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[More Blogs][Comic Blogs] | 9 January 2002
[books] The Digested Read covers The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking … ‘Apparently, a large number of the many millions who bought A Brief History of Time got stuck on page one. Oh dear. I expected more of my readers.’
7 January 2002
[books] Excellent interview / bio of Philip Pullman. During the interview Pullman is asked if we are missing out on magic in a world dominated by science … ‘Perhaps. I’m pretty skeptical, though. I think we’re far too superstitious on the whole. As for disgraceful betrayals of wisdom such as the pretense that there is something called “creation science” and we ought to give it equal time in schools with proper science — I’m ashamed to belong to a human race that is so sunk in abject ignorance and willful stupidity.’ [Related: Officicial Pullman Website]
4 January 2002
[books] Choke On This — an interview with Chuck Palahniuk … On his new book Lullaby: ‘It’s about a very burnt-out, jaded newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a five-part series about crib death, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. So, he wants to profile five different crib deaths. So, paramedics take him to, first, one crib-death scene, and he notices a library book that’s there, and it’s a cheap anthology of public domain folk stories and poems and anything that could be slapped together and published, and it’s opened to page 27. And the next crib-death sight is not exactly crib death, it’s a three-year-old, but it’s the same library book. And, it’s not open, but when he sets it on its spine, it falls open to page 27. Then the third, the fourth, the fifth crib-death sight, these people have all checked out this library book, and it looks like the night before these children died, it was read, what turns out to be an ancient African culling song, which was used to decrease population during famine or drought, and to humanely euthanize elderly or diseased or injured people in a painless, almost instant way. And he realizes that this is a spell for killing people.’ [via Feeling Listless]
30 December 2001
[books] Ellroy’s Kafka Routine — interview with James Ellroy … ‘The essential contention of the Underworld USA trilogy volume one, American Tabloid, volume two, The Cold Six Thousand, is that America was never innocent. Here’s the lineage: America was founded on a bedrock of racism, slaughter of the indigenous people, slavery, religious lunacy …and nations are never innocent. Let alone nations as powerful as our beloved fatherland.’
29 December 2001
[911 comment] History is back with a capital H — Naomi Klien on the End of History and ObL … ‘It’s an idea we’ve heard from many quarters since September 11, a return of the great narrative: chosen men, evil empires, master plans, and great battles. All are ferociously back in style. The Bible, the Koran, The Clash of Civilizations, Lord of the Rings – all of them suddenly playing out “in these days, in our times.” This grand redemption narrative is our most persistent myth, and it has a dangerous flip side. When a few men decide to live their myths, to be larger than life, it can’t help but have an impact on all the lives that unfold in regular sizes. People suddenly look insignificant by comparison, easy to sacrifice in the name of some greater purpose. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was supposed to have buried this epic narrative in its rubble. This was capitalism’s decisive victory. Ideology is dead, let’s go shopping.’ [via Wood s Lot]
23 December 2001
[wtc] Only Love and then Oblivion — Ian McEwan on 911 … ‘If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality. The hijackers used fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanising hatred to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy. Among their crimes was a failure of the imagination.’
22 December 2001
[comment] In the ruins of the future — Don DeLillo on 911. ‘Technology is our fate, our truth. It is what we mean when we call ourselves the only superpower on the planet. The materials and methods we devise make it possible for us to claim our future. We don’t have to depend on God or the prophets or other astonishments. We are the astonishment. The miracle is what we ourselves produce, the systems and networks that change the way we live and think. But whatever great skeins of technology lie ahead, ever more complex, connective, precise, micro-fractional, the future has yielded, for now, to medieval expedience, to the old slow furies of cut-throat religion. Kill the enemy and pluck out his heart.’
