Wildlife Day 6, .Portnoy's Complaint, the beginning of The Centaur

Getting back into the habit of reading multiple books at the same time, swapping from one to the other. I suppose it is a bad habit, shows an inability to concentrate on one thing at a time. But I need to change. I read the first chapter of Portnoy's Complaint last night, and  before 8am in the morning, then finished Wildlife. In between I read the first dense, lyrical paragraph of The Centaur again, as I'd found my old brown paged paperback copy on the table, in the kitchen. I did write "battered" but it came out as "nattered" , and then I decided that it was too cliched a description and deleted it.  But "old brown paged paperback copy" seems too long and ponderous. Get rid of the copy.  An old brown paged paperback.  Still too long. a brown-paged paperback.  But I don't like brown-paged, even with the hyphen. The pages are brown now, especially at the edges, and I wanted that to be known, but brown-paged?? It's too ugly a construction.  Browned paperback.  Maybe that's it - now it becomes a better piece of prose - I can get rid of the "old", as well and  looking back on it I've retrospectively added the commas, after "dense" and after "table" - that just counts as correction.  But maybe that first comma doesn't belong there. Maybe the second comma doesn't either.  It doesn't read right. Maybe it should be:

In between I read the first dense lyrical paragraph of The Centaur again, as I'd found my browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.

Now I'm having problems with the "again". It jars the rhythm of the sentence too much. It could become:

 In between I read the first dense lyrical paragraph of The Centaur , as I'd found my much read browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.

But "much read" is too twee.  Just a  reread" instead of a "read".  And I've taken out all the commas again to make it one long trot of a read to the end of the sentence.

 In between I reread the first dense lyrical paragraph of The Centaur as I'd found my  browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.

Now I have an urge to to put "fiercely dense" in, which alliterates with "first", and gets across the  intensity of that first paragraph. Over-egging?

 In between I reread the first  fiercely dense and lyrical paragraph of The Centaur as I'd found my  browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.

This is why I like having a real life editor as well as an electronic capability to endlessly revise and revise.

Time now to pay homage to the computer and the word processor.  But when I look back at pages of prose that I've written in notebooks way way before home computing I can see the same process going on, but just full of scribble and scrawl and crossings out. Might be interesting to try writing a whole story in Word with Track Changes on.

Here's that first paragraph anyway, with the second paragraph thrown in for good measure as I actually reread that as well. Being a favourite book I have it on the Kindle as well as in paperback.


CALDWELL turned and as he turned his ankle received an arrow. The class burst into laughter. The pain scaled the slender core of his shin, whirled in the complexities of his knee, and, swollen broader, more thunderous, mounted into his bowels. His eyes were forced upward to the blackboard, where he had chalked the number 5,000,000,000, the probable age in years of the universe. The laughter of the class, graduating from the first shrill bark of surprise into a deliberately aimed hooting, seemed to crowd against him, to crush the privacy that he so much desired, a privacy in which he could be alone with his pain, gauging its strength, estimating its duration, inspecting its anatomy. The pain extended a feeler into his head and unfolded its wet wings along the walls of his thorax, so that he felt, in his sudden scarlet blindness, to be himself a large bird waking from sleep. The blackboard, milky slate smeared with the traces of last night’s washing, clung to his consciousness like a membrane. The pain seemed to be displacing with its own hairy segments his heart and lungs; as its grip swelled in his throat he felt he was holding his brain like a morsel on a platter high out of a hungry reach. Several of the boys in their bright shirts all colors of the rainbow had risen upright at their desks, leering and baying at their teacher, cocking their muddy shoes on the folding seats. The confusion became unbearable. Caldwell limped to the door and shut it behind him on the furious festal noise. 

Out in the hall, the feather end of the arrow scraped on the floor with every step. The metallic scratch and stiff rustle mixed disagreeably. His stomach began to sway with nausea. The dim, long walls of the ochre hall wavered; the classroom doors, inset with square numbered panes of frosted glass, seemed experimental panels immersed in an activated liquid charged with children’s voices chanting French, singing anthems, discussing problems of Social Science. Avez-vous une maison jolie? Oui, j’ai une maison très jolie for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain throughout our history boys and girls (this was the voice of Pholos), the federal government has grown in prestige, power, and authority but we must not forget, boys and girls, that by origin we are a union of sovereign republics, the United God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood —the beautiful song was blindly persisting in Caldwell’s brain. To shining sea. The old baloney. He had heard it first in Passaic.

