|
September 25, 2003
[quote] Memorable Book Openings (#4): Something Happened by Joseph Heller … ‘I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or just plain nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out towards me through the frosted glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange. I wonder why. Something must have happened to me sometime.’
September 23, 2003
[quote] Memorable Book Openings (#3): White Teeth by Zadie Smith … ‘Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 06.27 hours on 1 January 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steering wheel, hoping the judgement would not be too heavy upon him. He lay forward in a prostrate cross, jaw slack, arms splayed either side like some fallen angel; scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left) and his marriage license (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes with him. A little green light flashed in his eye, signaling a right turn he had resolved never to make.’
September 20, 2003
[quote] Memorable Book Openings (#2): One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey … ‘They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them. They’re mopping when I come out the dorm, all three of them sulky and hating everything, the time of day, the place they’re at here, the people they got to work around. When they hate like this, better if they don’t see me. I creep along the wall, quiet as dust in my canvas shoes, but they got special sensitive equipment detects my fear and they all look up, all three at once, eyes glittering out of the black faces like the hard glitter of radio tubes out of the back of an old radio.’
September 19, 2003
[comics] Metacommentary (f) — Extracts from Warren Ellis’ new novel … ‘I sat down and basically wrote the first thing that entered my head. Mostly in the pub. Got to 50 pages, stopped and handed it over to Lydia. “Go on then,” I laughed, “do something with that., It’s got a Godzilla bukkake scene. You’re doomed.” Lydia sold the book to HarperCollins in New York within a couple of weeks.’
September 18, 2003
[quote] Memorable Book Openings (#1): Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney … ‘You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then, again, it might not.’
September 14, 2003
[books] Under the Skin — interview with Eric Schlosser author of Fast Food Nation … ‘Fast Food Nation captured, and intensified, a mood of visceral disgust with tainted and tasteless branded fodder. The backlash has forced McDonald’s itself to raise its PR game through the pursuit of cattle-friendly ranches and organic milk suppliers. Schlosser suspects this greener-than-thou campaign might be too little, too late: “I really do believe that this industry and this phenomenon has peaked and is in decline.”‘
September 9, 2003
[blogs] Salam Pax is on the promotion trail for his new book [Buy: UK | US] … - How I became the Baghdad blogger … ‘I spent a couple of days searching for Arabs blogging and finding mostly religious blogs. I thought the Arab world deserved a fair representation in the blogsphere, and decided that I would be the profane pervert Arab blogger just in case someone was looking.’
- Salam Pax on the BBC’s Today Programme — requires Real Player.
- Webchat with Pax … On the Internet in Iraq: ‘…the US would use the internet for email attacks: everyone who had an email in Iraq got an email telling you to cooperate with the coalition forces, to stay at home. All the military commanders got their phone numbers changed because for hours when they picked up their receivers they’d get a voice message saying “don’t fight, go home” from the coalition. ‘
August 27, 2003
[books] Close to the Edge — Interview with Douglas Coupland … ‘I remember growing up, the stories in which they live happily ever after, and the only part that I was interested was, like, after that. Well it was fun for a while then they broke up and she got into crystal meth, found religion and turned into a lesbian. That’s the part I wanted to know. That’s far more interesting to me.’ [Related: Excerpt from ‘Hey, Nostradamus!’]
[tags: Books][ permalink][ Comments Off on Interview with Douglas Coupland]
August 26, 2003
[book] Neal Stephenson Rewrites History — brief Wired interview. ‘…for a while, information technology was incredibly important, yet it had been ignored or gotten wrong by science fiction. There was this vast terrain of virgin territory, and there was a land rush. Now the revolutionary nature of that technology has become familiar. To make the obligatory social criticism kind of comment here, the bursting of the Internet bubble has proven that information technology is just another technology’ [Related: Preview of Quicksilver | Stephenson’s Home Page]
August 8, 2003
[science] You Ask The Questions — Michael Crichton … ‘Q: In ER, what is wrong with Kerry Weaver’s leg? A: I’m sorry, but that’s confidential between doctor and patient.’
