Where My Head's At

As August ended so did the 'summer' holidays and thoughts turned to my new job as head of English in a new school. Am pretty exhausted and have had slightly less time for reading, cinema going etc. However, have still managed to buy quite a few books. Last weekend saw me lurking in Books & Puzzles again and I picked up 4 new bargains:
- Under the Eagle by Simon Scarrow
- Samuel Pepys - The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin
- Well Remembered Friends collected by Angela Hutch
- Asleep by Banana Yoshimoto
- A Little History of The World by EH Gombrich

Already finished Under the Eagle which was what I believe is usually referred to as a cracking read. Unchallenging stuff about the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 42, but diverting nonetheless. My attention was first drawn to Mr Scarrow after seeing his latest book emblazoned over the supermarket shelves at half price. I'm always a little wary of books in supermarkets and have come a cropper on a couple of occasions. So seeing his back catalogue available for £2 each seemed a pretty marginal risk and so I took the plunge. In fact I may even return this weekend and pick up the rest of the series!

I remember the Pepys book coming out a few years ago and garnering a lot of positive attention so I was more than happy to shell out £3.99 which is pricey for a remainder paperback. Have so far read the introduction and have not been put off. Will dip back in at bed time. Thrilling, huh?

Have never read anything by Banana Yoshimoto but am a big fan of Japan. I realise that's a somewhat sweeping statement but true. I like both the Murakamis - although I probably prefer the less well known Ryu. I've actually read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Mishima, like sushi and the bullet train. Comprehensive, no? I don't like that rotten bean curd stuff. What's it called? Hatto? Something like that.

Well Remembered Friends is a bog book so probably doesn't count - it's a collection of 'eulogies on celebrated lives' and looked like it might come in useful one day. It's been placed on a shelf and may never be opened.

I picked up the Gombrich history in Waterstones a few weeks back - I was actually looking for HG Wells Short History of the World (which is excellent and came across this instead. I've read the first few chapters but find it a little too full of annoying rhetorical questions. Know what I mean? Never mind.

Finally saw Kung-fu Panda in Clonakilty. No, wait a minute - that sentence makes it appear that I was desperate to visit Clonakilty's cinema in particular whereas in fact I only included that detail to make me seem more wordly and cosmopolitan. Which is desperate; who ever is going to find Clonakilty either wordly or cosmopolitan? It wasn't a bad cinema though - I was impressed by the fact that they only sold salted pop corn. Is this an Irish thing? Here's a pic:

I took my eldest daughter (4) and neice (6) despite my wife's concerns about content. This was what Parent Previews had to say:

Although this film contains only mild name-calling and some brief rude humor, it is jam packed with depictions of martial arts action. The animated animals kick, punch and tumble their way through one encounter after another. Characters are also choked, burned, hit with spikes and pushed down a flight of stairs. Soldiers use weapons such as swords, chains and arrows. One character is stuck with needles during an acupuncture session. Fireworks and other explosions involving characters are portrayed.

Sounds great doen't it! In fact I was a little disappointed: it certainly wasn't as funny as I'd hoped although there 2 or 3 laugh out loud moments. My niece kept up a constant barrage of questions which I found impossible to to answer. My favourite came about 5 minutes into the film - she asked, "What happens at the very end?" Actually what happens is fairly predictable and I probably could have made a pretty accurate guess. When it was all over I asked my 4 year old daughter if she fancied learning kung fu:

"What? Like Kung fu Panda?"
"Yes"
"OK, but I don't think mummy would like it."

The animation was excellent (as you'd expect these days) and the big name voice actors were up to snuff. I particularly enjoyed Ian McShane's villain.

I'm really looking forward to some more 'grown up' fair and am dsiappointed to have missed The Visitor at The Curzon Film Club. Doh!