13 December 2001
[nyc] Tom Wolfe on the City of Change … ‘The case could be made that any post-9/11 federal appropriations to prop up business in New York should go first to the places where you can get Chilean sea bass with a Georgia plum marmalade glaze on a bed of mashed Hayman potatoes laced with leeks, broccoli rabe and emulsion of braised Vidalia onions infused with Marsala vinegar.’ [via Robot Wisdom]
9 December 2001
[comics] The genius of Jimmy — Raymond Briggs on Jimmy Corrigan … ‘Jonathan Cape also publish Rushdie, Amis, McEwan and Barnes, so can this mean that the modest Mr F C Ware has got a foot in the door of this pantheon? After all, his book is thicker and more expensive than theirs. Full colour throughout! And does it mean that we will live to see an ancient Dame Posy Simmonds go tottering by? ‘
Bugpowder posts a transcript of a Late Show Review of Corrigan between Tom Paulin, Dominic Lawson, Craig Brown and Miranda Sawyer. Paulin: ‘…the colours are dreadful, it’s like looking at a bottle of Domestos or Harpic or Ajax. Awful bleak colours, revolting to look at, it’s on it’s way to the Oxfam shop.’ 29 November 2001
[books] The Digested Read — Madonna by Andrew Morton … ‘Surprise success of first album – some songs weak, shock horror – then effortless meteoric rise to superstardom. Control freak, more failed affairs – “she’s very needy, she never stops ringing you” – abortions, Sean Penn, more albums, loads of celebs, sex. Did I mention she was a control freak? Career nosedives, resurrected by Norman Mailer, desperate to be Evita, desperate to be loved, more failed love – “she wasn’t very adventurous in bed” – more albums. Clunk, clunk, clunk.’
25 November 2001
[humour] How to DRIVE FAST on DRUGS while getting your WING-WANG SQUEEZED and not SPILL YOUR DRINK by P.J. O’Rourke with illustrations by George Perez (?!) … ‘Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you’re half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose, and a teen-age lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you’re going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban sidestreet. You’d have to watch the entire Mexican air force crash-land in a liquid petroleum gas storage facility to match this kind of thrill.’ [via Everlasting Blort]
24 November 2001
[books] The Grip that Death could not Loosen … the mad incestuous attic stories of Virginia Andrews. ‘So, back to the attic children who have just had sex – they are both the spawn of sibling incest and engaged in sibling incest. Oh, and the widow has decided to poison them with arsenic, which makes them very pale, but still extremely attractive to one another. They realise their peril and escape, with one younger sibling (the other has died). They lead a full and unhappy life of mistreatment and suchlike. A rogue doctor has an affair with the girl sibling – it results in a pregnancy, he performs a quick DIY abortion and keeps the foetus in a jar on his desk for a laugh. In the end, the siblings marry at the age of about 50 – they pretend they are unrelated, of course. No good comes of it.’
17 November 2001
[books] Top 10 literary hoaxes … ’10. The Hitler diaries — In 1983 a German magazine bought 62 volumes of the ‘lost diaries’ of Adolf Hitler. These had supposedly been discovered by farmers after the plane in which the diaries had been dispatched, shortly before Hitler’s suicide, crashed. They contained such fascinating snippets of Hitler’s domestic life as “on my feet all day long” and “must not forget to get tickets for the Olympic Games for Eva Braun.”‘
16 November 2001
[books] I Want to Go Ahead and Do It — old NY Times review of The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer … ‘[Schiller] …watches as Gary Gilmore’s ashes are let loose from a plastic bag to blow over Provo. The bag surprises Schiller. The bag is a bread bag, “with the printing from the bread company clearly on it . . . a 59-cent loaf of bread.”‘
13 November 2001
[books] The lost children — more on Philip Pullman from the Sunday Times. ‘…he can’t say all the classic children’s books perpetuate unblemished childhood. What about Enid Blyton’s Famous Five who often unearthed adult wrongdoing? Here, Pullman makes a remarkable confession: such realism is taboo today. “You can’t have your heroes and heroines going off by themselves to camp on an island. The publishers wouldn’t let you do it. There are all sorts of health and safety problems, paedophiles and goodness knows what else. The fear is that children are so stupid they’ll copy what they see in books. “So in order to give children adventures now, you either have to set it in the past when that sort of thing was allowed, or in another world where the rules are different. But you can’t do it realistically.”‘ [via Haddock]