August 4, 2003
[books] Something Might Plummet. Something Might Soar — an excerpt from Dave Egger’s new novella … ‘Mrs Gunderson. Whahaooaoooa. Mrs Gunderson. This is about Mrs Gunderson and it gets dirty. You know she’s got to be in her fifties but whahaooaoooa, what is it about her that’s got you thinking?’
June 16, 2003
[books] Excerpt from Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything … ‘…experts believe there may have been many other big bangs, perhaps trillions and trillions of them, spread through the mighty span of eternity, and that the reason we exist in this particular one is that this is one we could exist in. As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: “In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.”‘
June 13, 2003
[books] Life, the universe and everything — profile of Bill Bryson … Regarding his new book: ‘…the result is 30 chapters of slightly awestruck potted science – cosmology, palaeontology, evolution, cells, oceans, forests, the birth of self-creating life, the rise of man. Sensibly, Bryson leavens the jaw-dropping statistics and atomic physics with some droll stories of scientific endeavour from the last 300 years. Such as the astronomer Percival Lowell, who believed that Mars was covered with water-ferrying canals built by industrious Martians; few sought to disagree with him because he was, after all, endowing the expensive Lowell Observatory (which discovered Pluto in 1930).’
June 12, 2003
[books] A Beautiful Mind — profile / interview of science writer Paul Broks (“the new Oliver Sacks”) … ‘What would he tell a stranger the book is about? “Without putting them off?” he asks with an uncertain smile. “That’s the difficult thing. Well it’s about how personal identity is fragile, and how at one level we’re basically meat and at another level we’re basically fiction – human beings are storytelling machines, and the self is a story, and we tell a story about ourselves, and we just pick up on the story.” He stops, defeated…’
June 9, 2003
[books] Excerpt from /usr/bin/god — Two thousand word extract from Cory Doctrow’s new novel … ‘Everyone was a font of creativity and interesting factoids. Conversation was solidly anti-idiotarian, a form of discourse that ran, “Here is a $THING. It is stupid. I am smarter;” “I see! Here is $ANOTHER_THING, it is likewise stupid and I am likewise smarter.” It wasn’t just a fucking stock-market bubble — it was nerdvana.’
[tags: Books][ permalink][ Comments Off on Excerpt from Cory Doctrow’s /usr/bin/god]
May 20, 2003
[books] An interview with Zadie Smith — yet another one … [via kottke] ‘Q: Did the Rushdie fatwa cause you trepidation when you were writing your book, in which you lampoon Islamic separatists?
Zadie: I wrote White Teeth in the late nineties. I didn’t really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.’
[tags: Books][ permalink][ Comments Off on Yet Another Interview with Zadie Smith]
May 19, 2003
[obit] He was a Crook — Hunter S. Thompson’s classic obituary for Richard Nixon … ‘If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.’
May 18, 2003
[books] The Honest Outlaw — Paul Theroux on Hunter S. Thompson … ‘One of my favourite Thompson pieces (reprinted in his collection Better than Sex) was written after the death of Richard Nixon. As the funeral orations were being delivered and everyone was praising Nixon, Thompson wrote “He Was a Crook”, one of the best, the funniest, the most sustained polemics I have ever read. Midway through it, in a burst of candour, Thompson reflects on his harsh words and says, “but I have written worse things about Nixon many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it.”‘
May 14, 2003
[books] The Baroque Cycle Is Coming — preview of Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson’s new book … ‘He hadn’t really known what to expect of America. But people here seem to do things — hangings included — with a blunt, blank efficiency that’s admirable and disappointing at the same time. Like jumping fish, they go about difficult matters with bloodless ease. As if they were all born knowing things that other people must absorb, along with faery-tales and superstitions, from their families and villages. Maybe it is because most of them came over on ships.’
May 11, 2003
[books] Luke Rhinehart: Throw and tell — interview with the author of the Dice Man [Buy: UK | US] … ‘His idea was a serious one: he wants us, if not actually to take up dicing to dictate the course of our lives, at least to realise that we have options and that escaping the patterns of our existence is at least a possibility. Yet he is also a comic writer. The Dice Man is anti-political correctness and is consistently terribly funny. So, naturally, he is joking. Let’s pretend that there are millions of dicers sabotaging the normality of their lives and those of others around them because, hell, it will promote the book. Seriously, though, how many devotees of the dice way are out there? “I think very few,” he replies, finally.’
