A Bit of a Blur

Somewhere in the 200-ish pages of his autobiography A Bit of a Blur Blur bass player Alex James finds himself twisted up in expensive sheets in a hotel room somewhere in South America, alternating between having sex with the five prettiest girls he could find, drinking champagne and snorting a dick-load of cocaine.

It was, he says, pretty much at the height of his excesses.

It’s certainly as close as he gets to detailing them as this is a book that was almost more interesting in what it didn’t say than in what it did. Oh sure James is pretty up-front about constantly cheating on his long-term girlfriend and his partying ways but the booze and coke consumption is all skated over a bit finely for my liking. Call me morbid but I want to hear about nights spent snorting coke off someone’s boobs, passing out in toilet stalls and attempted interventions by friends. Instead we get vague references to waking up covered in blood in casualty and, only when he estimates he spent about a million pounds on coke and booze do we start to get a picture of just what it is that he’s not saying.

I seem to be reading a lot of autobiographical stuff lately, which isn’t particularly like me, but it’s always fascinating to have a look at someone else’s life.James’ role in the rise and rise of one of the 90s biggest bands certainly makes a compelling read - I romped through it last night with barely a break - and as someone with a soft spot for band boys myself it’s fascinating to see fandom from the other side of the fence.

He’s also a surprisingly deft writer, which I wouldn’t necessarily have expected, and I found his meditations on music and astronomy almost more interesting than his encounters with Johnny Depp, Bjork and Marianne Faithful.

It’s also full of helpful tips for the burgeoning alcoholic, such as eating carrots between glasses of champagne to stop your breath from stinking, or having something fizzy every few glasses of spirits to avoid getting too drunk too quickly. Valuable lessons those.

The Hungry Years

"I wake up on the fattest day of my life, 20 January 2003. I am just over 6 feet tall, and weigh... how much? I step on the scale and off it very quickly, to limit the damage. 236lbs. At best! My bathroom floor slopes slightly, and I have positioned the scale carefully to ensure the smallest possible reading"

So begins UK journalist William Leith's book The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict.

This is a fascinating and addictive book. The story, which is pretty meandering but follows Leith's battles with food addiction and attempts to understand why he is the way he is, is the best kind of voyeurism. I picked it up in London a couple of years ago when it had just been released. It was a whim and I was attracted by the sight of a large, half eaten donut on the cover as well as some good reviews on the back. I don't want to take the food metaphor too far and say I devoured the thing in one sitting but the prose is so good and the subject matter so ludicrously enthralling that I have to say the book was bloody hard to put down.

I picked it up again tonight, too tired to read anything new, and had the same reaction. I've never knowingly read any of Leith's stuff (he writes for the Guardian, the Observer and the Daily Telegraph apparently) but I'd imagine he's a very good journalist because he has an incredible knack for telling you the kind of things (and not all about food) that make you squirm a little bit with embarassment but keep reading anyway:

"(Leith's girlfriend) had this one position she favoured. I would lie on my back - which, being fat, I preferred anyway - and she would lower herself on top of me, and then tell me to do a specific thing . . . Sometimes I would do the specific thing slightly wrong and she'd be furious - she'd get up suddenly, angry, and put her underwear back on, and that would be that. Once I had to stop doing the specific thing because I got a cramp in my hand."

It's about consumerism, of course, but the structure - which reads almost like a series of blogs or diary entries - manages to make what might be a tired subject sound new. Having read a fair few women's magazines in my time, for instance, I thought I had read every possible variation on the story of fat people dealing with their fatness but I can very honestly say that this book said things I have never, ever thought about before - some of which I could probably have gone without ever reading in my life, if I'm honest, but all incredibly engrossing.

It's hard to say if my interest in the book stems partly from my own on-again off-again battles with food which, although, not particularly serious, seem likely to last forever, or not. I'd be fascinated to see what someone with a completely 'normal' (or at least healthy) attitude towards food thinks of the book. I suspect, however, that the voyeristic impulse in everyone is somewhat universal and that most people would find this as readable as I do.