11 November 2001
[furthur] “We are all doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives – we are always acting on what has just finished. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means.” — Tom Wolfe quoting Ken Kesey’s philosophy in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. [Related: Author and hippie icon Kesey dies]
10 November 2001
[books] Driven by daemons — excellent profile and interview of Philip Pullman …‘He is emotionally involved. He sits in the shed and makes it up and he weeps, yes, weeps copiously at the tragedies that unfold. He frightens himself and upsets himself and makes himself laugh. If the story evangelises, it isn’t him that’s doing it. It is merely his nature to admire qualities such as courage, kindness, intellectual curiosity, inclusiveness and open-mindedness, and to deplore cruelty, intolerance and fanatical zealotry, but he wouldn’t dream of writing stories to promote that world-view. If stories teach, that is not his conscious intention. “It’s craftsmanship. Your aim must be to tell a story as well as you can, shaping it and bringing the emotional currents to their… peak of emotional swishing about. You turn the raw materials, and all those loose bits of imagination and experience and memory, into something that stands up like a table with four legs and that doesn’t fall over when you put your elbows on it.”‘
31 October 2001
[books] First Chapter of Emergence by Steven Johnson… [via kottke.org]
‘…they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent “executive branch.” They are bottom-up systems, not top-down. They get their smarts from below. In a more technical language, they are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behavior. In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence.’ 29 October 2001
[books] More from Adrian Mole: ‘Glenn has been excluded from school, for calling Tony Blair a twat.’
27 October 2001
[no logo] Between McWorld and Jihad — Naomi Klein on 9-11 and the anti-corporate movement…
‘Of course, there is little evidence that America’s most wanted Saudi-born millionaire has a grudge against capitalism (if Osama bin Laden’s rather impressive global export network stretching from cash-crop agriculture to oil pipelines is any indication, it seems unlikely). And yet for the movement some people call “anti-globalisation” others call “anti-capitalism” (and I tend to just sloppily call “the movement”), it’s difficult to avoid discussions about symbolism: about all the anti-corporate signs and signifiers – the culture-jammed logos, the guerrilla-warfare stylings, the choices of brand name and political targets – that make up the movement’s dominant metaphors. Many political opponents of anti-corporate activism are using the symbolism of the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks to argue that young activists, playing at guerrilla war, have now been caught out by a real war.’ 26 October 2001
[books] Out of the ordinary — Douglas Coupland has been touring England taking photo’s … ‘Coupland adores objects, and most of his book-tour photography has been of hotel rooms, shop windows, products, promotional displays. But why do it? “I’ve never taken pictures before and I said to myself, ‘Dammit, I’m going to learn how to do this. I don’t remember my dreams. Do you? No one does. But if you wake up and write them down straight away, you can look at it 15 years later and like, ‘I remember that dream perfectly.’ It’s the same with this 36 days, or 46 days, or whatever it has been, I really want to remember them. But your body tends to remember the airport and the train rumble, rumble, so I’m trying to remember the good stuff.”‘
24 October 2001
[books] Sue Townsend: You ask the questions … ‘[Q] Where do you see Adrian Mole aged 51? [A] Still trying to flog his abysmal novel, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, to a London publisher. He’ll almost certainly have early prostate trouble and I think he’ll be really strong on cardigans, in particular the Marks & Spencer zip-up range for men.’
