Any context would do

I suspect Zoe Williams has been waiting a while to use "like playing Monopoly with someone who eats the money". And if she hasn't, she could have.

New and old

James Marcus's Amazonia is meant, among other things, to evoke the extent of late-90s internet euphoria; but it also shows the euphoria's limits, which are less talked about.

This bit is about an appearance on CNN, just before the curve turns. Jeff = Amazon's Jeff Bezos, for whom Marcus was a justly glorified blurb-writer.

"My cue was approaching. I had rehearsed my lines and knew exactly what I was going to say to the boy-and-girl anchor team in Atlanta. Moments before I went live, however, I heard some excited crosstalk in my earpiece: Jeff had been anointed [Time magazine] Person of the Year! They would be making the announcement in just a few minutes! At once it dawned on me that this little segment, which would allow me to preach the gospel of books to my biggest audience ever, was simply an appetizer for the main event: a lengthy celebration of my employer. Well, he had earned it."

In a book on the high-season web, that is, a magazine and an appearance on cable TV generate some of the greatest excitement, and offer the biggest audience. I don't think he's trying to do hindsight, either.

[Amazonia, by James Marcus (New Press, 2004). Humanist version of the rich-and-then-not story. Style nods occasionally -- the subtitle is "Five years at the epicenter of the dot.com juggernaut", which was almost enough to make me put it down straight away -- but in general it's rather good.]

Phrase of the week

"Honey laundering."

This is the business of attempting to smuggle possibly antibiotic-tainted Chinese honey into the EU via third countries, and was described on BBC Radio 4's Food Programme. In the event that you're here in time to listen again to the programme, do: it also has a wonderfully enthusiastic interview with a pollen expert, of a kind I find hard to imagine occurring anywhere else.

Compulsory irony

"'The Chauci --' How old was he then? Twenty-four? It was his first campaign. He began again. 'The Chauci, I remember, dwelt on high wooden platforms to escape the treacherous tides of that region. They gathered mud with their bare hands, which they dried in the freezing north wind, and burnt for fuel. To drink they consumed only rainwater, which they collected in tanks at the front of their houses -- a sure sign of their lack of civilisation. Miserable bloody bastards, the Chauci.' He paused. 'Leave that last bit out.'" -- Pliny the Elder dictates, in Robert Harris's Pompeii.

It's not quite fair to call this bit the compulsory irony: that comes a couple of hundred pages earlier, when the villain tells the hero there is no investment sounder than property in Pompeii. But it does send two messages vital for the modern historical novelist:

i) I have done my research. Lots of it.

ii) Don't worry. I'm not going to take it seriously.

Harris is far more competent at this game than most people who attempt it, but it still feels faintly cynical.

[Pompeii, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson, 2003). Romance and thrills among the falling pumice, naturally, but also a surprising amount of engineering. If that is the sort of thing you like, this will be the sort of thing you love.]

The Brits have a word for it

If you live in the UK and feel superior to US political culture, it may interest you to know that in Washington, chugging appears to be a nameless novelty.

[This is the start of a plan to post occasional stray thoughts here, and journalistic quotations, as well as bits of books. I am still likely to read more than I think, however.]

A teenage girl's view of Rome

"To me, the thought of Rome -- a city adorned with genitalia rather than vinyl siding and stucco -- seemed improbable. I had to see this place. In the weeks leading up to the trip's charter airline departure, I kept waiting for a TV studio buzzer to sound, for an audience to shriek at me, telling me that it was all a big prank." -- Douglas Coupland, Eleanor Rigby.

A work colleague of mine has just set off for a holiday in Rome. It took me a worrying amount of effort not to quote that at her.

[Eleanor Rigby, by Douglas Coupland (Fourth Estate, 2004). May be considered a more satisfactory answer to a friend of mine's question about Douglas Coupland characters and ageing; more satisfactory altogether, in fact, than many of his recent novels, despite the standard slide into fantasy.]