Just returned from a visit to my sister-in-law in West Cork. I'd taken along several of the books I've recently bought and actually made good progress into Housekeeping on the ferry. Her husband, Joe Horgan is an (about to be) published poet and columnist for the Irish Post - I've just tried googling him and there aren't any interesting links. His book comes out later this year so maybe his web presence will blossom then. Anyway. Joe is a book person. His book are organised by theme and then alphabetised. There's a big Irish writers section for instance and, more of interest to me, a pulp, throw away, easy reading section. Here, tucked in next to the Pelecannos novels was Special Topics In Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. The title did it for me - I'm a sucker for this overblown sounding nonsense. It has an American Highschool setting but the story is more Dead Poets' Society than American Pie. Actually that makes it sound shit. The story is narrated by Blue Van Meer who has been brought up by her brilliant university professor father and groomed as a future Nobel laureate. All of Blue's asides and intimations are acknowledged parenthetically by author and title. it takes some of the clichéd ingredients of the setting and turns them into a satisfyingly off beat mix. It also has the sort of elliptical ending which Pessl taunts readers with in her analysis of Antonioni's L'Avventura.

Joe doesn't much like people borrowing his books so I was forced to spend a lot of time trying to get it finished. Still didn't manage and had to steal it. Don't worry; I will post it back with thanks. I finished it last night and went to sleep happy. Momentum in the novel seems to be building towards Blue's discovery of the hung body of one of her teachers (an event mentioned right at the beginning so I'm not spoiling anything) but veers off afterwards in a way which suddenly switches genres. I liked it a lot but it was definitely a very self conscious show-offy kind of read. Whether that’s the result of this being Pessl’s first novel and thus self conscious and show-offy or this is an authentic attempt to capture the narrative voice ultimately didn’t matter: it was great fun.

Have now added Bill Bryson's 'biography' of Shakespeare to the read pile. I've put inverted commas around the word biography because, frankly, he doesn't really tell you anything about the bard himself. He lets us know early on that all anyone knows for certain about his subject is the date he was born and christened in Stratford, that he married Anne Hathaway, that he lived in London and that he almost certainly wrote a load of plays. Oh, we also know the day he died. Bryson sets out to tell us all the things we don't and can't possibly know and takes the time time to debunk a lot of popular myths about the great man. The one thing he seems absolutely certain about is that Shakespeare's plays were in fact written by Shakespeare (this reminds me of a probably acropophical story about an academic who spent his life's work trying to prove that the Iliad wasn't written by Homer, but by another Greek of the same name!) He's quite amusing, as well as pretty convincing, in the final chapter where he pokes holes in all the theories ascribing Shakespeare's works to Francis Bacon and sundry others. I felt particularly pleased to learn that some of the leading proponents anti-Stratford conspiracy theories have names such as Looney, Silliman and Battey. Wonderful. I also found the details of the First Folio's printing a fascinating subject - apparently no two copies were the same! But, and it's a big but, I didn't really learn anything about Shakespeare beyond the fact that the there isn't anything to be learnt. And that's just frustrating. I don't really know why Bryson took the trouble to write this - obviously it's sold very well and thus made him a few quid - but still. It's not half as much fun as Shakespeare in Love

Finished Ross Leckie's Scipio in the wee hours of yesterday; decided to stay up until I'd finished it after a row with my wife. For such a readable book I'm not at all sure whether I enjoyed it. It's set in Rome during the second Punic War. I'm not entirely sure why, but Punic basically means Carthage. The Romans have been taking a pounding from Hannibal - the guy with the elephants who crosses the Alps in winter (supposedly impossible) to invade Italy - and Scipio reforms the somewhat moribund Roman army to dramatic effect and saving the Republic. It's written as a memoir dictated by Scipio to his friend/servant/lover Bostar. Bostar and Scipio tell their stories intermitantly until the action starts hotting up at which Bostar's story annoyingly tails off. Bostar makes the point (again and again) that Scipio is an unreflective narrator whose lack of self knowledge makes him unreliable. Furtunately at any point where the reader might have to do any work at all, Bostar pitches up and beats us around the head with the authorial perspective. It's a cracking historical novel though. I would have liked to understand a bit more about the rivalry between Cato and Scipio which forms a major part of the plot but is never really elucidated.