[tags: Books][ permalink][ Comments Off on Interview with Dice Man Author]
May 7, 2003
[books] Have You Seen This Man? — a look at the reclusive life of Thomas Pynchon … ‘In 1997, a CNN crew spent days staking out Pynchon in New York, eventually capturing him on film. After the novelist’s heated objections, they finally broadcast three minutes of footage of street scenes without identifying the one-second clip that featured Pynchon himself. Some fans believe they have identified the man nevertheless, and the Dubinis’ film ends with a digitally enhanced loop of the man in army-surplus jacket and red baseball cap that one contributor believes to be Pynchon. The “fan” who has enhanced the clip affects sadness that Pynchon has finally been “caught”, even as he gazes at the TV monitor with something like possessive lust.’
May 3, 2003
[books] Tomorrow’s Man — profile of William Gibson … ‘”…I find myself thinking sometimes that there isn’t anything other than the impact of technology on society – possibly that has been more significant historically than any sort of political thought, in terms of bringing us to where we are now.” Gibson chooses a contemporary example: his friend’s camera-phone. “I get these pictures every once in a while – no explanation – and it’s just so cool, and it’s such an intimate thing. The view down an airport corridor, or something that struck him as funny.” But to every silver lining there is a cloud. “If that becomes very common,” he points out, “that’ll change the texture of life. You’d lose things. Someone telling you about their new girlfriend, for instance, and you don’t meet her for six months, so you have this picture in your head of her, and then you meet her … and that won’t be happening because he’ll have emailed the photograph right away. Apparently small things like that have a huge cumulative effect on how people experience reality.”‘
May 1, 2003
[books] A couple of William Gibson links from the Guardian … - Talk time: William Gibson — brief interview on Blogging, Google and the Internet … ‘Q: Is brevity the key to good internet communication? A: It’s hard to say whether it actually is brevity when it involves a hyperlink. If what you’re presenting is a customised node, then the node is the message and you don’t want a lengthy node!’ [Related: Slashdot]
- Back to the 80s — review of Pattern Recognition [Buy: UK | US] … ‘Pattern recognition, as a human phenomenon, becomes something else when it goes too far; it becomes “apophenia… the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things”. One of the disappointments of the novel is that it doesn’t push this far enough as a potential plot device. If there were an insane number of interconnections by the end, as is sometimes the case in thrillers, then the reader would feel more fulfilled.’
April 15, 2003
[books] E is for Excess — An A to Z of Brett Easton Ellis … ‘O is for Onica, David. Patrick Bateman buys an expensive original by the contemporary artist to hang over his fireplace. An ex-girlfriend suggests he may have hung it upside down. He kills her with a nail gun.’
April 7, 2003
[books] Pullman brings back Lyra for Oxford mystery — update on Philip Pullman … ‘”At the heart of it is a new short story called ‘Lyra and the Birds’, explained Pullman this weekend. “It’s set a couple of years after the end of The Amber Spyglass, and refers both back and forward – so it’s a sort of bridge between the trilogy and a longer book coming later, to be called The Book of Dust.”‘
March 4, 2003
[war] The Palace of the End — Martin Amis on the coming war in Iraq … Three quotes: ‘Osama bin Laden is an identifiable human type, but on an unidentifiable scale. He is an enormous stirrer – a titanic mixer. Look how he’s shaken us up, both in the heart and in the head. One could say, countervailingly, that on September 11 America was visited by something very alien and unbelievably radical. A completely new kind of enemy for whom death is not death – and for whom life is not life, either, but illusion, a staging-post, merely “the thing which is called World”. No, you wouldn’t expect such a massive world-historical jolt, which will reverberate for centuries, to be effortlessly absorbed. But the suspicion remains that America is not behaving rationally – that America is behaving like someone still in shock.’
‘We hear about the successful “Texanisation” of the Republican party. And doesn’t Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?’
‘Saddam’s hands-on years in the dungeons distinguish him from the other great dictators of the 20th century, none of whom had much taste for “the wet stuff”. The mores of his regime have been shaped by this taste for the wet stuff – by a fascinated negative intimacy with the human body, and a connoisseurship of human pain.’
