you can. (And you're a confident lovely person. Deal with it.)

Manhood For Amateurs

Michael Chabon

This is a collection of autobiographical essays about being a father and a husband and an ex-husband and a brief son-in-law. I don't know if it says more about me or Chabon that I read it is a stand-alone love letter to childhood.

I was particularly taken with the fact that he and his children are all massive Doctor Who geeks. Not because I like the show, though I do, but because I'm deeply attached to the idea that people need to share the same cultural environment, the same atmosphere of stories.

References are so important. They're the shortcuts and exploded diagrams of conversation. It's not always easy to communicate a particular situation, a particular relationship, or the significance of a pareticular event, from first principles. And if you can point your listener to a story that you know and that they know and that echoes what you wish to explain, you don't need to.

That's the best reason I can think of to mourn the loss of the classical education. I get sick of characters and their authors in old books always referring to Greek myths and the like, because I don't share the references. But the intended readers would undoubtedly have got them. These days, there's not many stories an author can point to and be completely sure the reader knows them. I don't even know with any certainty which stories are the wallpaper in my sister's houses. There's too many stories to choose from.

It's why it's so important to watch the same comedy programs as your friends. Even if they're crap. Making sure all my friends have seen the same comedy that I've seen has become a personal mission of the religious variety, in recent years. I want to live in the same richly textured storyworlds they do, so I can talk to them properly.

(An aside: That's also why every book or story I write is full of other books and stories. Salvage, in which a woman fantasises about the end of the world, is full of the characters from Friends. Full of them.)

That's all a long and laboured way of saying how excited I was to discover that the Chabons all watch Doctor Who, and quote it and discuss it and make sense of their lives in accordance to it. Let's not mourn the classical education, but let's all start watching Jonathan Creek. Or Band of Brothers. Or anything, it doesn't matter. Wodehouse and his daughter swapped letters about trashy American soaps for years. That's fine.

But while Chabon is keen to create a shared environment for his whole family, he is also keen to protect the independent world of childhood that he fears is a dying space, a swiftly dwindling rainforest. He makes the decision to disapprove of the mildly gross Captain Underpants books, despite secretly liking them, so his children have the start of somewhere to go where he is not allowed to follow. When adults start moving in on the cultural items of childhood, the children have nowhere to grow. They need their own world, and their own language. They need a basement.

When Chabon finds himself in a house without a basement, he worries for his children. Where will the 'dark tide of magical boredom' collect, ferment and inspire? So he builds them a treehouse. That's the one practical tip I picked up from this self-help guide. Build them a treehouse, and don't skimp on the dank. And hope,  with the same pure memory and desperate awe of my own childhood places that Chabon does, that 'they lie up there on their backs for hours, feeling tragic, and happy, and terribly, terribly bored.'

Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

Being a novice writer reading about the life of a professional writer is always hard going and endlessly fascinating and slightly queer. I repeatedly switched from wanting to take notes to wanting to give up writing to wanting to tell Agatha Christie what she was doing wrong. What she did wrong, by the way, was to not write in the way she writes here when she's writing about Poirot.

Because, and maybe this shouldn't be surprising, this is a brilliantly written book. I've read a fair amount of Christie--all the Poirot short stories, and half a dozen of the novels--and she doesn't write like this in them. I loved them, of course, but not in the same way I loved this memoir.

So. I have made it a personal mission now to track down at least one of Christie's Mary Westmacott novels. These were her more 'literary' works, or at least I imagine they are. They are certainly free of detectives. They are also, more importantly, the works she was most proud of, and most personally connected with. She wrote one of them in three days, even bunking off war-work for one day, and thought it the best thing she ever did. She was basically crazy. And I basically have to read that book.

Writing came accidently to her, as a career. She reckoned she could do it, but only as a challenge to her sister. She got involved in it, but only in the way her grandmother had got involved in embroidery--an abosrbing craft to fill the evenings. Even when she'd published half a dozen novels, she didn't think of it as a job, didn't put 'writer' down on her passport forms, and didn't see the cheques from the publisher as a genuine source of income.

It's hardly fair, I thought to myself, that this author, of such natural prose yet crafted plots, this gifted storyteller who is both loved and acclaimed, took to it so easily. So casually. Without fuss. When I want to do it more than anything else, and (occasionally) work really hard for it... et cetera, et cetera. Clearly, real writers are naturals, and I'm kidding myself that I can get there just by trying.

But the flipside of that thought is, if she can be this good by accident--imagine how good I can be on purpose!