Apparently this is the second of a trilogy. Will I read the other two? Only if I can pick them up for £2 in the remainder bookshop as I did with this one.

Slunk back to Borders today to return prof Wiker's book of fundamentalist Christian bullshit. Also, and I'm not proud of this, I kind of 'forgot' to let them know I'd used a 25% coupon to buy it. This was mainly because I had, as always, lost the receipt. In exchange I got Bill Bryson's Shakespeare, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and a beautiful, signed hardback edition of Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock. The thing which, to my mind, makes this such an aesthetically pleasing object is that the edge of the pages and the edge of the cover are exactly the same length! You know how usually there are a few millimetres between the edge of the pages and the edge of the cover? Well this book doesn't have that! As to what it's like as a text I have no idea - there's a recommendation on the front from Chuck Palahniuk (he who wrote Fight Club) and another on the back comparing it to the work of David Lynch. It sounds great, but I'm going to save it until I've finished some of the other stuff I'm reading. I'll save it for when my soul cries out to handle a beautiful objet.

Yesterday I was £10 down after an altercation with a car park ticket machine. Today I am £10 up (actually I suppose I'm merely even) after a John Lewis Chip and Pin reader freakishly tore the chip off my debit card. I looked on aghast as the assisatnt tugged the damn thing until it snapped. "Whoops", she says. Yeah right. I guess because I was buying school uniform for my four year old daughter made me seem pretty pathetic and they very kindly gave me a tenner plus a voucher for coffee and cake for two in their cafe. Result.

Anyway, this only signifies as it meant we were able to proceed with our proposed trip to the cinema. I finally gave into pester power and took Olivia to see The Clone Wars instead of Kung Fu Panda. She's crazy about all things jedi at the momemet and spends idle moments humming the Darth Vader theme - dum dum dum der der dum der der dum etc. That's when she's not singing Mamma Mia! I have to confess that I found The Clone Wars a much more watchable film than the 3 prequels which groaned ponderously under the weight of plot they were forced to support. As there were no particular dots to join up, this made for a fairly fun flight into the Star Wars universe. Plus I really liked the chunky animation style; Obi Wan's hair is excellent.

See what I mean? If you have young kids, take 'em. Watching Olivia watch the film was a glimpse back to being five years old in 1977 when I saw the original film. Well done George - I'm even starting to forgive Jar Jar

Yesterday I spotted a 25% off coupon for Borders bookshop in Saturday’s Guardian. I say spotted: it was emblazoned on the front page and not at all hard to spot. Regardless, I got very over excited and charged off for Bristol post-haste. I had it in mind to buy a literary biography and having just read Nick Hornby’s account of Larkin’s letters (apparently he says “cunt” a lot!) I had my heart set on getting a really good bio of the poet Philip Larkin. If nothing else you’ll know the one that starts, “They fuck you up your mum and dad / They don’t mean to but they do”. So imagine my delight a finding Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin, A Writer’s Life – 500 pages and at £16.99, a healthy discount. So far I’ve only read the introduction but am particularly taken with his will being described as ‘repugnant’.

I also picked up Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. This is another of Hornby’s recommendations, but on this occasion I rather feel I got there before him as I’ve already seen the “major motion picture” alluded to on the cover. Again, I’ve only read the first few pages, but I’m already very pleased to be able to report that there’s a lot here that wasn’t in the film. For those of you who don’t know, Persepolis is another graphic novel and as Hornby put it, “I know myself well enough to understand that I would never have read a prose memoir describing this life and these events”. Quite.

