woobiquity

Album art in the back garden II

I immediately thought of Björk, but unfortunately my neighbor's feet are probably twice her size.

These books have changed my life

I was asked recently in a semi-formal situtation to say which books have influenced me as a person and as a writer. I wasn’t very happy with the answer that uncoiled fitfully from my tangled thoughts. So I decided to make a therapeutic list.

Unlike Philippe Starck’s reply when asked about influences in a magazine interview last autumn (‘nobodee, nobodee!’) I was tempted to shout ‘everybodee, everybodee!’ and leave it at that. But after consulting Harold Bloom’s famous Western Canon as a memory aid I am reminded that ‘nobodeeeeeeee-ee-uh-uh-uhhhhhh!’ would be closer to the truth. More than humbled by my meagre reading, I am ashamed.

But I also know that the most accomplished or informed writing is not necessarily the writing that affects us most deeply as individuals, that makes us want to go or stay, change careers or love someone utterly. And how many literary books give you a paid excuse to drive around doing travel research for a summer?

(If only every book came with such a total body experience - and maybe in the true avatar age every book will, but I hope not.)

So I don’t feel too bad about my list. Or about leaving off so many of the masterpieces that I have or haven’t read – including the briefer, sans-ISBN ones: the stand-alone poems, essays, short stories, journalistic features and leaflets that, in some small or magnificent way, changed my perception of myself or the world or of you, reader. And that’s okay. These are perennials in a garden that I’ll be tending for the rest of my life.

The King James Bible (Oh God.)
Great Hymns of the Faith (Double God)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis
Walk Across America, by Peter Jenkins
And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
Poetry and Tales, by Edgar Alan Poe
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
Lake Wobegon Days, by Garrison Keillor
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles Driving Handbook
The AP Style Guide
Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
Lolita, by Vladimir Nobokov
Maurice, by E.M. Forster
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
Stranger at the Gate, by Mel White
Frommer’s America on Wheels: Southeast Edition
Guest of a Sinner, by James Wilcox
Absolom, Absolom!, by William Faulkner
The Kingdom by the Sea, by Paul Theroux
Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking, by Bill Neal
The Swimming Pool Library, by Alan Hollinghurst
Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin
James Baldwin, by David Leeming
Another Country, by James Baldwin
The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi
Arkansas, by David Leavitt
A Passage to India, by E.M. Forster
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare
Guida ai Monasteri d’Italia, by Gian Maria Grasselli
The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron
Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
Beasts of the Southern Wild, by Doris Betts
Aspects of the Novel, by E.M. Forster
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by John Berendt
Naked, by David Sedaris
The Passion, by Jeannette Winterson
To Noto: London to Sicily in an Old Ford, by Duncan Fallowell
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
Solitude, by Anthony Storr
Travels with Myself and Another, by Martha Gellhorn
The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
How to be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen
Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer
Stories, Essays & Memoir, by Eudora Welty
The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot
Common Ground: Around Britain in 30 Writers

Right. So now I’ve borne my soul. What books have changed your life?

(Photo: Conrad Aiken's grave in Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah)

The treasure that is a stylized life

Reading is like a treasure hunt, don't you find? I don't mean the clues scribbled in the margins of library books, or the one-sentence mysteries scrawled onto the end pages of the ragged volumes we pick up in used bookstores.

Actually, I do mean those. But I was thinking more of the discoverable connections between the ideas within seemingly unrelated books. That's part of the pleasure of reading. We get to connect the dots into constellations that are as individual as snowflakes.

I recently finished Garlic and Sapphires, Ruth Reichl's memoir of life as the New York Times' food critic. I had heard all the noise about the book when it came out and had planned to leave it at that until someone gave me a copy (thanks D.). I'd expected gentle, bed-time reading like a small dose of melatonin. By 2AM I was saucer eyed. Herbal sleep-aid? More like cocaine, this vividly-written foodie adventure offering turns with the Gray Lady -- and lavish meals, on her, eaten in drag-like disguises.

Then I came to the end.

"But I have to admit that with this book I have taken many liberties that do not follow journalistic principles... Some of the characters have been disguised... I've often changed names and distinguishing characteristics to avoid embarrassing people (there is no Myron Rosen working at the New York Times). In some cases I've exaggerated, in others I've conflated a few meals into one, or combined events that took place over a space of time into a single afternoon or evening."

I see.

The next night, reaching for something a mite more literary in the bedside stack I found this on the epigraph page of Lavinia Greenlaw's second novel:

"He had stylised himself -- life was easier that way." -- Graham Greene

I still say James Frey's main mistake was getting mixed up with Oprah. Stylized punches, and you asked for it.

In case you forget to breathe

If there must be signage on every inch of our city streets, please let it be more like this. (Wardour Street, Soho, recently.)

But must there be? One Brazilian city council didn't think so. It banned bilboards and electric signage altogether from earlier this year. The signs came down and revealed... forgotten architectural marvels, grotesque slums and thinly veiled factories fueled by slave-style labor. I wonder: what would Londoners find on the morning after? An original Coca-Cola Santa Claus fried to a crisp behind the neons on Piccaddilly Circus? Or just a hidden layer of dirtly old signage for Dickensian pubs and Georgian brothels? Hmm, that could be interesting.