Of course, the first thing you do when reading about a successful author is to isolate the similarities between their life and your own. Me and Agatha were both youngest children, who grew up in places they loved, with a large, loving family. We were both left to our own devices, extremely happy on our own, inventing worlds to play in and people to populate them, which I hear isn't the normal way of going about things. I don't know about that.

But that's what Mrs. Christie puts down much of success in writing down to, so... you know. Quid pro quo, or quad erat demonstratum, whichever is more plausible (I have a biography of Latin sitting on my shelf, so I'll find out soon).

Childhood A led to Huge Success.

Ben also had Childhood A.

Therefore Ben will suffer from Huge Success in later life.

Excellent.

PG Wodehouse: A Biography

by Frances Donaldson

Two things stand out most about this man. The first is his epic output, and the love of work that allowed it. Donaldson doesn't even bother trying to catalogue his work, talk about it in a chronological way, or approach it in any way as a unit. She is quick to point out, on a number of occasions, that it would require a much longer book, without the trifling distractions of the author's life, to make any sense of it.

Wodehouse's work ethic is the great triumph of his life. Of course, he had a natural way with the rhthym and nuance of The Great Sentence, and a good if not exceptional ear for comic dialogue, but those things were not responsible for his greatness. Greatness came, with more graft than glamour, from his plots.

Every archaic or stand-in or mill-running plot he wrote around was the result of weeks of agonising over every point. Every river-dunking had strictly apportioned motives, every failed plan was meticulously storyboarded and reshaped. If it couldn't hold itself up, if it couldn't float without the buoyancy aid of funny prose (and Wodehouse prose is the most buoyant) he would scrap it--or more likely, retinker it. If it wouldn't fit in a book, it became a musical.

Comedy is the easist place to look like an idiot; Wodehouse found that out in his war years. But in his books, he certainly took great measures to make sure he was never left looking like a fool. Every novel functioned--something he could control and predict--just in case the funny didn't stick. That's why he has an ouvre of about 100 novels, which vary in hilarity, but are remarkable consistent all the same--there isn't a single failure, not a single book that cannot entertain on the basic level. Every narrative narratives.

That's why Wodehouse was never comfortable with being highly thought of in literary circles--he was more proud of his constant functioning than of his frequent excelling. As Donaldson points out, he was incurably low-brow in tastes (not in a crude way, but in a John Stuart Mill way). And as her description of his working methods makes abundantly clear, 90% of his time was spent on the basic form a book would take. Writing it was the easy 10%, during which he felt guilty because it wasn't really work.

The second thing that stands out about Wodehouse is his inability to deal with people. There are few close relationships in his life, and while those few are sweet and deep and heartfelt, they still contain something impersonal, something distant. Even to his beloved stepdaughter he writes about his work, his dog, and later his favourite soap operas. He was never a soul-barer.

His lack of understanding about people is at the heart of his naivety, and at the heart of his alleged treason. As a prisoner of war in Germany, he didn't see the problem in broadcasting a few humorous monologues on a German worldwide radio station. He was showing how well the English in trouble were coping with their situation, stiff upper lipping and silver lining finding; and on a personal level, responding to the mass of mostly American fanmail he had recieved in his internment camp. If there was any more base motive behind his talks, it was simply his lifelong desire to write, to work, and to make people laugh, shining through four years of war-frustrated output.

The funny thing is, when you get into the unique rhythm and flavour of his life, you begin to forget about real life and normal approaches, and see things in the innocent way that he did. When I first read the passages quoted from the English press in response to him broadcasting on enemy wavelengths, being light-hearted and anything but serious, I couldn't understan the backlash. I mean, it was still funny, wasn't it? That's the main concern, isn't it?

But that's not the main concern, not in wartime, and Wodehouse realised later in life what a fool he had been. But how easy it is to forgive him, when he's left 100 novels, in each of which that unique rhythm and flavour of life is present, and the reader forgets about real life and normal appraoches, and sees things in the innocent way that he did. It's funny, isn't it?

Charles Chaplin

the autobiography.

Charlie Chaplin! The name is magic. I'm not sure why I picked this book up from my (excellent) local Oxfam B&M, being more of a Buster Keaton man, but pick it up I did.

A memoir will almost always make you like the person involved, if you didn't already. At least, that's the case with me. If people tell me they are nice, I tend to believe them. If they tell me they are not nice, I think the happy paradox, 'he's not only nice but honest as well. Hot stuff.' But I started taking a dislike to Charlie over the course of this beast of a book -- a dislike that slowly gave way to pity.