February 17, 2003
[books] Eggers v the Establishment — update on Dave Eggers … ‘He is what every young literary publisher in New York would love to be if only the accountants didn’t keep telling them the money is in self-improvement books. In short, Eggers can do it all. What he will not do is sit down and be interviewed, having learnt on the road to literary fame that accessibility is the death of journalistic curiosity.’
February 6, 2003
[books] AL Kennedy’s top 10 controversial books … [via I Love Everything] ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S Thompson. Insanity, obscenity, profanity, illegality and reptilian paranoia – but which is more distressing, HST’s lunatic chemical life and Gonzo prose style, or Richard Milhous Nixon and co taking a whole country for a nasty ride? And where, by the way, is the energy of Gonzo now when we need it?’ Brief Extract from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 … ‘On page 39 of California Living magazine I found a hand-lettered ad from the McDonald’s Hamburger Corporation, one of Nixon’s big contributors in the ’72 presidential campaign: PRESS ON, it said. NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE. TALENT WILL NOT: NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT. GENIUS WILL NOT: UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB. EDUCATION ALONE WILL NOT: THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS. PERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION ALONE ARE OMNIPOTENT. I read it several times before I grasped the full meaning.’
January 30, 2003
[books] Logomancer — a review of William Gibson‘s new book by Rudy Rucker … ‘Cool hunting, advertising, and marketing pervade Pattern Recognition – the book’s acronym is PR, after all. Pollard “knows too much about the processes responsible for the way product is positioned in the world, and sometimes finds herself doubting that there is much else going on.” But The Footage is there to prove her wrong. The Web makes it possible for an independent artist to gain a global following for no commercial purpose whatsoever. Gibson exploits the inherent tension between the monoculture and the emergence of novelty. On one hand, the monoculture lives by assimilating originality. On the other, new art has nothing but the monoculture to launch itself from. It’s one of the happy paradoxes of modern life.’
[tags: Books][ permalink][ Comments Off on Rudy Rucker on Pattern Recognition]
January 23, 2003
[reading] At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft … ‘Through the desolate summits swept ranging, intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.’
January 21, 2003
[books] Extract from A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker. ‘…when the hole in the sock on my foot became intolerable, I reached down and pulled it off in a clean, strong motion and flipped it across the room in the direction of the trash can — although I have to say there is something almost painfully incongruous in the sight of an article of underclothing that one has worn and warmed with one’s own body for many days and years, lying bunched in the trash.’ [via Anglepoised]
[tags: Books][ permalink][ Comments Off on Extract from Nicholson Baker’s New Book]
January 13, 2003
[books] Particular Obsessions — profile of the author Nicholson Baker and his new book … ‘A Box of Matches isn’t just about groping around the house before dawn and lighting fires. It also deals – in exhaustive detail – with such domestic mysteries as hole-ridden socks, belly-button lint and emptying the dishwasher. It features a protagonist/narrator practically indistinguishable from Baker himself and a family suspiciously like the wife and two children sleeping soundly in various rooms around Baker’s 18th-century wood-panelled, oak-beamed house. Even the pet duck that features prominently in the book is instantly recognisable as one of two now quacking in the yard. Baker has made a virtue of celebrating daily existence, whether it is the kaleidoscopic detailing of a single lunch hour in The Mezzanine [or] the labyrinthine sexual obsessions of The Fermata…’
January 8, 2003
[books] Pattern Recognition — extract from William Gibson‘s new book … ‘Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn’t click, he would say. Damien is thirty, Cayce two years older, but there is some carefully insulated module of immaturity in him, some shy and stubborn thing that frightened the money people. Both have been very good at what they’ve done, neither seeming to have the least idea of why. Google Damien and you will find a director of music videos and commercials. Google Cayce and you will find “coolhunter,” and if you look closely you may see it suggested that she is a “sensitive” of some kind, a dowser in the world of global marketing. Though the truth, Damien would say, is closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace.’