Updike, John (2007-08-30). The Centaur (Kindle Locations 117-135). Penguin UK. Kindle Edition. 

Wildlife has a strange distant feel to it - Richard Ford's 16yr old protagonist is nothing like as on fire as Alex in Portnoy. His view of his parents split is filled with pain, but it's unexpressed except in his blank thoughts, and his trying to say and do the right thing in a situation that he just does not comprehend. He is a lonely boy who only has his parents, he has no friends in Great Falls. I find these characters strange - the boy is very like the 16yr old in Canada - it doesn't feel like my experience of adolescence. Updike and Roth both capture this intense sexuality and richness of feeling and thought, whereas Ford is describing, is telling a story, though the eyes of an almost completely uncomprehending child who has not even begun to understand his own life.

Wildlife - day 2,3, Neal Asher - The Other Gun

A slow pace of reading, mainly because preoccupied with other things. And I did read a new Neal Asher short story in Asimov's Science Fiction. Which wasn't quite satisfying. Set in the Polity universe that he has created (Orbus is the best novel in this series), it's full of hardware and alien technology, trademark exotic weaponry, interesting twists. I read it like you might read a celebrity magazine*, with a faint sense of titillation but a sense of unease.

Unease. Typifies how you feel when you have a cold sore (herpes simplex), a visible, unsightly and painful sore with accompanying flu like symptoms. I used to get them more regularly  after catching the virus from an old girlfriend at drama college. No idea where she is now - I think she emigrated to New Zealand and has disappeared from view, but I have, every so often, this insistent reminder of our relatively short relationship.

Wildlife is still good, but I'm slightly impatient with its slow progress. It definitely feels like a rehearsal for Canada, which is a better book.

*Or how I imagine people read celebrity magazines, or those magazines aimed at women at the supermarket check-out. They can't have sweets there now, so they have translated those desires into a taste for sugary shlock horror true life horror. Trauma is relative of course, for the celebrity there are headlines, fucking headlines, about a roll of fat round the waist caught by some low life paparazzi, whereas the true life lower class real life stuff consists of women married to serial murderers who have gradually dispensed with their children, children brought up in dustbins without any TV, that kind of thing.

Wildlife - Richard Ford - day 1, New Yorker Magazine, Mar 25

Back to proper fiction courtesy of that strange book shop in Trafalgar street where nearly all the books are pile in length ways, so that you can't see the spine or any of the titles without taking a shelf height pile of a dozen books out.  Wildlife feels like the first version of Canada - 16 year old protagonist trying to make sense of his parents life, before he begins to try and make sense of his own. The writings so good though, effortless and flowing. I'm wondering if, like the artists who trained with the old masters, I should just take this book and rewrite it as my own, copy the style like brushstrokes, trying to get inside the structure and the form.

The New Yorker always - always what? - delivers the goods? provides something surprising. I feel like just making another bullet pointed list of the weird and wacky stuff it contains, but that would be a little repetitive.  But a street rapper turned bespoke rich clothing retailer, turning out made to order gear for crack dealers, boxers and rappers.? Strange story. Rags to riches stuff of course(Americans love that shit).  Then this alarming article about that rich bitch mining magnate in Australia, suing her father, suiting her children, obsessed with her money. Even more unsavory than Murdoch.

What else? Saw two films - The Spirit of 45 at Komedia, The Hunger Games on Netflix at home. '45 was a restrained polemic, it just let the poverty and anger and distress of what had happened before the war speak for itself, matter-of-factly and quietly.  Then the nationalisation of everything and the creating of the NHS.. And then from Thatcher onwards the gradual dismantling of everything except the NHS. 

Big Data, New Statesman, dreamthinkspeak, Hayward gallery light show

Big Data is one of those books written by experts who you heard talk somewhere ( Start the Week , BBC Radio 4 in my case) and thought, yeah, that's interesting. And I've got a hangover professional interest in data as well from HFEA days. The trouble is, that the book just restates, (certainly in the first three chapters), what he managed to say quite well on the radio.  Basically, we have such huge data sets ( and I mean if you think the number of little triangles in a Risk set is big, then you're thinking way way too small) that accuracy, and meaning aren't important anymore. Google found a correlation between bits of their data in searches and the spread of flu in the United states that predicted outbreaks two weeks before the medical authorities were aware they had a problem.  Big messy data, unstructured, incomplete, but containing within it correlations that allow you to make real time predictions. Women buy certain kinds of goods when they first know they're pregnant, so you can bombard them with baby stuff months before anyone else sees them ordering a babygro. Vital signs monitoring in premature baby units show, counter-intuitively,  certain very stable patterns just before they go down with an infection, so you can predict ahead of time. Don't know why, just know what is going to happen. Don't know what the causal link is - just know the prediction. 