So far so good. Now for the clanger. I really wanted to get a copy of Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World, but a visit to the Social Sciences section and a conversation with an employee convinced me there wasn’t one to be had. Instead I spied a tome entitled 10 Books That Screwed The World by Benjamin Wiker PhD. Well I thought, that sounds intriguiging. The blurb described it thus: “In this witty, engaging survey of bad guys ranging from Marx to Hitler, Nietzsche to Barry Frieden, Professor Wiker’s poison pen portraits are great critical aids to analysing some of the worst ideas that have ever contaminated Western civilization.” Sounds great, I thought. I had a quick flick through to make sure it wasn’t too impenetrably academic and hurried off to the checkout. I should have known something was seriously wrong when I got back to the car park and found that I had lost my parking ticket. I have never done this before and was outraged to discovered that a lost ticket results in a payment of £10. There is no argument – in fact there is no one to argue with. I gnashed my teeth with frustration but in the end I had to pay. It wasn’t until later that day, when I finally sat down to read Professor bloody Wiker that the awful truth dawned. The man is an evangelical Christian. His first chapter deals with Machiavelli’s The Prince, which because it’s pretty short I’ve actually read. Wiker traduces this text on the grounds that it encourages a lack of belief in God. I checked the fly leaf for confirmation, and there in the little biographical blurb everything is made clear. Wiker “writes full time as a senior fellow at the St Paul Centre for Biblical Theology”! Oh no!` This book cost £21.99! Even with my 25% discount this is too much. I wonder if Borders are prepared to take it back?

I watched the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line last night after buying it for £2,99 from a supermarket. Whilst I can accept that it's well acted it is never the less a terribly dull tale. Cash's rock 'n' roll excess is pedestrian - he comes across as a real light-weight with nothing interesting to say about anything. Why bother making a film about his life? Granted I've never made a hit record or met Elvis Presley, but my life, and I'm afraid you're going to have to take this on faith, is slightly more interesting than his! I'm taking the kids to see Kung Fu Panda this afternoon so hopefully I'll something more interesting to write about.

OK – post 2 will add to the stuff I didn't have time for last time.

My guilty reading pleasure is, I’m somewhat ashamed to admit, is science fiction and fantasy. I feel ashamed about being ashamed – why should I be? I guess I don’t want to be lumped in with geeks and groupies that cluster around Star Trek and Buffy franchises. I’m better than that! Anyway, a few months ago whilst surreptitiously browsing the sci-fi aisles in Borders I encountered a novel excellently entitled The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. It had one of those staff recommendations which said that if I’d enjoyed Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law (and I certainly had – Abercrombie has been described as the Quentin Tarrantino of fantasy!)) then this would be for me. Whilst it was quite as excellent as Abercrombie’s stuff, it was still cracking stuff – well written, darkly witty ( favourite line: “Well, that was as welcome as a barrel of dog’s cocks”) and inhabited by wonderful characters (none of whom had hairy feet). On a return visit to Borders this week I picked up Red Seas Under Red Skies, the sequel to Locke Lamora which picks up where the previous novel leaves off and follows the twists and turns of Locke and Jean, the Gentlemen Bastards – thieves and con men extraordinaire. If you like a well written, interesting fantasy novel you’ll enjoy this. If you tend to view what this particular genre offers with contempt, you won’t.

On the same trip I also picked up the Heroes graphic novel. I’m a fairly recent convert to graphic novels having never been a serious comic reader since becoming disillusioned with Whizzer and Chips back in the late 70s. This was put to rights after reading a Guardian review of Jimmy Corrigan a few years back – since then I’ve approached the comic form with the zeal of a convert. I loved the first series of Heroes and thought the comic would be a rewarding read. In fact I found it strangely disappointing. It’s a series of loosely connected inter-episode vignettes which provide some back ground and confusingly a whole new character who despite playing a seemingly crucial role in the plot doesn’t figure, as far as I’m able to recollect, in the TV show. And then she dies! I was expecting a retelling of the TV show in comic form - I always say that that expectations are resentments under construction!

In between all this I’ve been watching The Wire. I’ve been reading rave reviews of this HBO police drama for years and was never able to invest the time. This is also true of The Sopranos – can you believe I’ve never seen it? Anyhoo, I’ve made up for it over the past few months and have almost finished season 3 – Stringer Bell’s just been shot just as the Major Crimes Unit was closing in. Did you see that coming? Of course, but he was still a great character and I’ll miss him.