January 7, 2003
[blogs] William Gibson has a blog … ‘In spite of (or perhaps because of) my reputation as a reclusive quasi-Pynchonian luddite shunning the net (or word-processors, depending on what you Google) I hope to be here on a more or less daily basis.’ [via Boing Boing]
January 6, 2003
[books] All the Best for the New Year [ Part 1 | Part 2] — a cultural preview for 2003. William Gibson’s new book looks really interesting: ‘Pattern Recognition, his seventh novel, is notable for being set in London one year after 11 September, and the business of imagining the future takes a back seat to the complexities of the modern world. In a tip of the hat to Naomi Klein, the heroine, Cayce Pollard, makes her living through an unusual sensitivity to corporate branding. When a toothsome ad executive asks her to investigate the source of a mysterious phenomenon on the internet, which could be the most important viral marketing campaign ever devised, Cayce soon becomes entangled in a world of paranoid surveillance and commodity fetishism. Pattern Recognition is a stylish and ambitious novel.’
January 5, 2003
[radio] Northern Lights — BBC Radio 4 are broadcasting a dramatisation of the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman over the next three weeks… Terrance Stamp is playing Lord Asriel. [via I Love Everything]
[tags: BBC, Books][ permalink][ Comments Off on BBC Radio Drama — Pullman’s His Dark Materials]
December 18, 2002
[film] Orchid Fever — article from the New Yorker which was the initial inspiration for Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s film Adaptation … [via lukelog] ‘Collecting can be a sort of lovesickness. If you begin collecting living things, you are pursuing something imperfectible, and even if you manage to find them and then possess them, there is no guarantee they won’t die or change. The botanical complexity of orchids and their mutability makes them perhaps the most compelling and maddening of all collectible living things. There are nearly twenty thousand named species of orchids — it is the largest flowering-plant family on earth. New orchids are being created in laboratories or discovered every day, and others exist only in tiny numbers in remote places. To desire orchids is to have a desire that can never be fully requited. A collector who wants one of every orchid species will die before even coming close.’
December 6, 2002
[web] Little House on the Info Prairie — Danny O’Brien blogs interviewing Brewster Kahle … ‘I keep hearing him say “we can make a different world, by building it”, which sounds clumsy copied from my notes, but in context, spoken by Brewster Kahle in an old wooden house with a bunch of commodity web servers in one corner, a whiteboard with plans to scan a million books on the wall to the left, and shelf with a freshly minted Alice in Wonderland…’
November 28, 2002
[film] Solaris, Rediscovered — backgrounder on Stanislaw Lem and Solaris … ‘…this is the source of Lem’s uneasy relationship with American science fiction, and of his inevitable misalliance with Hollywood. Lem’s stories are about humanity in general. Movies – at least popular ones – are about characters. Moreover, when confronted with a beautiful woman who may be a phantom, an alien, or some kind of machine, Hollywood is more or less required to put one question ahead of all others: Can you have sex with it? This is what Soderbergh refers to when he says the movie will be a cross between 2001 and Last Tango in Paris.’
November 17, 2002
[books] Swaggering genius — more Sunday reading… a profile of Dave Eggers … ‘His attitude towards publicity is certainly contradictory; having written a candid memoir about his family and friends, he then retreated into Salinger-like reclusiveness and reportedly dismissed his US agent, bizarrely accusing her of wanting to make money out of his family’s story. Others have pointed out that although Simon and Schuster paid $100,000 for the manuscript of AHWOSG, he later accepted a $1.4 million advance for US paperback rights, and that in spite of early news stories (which Eggers later denied) claiming he had refused to sell the film rights because he felt a cinema version would surrender the book’s integrity, the rights were nevertheless sold to New Line for a weighty $2m.’
November 3, 2002
[books] Why He Died Before He Got Old — Pete Townshend reviews Kurt Cobain’s Journals … ‘The entries are not uninteresting. It is simply that they are devastatingly hard to contemplate. They actually hurt. These are the scribblings of a once beautiful, angry, petulant, spoiled, drug-addled middle-class white boy from a divorced family who just happened, with the help of two of his slightly more stable peers, to make an album hailed as one of the best rock records ever. I sometimes get letters from people who write and draw like Cobain. I put them in a file marked ‘Loonies’, just in case they try to sue me in the future for stealing their ideas.’