Well it sounds like epidemiology to me. Give a million people statins everyday and less of them will die of heart attacks and strokes.  Monitor a million people who smoke vs a million who don't, the smokers die earlier. We don't really know why, pertinent for me in the case of statins - if I take them I'll halve my chances of a heart attack / stroke in the next ten years. Why? Don't really know. 

I am getting bored writing about stats because the final awful certainty of it is that Amazon, Google and Facebook are going to sell a lot more stuff a lot more successfully to you, and you are going to buy more material goods than you ever had before. Ain't that a good idea. Oh well. We have the data and the processing power. 

But at the Hayward Gallery there were three rooms, one brightly lit in green, one rose pink, one blue. Walk from the green into the rose room and that rose is the deepest most intense rose pink you'll ever see. All you green cones have been saturated with the green light - all you can see is pink.  It was really powerful almost overwhelming. The attendant outside the room was doing a whole sing and dance act, attracting people in, a sort of random rap, "All you gotta do, is take off your shoe, it's your birthday in this room, you won't have no gloom". He was kind of freindly and weird and joyful at the same time.

Later on, I overheard the head attendant saying to another, "Can you hear him? What shall I do, shall I just tell him to shut up?"  I couldn't resist intervening - I said it's OK, it's a bit of harmless joy, nobody seems to mind.

dreamthinkspeak were as atmospheric and elegiac as ever. Instead of the department store that covered  one floor of the Cherry Orchard in Brighton, we were invited into the headquarters of Fusion Inc, to see the PetBots (actually built in Brighton), or the flame something, the demonstrators speaking the same mixed argot of intalian/spanish / german /russian and nonsense language that they spoke in the department store. This will mean nothing to you if yo have never seen dreamthinkspeak. Just see them, whenever you can. The Somerset House event is sold out to July though. Nothing that new in it though if you've seen them before, but still a dreamy, immersive experience, with moments of power and beauty.  They seem better when they are working with a myth or text like the Cherry orchard, which gives a more unifying and balanced theme. Lacking in meaning. We know working in call centres is dehumanising. We know that some high tec companies value the tech above all everything except whether it will sell or not.

I was a bit snotty about the New Statesman in a previous entry so bought one to read on the train up to London. It kind of met my snotty expectations. A bit local (though very European - article about how we always needed/ resisted the Germans!). Best article was Will Self writing about Costa in terms that you might expect, but so so stylishly.

So not a great day for reading, = a bit of a boring ramble of a blog. In my view.

Zona - Day 4, Stalker

You can't talk about Zona , which I finished this morning, without talking about Stalker obviously. But I'm writing an account of reading a book which is an account of watching a film - how far back can you go in this kind of recursion.  Well not very far, no-one is going to write an account of reading a blog about... etc. etc. It's  great to find someone else who loves this film, who is happy with its impenetrability and odd beauty.  I say odd beauty because Tarkovsky eschews dramatic images for lingering shots of puddles, bits of wasteland, syringes and rubble covering the floor, often under water.  Even in the beginning of Solaris, the bit that sticks in my mind is the marshy, slightly muddy bank with the clear water flowing through the water weeds.  I'm saying that purely from memory, even if it's wrong that's my image of Tarkovsky's visual sense.  Always water in Tarkovsky, still, flowing, reflecting, rain. 

In the end of the Stalker his wife lights a cigarette and speaks direct to the camera. She speaks of love and loyalty essentially, but the author of Zona hates the fact that she lights a cigarette, that there is a burnt out match there - hates the sight and smell of cigarette smoke. It touches on one of those things that can always happen, even with the books and films you love, there are parts, scenes, images that you just don't want, that trigger a visceral disgust that belongs to you, not the film. So I'm thinking, while the stalker lies on a small island of grass and rubble and lets the beetle crawl over his hand, how I would not like to be the actor having to let the beetle crawl over him, I'm not watching the film so much as imagining being the actor. 

