The most irritating book of the month (can’t you feel the collective heart of the Spree beating a little faster?) was Joe Pernice’s Meat Is Murder. One can accept, reluctantly, Pernice’s apparently inexhaustible ability to knock out brilliant three-minute pop songs – just about any Pernice Brothers record contains half a dozen tunes comparable to Elvis Costello’s best work. But now it turns out that he can write fiction too, and so envy and bitterness become unavoidable. Meat Is Murder and Warren Zanes’s Dusty in Memphis are both part of a new and neat little ‘33 ⅓’ series published by Continuum; Pernice is the only writer who has chosen to write a novella about a favourite album, rather than an essay; his story is set in 1985, and is about high school and suicide and teen depression and, tangentially, the Smiths. Warren Zanes’s effort, almost the polar opposite of Pernice’s, is a long, scholarly and convincing piece of non-fiction analysing the myth of the American South. Endearingly, neither book mentions the relevant records as much as you’d expect: the music is a ghostly rather than physical presence. I liked Art Linson’s What Just Happened?, one of those scabrous, isn’t-Hollywood-awful books written by someone – a producer, in this case (and indeed in most other cases, e. g. Julia Phillips, Lynda Obst) – who knows what he’s talking about. I can’t really explain why I picked it up, however; perhaps I wanted to be made grateful that I work in publishing, rather than film, and that’s what happened.
Clockers was my big book of the month, the centrepiece around which I can now arrange the short books so that they look functional – pretty, even, if I position them right. I cheated a little, I know – Clockers is essentially a thriller, so it didn’t feel as though I’d had to work for my 650 pages – but it was still a major reading job. Why isn’t Richard Price incredibly famous, like Tom Wolfe? His work is properly plotted, indisputably authentic and serious-minded, and it has soul and moral authority.
Clockers asks – almost in passing, and there’s a lot more to it than this – a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart? Price’s central characters, brothers Strike (complicatedly bad, a crack dealer) and Victor (complicatedly good, the minimum-wage guy), act out something that feels as inevitable and as durable as a Bible story, except with a lot more swearing and drugs. Clockers is – eek – really about the contradictions of capitalism.
I’ve been trying to write a short story that entails my knowing something about contemporary theories of time – hence Introducing Time – but every time I pick up any kind of book about science I start to cry. This actually inhibits my reading pretty badly, due to not being able to see. I’m OK with time theorists up until, say, St Augustine, and then I start to panic, and the panic then gives way to actual weeping. By my estimation, I should be able to understand Newton by the time I’m 850 years old – by which time I’ll probably discover that some smartass has invented a new theory, and he’s out of date anyway. The short story should be done some time shortly after that. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, because it’s killing me.
MARCH 2004
BOOKS BOUGHT:
The Amateur Marriage – Anne Tyler
The Eclipse – Antonella Gambotto
The Complete Richard Hannay – John Buchan
Selected Letters – Gustave Flaubert
Vietnam-Perkasie – W. D. Ehrhart
BOOKS READ:
Some of Flaubert’s letters
Not Even Wrong – Paul Collins
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered
the World – Francis Wheen
Liar’s Poker – Michael Lewis
Some of Greenmantle – John Buchan
How to Stop Smoking and Stay Stopped for Good – Gillian Riley
So this last month was, as I believe you people say, a bust. I had high hopes for it, too; it was Christmastime in England, and I was intending to do a little holiday comfort reading – David Copperfield and a couple of John Buchan novels, say, while sipping an eggnog and heroically ploughing my way through some enormous animal carcass or other. I’ve been a father for ten years now, and not once have I been able to sit down and read several hundred pages of Dickens during the Christmas holidays. Why I thought it might be possible this year, now that I have twice as many children, is probably a question best discussed with an analyst – somewhere along the line, I have failed to take something on board. (Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours’ reading-time while kids are awake. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini.)
If I’m honest, however, it wasn’t just snot-nosed children who crawled between and all over me and Richard Hannay. One of the reasons I wanted to write this column, I think, is because I assumed that the cultural highlight of my month would arrive in book form, and that’s true, for probably eleven months of the year. Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. The Magic Flute v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. The Last Supper v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception – Blonde on Blonde might mash up The Old Curiosity Shop, say, and I wouldn’t give much for Pale Fire’s chances against Citizen Kane. And every now and again you’d get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I’m still backing literature twenty-nine times out of thirty. Even if you love movies and music as much as you do books, it’s still, in any given four-week period, way, way more likely you’ll find a great book you haven’t read than a great movie you haven’t seen, or a great album you haven’t heard: the assiduous consumer will eventually exhaust movies and music. Sure, there will always be gaps and blind spots, but I’ve been watching and listening for a long time, and I’ll never again have the feeling everyone has with literature: that we can’t get through the good novels published in the last six months, let alone those published since publishing began. This month, however, the cultural highlight was a rock-and-roll show – two shows, actually, one of which took place in a pub called the Fiddler’s Elbow in Kentish Town, North London. The Fiddler’s Elbow is not somewhere you would normally expect to find your most memorable drink of the month, let alone your most memorable spiritual moment, but there you go: God really is everywhere. Anyway, against all the odds, and even though they were fighting above their weight, these shows punched the books to the floor. And they were good books, too.