Reading an autobiography from a public figure is a very different experience when you know nothing about said figure's career, and even less about said's public trials. You end up with a lot of 'that Hearst-Davies affair, of which I have nothing to add, except to say the story as it became known was 100% false.' If you don't know the story as it became known, that sentence is high in unsaturated intrigue and low in information. Which is unhealthy.

Unhealthy but addictive. This lack of knowledge is what kept me reading the book. Chaplin is a perfect example of an unreliable narrator, setting up a state of affairs an author would maim owls to emulate. He was my only source of information, and at first -- oh! how naive I was, back then -- I took him to be reliable.

But then, slowly, other narratives began to suggest themselves. Hidden in the background, the simple shape of events tell a different, contradictory tale. Over time, over pages, my suspicions rose -- the suggested story, what Charlie is trying to rewrite, is the truer one. And the gap between the two compels.

So I started to think Charlie was a bit full of himself, and not as smart as he thought. He's not great to the people around him, either. Not nasty, just defensive, ignorant and uninvolved. Here's a little example that made me gasp (in my head) mid-text.

CC is talking about how he works up a film idea. He starts filming lots of comedy routines around a basic subject/set/genre, until a narrative emerges. Then he casts off any of the funny stuff that doesn't fit. He stops talking about this for a short paragraph:

"During the filming of The Gold Rush I married for the second time. Because we have two grown sons of whom I am very fond, I will not go into details. For two years we were married and tried to make a go of it, but it was hopeless and ended in a great deal of bitterness.
The Gold Rush opened at the Strand Theatre..."

In 530 pages, this is the only mention of these people. Well done for not opening up old wounds, but... an aside? In a rather irrelevant anecdote about a film? Flipping heck.

But I didn't think Charlie a bad man, by the end. What comes across most, through his defensive attitude, his incomplete and ill-concealed retelling of events, his lack of understanding of others, and his fundamental incompetence in bonding with people, is how lost he was.

It's all there, in his childhood, though he doesn't tell it that way; he never got the chance to grow up. He was just a boy, gifted and lucky and greedy enough to become loved all over the world, and completely without the maturity necessary to deal with it. He was just a kid, man. The kid. I'm off to watch The Kid. 

Power, Sex, Suicide

by Nick Lane

Douglas Adams said the answer to life, the universe and everything was 42. Nick Lane says it's mitochondria. Apart from the fact it spoils one of the questions in the Bookshop Quiz I set some friends the other day, I prefer this new answer. 

Power, Sex, Suicide (catchy title, hey?) certainly convinced me of the importance of mitochondria, in our past (awesome!), in our present (a mixed bag) and our future (hang about....)

Lane takes us competently through the impressive role of the little chaps in the formation of multicellular life, sex, and the entirety of morphologically complex biology. The whole ruddy lot, as Alan Partridge would say. And he shows us some really excellent evolutionary explanations at the nuts/bolts level on the way.

But it gets a bit less palatable, though no less convincing, when he shows us their current and future significance. It's not a new idea that mitochondria play a significant role in ageing and even death, but we've got the details wrong, it seems, and we've completely missed out on the huge implications. Oops.

Old age and its ravages are not a build-up of individual mutations, ill-effects and late-triggering DNA bombs. It's a lot less daunting than that. The whole depressing lot of it can be laid at the feet (to clarify: mitochondria don't have feet) of a change in the environment in the cells from a build up of oxidization. That's a much smaller, singular, and solvable issue than the old model. The key word there is solvable. Say it after me: solvable.

Great, right? We can solve ageing, get rid of dozens of the worst illnesses we know about, and Not Die. Great, right?

I don't know. That scares the hell out of me.  We're already overfilling the planet with people... imagine what we'd be like if the old stock stays around. We won't stop getting new stock in, we'll just fill up, then starve. That's a messy business, all round.


Or we will adapt, and become a race of a specifically (and culturally) limited number of citizens, something like the Heaven of Jehovah's Witnesses. You know, there will only be 144,000 people at any one time. You can only have a child if there is a hole to fill -- ie. someone dies. Not old age death, not degenerative-disease death, but death death. Prospective parents would hire out assassins on their neighbours, or try and convince Granny to do the decent thing and take the damn pill, I mean she's been around for 200 years, let someone else have a go... Or the generous amongst us will give people their own suicide as a present. &c. &c. 

That nightmare aside, getting rid of all these things is/would be amazing, and no amount of bad sci-fi should count as an ethical rebuttal. But still, when they make an apocalypse/dystopia film epic of this scenario, I want to be the person who shouts 'WHERE WILL IT ALL END?' in the first ten minutes, then dies in a way that later seems ironic... and is never mentioned again, until he is finally and unsurprisingly referenced in the final scene of the film, just after it inevitably ended in tears and a destroyed planet. Roll credits.