Form burial

"Beginning on the second day, whenever a patient appeared to be moribund, a piece of paper with his name on it was fastened to his clothing. The corpse detail carried the bodies outside, placed them on pyres of wood from ruined houses, burned them, put some of the ashes in envelopes intended for exposed X-ray plates, marked the envelopes with the names of the deceased, and piled them, neatly and respectfully, in stacks in the main office. In a few days, the envelopes filled one whole side of the impromptu shrine" -- John Hersey, Hiroshima.

The second day is the second day after the bomb. If you look at the lines immediately above, this passage is about a reassertion of respectability: "Disposal of the dead," the line goes, "by decent ceremony and enshrinement, is a greater moral responsibility to the Japanese than adequate care of the living." It seems chilling in a way that set-up doesn't point to, however.

[Hiroshima, by John Hersey (Penguin, 1946). I read the Mary McCarthy attack on this thing (quoted somewhere downpage here; it's in this book) long before I read the thing itself. The journalistic stiff-neckedness she twits him for is real, but proves in some way a strength: if you aren't Dante, better not to try to interview the dead.]

Zeugmatic

"The city itself was a revelation and a hope for this skinny little light-brown kid crossing the river on the train, passing through the slums of Herne Hill and Brixton from the suburbs. It was intimidating, a grand imperial metropolis full of massive statues: blank-faced men covered in bird-shit and medals, who had commanded armies and ruled nations. That was the Empire for me: decline, and these relics." -- Hanif Kureishi, My Ear at His Heart.

Zeugma, for the non-littish, is the governing of incompatible nouns by a single verb. In English, with so many verbs to choose from, it tends to be contrived and therefore comic -- "She left in tears and a sedan chair"; Flanders and Swann; The Rape of the Lock. Here, however, it isn't, and serves to do interesting damage to the meaning of "medals".

[My Ear at his Heart, by Hanif Kureishi (Faber and Faber, 2004). H.K. reads the manuscripts of his father's novels, using them to place dad's "semi-broken existence" in relation to his own, more successful life. A middle-aged book: there's lots about turning 50, and revelations include that there used to be more second-hand bookshops, that London's avant-gardes were less cliquey in the 70s, and that there were once lots of good songs on the radio.]

Class action

"Since Titus had come to Great Mop Laura had seen little of Mrs. Leak. Mrs. Leak knew what good manners were; she had not been a housemaid at Lazzard Court for nothing. Taken separately, either Titus or his aunt might be human beings, but in conjunction they became gentry. Mrs. Leak remembered her position and withdrew to it, firmly." --Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes.

Of course, when you become a witch -- as Laura has just done -- being gentry ceases to matter as much. Mrs. Leak will be inviting her to covens in no time.

[Lolly Willowes, by Sylvia Townsend Warner (Chatto & Windus, 1926). Middle-aged woman sells soul to devil rather than spend the rest of her life as a favourite aunt. Tonally a bit uneven -- the devil's jokes, when he appears, seem to belong in a broader comedy -- it nonetheless casts a spell.]

The (fantasy) lives of animals

"Some thought seemed to be striking Moretobello every now and again; it had had a dream, that night, which was why it had left the stall and felt lost to the world that morning: a dream of forgotten things which seemed to come from another life; of wide grassy plains filled with cows, endless cows, coming lowing towards it. And it had seen itself, there in the middle of them, running about in the herd of cows as if looking for something." -- Italo Calvino, in the story 'Father to Son', in Adam, One Afternoon. Moretobello is an ox, in a valley where mules do most of the lifting.

"The old mule went on putting down its hoofs uncertainly on the surface pitted with flints and new holes; its skin was stretched tight with the impression on it; it had suffered so much in its life that nothing could make any impression on it any more. It was walking along with its muzzle bent down, and its eyes, limited by the black blinkers, were noticing all sorts of things; snails, broken by the shelling, spilling an iridescent slime on the stones: ant-hills ripped open and the black and white ants hurrying hither and thither with eggs; torn-up grasses showing strange hairy roots like trees." -- The same, in the same book, in the story 'Hunger at Bevera'.

These passages were written before (I think) Calvino became declaredly a fantasist; you are in the middle of some politically loaded slice of peasant life, and suddenly the animals are seeing more vividly, and feeling more deeply, than the rural proletarians who own them. It's an odd effect. I'm glad I don't have to guess what it signifies.

