woobiquity

The idiocy of speed reading

Quoth Jeannette Winterson in a profile in this morning's Guardian:

I ask what she thinks of the Booker shortlist. "I think it's a bit grim. The thing that really depressed me was when the chairman, Howard Davies, was on Front Row and said 'Yes, I read at 80 pages an hour.' And he thought that was OK. And I thought, I don't want anybody to read my books at 80 pages an hour! I mean, particularly for what I do -- it must look like gibberish. It's like putting it on a 78 instead of a 33 -- if you've got some bloody idiot who thinks it's great to read at 80 pages an hour when it's not The Da Vinci Code, you're doomed! Well, I am."

Never have I read such rousing words over my eggs and toast. A Molotov cocktail for slow, er, intelligent readers everywhere.

(Shhhhh. There are people reading in here.)

This cat's not out of the bag

Guru, seeing what it feels like to be a Selfridges purchase, Thursday evening.

The absent artist

I wasn’t going to write about this image, which I snapped on a pavement near Carnaby Street this week.

A quick Google proved it to be shameless self promotion. But on further reflection I think perhaps this is as good a springboard as any to consider the rising phenomenon of the absent artist. The phenomenon is rising because it works. And this is a textbook example. T.Magic looks to have engineered a sell-out business in £40 slogan tee-shirts (not particularly clever slogan tee-shirts) simply by making himself scarce.

If only all the shirts on his website were 'sold out' -- now that would be a statement.

Still, in the Age of the Media Whore this must take some constraint. Or is it part of a calculated backlash? A cynical homage? Banksy has, after all, through daylight napping and disciplined manipulation, magnified his invisibility to a level at which certainly his facelessness is on a par with Warhol’s wig or Lucian Freud’s penis as a defining ‘image’ of his era.

The thing is, surely he could easily be unmasked. And yes that might spark the art world equivalent of Black Monday, but, tell me, when was the last time even C-list fame did not stoke the adrenalin of at least one trigger-happy paparazzo? What is he, Salman Rushdie?

Maybe at a time when politics is a beauty pageant and even writers are expected to go on Oprah, we just like the ruse, the fact that for once the cat is still in the bag – even if the bag itself is such a glorious spray-painted eyesore that you’d see it at 20 paces. At least it’s one less face we have to look at.

How quaint (and yet so similar) the wait seems for the next volume of T.S. Eliot’s letters, which another Amazon alert informs me will be at least another month. After decades of scouring by his widow the letters are unlikely to reveal anything titillating about the man who died in 1965. But the hint of omission has kept wind under his canonical sails for well over 40 years.

T.Magic, read it and weep.

The stars come out at night

But on a rainy Friday in London the flourescent lights above the red carpet come out first. There's nothing worse than a gray complexion on the telly you know.

People waiting for celebrities who might turn up at the first annual ITV National Movie Awards, Royal Festival Hall, this evening.

Every picture tells a story

‘I wish you wouldn’t lean so far out,’ Fritz said. ‘It makes me nervous for you.’

‘I’m not your damned cat.’ Iona exhaled the words and the smoke simultaneously, watching the window frame part them.

‘But she might be dead,' he said. 'The veterinarian said she should not be out of sight. What if she fainted again?’

Iona held the almost-stub to her lips and paused, as always, before the final drag.

‘Where is she?,’ Fritz muttered, peeking under the sofa. ‘Whiskers? Whiskers Whiskers Whiskers…’

Picture: 10AM a couple of Saturdays ago on (Censored for privacy)strasse, Cologne. Story: photographer’s own. Incidentally, Marianne Wiggins’ new novel, The Shadow Catcher, includes photographs, a la W.G. Sebold, or like Eudora Welty’s unpublished first book, which publishers rejected because they said you couldn't do that. But why not? Particularly if it only deepens the mysteries... ‘Some things you remember for a lifetime,’ Wiggins writes, ‘other things, mysteriously, bleed away, or fade to shadow.’

The disillusioned (inner) child

Rats.

[The BBC children’s TV show] Blue Peter will once again have to broadcast an apology to its viewers, following the on-screen mea culpa transmitted earlier this year about a phone-in competition in which the winner was faked. The latest apology will be screened on September 25.

The BBC today said that the Blue Peter cat that was given the name Socks should have actually been named Cookie, which came top in the poll.

What next? Mr. Rogers was really called Dick Humphoofle? All the monsters in Monsters Inc. are just people in rented costumes? Beegu just a discarded dishrag?

