A Manifesto For Personal Book Disbursement

 “- A MANIFESTO- for disposing of books – part one.

1. Out of copyright, get it on the eReader, Oxfam or eBay

2. Old mangy curled up pages, dim print and obviously about to disintegrate. Trash it.

3. “I don’t think I’ll ever read that again” (or “did I really have an Iris Murdoch phase”). Oxfam or eBay

4. Someone else might want to read it. At a later date. Someone might just spot an Iris Murdoch on your shelf, borrow it, and have a life changing experience. No. Get real. If Iris Murdoch then Oxfam or eBay

5. “I like it on the shelves because it makes me feel and appear intelligent and well read” Oxfam or eBay, or unless it really does make me feel intelligent and well read.

6. Borderline. Decent crime / Ian Rankin, James lee Burke etc. Be strong. Oxfam or eBay. But it’s good to have easy read books for when people stay and are bored witless so want something undemanding to read. Reconsider. Take a mercenary review - eBay if there’s cash to be had.

7. The history, psychology (R D Laing, Fritz Perls, Transactional Analysis, for God’s sake). Store in boxes as hideous warning of what the 60s and 70s were really about? No, trash ‘em. Nooo….

8. Annotated Signet Shakespeares from my degree with occasional Arden editions. Labelled storage boxes. Why?

Was this well received? Did I receive supportive and sage advice. I'll leave you to judge from the bare data:  Jane Lucas: "Get out the house, Bill x"

I don't know - 2010 for God's sake, I was so ahead of the game and where am I now?

A later offer that I forgot I made: "I am for hire and offer deep counselling for Personal Book Disbursement (PBD). (I only say book trashing in weak, savage moments)."  It is still current. Reasonable rates.

possible obsession

Reading the new Murakami a little late - I have had it on the shelf for a few months waiting for the right time to read it and only now do I notice the cover properly. It is rather stunning. So this, together with the fact  that the book is rather heavy to read lying in bed, is the reason behind buying the book for the Kindle as well. I won't ruin the cover by leaving the book splatted pages down, or crease the dust jacket by stretching it to make a book mark. I am not blind to the fact that just as I get to the age where I should start perhaps to start leaving things behind, divesting myself and house of disparate and useless tat, I'm doubling up on books, electronic and hardback. To be fair I am getting rid of books as well, the ones that don't "delight" in that charming Maria Kondo phrase, stolen of course from William Morris. The cover of Killing Commendatore though - it is rather special.

This is all, maybe, a prelude to a new age of obsession. 

Of course someone has already made a playlist of all the music referenced in Killing Commendatore but, and this is key, not in the order the music appears in the book. So I am making a more accurate playlist, phone and Spotify by my side.

Current reading

I’m still in the middle of tracking down and noting my progress in all the books, that I am currently reading. Plus I have a bookcase of “to read” - books that I have bought  or borrowed but haven’t even started yet. To even get a look in they generally have to make it to the pre-read pile by my bed, but a book can be reviewed or mention somewhere and immediately, in a Pavlovian way , my attention will be caught and it will make the leap into my started reading list. Yet another book in the “currently reading” pile.

And then there is of course Marie Kondo, much in the spotlight at the moment with her thirty book limit. Now I have to say that  I started rationalising, pruning, sorting and re-organising my books long before she came on the scene.  I started in 2010 for God’s sake (1). But her presence in the news sphere somehow makes my rationalising, pruning, sorting and re-organising part of the current zeit-geist. This makes it easier to justify and to do somehow and has had the effect of making me tidy up my desk and my office.

Of course as soon as I look at this bookcase I realise there are a few re-reads in there and, although I'm not entirely sure yet, a few in-the-middle-of-reading-but-seemed-to-have-stopped (this is fine with the anthologies - they are meant to be dipped into) and a  few never-will-reads that I need to pluck the courage to throw out


(1) Pictorial proof - a link to a Facebook page of Iris Murdoch novels that I decided to ditch  And apparently I had a MANIFESTO for getting rid of books?? I can’t find it now.

Death in the Family - Karl Ove Knausgaard -Reviews

So there is no absolute agreement on the great authors - you only have to hear Nabokov's opinions of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Hemingway to realise that opinions are violently divided!
No surprise then to find that Karl Ove Knausgaard's Death in the Family, the first volume in his - and I have to stoop to cliche here - "provocatively titled " sextet of books My Struggle has the following break down of ratings on amazon.co.uk. as of 6th October 2018:

So half loved it (I am in that group, let's make that clear), but nearly a fifth of readers gave it either one or two stars. So why is that?