A few days a ago, whilst browsing in my local remainder bookshop, I came across a collection of articles for an American magazine called The Believer I had never heard of said magazine before but the author's name was Nick Hornby - he of Fever Pitch and Hi-Fidelity fame and I figured the resulting writing would be frothy, unchallenging and amusing. On reading the blurb ( yeah I know, but even when I'm only considering shelling out 2 quid I can't help myself) I discovered that Hornby had been commissioned to write a monthly column about the stuff he'd read that month. The only condition (set by the magazine) was that he was not allowed to be overly critical of any living writer. If anyone's interested the collection's called The Polysyllabic Spree. It begins in 2003 and I was impressed to see how many of the books Hornby chose to read in his first month were titles I too had read and enjoyed.

Anyway, to cut a long, and probably tedious story, mercifully short I have decided to take a leaf out his book and start keeping a record of what I'm reading, watching and listening to in order to provide an ongoing answer to the above question; where's my head at?

So: books I've read in the past few weeks:

Bring the Noise by Simon Reynolds
The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch
Heroes Volume I Graphic Novel
Good To Great by Jim Collins

Films I've watched:

Wall-E
The Dark Knight
Mamma Mia
The entire Star Wars oeuvre
The Wire season 4

What I've been listening to:

Public Enemy - It Takes A Nation Of Millions... & Fear Of A Black Planet

The Simon Reynolds book, subtitled 20 years of writing about hip rock and hip hop, is another collection of articles; this time documenting 20 years of music journalism. I have to confess that I have finished it yet, although I probably will as I'm interested in the subject matter. Reynolds is, to put it mildly, a bit of nob; he is one of the writers who examines popular culture through a high brow lens and so far he has applied his mix of psychoanalytic, Marxist and sundry other lit crit poses to The Smiths, Husker Du, Mantronix and Public Enemy amongst others. He seems preoccupied by the differences between 'black' and 'white' music and his central premise in collecting together these essays is to hold up examples of music which challenges, provokes and kicks against the mainstream and explain its importance and place in the canon of 'good' music. He's a scholarly writer but also is undeniably an enthusiastic and a terribly knowledgeable one at that. I think I'd find him exceedingly annoying in person - he strikes me as the sort of chap who'd hold forth in the pub on stuff you don't know enough about to argue. However, as I'm not trying to have a conversation with him he is proving to be erudite and provocative company. I've certainly been provoked into listening to my Public Enemy records again (something I've not done for years!) His enthusiasm is infectious and as I result I'm reminded once again that there's not enough time to listen to everything I want to listen to - what with all the reading and viewing I have to squeeze in.

Recent viewing has been largely the result of the Summer Holidays. I'm a teacher and am off work until the end of August. My two daughters (4 and 3) have developed a sudden and insatiable appetite for all things Star Wars - after watching the original 3 films endlessly over the past month I was persuaded, despite my aesthetic misgivings, to buy the most recent trilogy. First off - they're not really suitable for a pre-school audience and I was shocked to see that the last film is actually a 12! On a more positive note though, stripped of the big screen context and crushing disappointment which accompanied my first viewings of these films I've been pleasantly surprised how much fun they are when watched with small children on a TV screen. I can't tell you how chuffed they were when saw R2D2 fly or Yoda with a light sabre! Plus, they love Jar Jar and laugh delightedly at his antics. They're still pompous, overblown train wrecks groaning with shonky plots and flat characters, but now they seem so much more fun. Which is, I suppose, the point.

Wall E and Mama Mia were both family outings and both enjoyable on those terms. Mamma Mia is as ridiculously camp as you'd expect but full of such joie de vive that you can't help but smile, hum along and tap your feet. My wife has already been for a return viewing! Wall-E on the other had is an exceedingly odd film - the first half a pared down dystopian fantasy of a lonesome robot in an apocolypse-lite future, the second half a mix of inorganic romance, farce and fat jokes masquerading as social commentary or satire or something. As my 4 year old pointed out - there's no baddies! What kind of film is that?

Anyway, that's enough for my first instalment - I'll write about the rest of the stuff I mentioned at a later date - parenthood calls.