Sex God

by Rob Bell.

This is another good example of my challenge this summer: to only read authors who I've not read before. Rob Bell is a preacher chap who I'm familiar with from his DVD'd Christian-monologue thought pieces... and clearly, this is not a book I would buy myself.

But it got a hell of a good review in a bookswap between friends, so here I am.

To save you reading right through to the end, here's the verdict: he makes two very good points, but he doesn't make enough of them.

The two points are these:

1. Humans are not angelic or apish, fundamentally. They're human. Trying to fit ourselves completely into either category is not going to end well. And so sex isn't ignored, nor is it idolised. Sex is.

Sex has a strong and wider-than-we-perhaps-realise influence over us, but it is not everything. This is not a prescription of how things should be, but a description of how things are. Accept that first, try and work with it -- sometimes around it -- rather than change it. You're not gonna change it.

2. Connection. Community. Etc. Bell actually reminded me of Vonnegut (!) once or twice with his emphasis (well... more on that word later) here. So much of human experience, but particularly what we want and need and desire and chase, come from the problem of being social beings living asocially.

Okay, those are obviously my words and not his. And yes, he talked about God more. But connecting with other people is Absolutely Exactly Everything.

I hope you'll agreee those are two good points. The problem with Sex God is that I could easily have missed them. Not because Bell doesn't emphasise them, but because he emphasises everything. Else. As. Well.

Just like that

every word of the sentence,

is it's own sentence.

Shatner, anyone?

Sometimes each clause of a sentence is it's own paragraph, too. We've seen the DVDs, we know that's how he talks. But the DVDs were 5 minutes, this is a whole book of it. Aside from being really annoying, it's really damaging as well. You can't do it every page, man. You. Just. Can't.

The thing about emphasis is it makes certain bits stand out. If you emphasise every point that you make? You're not really emphasising anything.

And this book needs some emphasising. Because everything he says comes back to those two points I mentioned -- humans being human, and connection being key. But Rob Bell doesn't seem to realise that. These points are at the heart of everything he says, but because every point, every anecdote, every sidetrack, and every minor detail is emphasised, it's hidden. I'm genuinely not sure if the author realises how coherent his arguments are.

They come across as a series of vaguely connected points about different aspects of sexuality, but it's smarter than that. If only he knew.

Bono On Bono

by Michka Assayas

This is another example of a book I wouldn't pick up from a bookshop myself. It's the third and final installment of my bought-with-sweets series.

I don't (didn't) know much about Bono. I'm not a huge fan of the band, but probably know and like about a dozen of their singles. So I reckon I came to this book without the prejudices -- either direction -- that a lot of people might have.

It's an entertaining read. I didn't completely warm to Bono or Michka, though they gave honest answers and earnest questions, usually. Bono is smarter than I expected. He had some really interesting things to say, and interesting ways of thinking about things.

There was something wrong, though. He reminded me of something in myself, in one aspect, and it's probably something a lot of people can relate to. You see, he's good with words, rather than careful with them.

He can string together interesting answers, articulate answers, and clever maxims, all spun with a kind of impressionistic honesty, with ease. But he does it with too much ease: he ends up at attractive conclusions he doesn't really mean, and contradicts himself over time. Which of course you do, when you talk in maxims and absolutes over the course of hundreds of topics and questions.

It's not a novel, so I won't try and assess it as one. But on that topic, there is an interesting exchange:

BONO: It's not that I'm trying to figure anything out. That's the difference. A novelist is just trying to figure things out.

MICHKA: I don't think so... I think a novelist has no clue about what he's grasping. There is that fantastic phrase that I always quote, by the Franco-American writer Julian Green: "I write my books because I need to know what's inside of them." It's not that you draw out a map, make a big plan, and then fill in the gaps. That's what I would say bad writers do.

It's a fair microcosm of an argument I am expecting to have with a writer-friend of mine in the future. Planning vs. 'The Art'. I admit that there is huge value in the creative process: I inevitably learn things and surprise myself in the writing of a book. But I think planning helps that, rather than opposing it. I plan like mad.

It can also be framed as creativity vs. craft. Well, I've been 'creative' all my life. I know tons of 'creative' people. It's no big deal. I'm far more interested in craft, at the moment. Sure, you need both, but one is a real set of skills and processes you can learn and practice and master, one is this mystical thing behind the curtain that you're not allowed to stare directly at, prod with a stick or call names.

I'm confidently expecting this opinion of mine to change, maybe even reverse, over the coming years.