Perhaps we need some comparisons -lets' take, just because I mentioned two of them above Dostoevsky's and Nabakov.  Again amazon.co.uk only. We'll come to amazon.com later -to see if there are any interesting differences or whether the spread of like / dislike is eerily the same both sides of the Atlantic ( OK very roughly speaking both sides of the Atlantic)

Here's Lolita - winning on 59% loved it, only 12 two & three star ratings:

And here's The Brother's Karamazov:

Outdoing Nabakov, his detractor. Nabakov said of Dostoevsky 

"as in all Dostoyevsky's novels, a rush and tumble of words with endless repetitions, mutterings aside, a verbal overflow which shocks the reader after, say, Lermontov's transparent and beautifully poised prose. Dostoyevsky as we know is a great seeker after truth, a genius of spiritual morbidity, but as we also know he is not a great writer in the sense Tolstoy, Pushkin and Chekhov are. "  Nabakov  on Dostoevsky , New York Times

So what would Nabakov have made of Karl Ove? We'll never know - but what we do have, to begin with,is those 164 reviews on Amazon, 82 of which are positive rave reviews, approx 45 are mixed and 32 of which relayed that they did not like his book at all!

Well how did you not like his book I ask - as well as how did you like his book? A good review should give some evidence for the reader's opinions surely? By and large the 5* reviews pick out things that readers particularly enjoyed or admired.

Concentrating on the 1* reviews though there are a number of short sparse expressions of annoyance and despair, with the emphasis on short. These are not people who are going to spend a lot of time giving you their extensive assessment of Karl Ove's oeuvre - they're bored and pissed off and just want to send let you know with a short sharp blast of negativity.

There are a number of two or three line 1* reviews that by and large have three main critical points, if you can call them that. They say the book is

• boring
• self-indulgent
• rubbish

I put the list so it read like that as some of the reviewers included more than one of the three criticisms. What links them all of course is resentment, resentment that he's become famous on the back of this to them unreadable prose. Like that Dire Straits song Money for Nothing, they are full of anger at his to them unwarranted success.

Some struggle to include wit in their answer for example: he talks about his struggle, well I struggled to read it - or some kind of literary reference - the Emperor's New Clothes are referenced of course! Others are less nuanced - "Drivel." says one.

For the most though they are upset and personally affronted that someone who is a "writer" is describing ordinary things in detail. They can't see beyond this, they can't see the form and shape, they can't see the story that does build up from this concatenation of feeling and detail. A number of them value their time so much that they are very upset indeed that Knausgaard is causing them to waste it. In fact this kind of time is of so much value  that they are prepared to write a review to warn others not to make the same mistake - or is it that they just want to get it off their chest, have a good public moan and stick it to his literary propensities. Who knows?

I think it is a common complaint among a certain kind of reader that doesn't "get" certain kinds of reading. They feel the need to expose it and themselves in the minute unread print of a 1* star review. But all one really asks for is a bit of intelligence and engagement, a bit of real criticism.

It's an odd coincidence that just as I was writing this the literary Hub came up with a rather lazy daily post - they just cut and pasted  the "50 best" one star reviews of James Joyce's Ulysses and let them speak for themselves - here.

Iain M Banks and Iain Banks, The Culture novels and The Bridge - a reflection on the worship of fiction and fandom

Someone said Iain (M) Banks was* two of the best novelists we ever had and I would go with that. I've been listening to some of the Culture novels beautifully read by Peter Kenny and loving being immersed in the Culture again. I've now moved on to listening to The Bridge (again wonderfully read by Peter Kenny) which is, well, maybe a bridging novel between the two genres that Banks wrote in, certainly a bit of a homage to Lanark (Alastair Gray) but entirely, robustly, on its own two literary feet.

So far I've listened to the Player of Games and The Use of Weapons (read by Peter Kenny) and one of the great joys is hearing the names pronounced correctly out loud, and then, of course, and this is down to the skill of the reader, a series of wonderful character voices for the ships and drones. That is one of the great joys of hearing something read aloud especially with humour is that it makes you *hear* properly and pay attention to the story and the humour. (There should be a mention here of Matter read by a different reader, but just as good as kenny - in fact I think I was so impressed I reviewed it here: Matter - Amazon review

I've also just joined the Iain [M] Banks fan forum, just to read and speak and interact with people, who love these novels, just so that I can get more out of my re-readings and listenings


*Iain Banks died on the 9th June 2013 - an inconceivably bitter blow - I still feel distraught even now.