Dirty Havana Trilogy pt 1 Day 6-7 , Zona Day 2-3, Stalker, New Yorker Magazine, Mar 18

So a messy weekend and a quiet, crawl back under a duvet whenever possible Monday. In fact i watched the Stalker on YouTube, where all of Tarkovsky's movies are now, on my Nexus, because I'm reading Zona, which goes through the entire film step by step. Third time,maybe fourth, watching Stalker  and maybe the best time. The sound is quite faint so I used my iPod earphones and lay in bed watching this small but clear screen.  I could stop whenever I wanted, and somehow, even tho' it's only a 7 inch screen it was more immersive than watching it on the TV in the sitting room, with all the intervening space of floor, rug, coffee table getting in the way of you and the film. It's why I like cinema so much more than watching a film on TV - it's dark, it's quiet (unless you're watching a blockbuster in some prole pit like the Odeon, when people just can't shut up), it fills your vision without interruptions.  Amazingly watching on the Nexus captured some of that feeling, and my attention was kept on the images.

There's a famous sequence, where the Stalker and the Writer and the Professor are on a small petrol driven rail cart, rail clanking along at a steady speed - we just see the backs of their heads, each in turn, while this grey, ruined mix of countryside and abandoned buildings and industry passes by. It's restful, interminable in a good way. Then the cart stops, and the film immediately goes from this weird monochrome to full colour, a long steady shot of greenery, trees, long grass, big weeds, overgrown meadow.  It's a very gentle startling moment of great power, I'm not sure why. I've seen it done before, in Heimat, where in a time of leanness and hunger the camera focuses on potato cakes frying in a pan in black and white - they fill the whole screen, until colour floods in and blasts you with the smell and taste to be of the potato cakes, a kind of cinematic synaesthesia. Zona is good enough, it has a real respect for Tarkovsky, while not sidestepping the issue that so many auteurs can be such wankers. Just had to quickly look up auteur, to make sure I was using the right word, and I think I was. Yet again the internet's availability changes reading, having the film of Stalker right by me, in my fucking hand, watchable in an instant while I'm reading Zona, changes how I would have read the book.  I can instantly see where he's right or wrong - he's mainly insightful and right, but it is a beetle that crawls over the Stalkers hand , not a fucking ant. Unless they have huge ants in Russia. That look like beetles. I could go and check again, but I can't be arsed.

I've finished the first book in the Dirty Havana trilogy, which ends abruptly in rural idyll, staying in a hut on his cousins farm, helping out with crops, 5am starts in sky, land and sun.It works this ending - you just feel that the intensity of Havana has got too much, everybody needs a break, even the reader, everybody needs to go somewhere quiet, natural and away. 

The New Yorker Magazine though. Crazy magazine, but so much more interesting than any English equivalent - though maybe I should check out an issue of the New Statesman but I hate well meaning po-faced left journals nearly as much as shit slinging right wing rags like the Spectator.  

I read these long articles on:

• Transgender reassignment, pre-puberty issues and more
• The throwing of acid in the Bolshoi directors face earlier this year
• The Republican leader and their retreat to lick their wounds after their defeat
• Florida's sinkhole peril
• a profile of Ruth Bader Ginsburg ( a Supreme Court Judge)
• Aaron Swartz - the guy indicted for downloading millions of articles from an academic database, who then committed suicide

Highlights might be:

• advice given  to (male) Republican politicians in campaigning - don't talk about rape
• The history of the sheer corruption and in-fighting at the Bolshei ballet - always a badge of respectability for every tyrannical politician from Stalin to Putin
• said of Swartz - he had " a tremendous and in some ways pathological capacity for compassion"
• it costs over $100,000 to get a dick made out of your vagina if you are F.T.M (Female to Male), but it's cheaper and easier the other way round (M.T.F). That's a bit of a cheap thrill highlight actually - the article does spend time explaining that sexual identity isn't all that gender re-assignment is about. 

The New Yorker Magazine is great for reading at the table, around 7am, when I've made coffee, breakfasts, sandwiches and am drinking my own black liquid kick-start and beginning to feel ready to face the day.

Dirty Havana Trilogy Day 4, Day 5 , Zona Day 1

Starting to get a bit lost in some of the unevenness of the stories in the first book of the Dirty Havana Trilogy, so have slowed down reading. Then Zona came though the post today, - as it says on the cover "a Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room" - it's a book about Tarkovsky's Stalker, one of my favourite incomprehensible films. So I started reading that - the first few pages anyway. I hope it gets a lot fucking better than the start, which is mildly interesting, a bit laboured. But the man thinks that if he hadn't seen Stalker his responsiveness to the world would have been "radically diminished".  It pisses me off that he has said that, firstly because I agree, and secondly if this guy turns out to be a right little tosser who's written a crap book about one of my top films, I will , in some sense, feel radically diminished myself in some unexplained way. And if you think that is unclear, then you had better watch the Stalker.  