21 October 2001
[books] All Authors are Pyschotic — interview with Douglas Coupland … ‘…when you look at the history of the smile in the photo… up until World War II most people in photographs had their normal faces. And then Kodak and other camera people and filmmakers always had their people smile, and then we entered this cult of the smile collectively. If you try not smiling when people are taking your picture they basically tell you to fuck off and start smiling.’ [Related: BBC News on Coupland, via Feeling Listless]
19 October 2001
[comment] The View From Smalltown, USA — Chuck Palahniuk on 9-11 … [via Barbelith Underground]
‘On television, the towers fall in slow motion. The same crowds of people stand around on the West Side Highway, observing. There’s the same jiggling, chaotic shot taken by some cameraman fleeing the cloud of dust. Watching this, David says: “This is worse than The Blair Witch Project.” Then he asks: “They ever find that intern, Chandra Levy??”‘ 13 October 2001
[books] This is how it feels to me — Zadie Smith on what it’s like to be a writer at the moment…
‘We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. And now, when I finish a long day of CNN-related fear and loathing mixed with eyeballing my own resolutely white screen, I do not crawl into bed with 500-page comic novels about (God help me, but it’s OK; I’m going to call on the safety of quote marks) “multicultural” London. I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis’s essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn’t sound like me.’ 10 October 2001
[interview] You Ask The Questions: P. J. O’Rourke … ‘A title of one of your early books was Give War a Chance. In the light of recent events, do you still hold to this credo? “Credo” is as it may be. But “Give Communications Intercepts, Intelligence Agent Penetration of Terrorist Cells, Limited Special Forces Covert Actions and Suppression of Worldwide Money-Laundering Activities a Chance” will never be a book title.’
7 October 2001
[ubl] An Ernst Stavro Blofeld for our Times … article comparing Osama bin Laden with the Bond Villian. ‘Of course what the public craves in all this is a real-life James Bond to tackle him. Unfortunately, the secret service has changed since the days of 007. Out have gone the cocktails, the girls and the relentless innuendo, to be replaced by a new politically correct streak. The CIA, for example, has spent 20,000 man-hours in a year on “sensitivity training” and the sewing of quilts to celebrate cultural diversity.’
Kill bin Laden or risk catastrophe, says FBI … ‘Officials in the Justice Department and intelligence services believe that the bin Laden network, still operative in cells across the globe, would implode if he were beheaded. Investigators laid out two scenarios: “There’s a notion that if you behead the snake, another two crawl out of the swamp,” said one official. “This situation is the opposite: cut off the snake’s head and the body shrivels up. The important thing is to get the man”.’ 6 October 2001
[books] Learning to Fly by Victoria Beckham — The Digested Read … ‘Brooklyn is literally the best baby in the entire universe and David and I just so love him to bits. We are just so at our happiest when it’s just the three of us together out shopping at Versace.’
[comics] To be Precise, Tintin — another look at Michael Farr’s Tintin – The Complete Companion … ‘In a career of more than 50 years, Hergé produced only 24 Tintin books. Had he been less meticulous, he might well have been a lot more prolific, but I doubt he would have ended up being so widely loved and admired. Picking up a Tintin book the other day for the first time in many years, I found myself torn between a narrative-driven urge to race through the frames as quickly as possible and an impulse to linger and wallow amid the lovingly realised visual detail, the brilliant evocation of time and place. I don’t think there are any other books which made quite such an impact on my childhood imagination as Tintin.’
5 October 2001
[comment] Robert Anton Wilson on The War Against Some Terrorists … ‘Just as the War Against Drugs would make some kind of sense if they honestly called it a War Against Some Drugs, I regard Dubya’s current Kampf as a War Against Some Terrorists. I may remain wed to that horrid heresy until he bombs CIA headquarters in Langtry.’ [via Fark]
1 October 2001
[books] Adrian Mole — Monday, September 24 … ‘I heard with alarm today that, due to the coming “Crusade” or “Infinite Justice” or “The Conflict” or “World War Three”, David Blunkett has warned that my civil liberties may be restricted in the future, and that I may have to carry an identity card with me at all times. Since I am constantly losing my Sainsbury’s Reward Card, the future looks dim for me. ‘
18 September 2001
[comment] Fear and Loathing — Martin Amis on 9-11 … ‘It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment. Until then, America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her. I have never seen a generically familiar object so transformed by effect. That second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanised with malice, and wholly alien. For those thousands in the south tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.’