Understanding Differentiation - Leonard Susskind & George Hrabovsky - Classical Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum

I've up to a point dimly understood differentiation - the idea that the slope of a graph is its rate of change, and that you can differentiate an equation like x³ + 5x² +12x -7 quite simply by following the rules - the x³ goes to 3x², the 5x² goes to 10x, the x goes to 12 and the 7 disappears. You can check this very easily by just cut and pasting my first formula into this brilliant derivative-calculator site   Wonderful though this site is it doesn't actually explain why this is happening - it explains the individual rules, but not why the rule works.

It wasn't until I started reading Classical Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum (Theoretical Minimum 1) by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky, and then checked my answers to the differentiation question that I actually understood the marvelous mathematical sleight of hand that differentiation is.

 I had to do it in my own hard way by looking at each line of the explanation, then matching up bits of equation with the next line to see what was different or missing. It was then that I really understood what that delta t, that little bit of infinitesimal time actually does. So that I never forget it I'm going to lay it out all in glorious colour here.

What we're actually doing with differentiation is taking a function like this one: f(x) = x³ + 5x² +12x -7 and then writing out the equation again as f(x+𝛥t) - basically adding 𝛥t on every x as so:

 f(x+𝛥t) = (x+𝛥t)³ + 5(x+𝛥t)² +12(x+𝛥t) -7

which we then multiply out to make things easier to combine. (𝛥t or delta t as it is pronounced is just a very small bit of... time.)  Of course I began to get into real grief here just sorting this out and had to visit another fantastic cheat site -Symbolab  that did the expansion for me - and showed me how it got there. I had forgotten that there were formulae for multiplying out things like (x+𝛥t)³

 f(x+𝛥t) = x³ +3x²𝛥t+3x𝛥t²+𝛥t³+ 5x²+10x𝛥t+5𝛥t²+12x+12𝛥t-7

So there we go with the expanded f(x+𝛥t). Then we write out f(x) - f(x+𝛥t) using these expanded formulae and take one away from the other.

 f(x+𝛥t)- f(x)  = x³ +3x²𝛥t+3x𝛥t²+𝛥t³+ 5x²+10x𝛥t+5𝛥t²-12x+12𝛥t+7- x³ - 5x² +12x -7

The coloured pairs like x³ from both f(x) and f(x+𝛥t) nullify each other so you're left with:

f(x+𝛥t)- f(x)  =3x²𝛥t+3x𝛥t²+𝛥t³+10x𝛥t+5𝛥t²+12𝛥t

Now the really clever bit - divide both sides by 𝛥t and you get 3x²+10x+12.  All the multiples of delta t vanish as you go to zero - what you are doing is "taking the limit" as delta t heads for zero. I should write it out properly really but I need a better mathematical editor to do that but here it is bodged up with the space bar to line it up on two lines.
                                              lim      f(x+-𝛥t) -f(t)   = 3x²+10x+12
                                          𝛥t->0          𝛥t


Looking at the writing out of  f(x) - f(x+𝛥t) using these expanded formulae above I realised I had got all the plus and minus signs in the wrong place, but the gist of it is if you take  f(x) = x³ + 5x² +12x -7 away from  f(x+𝛥t) = (x+𝛥t)³ + 5(x+𝛥t)² +12(x+𝛥t) -7 all you get left with is the bits that have 𝛥t in them.  Well it makes sense to me now - but it's been days, days.

Technical stuff - well off topic

I'm enjoying getting technical again - looking after websites (including eradicating Flash!), building stuff. I always got promoted / pushed up into management roles so I never fully realised my true geek potential at work.

So I idly downloaded Fing to have a look what's on my network. And that got me thinking. Checking out my second router to ensure I wasn't running two separate 5Ghz wireless access points (I wasn't - had disabled the other), I saw this on the 20005 port on my NetGear router:

"20005/btx xcept4 (interacts with german telekom's cept videotext service)"

Rather weird. But I'm only scanning inside my network, so fairly happy it was nothing to sinister. Turns out it's NetGears "ReadyShare" - an implementation of file sharing over USB for your home network.  It is OK, but it would be a vulnerable point if someone got into my network.  As PC World said:

"The way in which vendors have implemented NetUSB in their products is egregious, Holcomb said. “For instance, hardcoded AES keys, the processing of unvalidated and untrusted data, and kernel integration are all red flags that should have been identified during the early stages of SDLC [software development lifecycle]"

It was worth the effort just to find this wonderful paragraph.