So. I'm actually writing this waiting for a poker tournament to start - there seems no point to stopping until it does start as what would I do?  I don't like to read things while I'm keeping an eye on something else. Writing is ok.  It's like the mental equivalent of lifting your eyes from the screen to look out the window to rest them, watching out for the names that should soon appear in the tournament roster. I have to keep an eye on them because I look up their status, and make a decision whether these players are crap (fish in poker terminology), or good, or there isn't enough information to decided. You can look up every poker players online results for all their poker playing career, unless they have actively written to a site to block their stats being shown.  Which some do. I don't - I'm quite proud of my ROI (Return on Interest) - at least it's positive - yes I win money at poker! But not very much. A few hundred quid every six months (total profit that is).

Dirty Havana Trilogy Day 3

It's still good but is there more to say about it? I'm along for the ride with this sex obsessed rum obsessed, sometimes down sometimes out, journalist who's got none of the material trappings of Hunter. S. Thompson. He is where he is and we're jogging along fine in a Havana that is literally falling down, whole walls of apartments block crumbling away in a storm.
As one 83 old lady says in the book,  "There's no place in the world where the government can take care of everything".

Then I get to thinking, this is a big dysfunctional fucked up city with a big dysfunctional fucked up government - but this is Castro's Cuba right, and Pedro Juan Guatierrez still lives there. So how does he manage to stay clear of being arrested?.  He's already said that when he was journalist half his writing was censored. So maybe it's pretty good in Cuba, just hot and run down (blame the US embargo as well as Castro for that)  and full of people in skimpy clothing - see what he says here: Pedro Juan Guatierrez.   I like this man. Two extra obsessions at the moment, just discovered (apart from the usual that is) - reading Guatierrez and listening to Lily Allan.  I think we all share a love of sex, drugs and profanity, but above all sheer enjoyment and interest in the world. And none of us would have anytime for Bush. 

Dirty Havana Trilogy Day 2

I was going to say that the Dirty Havana Trilogy was about as far as you can get from Philip Roth, apart from the preoccupation with sex and fucking, but then another  parallel struck me - the protagonist is a writer (well a journalist), another (Cuban) Zuckerman.  It's all heady stuff, full of poverty, dirt, sex, and racial comment. I was going to say racism, but although there are comments that you could easily say, hey that is really racist, it's more reportage, repeating the casual unexamined attitudes that you find under the surface almost anywhere.  I remember an Indian colleague of mine who said that going to Cuba was the first time that he had been anywhere where there wasn't a hint of racism in his reception, where he felt the colour of his skin was completely irrelevant.  

The poverty is in your face, it smells, it's not clean, it's not a fastidious book, or a book for the fastidious.  There used to be a kind of American literature branded "Dirty Realism", whole Granta anthologies of it which were good to read, but this really fits the term.  Instead of nice apartments and houses backing onto mountains there are shacks with no plumbing, single rooms with wooden platforms where a child sleeps in one corner while they fuck in the other, the building seemingly collapsing around them as stones and dust rain down.  The whole feel is episodic rather than constructed, hot, dusty, drug and alcohol hazed chaos. Like Charles Bukowski in a hot climate, without any grinding post office to work in, just the occasional hustle to move things along and get some cash, food, drugs, drink, sex.

Exit Ghost - Day 4, Day 5; Dirty Havana Trilogy Day 1

I'm struggling to find a voice that's appropriate to talk about Exit Ghost.  Finished reading it this morning courtesy of a snow-stopped day and lie in (everything stops around here when it snows). I want to read the rest of the Zuckerman novels for sure.  Come to that I want to read all the rest of Philip Roth.  There's some great railing against biographers of writers.  I agree with him. I read Clare Tomalin's biography of Thomas Hardy and, although I wanted to know more about Hardy, it really irritated me the way she dug and insinuated with her scabby dry biographer mole claws, trying to dig out the dirt and the sex in Hardy's life.  Not that I wasn't interested, but it was the way she shaped her dusty little researches into a sexy little mound, that might be true, might not be, all surmise and selling.