[books] Bare Faced Messiah — an excellent out-of-print biography of L. Ron Hubbard complete on-line… ‘The glorification of “Ron”, superman and saviour, required a cavalier disregard for facts: thus it is that every biography of Hubbard published by the church is interwoven with lies, half-truths and ludicrous embellishments. The wondrous irony of this deception is that the true story of L. Ron Hubbard is much more bizarre, much more improbable, than any of the lies.’
16 September 2001
[comment] ‘We just have to stop being Americans for a little while’ — P. J. O’Rourke was in Washington… ‘The four of us walked to the Dubliner bar on North Capitol. “The Congressional leadership,” said the second staffer, “has been whisked off to ‘an undisclosed location’. As far as I’m concerned they can keep most of them there,” which touches on another theory of terrorism, that the organisation of society can be attacked by striking organisations; that we can’t organise things ourselves. “Four Guinnesses,” said the first senate staffer to the bartender. “Time to take sides,” said the second staffer. “Time to turn sand into glass,” said the first.’
15 September 2001
[nyc] Brightness falls … Jay McInerney writes about the last few days in NYC … ‘Jeffrey lived in Jersey, and had no way to get home; he was going to look for a hotel room since all transit, all bridges and tunnels were closed. I told him to call me if he couldn’t find shelter, and Jeanine gave him my name and number. He looked at my name and asked me if I was the author of Bright Lights, Big City. “I just realised something,” he said. “Wasn’t the World Trade Centre on the cover of your book?” “My God,” I said, “I hadn’t thought of that.”‘
14 September 2001
[comment] Blake Morrison on the attack: ‘…there is the history and symbolism. America has just been violated as never before. We’ve seen the heart of the world’s greatest empire – its military brain and financial nerve centre – going up in smoke. None of us was there to see the siege of Troy, the fall of Constantinople, the burning of Rome, the Great Fire of London, but we’ve often wondered what they were like. This time there were cameras present.’
[comment] Fear & Loathing in America … Hunter S. Thompson’s reaction. ‘This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now.’ [via Dr. Menlo]
[comment] Ruin more beautiful than the building — The Times interviews Norman Mailer on the attacks. ‘… [He] said that the remaining steel prongs of the World Trade Centre would inevitably become a national monument. ‘It is more beautiful than the building was,” Mr Mailer, 78, who described the towers as ‘two huge buck teeth’ […] ‘I think they will keep it. If they have any sense they will. And politicians usually have exactly that kind of sense, if no other. I don’t disapprove of that. You’ve got that many people killed who’ve had nothing to do with bringing on their own death other than working in a monument to corporatism.”
8 September 2001
[books] Today, I’m mostly reading… Fast Food Nation by Eric Sclosser. Ray Kroc (one of the founders of McDonalds): ‘We have found out … that we cannot trust people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them in a hurry … The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.’
Fast-Food Nation: The True Cost Of America’s Diet [Part 1 | Part 2] … this is the original article on which the book was based … ‘A middle-aged woman in a lab coat handed me a paper plate full of premium extra longs, the type of french fries sold at McDonald’s, and a salt shaker and some ketchup. The fries on the plate looked so familiar yet wildly out of place in this laboratory setting, this food factory with its computer screens, digital readouts, shiny steel platforms and evacuation plans in case of ammonia-gas leaks. Despite all that, the french fries were delicious – crisp and golden brown, made from potatoes that had been in the ground that morning. I finished them and asked for some more.’
7 September 2001
[books] Dot.Bomb — first chapter of the book by David Kuo … ‘Winn’s goal was not just to sell a lot of one kind of stuff or another. He wanted to use the Internet to revolutionize every facet of retail, creating a one-stop Internet shopping site of unparalleled selection, product information, and efficiency. It would be for the Internet age what Harrods was for the entire British Empire at its height: the shopping source for all things. Winn knew it was an inspired – and possibly psychotically lucrative – vision.’
6 September 2001
[books] Hip to be square — interview with Douglas Coupland … ‘When I lived in Tokyo, on the subways everyone would be reading papers or manga, but now everyone sits there reading their phones. Every medium creates its desired form. It’s like AM radio created the two-and-a-half-minute song, then FM radio created art rock and the double album, and TV created the video and the 22.5-second news burst. It turns out that people want their printed information in three minutes; as long as they have three minutes’ worth of words, they’ll pay 100 yen. It’s scary. It’s the future.’