Mysteries - Knut Hamsen

Knut Hansen - I have some old PAN copies of his books ever since Doris Lessing said that he may well have made some wrong choices (Nazi sympathiser, gave his Nobel medal to Goering apparently, so a bit more than just a vague fellow traveller), but that didn't detract from his abilities as a writer. Fair enough - I mean I still like P.G.Wodehouse without agreeing or being happy about his Fascist sympathies.  But Mysteries gradually becomes less and less readable as it's fucked up and more and more unpleasant hero indulges in drunken tirades, poisons the object of his love's dog (well it did bite him) and generally behaves in a very unsociable manner.  Also in a less and less readable manner - you get tired of his anti social outbursts, his ravings. You don't get any insight into his inner musings, only a third person narration of what he does and says and dreams. He's compared with Dostoyevsky, but he lacks Dostoyevsky's sense of inner truth and realism, his sense of meaning.

I've been searching for a summary of the book so I don't have to read it all - not that I believe anything much will happen. There is no time to read it, given the mountain of unread books that grows week by week.  I just want a sense of closure!

The Married Man: A Life of D.H.Lawrence

There are, sometimes, som very irritating passages in biography that just call out for, well, calling out.  Those interpretive passages that take off with some kind of (usually) psychoanalytic (but can be political) speculative analysis that can't be proven. Then it's backed up with just a little bit of scientific research that is entirely tangential to the conjecture, but never mind that hey it's science in the same paragraph so it makes my assertion nearby more true!
Here it is - I can't be bother to type it out, I found it quoted somewhere else(Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding
By David Ellis) , by someone who has the same dubious view I have of her psychoanalytic judgement, and snipped it as a .jpg.

Of course it fits in with the zeitgeist about Lawrence (if you can have a zeitgeist  about something, ah well). Lawrence isn't popular or read now - people turn their noses up at him not even because they've read much about him I suspect, but just because they've heard about him. Sons and Lovers, Woman in Love, The Rainbow - still some of the best novels in the English language - what evidence can I give? - give Leavis a chance!

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.- Thomas Nagel

Such a snappy title - or did I make that lame joke the last time I referred to it? It has this wonderful ring to it though, the "almost certainly"  throwing what we might unfairly call the "Logic of  Dawkins" back in his face. Because, make no doubt about it, this book does tug at all the uneasy feelings you have about "how?" How did it all come about? - yeah, yeah evolution is the best we've got , it does make sense but not all the way. The Theists have their day and then God Squadders wade in with their triumphant right wing nastiness all in the name of the Lord.

Well that was a very uncool rant to begin what was to be my gentle exploration of the the fact that there seems to be good evidence that we are missing out on crucial thinking regarding the development of life and the development of consciousness. I'm reading the book very slowly, underlining things in pencil, making notes like this: " 'the prevailing doctrine' that life has appeared solely by random physical laws cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption". I think I'm getting it, in that I'm understanding that he's not posing any particular solutions, not sticking out for, say, Neutral Monism ( dontcha just love it, tossing these terms around - means you can get it on with the Bhuddists when they talk about the numinous), just saying that reductive materialism is, at bottom, so highly improbable that there must be something else.

I'd always veered towards a kind of sloppy emergence, the idea that as systems get really complex so new emergent things, well, emerge, including consciousness but Nagel does argue very forcefully that that is just not good enough. It's enough to turn you into a dualist and start searching for the ghost in the machine all over again. Because, actually, if there was something out there to be discovered as fundamental as relativity or quantum theory, why not posit it as being all ghost wrapped up entirely with our ordinary world, but undetectable and unprovable.

The Dedekind Cut - The Road To Reality- Roger Penrose

I think I just understood the Dedekind cut, as a way of defining the irrational numbers (like the square root of 2) as occurring in the spaces between the rational numbers, but with having recourse to the slightly clunky (in certain mathematician's view) geometric visualization of the number line. See The Road To Reality- Roger Penrose, p58.

Bob Dylan - an after-thought

It says something about how horribly suggestible and easily led I am (well, we all are is what I am getting at) that as soon as I hear that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize I want to listen to Blonde on Blonde.  This is rather strange because I never liked Bob Dylan that much and at the time Blonde and Blonde ( my cousin had it) was just too folky and acoustic to be something that I really liked to play.  I knew, even then , that it was an iconic album, but his voice just grated and droned on a bit. It was Blood On The Tracks, and to some extent Desire that got me listening to Dylan.  But, anyway I called it up on Spotify and began to play it, just like a million, maybe ten million other people probably did. Or maybe it's just sad fucks like me that play some guy who's won the Nobel prize's tracks even though they didn't like them much in the first place. And it was OK. OK. Rainy Day Women was the dirge that it always was, especially without that nudge nudge hey that's about getting stoned kind of smile that you had when it played in the 6th Form centre of my youth. In the end the Dylan I play the most is Slow Train Coming - especially You Gotta Serve Somebody. Gotta say something about me, but I don't know what.