To conclude I'll turn it over to Leith, who writes of his fascination with watching an obese family wolf down snacks on a train - a spectacle he enjoys for probably exactly the same reason I loved reading this book:

"The sight of these poeple is almost entertaining. They each carry a plastic bag full of snacks - bags of potato crisps, cylindrival tubs of potato crisps, chocolate bars, bags of sweets. As soon as they sit down, the show begins - they grab the snaks, they tear at them, they wolf them. Their hands - soft, oversized hands - begin to cram the snacks into their mouths. Constant eating has developed in them superhuman abilities to chew, to release enzymes in the mouth, to form the food into a bolus and swallow. They do not talk to each other. The guy inhales two large bags of crisps in
three or four minutes. The girl kills a Mars bar in a couple of gulps. Then she hits the Pringles. She eats the Pringles in two-inch stacks. When she runs out of food, after about fifteen minutes of uninterrupted eating, she starts moaning. She tries to snatch her brother's food bag. There is panic, fighting. The girl is making sub-orgasmic noises. The guy is grunting. He's lashing out. The mother bops the girl on the head, and gives her a Mars bar to calm down.

It is after breakfast and before lunch, These morbidly obese people are moving towards a meal, having recently finished a meal. I think: they are addicted - to starch, to sugar... But then I think, no, it can't be that simple. There must be something else, something deep, ugly. Something unspeakable in these people's brains. When you see fat people, you want to blame them for their condition. Those fat bastards. You want to blame them."

American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

I saw the movie years ago and loved Christian Bale's performance of a yuppy serial killer, so I thought I'd pick up the book and have a read.
What a brilliant piece of work.
The character development is top-notch and while it can be, at times, a little wordy, the descriptions of settings and characters really does set the reader up well for the rest of the novel.
The book is narrated in first person, which makes reading it all the more unsettling, and goes to sometimes painstaking lengths to describe the complete outfit that every single character is wearing at the time.
For example: "Carruthers is wearing a silk double breasted pinstripe suit from Armani, an off-white shirt by Hermes and crocodile-skin shoes by Gucci."
This constant reference to brands and appearances, while cumbersome at first, really sets the scene for the culture in which the main characters exist.
It is far from subtle yet extremely effective.
The reader is given the impression that these people don't live in the 'real world,' that the normal rules don't apply to them, which sets the scene nicely for a bit of needless violence, torture and murder.
The book is far more graphic when it comes to the detail of what the protagonist, Patrick Bateman, does to his victims. Some of the scenes in this book you just can't show in a movie.
But aside from that, the first-person perspective allows the reader to track Bateman as he slowly loses it and becomes (more) criminally insane.
There is one scene near the end of the book when he is involved in a gunfight with police (while resplendent in his Versace suit) and during the middle of it, the narration switched from first-person to third for a few pages, which is quite effective in emphasising the protagonist's detachment from reality.
Oh, and without spoiling the end for anyone, the movie ending is Hollywood fluff. The book ending is a lot more satisfying for the reader who, amazingly, is still made to empathise with the character despite the fact that he is a cold-hearted, remorseless killer.

Kate

I demand you write your observations on Down to This here immediately. And please try not to sound smarter than me. xx

I am Down to This...

OK, because of my literary schizophrenia, I picked up a completely random book the other day - A book called Down to This by the improbably-named Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall. In 2001 Stall (then aged 27) decided his life was shit and he would go and live for a year in Tent City, in Toronto, among the homeless and perhaps write a book about it.
I was quite transfixed. I'd like the other members of this literary wankfest to read it and tell me what you think. It's spruiked as a memoir and I suppose it is,but it raises on hell of a lot of questions for me.

Stall at no point really, really seems to regret his decision. He never seems to question the validity of his choice or really deeply longs to just go home. He accepts his new life as easily as we accept that what we want to order isn't on the menu today. It is curiously written and perhaps more refreshing that way. He doesn't write the book I expected him to write.

Sure, he describes the people he lives with in details, in depth, but somehow I don't have a picture of them in my head. Nancy, Jo-Jo, Karen - they are all bonkers, one had a baby, one is dying, one fights with two-by-four, one is a hooker - I can't remember which. Maybe all. They are interestingly sad people whose lives have been characterised by violence and abuse. They, in turn, abuse themselves and each other but, like any people, ahve an immense capacity to care and love and look out for others.

Stall, being a well-educated, middle class person just accepts his life in tent city and goes about his way. Sure, he ends up with carbon monoxide poisoning and the shit kicked out of him, not to mention more, but this is his real life. I suppose it shows how much he wanted to run away from his old one. There's crack and coke and booze of all kinds every second of every day. But there's a community and a shit-kicking affection that seems to be missing from his regular life.