Five or six years ago, a friend in Philly introduced me to a local band called Marah. Their first album had just come out, on an indie label, and it sounded great to me, like the Pogues reimagined by the E Street Band, full of fire and tunes and soul and banjos. There was a buzz about it, and they got picked up by Steve Earle’s label, E-Squared; their next album got noticed by Greil Marcus and Stephen King (who proudly wore a Marah T-shirt in a photo-shoot) and Springsteen himself, and it looked like they were off and away. Writing this down, I can suddenly see the reason why it didn’t happen for them, or at least, why it hasn’t happened yet. Steve Earle, Stephen King, Greil Marcus, Bruce, me… none of us is under a hundred years old. The band is young, but their referents, the music they love, is getting on a bit, and in an attempt to address this problem, they attempted to alienate their ancient fans with a noisy modern rock album. They succeeded in the alienation, but not in finding a new audience, so they have been forced to retreat and retrench and rethink. At the end of the Fiddler’s Elbow show they passed a hat around, which gives you some indication of the level of retrenchment going on. They’ll be OK. Their next album will be a big hit, and they’ll sell out
Madison Square Garden, and you’ll all be boasting that you read a column by a guy who saw them in the Fiddler’s Elbow.
Anyway, the two shows I saw that week were spectacular, as good as anything I’ve seen with the possible exception of the Clash in ’79, Prince in ’85, and Springsteen on the River tour. Dave and Serge, the two brothers who are to Marah what the Gallaghers are to Oasis, played the Fiddler’s Elbow as if it were Giants Stadium, and even though it was acoustic, they just about blew the place up. They were standing on chairs and lying on the floor, they were funny, they charmed everyone in the pub apart from an old drunk sitting next to the drum kit (a drummer turned up halfway through the evening with his own set, having played a gig elsewhere first), who put his fingers firmly in his ears during Serge’s extended harmonica solo. (His mate, meanwhile, rose unsteadily to his feet and started clapping along.) It was utterly bizarre and very moving: most musicians wouldn’t have bothered turning up, let alone almost killing themselves. And I was reminded – and this happened the last time I saw them play, too – how rarely one feels included in a live show. Usually you watch, and listen, and drift off, and the band plays well or doesn’t and it doesn’t matter much either way. It can actually be a very lonely experience. But I felt a part of the music, and a part of the people I’d gone with, and, to cut this short before the encores, I didn’t want to read for about a fortnight afterward. I wanted to write, but I couldn’t because of the holidays, and I wanted to listen to Marah, but I didn’t want to read no book. I was too itchy, too energized, and if young people feel like that every night of the week, then, yes, literature’s dead as a dodo. (In an attempt to get myself back on course, I bought Bill Ehrhardt’s book Vietnam-Perkasie, because he comes Marah-endorsed, and provided the inspiration for ‘Round Eye Blues’, one of their very best songs. I didn’t read the thing, though. And their next album is tentatively entitled 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, after a Patrick Hamilton novel – I’m going to order that and not read it, too.)
It wasn’t as if I didn’t try; it was just that very little I picked up fit very well with my mood. I bought Flaubert’s letters after reading the piece about Donald Barthelme’s required reading list in the Believer [October 2003], but they weren’t right – or at least, they’re not if one chooses to read them in chronological order. The young Flaubert wasn’t very rock and roll. He was, on this evidence, kind of a prissy, nerdy kid.‘friend, I shall send you some of my political speeches, liberal constitutionalist variety,’ he wrote to Ernest Chevalier in January 1831; he’d just turned nine years old. Nine! Get a life, kid! (Really? You wrote those? They’re pretty good books. Well… Get another one, then.) I am probably taking more pleasure than is seemly in his failure to begin the sentence with a capital letter. You know, as in, Jesus, he didn’t know the first thing about basic punctuation! How did this loser ever get to be a writer?
Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World was a better fit, because, well, it rocks: it’s fast and smart and very funny, despite being about how we have betrayed the Enlightenment by retreating back to the Dark Ages. Wheen wrote a warm, witty biography of Marx a few years back and has a unique, sharp, enviable and trustworthy mind. Here he dishes it out two-fisted to Tony Blair and George W. Bush, Deepak Chopra and Francis Fukuyama, Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton and Jacques Derrida, and by the end of the book you do have the rather dizzying sensation that you, the author, and maybe Richard Dawkins are the only remotely sane people in the entire world. It’s difficult to endorse this book without committing a few cardinal Believer sins: as you may have noticed, some of the people that Wheen accuses of talking bullshit are, regrettably, writers, and in a chapter entitled ‘The Demolition Merchants of Reality’, Wheen lumps deconstructionism in with creationism. In other words, he claims there isn’t much to choose from between Pat Buchanan and Jacques Lacan when it comes to mumbo-jumbo, and I’m sorry to say that I laughed a lot. The next chapter, ‘The Catastrophists’, gives homoeopathy, astrology and UFOlogy a good kicking, and you’ll find yourself conveniently forgetting the month you gave up coffee and mint because you were taking arnica three times a day. (Did you know that Jacques Benveniste, one of the world’s leading homoeopathic ‘scientists’, now claims that you can email homoeopathic remedies? Yeah, see, what you do is you can take the ‘memory’ of the diluted substance out of the water electromagnetically, put it on your computer, email it, and play it back on a sound card into new water. I mean, that could work, right?)