31 August 2001
[books] Extract from The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman … ‘Lee Scoresby looked not asleep, nor at peace; he looked as if he had died in battle; but he looked as if he knew that his fight had been successful. And because the Texan aeronaut was one of the very few humans Iorek had ever esteemed, he accepted the man’s last gift to him. With deft movements of his claws, he ripped aside the dead man’s clothes, opened the body with one slash, and began to feast on the flesh and blood of his old friend. It was his first meal for days, and he was hungry.’
28 August 2001
[books] Author angers the Bible Belt — article on the reaction to Philip Pullman’s books in America … ‘At their core, Pullman’s books are profoundly humanistic. Joan Slatterly calls them stories ‘about love, seizing the day and being alive’. ‘For all the qualities they have,’ says Pullman, ‘mine are ordinary children who come to realise that the world is a wonderful place whose destiny is not their birthright. There are no hereditary traditions or magic wands like in Harry Potter. There is the occult but not in the sense I see in other books. I don’t give people magical powers.”
24 August 2001
[distraction] Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s public book reviews on Amazon. ‘Rogul’s book is a fascinating guide to the phenomenon of alien abduction, and as an abductee myself I was staggered by how similar my experiences were to the examples he cites in his book. I too was whisked up to the mothership where a group of 7 or 8 humanoids with enlarged craniums and black oval eyes subjected me to intense examination, lavishing particular scrutiny on my […], which they probed with a glass-like instrument which emitted a blue glow. ‘ [via Barbelith Underground]
[comics] Cartoon strip seeks to be first of the first books — Jimmy Corrigan in shortlist for this year’s Guardian First Book Award. ‘Ware has won rave reviews for his subtle, innovative book with its dark portrayal of alienated wage slaves and dysfunctional family relationships. The title character is an introverted office dogsbody whose awkward reunion with his long-lost father brings him further confusion and pain. The author is already being championed by last year’s First Book Award winner. “He should win immediately – I don’t even care what else is on it,” declared novelist Zadie Smith. “It’s a work of genius.” The author Nick Hornby is another fan, who said Jimmy Corrigan was “too beautiful to take anywhere”.’ [Related: Buy Jimmy Corrigan at Amazon, Chris Ware at Fantagraphics]
22 August 2001
[books] Kids’ stuff — Guardian interview with Philip Pullman … Pullman: ‘Traditionally, children are seen as beautiful, innocent beings; then comes adulthood and they become corrupt. That’s the CS Lewis view. My view is that the coming of experience and sexuality and self-consciousness is a thing to be welcomed, because it’s the beginning of true understanding, of wisdom. My book tells children that you’re going to grow up and it’s going to be painful but it’s going to be good too.’
20 August 2001
[books] Philip Pullman: A winner – if he gets his evil way — interesting profile of the childrens author … ‘His novel, The Amber Spyglass, is unusual. It’s a magnificent piece of storytelling that, unlike self-consciously difficult literary novels, is sinfully sweet to devour. Despite its bulk, it isn’t a stand-alone book, but the culmination of a trilogy. Most pertinently, it’s a novel for children, albeit one that can be enjoyed with equal intensity by adults, who are more likely to pick up on its allusions.’
16 August 2001
[books] You ask the questions: Peter Ackroyd. On genuinely disturbing parts of London: ‘There are a couple of spots of London that have always interested me. One of them is a small area known as Angel Street by the old wall of Newgate Prison, which has been a haunted spot for many centuries. It was here that the black dog of Newgate used to be seen in spectral form — certainly not a place for the faint hearted. Stew Lane is another spot. It’s a little-known alley that leads from the river upwards to Upper Thames Street. It’s dark and narrow — I’ve never known why it’s called Stew Lane or what happened there, but it is a curiously uncomfortable place.’