The Vorrh - Brian Catling, China Mieville, Witold Gombrowicz - Ferdydurke

I found The Vorrh while browsing the science fiction table in Waterstones in Tunbridge Wells, being a place that I escape to when having to be in Tunbridge Wells for a short time. I was attracted by the first few pages, by Philip Pullman's high praise, but I wouldn't have bogt it unless I had been  in a physical bookshop looking for new authors - I must have missed the reviews when it came out, or else glossed over them. So this post is in praise of the casual looking through the shelves as much as it is in praise of the book itself. And of course this is how I used to read, but it wasn't Waterstone's I lingered in, it was our local public library, housed in an old house behind a circular drive, with its wooden counters and infamous notice in elegant letters on one of the posts.

"NO 

DOGS 

SMOKING 

PRAMS" 

I found the Hobbit there, I found the Lord of the Rings there, and I also found Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, a scurrilous surreal piece of literature that fascinated me. I'm trying to remember what else I found there, because I remember being so pleased when I finally got an adult ticket and could take out I think about eight books at once.  Ferdydurke was a strange concoction about which I can remember nothing very much, but it does lead into to talking about The Vorrh, a fantasy/ steam punky cross over science fiction novel that has fascinating strands of narrative carried along by inventive prose. Reminds me of China Mieville, one of those writers I have always desperately wanted to like, but have never been able to finish a book by him because his books always seem to lack an emotional core, whereas The Vorrh has all the strangeness and alienness but still has something more recognizable and connectable with at its core. I tried reading Perdido Station so many times, and Mievilles book blurbs always seem to promise so much, plus he seems an incredibly serious and complex writer whose novels I should enjoy.

American Honey, directed by Andrea Arnold

If you've ever worked in a tele-sales, or even door-to-door this film will surely show you things that you saw and felt - the ridiculous competitions and prizes for first sale of the day, most sales of the day, the pressure always on because if you don't sell you won't be coming back the next day. A bus load of fairly anarchic teenagers are taken to different areas of the US to sell magazine subscriptions door to door. The icy Krystal leads them, chooses the areas, is driven by one of the sales team in an open top car. What do they want? Money.

There's a great soundtrack, which both entertains and underpins the frenetic rolling pace. For the heroine, Star it's an escape - the first scene she is crawling in a skip with her eight year old sister, trawling for food, while the four year old, too small to climb in, waits outside. Anything has to be better than this, or you would think.  American Honey takes its time but with few long set pieces - the Texans in white hats are a set piece, the oil worker is a set piece,  but for the rest it follows this uncomfortable, crazy world of selling as it happens from place to place, using short realistic scenes to punch its message at you. It's a bleak message, but full of kaleidoscopic moving, dancing and cameos of the riders in the mini-bus. The colours are harsh, bright and blaring, just like the life they are leading. The cast were picked up from streets and beaches to join the film,  so there is a fine natural feel to the group of misfits that Krystal has assembled.

Great dialogue keeps it moving, and ultimately it teaches you that selling is about selling yourself, nothing else, the product, the magazine is secondary. It's a lesson that Star learns and it isn't a happy one.

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False- Thomas Nagel

This snappily titled slim volume arrived in the post today and I've started reading it immediately - interesting it's the only thing I've been reading in the last few days that has really motivated me to write. Not that my previous few days reading hasn't been fulfilling and interesting - still immersed in Virginia Woolf's biography and her diary - but I haven't had the stimulus to write until now.  The Woolf books are full of the minutia of her family members and their mental upsets and moods - her father used to have black depressions, used to walk around making involuntary groans, other family members were just barking mad and taken to asylums - it's all a little too close to home - especially that moaning out loud. I lay in bed late yesterday, waking from strange nightmares every fifteen minutes or so with a horrible sense of dread and a small involuntary cry, all that remains of the scream inside my head. The fact that this is something so many experience is of some comfort but not much.

So, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (M&C from now on), essentially picking at questions that bother me - just the sense of how improbable it was that self replicating life evolved, and the difficulty in invoking consciousness as purely an emergent property of material chemistry.  Quite aside from the horrible complexity of DNA and RNA as the companion messenger molecule, the sheer difficulty of scaffolding these complex chemicals together into a cell is not understood in any way. It is possible that early clays left pockets in which complex organic molecules could replicate - that's one theory, not in the ascendant at the moment. There are other guesses, with good if speculative thinking and science behind them, but Nagel argues that we don't live in the world of the Blind Watchmaker, that there must be another principle, another way of thinking that will allow explanation of the improbable, that pure reductionism is ultimately not enough. He's not into intelligent design though - but he does say that the intelligent designers arguments about improbability of evolution have been unfairly discarded in the rush to ridicule the concept of intelligent design.

I have a feeling that this might be useful read in the context of both Nagel and Woolf, but I don't think I'll ever get around to it. Here's the Amazon blurb for Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience, Liah Greenfield

"Modern nationalism, says Greenfeld, rests on bedrock principles of popular sovereignty, equality, and secularism. Citizens of the twenty-first century enjoy unprecedented freedom to become the authors of their personal destinies. Empowering as this is, it also places them under enormous psychic strain. They must constantly appraise their identities, manage their desires, and calibrate their place within society. For vulnerable individuals, this pressure is too much. Training her analytic eye on extensive case histories in manic depression and schizophrenia, Greenfeld contends that these illnesses are dysfunctions of selfhood caused by society's overburdening demands for self-realization. In her rigorous diagnosis, madness is a culturally constituted malady."

The alternative to this "unprecedented freedom" appears to be feudalism, slavery and despotism, so not much comfort there.

Virginia Woolf - Hemione Lee, Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason, John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, Kingsley Amis - Memoirs

Sometimes you wake slowly and drowsily, with a feeling of warmth and bliss, in a blessed state that is only punctured by the curse of rising that destroys all the comfort and reach of your rest. Today after this, after the trip in the car to the station I went back to bed, sneaking back under the covers. When I finally had to get up I started reading Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee's dense but accessible biography and thought yet again how reading, writing and thinking are the things that can lever me out of the slough of despond*. Having read so much (but not all) Woolf the biography is full or references that I can nod at, or at least know that I can link something I have read of Woolf's to what is being said which is very satisfying. I read the part where Lee discusses the interiority of Virginia Woolf's autobiographical writing, how she saw that the external public maw in which men operate was the only biographical shape that was extant - live, emotional inner worlds - and by design and by chance therefore almost all of womens' lives are excluded, never told.

The next chunk that I read was about her memories of staying at Talland House in St Ive's, these beautiful impressionistic descriptions of the yellow blind, the acorn like end of the string that pulls the blind sliding across the floor and the rhythm of the waves, descriptions that she retells and reworks and which to me sum up the wonder of The Waves (necessarily!), the book of her that I read as a wash of sensation and beauty.

I've also just read the introduction to Kant's  A Critique of Pure Reason , the reason being that a friend of my eldest son wants to have a reading group to tackle this and there is something very attractive about actually thinking about thinking, and making sense of what it is that we do that makes us human, perhaps.

I've also added a quote below from Pilgrim's Progress, an edition of which I may still have somewhere, unloved and unread, but some of his images are so part of common parlance that we use them without thinking. I've always found it unreadable though - it does remind me of Kingsley Amis quoting Philip Larkin's attitude towards early english poems - "'apes bumfodder'" . Amis's summary is below:

"All Old English and nearly all Middle English works produced hatred and weariness in everybody who studied them"

They had the added burden of being lectured to by Tolkien who was "incoherent and often inaudible" - I had to add that - God knows what Amis thought of Lord of the Rings. It does seem to me that many so called classics are there just because they are there, just because at a certain point in time they got admired and then the admiration sort of ossified around them. I have the same kind of feelings about Citizen Kane - supposed to be one of the best films ever made, but I've never got more than half way though before turning off out of boredom and incredulity that it is so admired.

* "This miry Slough is such a place as cannot be mended; it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore is it called the Slough of Despond: for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there ariseth in his soul many fears, and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place; and this is the reason of the badness of this ground."

John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress 

Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansgfield and civet cats

Virginia Woolf remarked of Katherine Mansfield that she smelt like a "civet cat that had taken to streetwalking" so I wondered whether that was a bad thing or a good thing.  That ingredient of scent used to made from the anal glands of civet cats, but is now mainly synthesised (I imagine its harvest was equally traumatic for the "cat" and the collector, as civets are related to skunks and the scent collected is only pleasant when well diluted). You can still buy perfumes with civet in - Google says Giorgio Aranani in Boots has civet but I think that's wistful thinking on the part of Google. There are a number of perfumes with civet though on fragantia.com including this one which caught my eye from Opus oils. Interesting that a perfume I really like - Coco Chanel - has civet base notes.