Biographies of politicians, of generals, of scientists yes - but of writers - well I guess I've read them, yes and still will.  But not the ones that are bending over backwards to get "an angle", that'll increase the £ and the $, and titillate as much as inform.

On to the next book, that I bought by accident thinking it was an author that had been read in the New Yorker Magazine - the Dirty Havana Trilogy - by Pedro Juan Gutierrez. No need to dig about in this author's biography for the sex and the dirt, it's all there in the fiction. There's a skeletal biography of him in Wikipedia, but his own website is great. It's a shame my Spanish isn't up to reading him in the original language. But it will be. Eventually.

Exit Ghost - Day 3

"But isn't one's pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most."

The impressive paragraph that , being  constitutionally lazy, I typed the first five words of into Google hoping to find it already to cut and paste into my blog. (somehow typing all out wasn't an option, though it is a para I would have happily copied out in longhand in my moleskine notebook  if I'd been somewhere warm and sunny like Crete, away from the distractions of computers and the internet). Of course I turn up a whole page of reading blogs and reviews of Exit ghost who have all seized on this paragraph  Going to have to have a look to see if they're saying the same things as me.  Which they probably are, although I can't find many comments from the actual bloggers / tumblrs in the first page of reference.  

Well I have found one, and satisfyingly it's abit bollocks, in that that (that lovely construction again, with a third that only separated from the first two by a bracket) reading doesn't appear to me to be right. Here it is: 

"What Roth seems to be offering here is a defense of the whole Zuckerman project. If the way one conducts one's life is sometimes no more real than fiction, as Maria discovered in The Counterlife, then why shouldn't the "unlived" life be equally as real? And so Zuckerman himself, the "ghost writer" of Roth's fiction, becomes more real to the reader than his creator. The writer need not choose between life and art; he can live just as fully--if not more so- - through his creations."

(quoted from Permananet Groping - a long, and I mean long, review cum essay on the book)

You see I like the original quotation from the book because it says to me how - well no, I'm probably about to say the same thing, and I can't be arsed enough to change ti round enough to make it snottily different. It's not a bad quote about a quote after all. It's just a bit too laden dwon with reference to the "whole Zuckerman project". Whereas I think Roth is writing about the exquisite satisfaction and pain of creating a perfectly imperfect but deeply felt fantasy of what might have happened, what could happen, but never did or does. If that makes sense. It's like dreaming about your anima, wonderfully enveloping and fulfilling in the dream, a sweet memory when you wake, gradually fading as the everyday business of the day occludes your warm fuzzy happiness. You see I take at face value - probably shouldn't.

Exit Ghost - Day 2, The Riches

I'm reading Philip Roth at a pace because he is so good to read, but at the same time not too fast( as before in another post. I think, I moderate my reading speed in order to pay attention). I'm also reading other stuff, and writing too, and thinking, so this blog could indefinitely branch off into that avenue or this. I like cutting and pasting bits of my own work, randomly - well not that randomly - new stuff that I am writing - into the blog.  What I'm watching too. The Riches deserves oscars or emmies or something like that , or Eddie Izzard does certainly, just for inventing the word "buffer" - what grifters call the rest of us in our settled homes and jobs. Uneven plot but great writing in this series. Fantastic names - the "Riches" alerts us to the fact there will be great puns throughout, and they make their new home in "Eden Falls". 

One sleepless night, when Wayne/Doug is woken by the running teacher, and groans out to him "I'm a fraud", the teacher (good guy) says, "We're all frauds. This is Eden Falls", or something like that. The American dream has never seemed more unattractive. Or the grifter life come to that. You can see that people live in what they are used to, and don''t get along with what they're not. 

There's a universal truth for you. Give someone complete freedom, to do whatever they like, and it's like you set them down on a limitless plain, the horizons so big and faraway and full of distant promise, they just spin on the spot. Confine someone, however, to one of those narrow trails, up the side of the hill, working your way up or just traversing, but ever with an eye to the drop down below, and the mind is concentrated  you know what you've got to do.  You may moan and cry, but you make sure you put one damn foot after another on the path because diverting to the one side is the drop, to the other a climb up a steep, treacherous  loose shingle. At least the path's marked out, at least there are footprints to follow, at least you know other people have gone before you.  At least you know there is a destination?