Sigh. It takes so little to upend the inner child, its expectations being so pristine and all. And now the inner children of a whole British generation have been splattered with the notion that democracy is not about the votes at all, but about revenues, elitist 'good taste' and viewer numbers (really, the kids could have waited to find that out).

It’s enough to send me into my Cupboard of Escapist This and Thats in search of a low-risk creative diversion.

I picked up The Fable Game at a posh stationer’s in Rome recently (speaking of elitist good taste). It was designed in 1965 by Enzo Mari and has the Spartan look of that period, which I really like. The interlocking plates are meant to be like ‘a magic pack of cards’ picturing '45 animals plus the sun, the moon, an umbrella, a big boot, a cage, a hedgehog, eight trees, a tree trunk, nine bamboo canes, five stones, an apple, a pile of earth, a newt and two eggs.’ It's supposed to inspire whole new fairy tales.

I set it up on the floor, and… nothing. Not a peep. Not a roar. Not even a tweet that could really be coming from one of the birds in the back garden. It's just not working for me. My inner child must be having a nap.

Never mind. David Sedaris already has the animal fables for adults (or inner children who drink and smoke) thing covered anyway. The book’s due out in June 2008 apparently. I hope my niece likes her Christmas present.

The End (of the affair)

I’m within 20 pages of finishing The End of the Affair (confronted with assigned reading, who wouldn’t start with the thinnest book on the pile?), and it’s got me in a mood to think about old loves. Not people loves so much as books.

Such passions as good writing can induce. And so quickly the writing itself fades after The End, like the voice of a former lover, which, like Graham Greene’s Maurice Bendrix, we are startled to realize we can’t quite remember, and so soon after they are gone.

I’m thinking of the time that has passed since I finished The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. It’s been weeks, that’s all. And yet I’m already like the friend who once recommended The Secret History, saying, ‘I can’t remember exactly what it was that I loved so much about that book, only that I really loved it.’

Granted, my memory (or lack of) may be a special case, but already I have forgotten all but the most stylized details. The characters’ names? Gone. The story behind the novel within the novel? A forgotten world. Mainly I remember the main character, a Jewish retired locksmith who is so close to death’s door he thinks he may already be a ghost. But. (The halting conjunction is one of the character’s many endearing habits.) A boyhood friend lives in the apartment above, and they entertain each other, exchanging knocks on the radiator after a silence, to check whether the other is still alive. Once means yes, twice means no.

Or was it twice yes and once no? Finding my copy of the book, I open it to a page that’s dog-eared at the bottom. What was it here that I wanted not to forget? Oh, I see. “We clicked glasses,” the passage begins.

Then he told me the story about how he fell in love with Alberto Giacommetti when he was twenty-five. “How did you fall in love with Aunt Frances?” I asked. “Ah,” said Uncle Julian, and mopped his forehead…

He describes a painting he’s fond of, and young Alma asks:

“What does it have to do with Aunt Frances and Flo?” I asked. For a moment Uncle Julian looked lost. “I really don’t know,” he said. He mopped his forehead again, and called for the check. We sat in silence. Uncle Julian’s mouth twitched. He took a twenty out of his wallet and folded it into a tiny square, then folded that into an even smaller square. Then very quickly he said, “Fran couldn’t give two shits about that painting,’” and put his empty beer glass to his lips.

How did I fall in love with The History of Love? It was the empty beer glass. But. It was a lot of other little things too.

You can admire a great book as a book, but if you’re going to fall in love with it, that only happens a sentence at a time. It happens between the lines, just like love between people, our affection waxing/waning as slowly the person or novel reveals more of its perfect/imperfect whole.

And then, of course, with a book, it’s over. Quick, tidy, nearly anonymous. But.

Watching where you step

Or 'Looking down in Cologne, Germany', this past weekend.
Theme music: 'Early Autumn'.

All the wonders of the world are marketing

I looked out the window of my southeast London two-up-two-down yesterday morning and saw this:

Of course, there was a camera crew standing with hands on hips in the background. There’s always a camera crew. Our street must be on some kind of list. At least it’s not the one for sex offenders.

Whether Greenwich was meant to stand in for a post-meltdown tundra in some global warming advert, I couldn’t tell you. And as far as I could see the family's sojourn didn't end with them reaching into their sealskin pockets for oversized tubes of Ice-Cool Toothpaste, a clean sparkle twinkling out from the dog’s satisfied smile. 'Ruff!' Maybe that only happens when they reach Croydon.