[Adam, One Afternoon, and other stories, by Italo Calvino, translated by Archibald Colquhoun and Peggy Wright (Collins, 1957; but before that Einaudi, 1949). Short short stories of the working-class during and after WW2. It's not just self-willed beasties that upset things -- the amoral little boys may be even spookier.]

Obvious reasons

"Philip met her eyes, and smiled quickly. After which he looked away, and said something she could not possibly have been anticipating. '"What is the name of your goldfish?"'

"Lois frowned. 'I beg your pardon?'

"'"What is the name of your goldfish?" That was the first thing I ever said to you. Do you remember?'

"'No -- when was this?'

"'Twenty-nine years ago. I was round at your parents' house. They threw a dinner party, for my Mum and Dad. You were wearing an incredibly low-cut dress. I couldn't take my eyes off your cleavage.'

"'I don't remember that at all,' Lois said. 'Anyway, I never even had a goldfish.'

"'I know. You were talking to my dad about Colditz, the television programme...'" -- Jonathan Coe, The Closed Circle.

The problem with linking two novels -- this one and The Rotters' Club, in which you can read 'live' the conversation discussed above -- over a gap of 30-something years is that your characters have to keep telling one another their back stories. The advantage is that 'Do you remember?' conversations really happen, and feel less awkward when represented in a double-book.

[The Closed Circle, by Jonathan Coe (Viking, 2004). Second part of The Rotters' Club -- preplanned, so it's unfair to call it a sequel -- set 1999-2003. The less attractive end of the pantomime horse; strong on middle-aged defeat, but weak on Blairism, of which it's in part a satire. The first book's little Thatcherite is now a new Labour MP. Thing is, when he's meant to have been reading Milton Friedman in bed, most future newLabourites were far-left chisellers at the NUS.]

[Note: The quotation immediately below marks the beginning of an attempt to work systematically through all the unread books in my room, starting at the top left hand corner of one wall and working shelf by shelf to the bottom right of the next. There will be another of these stand-alone notes when the project is completed -- or abandoned.]

Proportion

"Although the great Gothic cathedrals had been erected, the Roman arch remained the norm for stone bridges. Although Stonehenge and the pyramids had been standing for millennia as monuments to mechanical advantage, Galileo was just asking anew questions that the Peripatetic philosophers had raised but not fully answered. By the end of the seventeenth century, not only would Newton and Galileo have laid the foundations for modern science and engineering, but the lead pencil would achieve its present form." -- The Pencil, Henry Petroski.

Can you, too, detect traces of a 'more importantly' after that 'but'?

[The Pencil, by Henry Petroski (Knopf, 1989). Makes a case for the importance of its subject by parallelism -- the history of pencil development is a model for the history of engineering -- rather than by claiming that pencils changed the world or by attempting a big narrative arc. Which is admirable. But it reads at some points like a graduate thesis and at others like a poor translation of Lucretius.]

The good and bad of Jonathan Coe

I can give you it in one quote, a single sentence, from the section in The Rotters' Club dealing with the affair between Bill Anderton, a British Leyland shop steward, and Miriam Newman, a typist there: "They checked into The Talbot Hotel as Mr and Mrs Stokes (a little tribute Bill had decided to pay to the current chairman of British Leyland)."

The good: That detail fits Bill Anderton's character perfectly, adds to it, and helps make a militant union official conducting an affair with someone he has power over sympathetic.

The bad: Coe has to tell you the significance of the name, and throw in "current", which makes the tone suddenly journalistic. He does this kind of thing a lot.

[The Rotters' Club, by Jonathan Coe (Viking, 2001). Historical novel of the 1970s, looser structurally than his earlier work; this gives the characters more space but makes the occasional implausibilities harder to accept. Rereading, for obvious reasons. It stands up.]

The strange life of English literature

"Important writing, strange to say, rarely gives the exact flavour of its period; if it is successful it presents you with the soul of man, undated. Very minor literature, on the other hand, is the Baedeker of the soul, and will guide you through the curious relics, the tumbledown buildings, the flimsy palaces, the false pagodas, the distorted and fantastical and faery vistas which have cluttered the imagination of mankind at this or that brief period of its history" -- George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England.