New Yorker Magazine 1 ( issue date Mar 4, 2013)

The USA never ceases to surprise me, and after reading the mammoth biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals, now of course after seeing the cunningly gutted and powerful wonderful  portrayal by Cecil Day Lewis  in Speilberg's Lincoln, I'm reading political articles that I wouldn't perhaps have read before. I'm still have great difficulty seeing how the Southern Democrats and their racial prejudice (even in 1937 a Democrat senator, Claude Pepper was a proud white supremacist)somehow metamorphosed into the party of social conscience and liberty, of Clinton & Obama. There must be a point where they changed, and I don't know enough history to find it.  

The other surprising thing is that despite the appeals from German Nazis the Southern Democrats "resisted, with a startling degree of rightousness, any analogy between Nazi anti-Semitism and Southern segregation".  They were right behind the Allies in WW2, solidly anti-Fascist. Who says Americans don't do irony.

Exit Ghost Day 1, Baba Yaga Starta

Philip Roth writes so clearly and, one of those words that I've never really understood in the context of writing, economically.  Economically rather than sparing which sounds a bit leaner and more desolate. Economically because he crams a lot into a few pages, just like, but not like, filling up a supermarket trolley to the brim for under £100, or driving so well that you make  a five hundred miles in a car on one tank of petrol. You can see that I take the unclearly understood metaphor fairly literally. His story of the Larry Hollis is compacted, without feeling crammed, into a few short pages, seamlessly woven into the main story. No, what am I saying, "seamlessly woven", what does that mean? I should say stitched in as neatly as a talented seamstress would sew something, something not really part of the original dress but something that accentuates and makes it look better than it did already. 

If this book were a TV makeover, Larry Hollis and his family would be the great accessory that makes the whole outfit work. It might be a cheap accessory, which wouldn't help the economic metaphor, or it might cost twice the price of the main item, but the main thing is that it works.


Baba Yaga first draft extract

Baba Yaga

You’ve sure heard told about the Yaga strip and the weirdnessess that came out of that old song and dance.  Classic frighten the children tales, but there’ substance behind all that menace. The NewGen that was meant o feed us all did, but there were some who took it down dark paths and then some. That’s always the way – it’s not the NewGen it’s the people who uses it, and they ain’t going to go away never. I don’t know where they come from –m well I do – you can see them brewing and in the making in the poor man cells and behind the rich man gates where love and affection are stifled and not valued for their own.  There’ s always new creation of the good and the bad just like the fizz of quantum particles in space o the animacula that they used o think sprang out of the mud. Good and bad and indifferent, though those that’s indifferent surely lean towards the badness unless they gets  a steer. And yes that’s what my story is about, because even in the bad parts of the strip there was goodness that came out of it, if only by the skin of her teeth.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes Day 15

The netsuke, in the final part of the book, travel back to Japan with the author's uncle.  There is a strange sense of even more dislocation - not only has his uncle a escaped from Austria and Germany, to go to Paris, then to go to the USA, but you also feel that he fled from America to go to Japan after the war.  From being a reluctant banker, then escaping to be a fashion designer in Paris and New York, then after fighting in the Second World War in Europe , he becomes a wealthy and respected banker again - but in Japan.  He lives with his companion, Jiro, in a next door flat - they each have a separate front door, but there is an interconnecting door between.  The gentle setting out of this arrangement makes clear that they were a gay couple, but of course in the fifties, and even the 60s 70s and 80s it's not a great idea to be too conspicuous.

The author is the son of a clergyman, his Jewish roots are back in this extensive family, and nonetheless deeply felt for that.  I get the sense of distress he has from the horrible, meticulous documentation of the stripping of all their family assets. And that sense of a smug quiet Austria that represents itself as invaded by Hitler and therefore not responsible for making reparation, despite the hundreds of thousands who cheered Hitler in. But how do you blame a country when there were plenty of dissident voices, anti-Nazi activists who were arrested and beaten as well.  I'm struck by how quickly Austria granted an amnesty for all its Nazi collaborators.  How can you revenge yourself on years of antisemitism?  It's the fantasy that Tarantino takes forward in Inglourious Bastards, and in Django Unchained. See here, he says, if only we were able to take proper revenge on the evil and the twisted, how satisfying it would be. Tarantino was criticised and aggressively interviewed about the violence in Django - his angry answer was that far worse was perpetrated than he shows.  The point is that it reminds who the good guys were, and who the very bad, and that there is a difference between the two, a very great difference.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes Day 15

The interwar years pass quite quickly in the book; the first Word War has depleted businesses and countries, and they recover in patches, but the seeds of further conflict have been sown. There is a civil war in Austria, but the pro-german Austrian Nazis are defeated after a failed coup. The Ephrussi family is still rich, but not quite so rich; the family is dispersed: marriages to Spaniards, emigration to the USA, and of course the Austro-Hungarian empire has disappeared. 

