I was doing a bit of writing this evening and ended up at one point including the phrase ‘ee-ay-addio’ which had me wondering about its origins. Via Private Eye’s football reporter E I Addio, I ended up looking at football chants and then back to the nursery rhyme ‘The farmer in the dell’, where it comes from. The rhyme itself is alluded to in The Secret History by Donna Tartt (a book I love), and I’m pretty sure it’s referenced by Dennis Potter in The Singing Detective. It is also the source for the title of the book I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. For some reason I’ve been thinking about Robert Cormier recently, even though I’ve not read any of his books since I was a teenager. I went looking for any surviving Cormier books and found a long-forgotten copy of the screenplay to Jules et Jim. 
That and After the First Death are stacked up as the next books to read. And back at my writing - it’s a story about a computer - I finished a second draft, did a word count and discovered I had written 6502 words. The very first computer I used was my brother’s KIM-1, basically a development kit for the 6502 processor, and my introduction to computer programming was 6502 assembly language.
Archive for the 'literature' Category
After a strangely satisfying day at work I feel like I’m on a roll. I’m reading a great book (thank you Sarah) - a Douglas Coupland that eluded me - Eleanor Rigby. Pretty much every page has a beautiful idea or joke - like the idea that the reason that the FBI witness relocation program is so successful is because anyone who goes on it gets shot. Genius!
And I’ve rediscovered a lost gem in my CD collection (thank you Smilja wherever you are) - Are You Okay? by Was (Not Was). It’s from 1990! It still sounds great! It has an up-tempo song that’s actually about domestic murder! It has Leonard Cohen singing about Elvis’s Rolls Royce! It has a song - oddly not heard on the radio much since 9/11 - called ‘I Blew Up The United States’! And I feel better than James Brown! I feel better now. How do you feel?
One of the unexpected pleasures of having young children who play rugby on a Sunday morning, is that one of the other dads just lent me Mark E Smith’s autobiography. I’m glad I didn’t shell out for the hard-back as it’s a slim volume, but I did chuckle at the things he had to say about the BBC and Johnny Cash.
They’re an odd bunch at the BBC. I remember having to meet these two media graduates just before they started filming that documentary… what a pair they were! One of them was this girl, a festival type, a Jo Whiley-ite. She’d just come back from some festival or other, and that was all she could talk about… First thing she did as she sat down was cross her legs as if she was about to do some fucking yoga - a modern hippy, in other words. I offered to buy her a drink but she’s like, ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly have another drink. I drank so much at this festival’… and she never made an effort to get her round in. What are they teaching them at the BBC?
I liked the way everyone started jumping on the Johnny Cash bandwagon as well. If you were a Cash fan in the 70s people thought you were a racist. Nobody admitted to it… I find it horrible the way they’ve made money out of him, releasing all these maudlin recordings. Give me early Cash any day… The film was a disgrace as well… Would you rather see Walk the Fucking Line with River Phoenix’s daft brother or Cash Live at San Quentin?
And just the odd beautiful turn of phrase:
You can bet some strange things go on behind the doors of the FA. They’re like a cult; a randy cult souped up on good wine, expensive fruit and nice clean sausages.
I saw this on the CBBC show Chute! By the end I was laughing out loud.
Here’s a good game… found on a blog called Never Judge A Book By Its Cover.
“Someone” [she doesn't say who] reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. It’s not the Big Read though — they don’t publish books, and they’ve only featured these books so far. In any event . . .
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you started but did not finish.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 or less and force books upon them.
1. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
3. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
4. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
5. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
6. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
7. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
8. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
10. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
12. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
13. His Dark Materials (trilogy) - Philip Pullman
14. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
15. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
18. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
19. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
21. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
22. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
23. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
24. Animal Farm - George Orwell
25. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
26. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
27. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
28. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
29. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
30. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
31. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
32. Complete Works of Shakespeare
33. Ulysses - James Joyce
34. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
35. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
36. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
37. The Bible
38. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
40. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
41. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
42. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
46. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
47. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
48. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
49. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
50. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
51. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
53. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
54. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
55. Middlemarch - George Eliot
56. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
57. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
58. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
59. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
60. Emma - Jane Austen
61. Persuasion - Jane Austen
62. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
63. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
64. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
65. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
66. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
67. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
68. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
69. Atonement - Ian McEwan
70. Dune - Frank Herbert
71. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
72. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
73. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
74. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
75. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
76. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
77. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
78. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
79. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
80. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
81. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
82. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
83. Dracula - Bram Stoker
84. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
85. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
86. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
87. Germinal - Emile Zola
88. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
89. Possession - A.S. Byatt
90. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
91. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
92. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
93. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
94. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
95. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
96. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
97. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
98. Watership Down – Richard Adams
99. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
100. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
So how did I do? Read 27 or 28, so a bit better than 6, piss-poor for an English graduate - and I only really loved 4 of them. Well, Hitch-Hiker’s Guide is a radio play not a novel, and The Wasp Factory isn’t Iain Banks’s best book, The Crow Road is, as any fule no.
Bit depressing. Of those four I loved, Donna Tartt is the one I’d fish out of the fire first. Man, can that woman write. She doesn’t write much - having made a career out of writing only two books in about 20 years - but she just puts you there like no-one else.