Kingsley Amis - Memoirs

Thank God I can still read and I can still write despite - although the wireless network connector has just fallen over and I can't save this at the moment, then the browser froze and I can’t even type so I’m continuing in Word, ready to paste back here> That was very irritating, the whole PC freezing up, DNS look-up gone to fuck and Christ knows what else. Maybe this is just the psychic version of the pathetic fallacy updated for the Internet, but one knows that it is just coincidence. One of those difficult times which one does realize are shared by countless millions but trapped in your own little bubble it is difficult to find this comforting other than in an abstract "well this is what its like for lots of people kind of way".
Kinglsey Amis, amazingly, tried all different kinds of therapy, because he suddenly found that he was having panic attacks on empty trains, or when he went out anywhere. He talks about "fears of depersonalisation", first from dark nights, then from getting on empty trains. Sounds like panic attacks, which I used to get but don't seem to now, where you suddenly experience this immense fear that you are going to literally disappear. It's in the section of the Memoirs entitled shrinks, and he doesn't think very much of them and if his reporting of their input is accurate, neither do I.

My current therapist, who I have only been seeing for a few weeks, I chose because she looked and sounded interesting (my wife added, yes and young and attractive too), and didn't look like one of those people who've spent years and years making a living out of chatting to people with half - arsed complaints like me, but someone who was interested in what makes people tick. And largely I talk in the sessions, so there is little of the framing / reframing of the problem that Amis complained about. When it does arrive, usually in the from of a "well that sounds positive, that's good" or something "positive" like that I merely look pained and bewildered and say "No that's not it" It's hard to say if it's going anywhere at all - we've established that I feel trapped by lots of situations, that I use depressants to suppress my emotions, that I would like to escape some of these props and prisons, but just stating the problem isn't solving it by any means.

One of the reasons that I'd like to stop taking any kind of depressant is that it stops me thinking properly. I remember once seeing Germaine Greer interviewed and the thing that stuck out, in fact the only thing I remember about the interview was that she said that she loved thinking, that being able to think was the thing that she most enjoyed doing. That certainly resonated with me, and it's why sometimes when I've perhaps drunk too much while cooking, so that I can't really think clearly and accurately,  then the only thing I can think of to do is to go to bed and sleep even if it is only 8pm in the evening or earlier. This feels like such a waste of time, but once the drugs are loaded in your system there's nothing you can do except wait for your body to process them. Which begs the question of course of why load up in the first place? Well that question is of course the key, and some of the answer is that it's all about passing the time, about getting through the time, and without something huge and beautiful and wonderful to do the time drags heavily and dangerously and depressingly. The answer is to do something, anything, but keeping doing things - keeping writng would be a fucking start, actually get some more things finished.

London Review of Books (cont), Diary- Virginia Woolf, Kingsley Amis - Memoirs, Lucky Jim

Writing about Rupert Brooke and the Olivier sisters and all their sexual shenanigans (or not - the point being that women were always at the risk of ruined reputations and pregnancy) reminded me of  Virginia Woolf's diary entries re Marjorie Strachey. There was a lot of discussion over her saying she had fallen in love with a married man (Jos Wedgewood) - Virginia Woolf says that she certainly seems to be in love. But Jos Wedgewood was a "pillar of the establishment", with a wife and seven children, albeit his wife had left him two years earlier. The discussion revolves around the fact that to be an ordinary mistress would lead to "ruin" - there is no way in which she can have this relationship and stay respectable. Of course it all ended badly - Jos Wedgewood finally divorced his wife then promptly married his deaf governess. According to Virginia Woolf's diary Marjory had renounced him ( Letters, 15/7/1918) and was quite sprightly about it. ( I found all this out with the usual Googling, but then I noticed that you could buy a complete Virginia Woolf including the diary and all the letters for £1.92 - the thing being that while it might not be so satisfactory reading the letters and diary on a Kindle, having the ability to search for "Marjory Strachey" though all the works is a great thing. A great thing. It beggars belief the amount of sheer library slog biographers would have had to go through before the digitization of everything. This is so easy now, to search for references and cross - references).