Stadtgarten (Cologne, Germany)

Fashion victims, right this way. (Spotted during a walk in the park, last weekend.)

The book is dead (and other myths)

To the Southbank last night to hear two esteemed novelists (Margaret Atwood and Andrew O’Hagan), a preeminent publisher (Stephen Page of Faber and Faber) and a literary critic (Erica Wagner of The Times) discuss the future of the book.

Andrew O’Hagan raised an alarm on behalf of authors everywhere, suggesting that digitization and other trends threatened to rip the book apart at the seams, maybe even eradicating the more conceptual things that hold books together, things like form and narrativity, not to mention copyright. O’Hagan proudly spoke up for writerly greed, and for good books as a pastime mainly for educated people.

Margaret Atwood did not agree with any of it. She took the calming, long view about the book’s future, noting that books were also once a new technology. “Human beings are narrative creatures,” she said. “They’re also poetry-making creatures.”

Atwood said eBooks wouldn’t catch on until someone designed a version that you can drop in the bath. She added that eBooks, when they do arrive, would be ideal for seaside holidays. (All this water made me wonder whether, like Jane Smiley, Margaret Atwood also relies on a hot bath to get past writer’s blocks.)

Stephen Page talked thoughtfully about the importance of publishers and editors as filters and refiners of the stuff people read, suggesting that this function is more necessary that ever because of the sheer number of books published now (more than at any other time in human history – hmmm). So-called democratic media lurked between the lines he spoke, threatening an old order. But Page found something to smile about.

“In some ways,” he said, “the arrival of blogs has relieved publishers of an enormous burden. We don’t have to read that stuff anymore.”

Still, Margaret Atwood drew the loudest laugh of the evening (her comic timing is superb) by evoking the scene of the award-winning novelist (her) sitting down to the computer to work on her latest tome, only to be cheerfully prompted by the box in the corner: “You appear to be writing a letter”.

Does a heart make it art?

Cologne, Germany, yesterday. Quite possibly something's been lost in translation... again.

More baking, less obnoxious talk

Here's a gentle quip from Eudora Welty, one of the greatest ever short story writers and a lifelong Southerner whose use of various N-words in her prose left her books dotted with landmines for the 21st-century reader but meant no offense, merely reflecting the culture she witnessed:

A critic once asked Welty to explain the symbolism of a marble cake in one of her stories. She replied, "It's a recipe that's been in my family for some time."

I can’t say exactly why hearing this remark made me feel better about Don Imus being shoved from the radio airwaves over an exceptionally crass comment… In fact, I can’t stop and chat. I’ve got cornbread in the oven…

The strange incident of the VP in the plane

Not so strange really. Or not without the context. Dick Cheney’s plane hits a bird while landing in Chicago. Mechanics check the engines. They’re fine (though the bird is toast). The vice president makes an obstinate speech, gets back on the plane and flies away. End of story. Move along people. There’s nothing to see here.

And yet there’s something somehow ominous about this incident, especially given the CNN headline about it. “Cheney plane undamaged in collision with bird.” Or maybe what’s alarming is it’s the fact that the story is considered to be news at all.

The story is news because there might not have been an ‘un’ in the headline. But it’s really news, to my eye, because this is not an isolated brush with danger. It fits a pattern. If Dick Cheney were a novelist’s creation he might not be looking over his shoulder with terror at this point, but the reader certainly would be.

Severe heart problems, frequent visits to hospital emergency rooms. He shoots a friend while hunting. A bomb detonates within hearing range. And now this. And those are just the headlines I happened to catch.

From the foreshadowing alone, this man’s a dead man walking. That’s ironic, given the war. But right at this moment I’m more interested in Dick Cheney the character than in Dick Cheney the bunker-living public figure who lit a fuse on a dynamite stick and shoved it up the rear of human history.

Who will ever write a novel or play about Bush that portrays him as anything other than a buffoon or one-dimensional believer? But Cheney - there’s a Frost/Nixon there for sure. A true work of art. Do I flatter the man? No, I only note that he’s called ‘Dick’ with a capital D. Writer, you’ve been handed a gift.

Cheney’s policies are single-minded, but his particulars are more complex. There’s no single strain of cause and effect. There’s a cloud. There’s a hint, in Cheney’s slumped stubbornness, in The Signs, of other powers. And that invokes Norman Mailer’s new novelistic theory about Hitler: that his rise was the devil’s doing. Literally the devil’s doing.

Am I comparing Dick Cheney to Hitler? Only literarily. Mailer calls Hitler 'gargantuan', and no one would say that of Dick. Would they? But there’s a novel in it, I’m telling you. A serial novel perhaps? In which case Maureen Dowd at the New York Times has written a few brilliant chapters already. I’d love to show them to you, but that's a whole different shame.

St. Giles High Street (London WC2)

Not the only woo in the village? Chinese restaurant, Covent Garden, last week.