Perhaps. It's hard, though, to find books that are both guileless enough to be informative and sufficiently well-written to be read without the aid of either a publisher's advance or a grant from the AHRB. Many of them spell "faery" like that, and without Dangerfield's excuse of mocking a poem he's just quoted.

[The Strange Death of Liberal England, by George Dangerfield (Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1935). Political history from the school of Lytton Strachey - somewhere that might do with reopening. You could certainly still steal this one's structural tricks with profit. A sense of inevitability (un-Stracheyish, and in the suburbs of Marxist) also gives it a tremendous shove.]

What not to wear

"Outside in the blinding sunlight, antiquated trams spew out agile targets for the Mercedes taxis. Dark-skinned young men with long black hair parade along the water's edge in bikinis almost big enough to conceal a comb." -- Harry Lime hits Beirut, early in Len Deighton's The Ipcress File.

I've asked the OED, and 'bikini' meant the same in 1962 as it does now -- and as it had done then for more than a decade. So that's either how you get homosexuality into a pre-legalisation thriller, assuming you're a mite homophobic, or a Deighton blind spot. Or both.

[The Ipcress File, by Len Deighton, Hodder & Stoughton, 1962. Has dated interestingly, if not exactly well. Much more expository dialogue than I'd like to think he could now get away with.]

Inversion

"The sort of dream out of which stuff is made." -- Paul Durcan, 'Mr and Mrs Andrews', from Give Me Your Hand.

[Give Me Your Hand, by Paul Durcan, Macmillan, 1994. Poems facing pictures from the National Gallery. Both visually acute -- yes, Mr and Mrs A are "in the Suffolk desert" -- and pleasingly tangential.]

Illness as metaphor

"Our men could only draw on such funds of nerve and physique, knowledge and skill, as we had put into them... Like the syphilitic children of some jolly Victorian rake, they could only bring to this harsh examination such health and sanity as all the pleasant vices of Victorian and Edwardian England had left them." -- C.E. Montague, Disenchantment.

He's talking about the English soldiers of World War I. Presumably someone has already written the thesis on venereal disease in post-war writing.

[Disenchantment, by C.E. Montague, Chatto and Windus, 1922. Bellelettristic analysis of the psychological impact of the then Great War, by a leading light of the then Manchester Guardian. Overturns several ideas I hadn't even realised were received by then, in a style heavy on everything -- untranslated chunks of Latin, wide literary reference, long flights of rhetoric -- that journalists are no longer allowed to do.  Given that he appears to have spent 1916-1918 as a censor, the propaganda chapter is perhaps particularly interesting.]

Manners

"The toddler looks up hungrily at his mother; he has finished his stick of sugar-cane, the mangled remains of which lie scattered about our feet. She takes out a banana from her basket, peels it, drops the skin on the floor and presents it to him. A congenial little slum is being created around us. She smiles happily at me." -- Shiva Naipaul, North of South.

The woman has two other children; they are all sitting next to the author on a bus from Malindi to Lamu, in Kenya. 'Congenial' generates as much of the sting as 'slum', you'll notice.

[North of South, by Shiva Naipaul, Andre Deutsch, 1978. Brother of the more famous V.S., and with a similarly forgiving eye. This is a travelogue taking in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. The emphasis is on the risks of being Indian in post-independence Africa. Very fine, very strong; but you would definitely be afraid to eat in front of him.]

First, define your terms

"Nationalism, that specious patriotism of the morally stunted..." -- Louis de Bernieres, Birds Without Wings, chapter 31.

"Guerillas, bandits, brigands or liberating heroes, motivated by hatred and the desire for loot (otherwise known as patriotism)..." -- ibid, chapter 50.

That would be a morally mature hatred and desire for loot, then.

[Birds Without Wings, by Louis de Bernieres, Secker and Warburg, 2004. Attempted Turkish cover-version of War and Peace, not quite as flawed as it is ambitious; the good bits are very good. Caveat: Both quotes are asides. I capped up the beginnings for aesthetic reasons.]