There's an article in the Guardian (A century later, why do we still kneel at the shrine of the Bloomsbury set?) that says, essentially, they were successful Bohemians but only because they had money. Which is true, of course, but there were plenty of other people who had money that didn't live or behave like they did, so it doesn't seem to right to write off their experimentation and way of living as the pure and only result of a private income. Would it have been possible without the money - no it wouldn't.  And here's my point, given the riches that large numbers of us live with these days, there are opportunities to experiment and do different stuff!  And given the huge wealth of literature and film and insights that are available to us the fact that Bloomsbury still shines through, not only in the writing of Virginia Woolf but in the lives they chose to lead it's not just a matter of televisual lives of posh others that we watch in superbly recreated costume environments, there's more substance and sustenance than that. It's all about choices (Barcode Brothers), as ever. 

Before I stop and have some more coffee, have to mention Kinglsey Amis's Memoirs  which have that witty wicked voice describing such a dull dreary life in the 1930s to 1950s, which seems to me to be the absolute opposite of the more life affirming dalliances of the Bloomsbury set. It's funny to read, but full of bile at the same time - a tale of relatives and upbringings in Norbury and Purley, perhaps this savage tone is the only one that is adequate. It reminds me uncomfortably of my own writing - the Clive and Beth stories where Clive is a cynical and desperately sad character who would love to be loving and real but just can't quite make it. I've read Lucky Jim a couple of times and it is a comic classic - the next book, whose title I forget is less successful, a portrait of a young man with a wife and child who is trapped in every sense of the word by circumstance, but utterly fails to live the life he could - its a weary and miserable comedy, brought alive by some of the set pierces but collapsing under it's own black mood. 

London Review of Books, Virginia Woolf, Rupert Brooke, Noel Olivier

The LRB is proving it's worth - still haven't read it all. After the article on Turner's

Turner’s ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’  I started reading this: Something Rather Scandalous,a review of various books about Rupert Brooke that segues pretty easily and scandalously into a review of his sexual life and mores, complete with one of the most erotic photographs I've ever seen in a mainstream publication, a picture of the Oliver sisters naked on the beach at St Ive's. Prurience and genuine awe mean that I must reproduce it here - so here it is: 

The Olivier sisters in Cornwall in 1914. From left, Margery, Brynhild, Noel, Daphne

Proof that people had a lot of fun a hundred years ago, that sex was and always will be such a driving motivation. The picture is in the LRB because Rupert Brookes was in love with, or certainly eager to get into bed with Noel, for some years, but she kept him at arms length. The reason why that might be is fairly mundane and obvious - while all the young men  were fairly busy having sex with one another (Rupert Brookes was bisexual), the women and girls were unable to join in this rampant promiscuity. The boys could get away with it, the girls faced pregnancy and ruined reputations. The popularity mentioned, later in the review, of swimming naked as recommended by the Headmaster of Bedales( the progressive school where Noel Olivier went)  at the time must have allowed for a tantalizing eroticism that was seldom sated with actual sex. Hang on though, why this picture of Noel Olivier? (there are loads of others).  Yes it does fit in with the very sexual themes of the Rupert Brooke's life, but you have to conclude that even the LRB knows that salacious pictures and sex sells. I'm not complaining - I think it's a fantastic picture.  They are very beautiful. The review does mention that Noel studied medicine - in fact she became a doctor, in a lot of ways she is a much more interesting character than Rupert Brooke (apopros of  available pictures there is a great, if completely unsalacious, picture elsewhere on the web,of Noel Olivier, Maitland Radford, Rupert Brooke and Virginia Woolf. 

By Unknown - National Portrait Gallery: NPG x13124

The picture is dated 1911, so she is 19 perhaps. Brooke met her and fell for her when she was 15).

But anyway back to sex and nudity - I knew that a theme was emerging in this post. It's interesting and sad the terrible taboos we still have on nudity - that poor guy who likes to walk nude is always being imprisoned for it. And when I say "terrible taboo", I mean internal, self - censoring taboos, the kind of inner dialogue which says "Ohh I wouldn't want him / her / it to see my naked body, ohhh they're all pervs, that's what they are". The kind of dialogue that means if you want to swim naked in Brighton you have to go all the way up to the marina and climb a steep bank of stones. And then of course you do meet the very "pervy" behaviour that people are so frightened of, men with paunches slowly walking up and down the beach seeing if they can look at a woman naked. It does spoil it a bit - I'm not sure I would be comfortable being a woman alone on a nudist beach just for the sheer  heavy traffic of passers by just hoping for a glance, which would make you feel a bit self conscious if not unsafe..  Which is a real shame because I hate swimming with trunks on, they just drag you down, and I feel perfectly comfortable being naked especially on the beach.