Evil In War

I will get The Unfolding of Language out of the way first. Not only because I read it first, but because I want to concentrate on fiction in this blog as much as possible. That's what I want to write, after all. It's not an entirely worthless exercise, though: as a reader, I don't mark the distinction too heavily.
I read for pleasure, regardless.

Guy Deutscher--The Unfolding of Language

This book is about the mechanisms behind the ongoing evolution of language. First of all, it wasn't the book I hoped it to be: it starts after the interesting stuff has already happened. Deutscher begins from a point where the human mind is developed as it is now, and with a rudimentary language--thing-words and doing-words (not quite the same as nouns and verbs) and some deeply lodged principles already to hand.
It's not the book that looks at how things got to that point, but it is a very good sketch of the next stage along. The three principles of expression, economy and analogy are elegant and all-encompassing, and the whole thing rests on and supports the fact that the human mind seeks patterns. Darwin would be happy.

Deutscher operates the Complete Lack Of Surprise literary principle, and it's a principle I like. It's almost ubiquitous in non-fiction, especially in anything close to evolution.
It goes like this: the reader knows exactly what is going to happen, or what conclusion the author will arrive at, from pretty much the first page. And they know what they will think of it, too. The reason I like this is that it doesn't have to intefere with the enjoyment of the book. It's Suspense vs. Entertainment, and I've always preferred Entertainment.

Part of it is the slowly-revealed but uncontroversial 'how'. But a lot of it is the writing itself: Deutscher, for instance, cannot make a single point that doesn't have a joke, anecdote, or (entertaining) surprise heavily involved in it. Not just tacked on, but as a useful and original way to get from A to B. Everything is approached from a unique angle.
I picked up a few favourite asides along the way. Grot is a new word, for example. Lazy hippies shortened 'grotesque' to 'grotty' in the 60s. And as per, the human mind 'finds' the pattern: as sure as shit is shitty, grotty must be an adjective from grot. It doesn't matter that grot was never a word, symmetry will reign. So now we say grot.
Resent used to mean an emotional recieving of good AND bad things, and it meant them at the same time. I could resent a birthday card as much as a slap. Nice.
Simitic verbs are flipping insane, and hearing how they got that way is honestly like watching a magic trick.

It doesn't matter that I don't know much philology, and already agreed with what this book is meant to convince me of. A succession of excellent details kept me happy.

A minor point: Deutscher buries a great point about literacy vs. word-fusion in the epilogue. It annoys me when people do that! Put it where it matters.

Evelyn Waugh--Put Out More Flags

"But Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happines without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and inperfect, various humanity."

That's what Ambrose Silk says. Imperfect, various humanity shines through this book, but he's the only one to notice it. Limbo is the place, too.
It starts-- and there's no better place to start a story-- at the start of a war. The first year of the war is a lot of waiting around, a curious in-between that is aware of it's own curiosity. We start on the first day of the war, after days which "cannot, without irony, be called the last days of peace," and end as the war "has entered into a new and more glorious phase".
We follow a class of people failing in a range of ways and extents to get to grips with the war. Centrally, cunning loser Basil Seal and clever artist, Ambrose Silk.
Everybody is trying to find their own place in the war. Some people are frustrated in their attempts to lose themselves to it; others are frustrated in their attempts to gain from it; others find it frustratingly easy to get lost in the background.

I always feel the same thing when reading Waugh. Nobody else can evoke the imminent passing of eras, time, people, friends, and entire worlds so effectively. He knows what lasts and what doesn't, and that's what he shows us.
He is completely consistent. Every thing happens at the human scale, rather than the global or the personal. We never get too far into the minds of Basil and Ambrose. We get to like them, but never completely know them, not even by the last page, where we are still learning new things about them.
There's a lot of different human dramas going on here, and Waugh leaves enough room for them all. He never makes more than he needs to of anything: new jobs, joining the army, affairs, scams, alcoholism. They are covered in half-pages and paragraphs, confidently enough to let the implications take care of themselves. Which they do.
Less is more.
He's very clever with dialogue, too. Somehow he only shows what needs to be shown, keeping myriad balls in the air, without a single line being unnatural. It's too clever, in fact, for me to quite see how he does it.

Another minor gripe. I noticed this in a George Orwell novel of a not too dissimilar time the other week, as well: the replacing of certain swear words with -----. It's a product of the time, clearly, but it's really annoying. I don't know how soldiers swore in the 40s, or gypsies in the 30s, so I can't fill in the blank. It's frustrating, especially when Orwell had also gone to a lot of pointless trouble to get the accuracy of speech in the poor people dialogue.