And after finishing the book , I don't have closure, and I have been dreaming endlessly about it, to the point that for the last two days I have been grumpy and sleep-deprived. He writes about being cold (remember canadian winter, living in non-waterproof shack that you built yourself/tent), the way that Knut Hamsun describes being starving on the streets on Sofia in the 1800s in his aptly-called Hunger (it's fictional BTW) in a way that you can't help feeling it yourself.

When I read Hunger, I had to get up and make a sandwich every few chapters. I had sympathy pains. And when I read Down to This snuggled up in bed, I couldn't get warm. I am confused by this book. I want to ask Stall a whole bunch of questions. It is a curious tome that really grabbed my attention and I could go on but I don't want to spoil it.

Maybe the end message isn't about homelessness or what Stall thinks about it in the end. I think it's about love and where you find it.

On the courier to the next person who asks. Unless it's Kate. Then I just throw it at her head.

in a world of danger the pen is still mightier

Every now and again something inspires you to pick up a book that is completely out of character for you. It is completely unlike something you would normally read and you don't even know why you want to read it. But you have to. I felt that way about The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.

It is a post modern voyage into the conceptual. No, that's not me trying to be smarter than I am, it actually is. You start with a man who wakes up with no recollection of who or where he is. Gradually, through notes left for him by himself before he lost his memory he is introduced to a world in which all the communications, information exchange, relationships, memories, thoughts and ideas between people form a kind of conceptual fluid. In this fluid swim conceptual fish. This particular man, the main character, is being hunted by a shark - it wants to feed on his mind until there is nothing left.

Cue adventure story, clue following and conceptual shark hunting. The great thing about the novel is its premise, the adventure story lost me a little because it felt a bit too Indiana Jones - complete with love interest and humorous side kick. Although the intertextuality of the story was great and made me remember how much I love postmodern writing. Collective subconscious anyone? The brilliance of Hall's tale is based on the idea that words and ideas are powerful and dangerous. The fact that people are impressionable and easily manipulated, that minds and identies are easily fractured.

This is not something I'd normally pick up, but something I'm glad I read. It does have a Da Vinci Code feel to it and it is a film waiting to happen, both of which cheapen it a little. But I'd still recommend it. It's like taking a can opener to your mind.

Incidentally Kate, you might be interested to know that Hall has named Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying by Belle & Sebastian as his main character's theme. Oh yes, film rights on their way.

P.S Might I add that it somehow reads like a manga movie in parts, a comic book in others and a philosophical tome in the rest (that isn't adventure story). It's a good read.

my mind is hungry

From 50 books.

Mother Tongue

This is the first time I've contributed to the CNG Lending Library blog so I just thought I'd share what I'm reading.
I'm about a third of the way through Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue. Anyone who has read Bill Bryson before knows his work is always an entertaining read, and this book in particular is of interest to all my fellow wordsmiths (in fact it's a must-read) - it basically goes into all the intricacies of the English language. Anyone who wishes to borrow it is welcome to do so when I'm done. Here's a passage with which to leave you:

"Even when you strip out its obsolete senses, round still has twelve uses as an adjective, nineteen as a noun, seven as a transitive verb, five as an intransitive verb, one as an adverb and two as a preposition. But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks a wholly unassuming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of a single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participal adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the Oxford English Dictionary 60,000 words - the length of a short novel - to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English."

A Novel approach

So lat night I had an hour or two to myself after the gym and I began work on my masterpiece: The Definitive Australian Gay Classic.
This hasn't been done before, to my knowledge.
It fits somewhere into the same genre of those old Crawford productions like All The Rivers Run. A bit like A Town Like Alice (the second half). A feast of the Baz Luhrmann variety. With a bit of Brokeback Mountain thrown in.
Priscilla Queen of the Nineteenth Century.
In novel form.
Not a movie. Which the above would infer.
I plan to be the Colleen McCollough of homos.
I post this here in the hope it will encourage my fellow literary-types to also write. The Lending Library could expand its borders a little.

Down in the Dumps Books

When I’m in a certain mood, by which I mean a bad, sad mood there are always certain books I gravitate towards. Books that tell me what I want to hear, some times, or books that sink into depression with me.

Right at the top of the list for the latter category is Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, which is also one of my favourite books for any time. It’s a nice, bitter little volume and the literary equivalent of listening to depressing music when you’re already depressed or going out for a drink with someone whose life is just as shite as yours.