Richard Dawkins, Wheen recalls, once pointed out that if an alternative remedy proves to be efficacious – that is to say, if it is shown to have curative properties in rigorous medical trials – then ‘it ceases to be an alternative; it simply becomes medicine’. In other words, it’s only ‘alternative’ so long as it’s been shown not to be any bloody good. I found it impossible not to apply this helpful observation to other areas of life. Maybe a literary novel is just a novel that doesn’t really work, and an art film merely a film that people don’t want to see… How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World is a clever-clogs companion to Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men; and as it’s about people of both sexes and every conceivable hue, it’s arguably even more ambitious.
I read Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’s book about bond-traders in the eighties, for two reasons, one of which was Wheen-inspired: he made me want to try to be more clever, especially about grown-up things like economics. Plus I’d read Lewis’s great Moneyball a couple of months previously [see p. 38], so I already knew that he was capable of leading me through the minefields of my own ignorance. It turns out, though, that the international money markets are more complicated than baseball. These guys buy and sell mortgages! They buy and sell risk! But I haven’t got a clue what any of that actually means! This isn’t Michael Lewis’s fault – he really did try his best, and in any case you kind of romp through the book anyway: the people are pretty compelling, if completely unlike anyone you might meet in real life. At one point, Lewis describes an older trader throwing a ten-dollar bill at a young colleague about to take a business flight.‘Hey, take out some crash insurance for yourself in my name,’ the older guy says.‘I feel lucky.’ As a metaphor for what happens on the trading floor, that’s pretty hard to beat.
Francis Wheen’s book and Paul Collins’s Not Even Wrong were advance reading copies that arrived through the post. I’m never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because quite clearly there’s nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one’s otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. I had no idea I wanted to read Wheen’s book until it arrived, and it was because of Wheen that I read Lewis, and then Not Even Wrong turned up and I wanted to read that too, and Buchan’s Greenmantle got put to one side, I suspect for ever. Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e. g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.
Having said that I hardly ever read books about autism, I have now read two in the last few weeks. Paul Collins, occasionally of this parish, is another parent of an autistic kid, and Not Even Wrong, like Charlotte Moore’s George and Sam, is a memoir of sorts. The two books are complementary, though; while writing unsentimentally but movingly about his son Morgan’s diagnosis and the family’s response, Collins trawls around, as is his wont, for historical and contemporary illustration and resonance, and finds plenty. There’s Peter the Wild Boy, who became part of the royal household in the early eighteenth century, and who met Pope, Addison, Steele, Swift and Defoe – he almost certainly played for our team. (Autistic United? Maybe Autistic Wanderers is better.) And Collins finds a lot of familiar traits among railway-timetable collectors, and Microsoft boffins, and outsider artists… I’m happy that we’re living through these times of exceptionally written and imaginative memoirs, despite the incessant
whine you hear from the books-pages; Collins’s engaging, discursive book isn’t as raw as some, but in place of rawness there is thoughtfulness, and thoughtfulness is never a bad thing. I even learned stuff, and you can’t often say that of a memoir.
New Year, New Me, another quick read of Gillian Riley’s How to Stop Smoking and Stay Stopped for Good. I have now come to think of Riley as our leading cessation theorist; she’s brilliant, but now I need someone who deals with the practicalities.
APRIL 2004
BOOKS BOUGHT:
Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
The Long Firm – Jake Arnott
American Sucker – David Denby
BOOKS READ:
Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
The Long Firm – Jake Arnott
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
True Notebooks – Mark Salzman
Last month I was banging on about how books were better than anything – how just about any decent book you picked would beat up anything else, any film or painting or piece of music you cared to match it up with. Anyway, like most theories advanced in this column, it turned out to be utter rubbish. I read four really good books this month, but even so, my cultural highlights of the last four weeks were not literary. I went to a couple of terrific exhibitions at the Royal Academy (and that’s a hole in my argument right there – one book might beat up one painting, but what chance has one book, or even four books, got against the collected works of Guston and Vuillard?); I saw Jose Antonio Reyes score his first goal for Arsenal against Chelsea, a thirty-yard screamer, right in the top corner; and someone sent me a superlative Springsteen bootleg, a’75 show at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr with strings, and a cover of ‘I Want You’, and I don’t know what else. Like I said, I loved the books that I read this month, but when that Reyes shot hit the back of the net, I was four feet in the air. (The Polysyllabic Spree hates sport, especially soccer, because it requires people to expose their arms and legs, and the Spree believes that all body parts must be covered at all times. So even though I’m not allowed to talk about Reyes at any length, he does look to be some player.) Anyway, Patrick Hamilton didn’t even get me to move my feet. I just sat there – lay there, most of the time – throughout the whole thing. So there we are, then. Books: pretty good, but not as good as other stuff, like goals, or bootlegs.