The antisemitism that has been such a strong theme finally erupts into the family's life.  The anschluss in 1938 means that a rabid populace is given free reign to inflict its violence on theJewish population. The Ephrussi family house is broken into, their furnishings are smashed, their belongings stolen, they are spat on and abused.  The book really gives this sense of a dammed  undercurrent of Nazism / antisemitism just waiting to be unleashed.

 It makes me think of all the readers of the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, in this country, ignorant fuckers who, given a false sense of power, would be those brown shirted rabble - probably attacking and looting Muslim people here because they are visible, but I can see old fault lines cracking and there would be another antisemitic undertow as well. It is a frightening thought. The mad and the bad, UKIP, the BNP, small as they are, tuck themselves into that little corner of racism and intolerance that still exists, but isn't expressed, is kept under cover.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes Day 14 probably

Only reading short bits of the book at the moment.  Having received my first issue of the New Yorker magazine, I have been reading that - a great short story by Colm Toibin,some interesting articles, and some not so interesting - a huge long piece on surgeons repairing the vocal chords of singers is rather weird, and not interesting at all, the Shouts and Murmurs piece isn't that funny ( this is the "slight" comic piece the New Yorker always runs, the written equivalent of the cartoons). Actually to hear two superb pieces from Shouts & Murmurs listen to Jonathan Franzen reading Coyote v. Acme  (or just read it here). In fact, for the solace of the soul , the stimulation of the mind and the sheer fucking joy of hearing terrific short stories read aloud download all the free New Yorker podcasts They are why I took out a subscription to the New Yorker - their fiction editor Deborah Treisman provides near perfect interviews and conversations with the writers who have chosen their favourite short story from the New Yorker archive. 

It just makes you feel intelligent having the New Yorker magazine, the home equivalent of buying a copy of the Economist at an airport to read on the plane.

But back to the Hare, war privations are starting to bite in Vienna - all the man servants are away at war, there are shortages and queues for foodstuffs, and tens of  thousands of Jewish refugees from the Russians, who have driven them out. No-one knows what to do with them. But at least they are allowed into Vienna. 

The Hare with the Amber Eyes days 12 & 13

The first World War is a calamity for all the sophisticated families whose business and relationships span the continent. All sorts of racial rivalries and nastiness are emerging  and of course the Jews are a prime target for everybody - perhaps no more than usual, but with that loosening of the thresholds for violence that war brings.  The domestic life of the Ephrussi family, after an initial panic - where is it safe to be? - continues in Vienna. I'm struck by the battle that the girl Elizabeth has to get an education - girls don't go to the gymnasium, but there are a small  number who, if they pass the exam, can go on to the university.  I like the mixture of the macro (WW1) and the domestic - maybe it was like this in the WW2 when my mother was a child. Although Vienna isn't under fire, the bombing of civilians and cities hasn't started, the dangers are in the upheavals and being in the wrong place - like being in the path of the armies fighting in Russia. 

The Hare with Amber Eyes - Day 11

The author traces his family history easily - even his great grandmothers lovers are a matter of ribald knowledge in the Austrian genealogical society's restricted (members and guests, only on  Weds evenings) open evening.  You can feel his excitement, and has he admits, slightly English embarrassment, that so much is laid bare. I begin to think about my own family stories - the two alcoholic brothers whose horse and cart knew the way back from the pub by itself - they would be found sleeping it of in the early morning outside the house, the horse patiently waiting.  Or the great-grandfather who owned an inn in Somerset (which?), but was an enthusiastic amateur chemist, blowing his laboratory up twice (true? apocryphal?).  Canon Waskett in East Anglia, my grandmothers family name that died out in this branch as Canon Waskett had only daughters. That name I keep on as a character for walkabout, a louche, drunken vicar type, a long far call from the slightly starched impression of the old photograph that I have seen.  I begin to appreciate the enormous amount of work and research that must go into a book like this.

And to have the netsuke as a theme sits well in the book, these small perfect carvings from another culture that perfectly inhabit a child's world in early 20th Century Vienna, alongside Andrew Lang's fairy tales.  His grandmother tells of this in a short memoir she wrote in the 1970's.