“I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside
Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to
serve the winter mood: Oh God. You’ve done enough. You’ve robbed me of enough,
I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever.”

Greene’s prose is so lovely and so emotive I often find myself stuck with a quote from this book in my head, or mooching along in the cold, imagining myself as the book’s protagonist in a long overcoat.I’ve tried to write this sort of stuff when I’m quite depressed myself or when things aren’t going well but it never works out - I seem to spiral into self pity and get nothing done but clocking up a lot of couch time. I just don’t know Greene did it and I’m struck down with serious envy.

“I sat with the telephone receiver in my hand and I looked at hate like an ugly
and foolish man whom one does not want to know. I dialled her number. I must
have caught her before she had time to leave the telephone and said: ‘Sarah,
tomorrow’s all right, I’d forgotten something. Same place. Same time. And
sitting there, my fingers on the quiet instrument, with something to look
forward to, I thought to myself: I remember. This is what hope feels like.”

Anyway, enough of the jealousy - what about you guys? Anything particular that you reach for in time of crisis?

don't accept books from strangers

My list for the super fun book mart is mostly comprised of books given to me by someone who couldn't be bothered with the trip to Good Sammies. Don't judge me. Please.

1. One copy of Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle. Self help book given to me by my much treasured aunt and uncle who clearly think me in need of unprofessional help. Yes, it is as bad as it sounds. Good to read outloud ironically while drunk. Condition: one small cut in bottom right hand corner - consequence of frantic Christmas present wrapping.

2. One copy of A Month of Sundays- How to go Travelling Without Leaving Town by James O'Loghlin. Condition: Slightly curly corner on the cover as consequence of being stored in a box. Other than that barely been opened. When I travel, you won't see me for dust.

3. Creepers by David Morrell. It is about "urban explorers who illegally enter sealed buildings. . . soon after the group enters it becomes clear this decaying seven-story building holds more secrets than they could have imagined in their worst nightmares." Condition: second hand but looks like its first owner thought as little of it as I did and left it firmly closed.

4. Beneath the Skin by Nicci French. Zoe Jennifer and Nadia are three women with nothing in common. Except for the man who wants to kill them. Ho hum. Condition: practically new- shouldn't have been written.

5. Cathedral by Nelson Demille. March 17 is a day when everyone, everywhere is an honorary Irishman. Everyone except IRA man Brian Flynn. Cosmopolitan called it a "bulldozer of a book". Need I say more? Condition: third hand - could do with some semtex.

Super Fun Book Swap Mart # 2

Ok. I'm unwilling to part with a much as I previously thought but I have:

1. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Johnsy has already requested)
2. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (I have two copies and I hated it)
3. Property by Valerie Martin (Winner of Orange Prize 2003. Not my bag, baby)
4. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James (A rather nice copy, but I can't do it.)

Free to good homes. please take them. please.

Super Fun Book Swap Mart

Kate and I have just been talking about going on a massive book-buying spree, but I have just realised that I really do not have any more room left on my bookshelves and the catbox couldn't possibly accomodate another lot of furniture. However, there are a few books I would willingly part with in order to make room for preferred one. These are ones I started and never finished, books I hated, odds and sods. I am already sending a duplicate copy of Hitchhikers Guide to Johnsy tomorrow, so I suggest this: Everyone does an audit of their bookshelves and advertises their extraneous wares on the CNG library blog. Books are free to good homes although swapping is encouraged.

I shall post my audit tomorrow. It will probably start with Henry James' Wings of a Dove.

has it come to this?

A used book seller in the States has started burning books in protest at the declining value of the written word. Tom Wayne had thousands of books in storage and tried to give them away to thrift stores or libraries but was told there was no room in the inn. So he burnt them. Well, he burnt some of them before the fire department forced him to stop because he didn't have a burning permit.
He told spectators "This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today".
All I can ask you is: on a scale of one to ten - how horrifying do you find this?

Tell me honestly...

When to blazes is everyone finding time to read so much?
I have barely started a book I received a fortnight ago and am thoroughly enjoying!
I think I have too many commitments. I need to shed something. I used to find hours and hours each week. I used to finish books in a sitting. (The first time ever, for any book of length, was Roald Dahl's Matilda. Don't know how old I was but I just devoured it!). But now... now I can barely find five minutes!
So tell me... when are you stealing five minutes?