12 August 2001
[teeth] Something Rotten — William Leith on his teeth… an extract from his book British Teeth. ‘He put his drill down, picked up another tool, a hooked needle, and loomed over me again. He poked the new tool deep into the open roots of my tooth. He was looking at something. The wadding! He had found the wadding. Godzinski dipped the needle into the hole in my jaw. Then he removed the needle from my mouth and sniffed at it. Some of the purulent wadding was on the end of the needle. Godzinski offered the needle to his nurse, as if it were a special treat. “Smell that abscess,” he said.’
10 August 2001
[books] First chapter of Sonic Boom — a book about Napster, MP3’s and the future of music … ‘From that moment forward, Fanning would appear frequently dressed in a Metallica T-shirt, most famously as a presenter at the MTV Music Awards, where Ulrich sat in the audience looking sick. It was difficult to say whether the Beavis and Butthead like fashion statement was meant to be mocking or merely the honest expression of a fan laced with a little irony. Whatever the case, Ulrich made clear that, as far as he was concerned, being a Napster user and a Metallica fan were incompatible: on television and the Internet, he directly told fans who used Napster that the band didn’t want their types.’
[quote] Tinned Pineapple. ‘…I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand. We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry – but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast.’ [Related: Project Gutenberg Etext of Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome]
8 August 2001
[70’s pulp fiction] Sextacular! — the Guardian profiles the life and books of Jacqueline Susann. ‘…The result was Valley of the Dolls, “the sensational truth about the glamour set on a pill kick”, a careening, gossipy, salacious ride of a read about three women trying to make it, hampered by cads and drugs. She satirised [Ethel] Merman as a blowsy has-been, and based an actress-singer battling with weight and drugs on Judy Garland. Thanks to years of listening at dressing-room doors, her dialogue was irresistible. Caked in kohl, tripping on hairspray (as well as sleeping pills, diet pills and amphetamines), in her Pucci print frocks and lacquered wigs, she rose at dawn to serve truck drivers breakfast – to make sure they’d get her books out in time – then schmoozed booksellers all day, and stayed up late partying with the glitterati.’
4 August 2001
[intersection] Adrian Mole and Big Brother 2 … ‘I lay awake pondering yet again on the true nature of my sexuality. Did I vote for Brian out of gay solidarity or because he is a semi-erudite Irish eccentric? I garnered the evidence: a) I like Kylie Minogue; b) I sleep with a lavender pillow; c) I am no good at sex with women; d) I am very fussy about my sheets, pillowcases and towels.’
30 July 2001
[must read] Salon reviews James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand … ‘Ellroy once called himself “the greatest crime novelist who ever lived,” and then wrote books like “The Black Dahlia,” “The Big Nowhere” and “L.A. Confidential” to prove it. Now he wants to sit with the grown-ups, and if they don’t make room at the table he’s going to tip it over. One way or another, he means to make it, and on his own terms. “Fuck being a crime novelist when you can be a flat-out great novelist,” he once told me — there never being a doubt in his mind that being either one was merely a matter of choice, of will. Ellroy took risks.’ [Related: Cold Six Thousand at Amazon]
29 July 2001
[profile] Prophet of the new child order — Sunday Times profile of Michael Lewis… ‘It seems a curious moment to introduce his theory that technological advance is rocketing ahead too fast for most of us. Virtual reality is mostly stuck in amusement arcades, e-mail use is declining, dotcom companies are still on the ropes and silicon chips report falling profits. All this is irrelevant to the changes that are taking place under our noses, he claims. “The profit-making potential of the internet has been overrated and the social effects of the internet were presumed to be overrated. But they weren’t.”‘
Thank God for the Internet — Another article on Lewis at Salon. On Bill Joy’s view of technological change: ‘…what bothered me was that he had a political interest in reining in this process. Stopping it. Stopping change. This just seemed the height of hypocrisy to me. This is a man whose status in the society derives entirely from the society’s willingness to be very liberal in its attitudes toward technology and change and development and now that he’s on top he wants to control it. It just reeked to me of status anxiety.’
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