[tags: Books, Music][ permalink][ Comments Off on ‘I hope I die before I become Pete Townshend.’]
October 4, 2002
[books] Angry Bed Positions from Mil Millington … ‘Think of it as a ‘K’. One person is in the standard half-‘X’ shape (facing away) and the other is a rigid ‘I’; lying prone, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Here you lose points for style if the ‘I’ person doesn’t let out frequent sighs and snorts in an attempt to get the Half-‘X’-er to ask ‘What is it?'” [via Anglepoised]
October 3, 2002
[books] The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith — The Digested Read … ‘Jesus, thought Alex-Li as he checked his messages. I must have booked a flight to New York while I was out of it. Still, it will go down well with US readers. He phoned Ads. “I’m off to New York.” “You’ll miss Esther’s heart operation.” “Hmm. That adds some pathos.”‘
September 25, 2002
[rant] Trouble when Tweed Comes to Town — Will Self rants about the Countryside March … ‘Yes, Countryside Alliance, you’re the Tories who can’t stand the free market; you’re the libertarians who can’t handle homosexual rights or decriminalising drugs; you’re the defenders of Fortress Britain who get bankrolled by Brussels. You aren’t old MacDonald – you’re bloody senile.’ [via Guardian Weblog]
September 22, 2002
[books] Philip Pullman Reaches the Garden — interview with the author of the His Dark Materials Trilogy … Pullman: ‘It’s a curious thing: we have to be told how to fall in love. We don’t do it automatically. Somebody made the point that if there were no stories about love, nobody would ever fall in love. We wouldn’t know how to do it.’ [via Interconnected]
September 19, 2002
[books] Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington — his new book looks interesting … ‘Millington’s customarily whimsical take on contemporary gender relations is, of course, much in evidence but some of the sharper comedy here actually occurs beyond the familial settings. In certain respects the book has possibly more in common with the wry, mild-mannered satire of the Ealing films or David Nobbs’ Reginald Perrin than the novels of Tony Parsons, Nick Hornby and co.’ [Buy: UK | US]
September 15, 2002
[books] Man and Wife by Tony Parsons — The Digested Read … ‘I. Don’t. Know. Why I. Write in. These ridiculous. Sentences. And repeat. Re. Peat. Mys. Elf. Now. To women. Know I hate. The poncey. Middle-classes. That. Watch the. Late. Review. I. Really. Love Pat. He’s my son. Pat I. Love. He’s the. Best. Thing. I’ve ever. Done. Best. The. It breaks. My heart. That he. Lives. With. Gina.’
September 13, 2002
[books] On The Road: American Writers and their Hair — Zadie Smith in America … ‘Kansas City is oven hot, dead metaphor or no dead metaphor. And for some reason it is God’s plan to have me read in an inter-denominational all-faith meeting house, the better to offend all his children in different ways. By the time I get back to the hotel I’m washed up. The Jews hate me. So do the Catholics, the Muslims, the Hindus and the Jehova’s Witnesses. The Buddhists aren’t so crazy about me either. It turns out Kansas is not the city for religious comedy. Who knew?’ [thanks Prentiss]
September 12, 2002
[books] Warren Ellis on James Bond … ‘In some ways — and I don’t think Fleming was unaware of this — he is what Allen Ginsberg called “bleak male energy,” causing and taking immense damage in single-minded pursuit of what he wants. At the conclusion of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, the front end of his personality essentially rubbed out by torture, drugs, multiple trauma and a sequence of horrible mental hammerblows, there is an almost disturbing glimpse of an amnesiac Bond as gentle, open, devoted, and almost sweet. And his lover dreads the day that he recovers. He is England’s blunt instrument of international assault — the spiteful, vicious bastard of a faded empire that still wants the world to do as it’s bloody well told.’
September 10, 2002
[books] A Diverting New Chapter in the Life of a Literary Superstar — Zadie Smith Profile … ‘The essential charm of Smith’s writing is not its multicultural sweep, nor its Rushdie-like exaggerations and swift changes of direction, not even its incisive comic wit; it is the warmth with which she invests her portraits of even her unloveliest characters.’
|