Today I was killing time while my sons had their swimming lesson. I walked around the outside of the pool with my daughter. As we got ready to go back inside I heard a man say to his young son “the Astra is basically Vauxhall’s version of the Focus”. And it’s at times like that that I think I know why Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
Just took my Richard Brautigan anthology off the shelf and it looks like I haven’t read it in a while.
The bookmark is one of the strips of paper BBC World Service studio managers used to write their shifts down on.
On this day I did shift A4 which consisted of the following:
- 1700-1730 Thai PO Box recording in S14
- 1730 in S35 for a Somali transmission, on air at 1800. Jonathan Haine was panelling
- 1930 in C33 for a Ukranian transmission on air at 2000. Tania Garner was the panel SM.
- 2045-2315 in the Newsroom. So, no change there, then.
On the back of the sheet I had written the words ‘Surplus Affection’. Mmm.
(another short story, I’m afraid… look away)
Winterlong the tall tree stood shoulder-to-shoulder with all the other trees beside the busy road that snaked through the forest. The tree spent the short days watching the ebb and flow of the traffic, wondering why and where all the people were going in their cars. As more cars appeared on the roads he felt his branches tingling more and more.
Spring came and as the sap rose in the other trees the forest grew noisier as the wind rustled the leaves that started growing on the other trees. But none grew on the tallest tree.
He started to grow sad, standing apart a little from the other trees. The other trees looked so beautiful with their fine greenery, and as the wind blew through the forest it seemed as if all the other trees were talking about him.
One day a bright red fox was exploring the forest and noticed that the tallest tree looked sad, his branches drooping.
“Hey, tallest tree!” she called.
The tallest tree looked around, hardly daring to believe that the fox was talking to him.
“Me?” he mumbled.
“Yes - you! What’s wrong? Why are your branches drooping?’ asked the fox.
“All the other trees have beautiful leaves and I have none.”
“So… you’re different from the other trees?”
“Yes.”
“But you must be here for a reason.”
“Really?” asked the tree, “Why are you here, fox?”
“I empty the bins” replied the fox.
“Oh. I don’t do that. I don’t do anything, except watch the sun rise and set and the moon wax and wane…”
“That’s something. Don’t you notice anything else?”
“My branches tingle sometimes. More in the day”.
“Listen to the tingles!” laughed the fox and she ran off deeper into the forest.
“Come back!” cried the tallest tree but she had left him all alone.
The sky lightened as the sun rose and the tallest tree watched the cars grow in number. The tingling in his branches got stronger and he remembered what the fox had said. He closed his ears, emptied his mind and listened to the tingling. And now he could hear the voices, so many voices and messages pulsing through his veins, words of anger, words of joy and words of love.
(A short story. Sorry.)
What is it with beautiful women and ugly blokes?
You’ve heard that before, right - some stand-up or other? But it truly happens and it makes me crazy with fury and rage at the injustice of it.
Take the 9.23. I took the 9.23. Every day. I used to see this couple sitting in my carriage on the 9.23. He was - anyone would agree with me - an ugly bloke. His physique was nothing special. His face suggested that he’d sprung forth by some process of spontaneous generation from the lower layers of silt at the bottom of the gene pool. At least you’d think that if you saw him on his own - but he wasn’t on his own, was he?
No, he was always sitting next to his girlfriend (surely not wife) - the not-quite-domestic goddess. In her late 30s, I’m guessing no kids, dripping in Boden, her long dark hair framing her perfect face and lips that would kiss… she looked a bit Nigella-ish to be sure, but less playful, less - oh I don’t know…. less obvious.
I was bewitched. Maddened. Intrigued. Every morning there they were, every morning I was trying to figure out exactly what she saw in him. His repartee? Nothing doing there. His wealth? The shoes and watch say no. Good in bed? That must be it. Bastard. Lucky, lucky bastard. I hate you. I wish bad things upon you. I want you out of her life. I want her for myself.
Then one day he got on the train with his arm in plaster. After that he wasn’t on the train so much. I still saw her though, every day at 9.23 she pitched up just in time. She was what Jerry Seinfeld would call a ‘close stander’. I must have taken the spot on the platform that she had decided long ago was the optimal point to stand. I was always there long before her, and always - even if the platform was fairly empty - she would stand unfeasibly close to me. And then when we got on the train she always walked right, I always walked left.
Then I never saw him on the train again. Not once.
Last week, I was wandering home in the twilight and saw him ahead of me. Ugly bloke. Ugly bloke more dishevelled than normal, shuffling down my street with a handful of old carrier bags.
Walking up my path. Knocking on my door.
I read this fine passage from E M Forster today, on the train appropriately enough, and wished I’d spotted it in time to add it to my essay on train travel between Paddington and Slough. Somehow it is made even more poignant by the fact that Mark Speight apparently killed himself so close to Paddington station because it reminded him of trips to the West Country with his girlfriend.
Like many others who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return. In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo [...] And he is a chilly Londoner who does not endow his stations with some personality, and extend to them, however shyly, the emotions of fear and love.
Howard’s End, Chapter 2.
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