From Virtual Information Hoover to Revelling Reader (and back again)

A personal counter-cultural trend has accelerated this week catalysed by a week of working from home. Whilst I sucked up and spat out a barrage of information snippets, data points and piano-playing cats via email, friendfeed, text and tweet, I also found myself on a complementary novel-reading jag in my non-working hours.

At the end of days spent staring at screens, tapping into keyboards and instantly responding to vibrating devices, I finally finished John Fowles’ The Magus then polished off the week with a quick sojourn to Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac. I revelled in the blissful escape via stories that twisted and turned in less frenzied alternative worlds, tempted in by the slow strip tease as characters and details were revealed to me with no more effort than eyes tracing along lines and the turn of a page.

So I was struck by this sentence towards the end of an article in yesterday’s Guardian about the decreasing popularity of non-fiction books,

“many publishers think the noise and immediacy of the web will make slow, quiet immersion in a book seem more, not less, appealing.”

Because this week it's certainly felt that way for me, although I confess I’ve always been a reader, from the most embarrassing of my letters to Father Christmas, containing the should-be-lisped phrase “books, books and more books!” to my current membership of readers' social network Goodreads*.

But I genuinely hope that as gigs and festivals have risen in popularity and importance alongside the file-swapped and mashed-up world of music, and the slow food movement emerged amidst our pre-packaged, fast-food nations, so there will be a trend (who knows? maybe Kindle-driven), in support of the mental nourishment and resuscitation a good book can offer.

With this in mind, please find the following recommendations meant for particular types of my virtual and media-saturated friends. As a break from our networked worlds full of fast, shallow, aggregated knowledge I believe we could all benefit from the occasional slow, deep wallow in words.

1. ARG and Lost fans – The Magus
   Bear with it, you’ll gasp more than you did when The Others popped up.
2. Peep Show and In-betweeners self lovers/loathers – Portnoy’s Complaint
   A culturally specific and self-revelatory journey with some great masturbatory anecdotes.
3. Twitter addicts – Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
   In your quest for information and your constant need for innovation, the pace, wit, style and sheer ingenuity should suit.
4. Virtual World Inhabitants and Hardcore gamers - A Clockwork Orange
   Learn about societal trends and tribes via this imagined violent world, with real pleasure to be gained from cracking the language.
5. Guilty Grazia readers - Hotel du Lac
   Learn about love through an array of fabulously dressed female characters more interesting than Madonna.

Disagree? Too obvious? Add your own recommendations as you see fit.

*Apologies for the distraction, but there’s a great article I received via @zeroinfluencer’s friendfeed about the benefits of asymmetric friending on Twitter vs. Goodreads (I know, I can’t help myself.)

Trying out Embedding a Goodreads Book Review

H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
If you love Michel Houellebecq you'll find this fascinating. Howard Phillips Lovecraft is an underrated tale teller and misanthrope with an amazing imagination, the influence of which can be felt in Houellebecq's works especially the last, The Possibility of an Island. And even tho, at times, Houellebecq gets as close to a hagiography as one can with a sexless racist, his explanation of Lovecraft's life and works is a captivating read due in no small part to the quality of Houellebecq's writing.



Lovecraft's "great works" included in this volume might leave you a little colder, however. I found The Call of Cthulhu verging on the unbearable and had to gallop through it like I was taking some nasty medicine, but took enormous guilty pleasure from the second, The Whisperer in Darkness, from which the influence of Lovecraft's stories on modern culture are evident.



The foreword by Stephen King is rather good as well.


View all my reviews.

Louise's Choice: Novels vs Blogs

Partly due to a lull in my urge to blog, I've been considering whether I should get on with the real writing work I've been practising for - the novel that bubbles away in various paragraphs in various books and files and daydreams. It really pains me to confess to being another of the deluded hoardes who has a novel inside them - it feels a bit like confessing I've found Jesus or am a secret Tory (no I haven't, no I'm not). But it's there, feeling like an addiction in abatement, this blog being a more satisfactory methadone than I understand the real deal to be.

As I deliberated this weekend where to spend my meagre amounts of free time (although I confess in the next few months it's most likely those minutes will be spent on fretting over tiaras and corsages) - book or novel - I came across two things that stimulated my deliberations.

First was a posthumously published piece [of pickled pepper] by Susan Sontag which argues for the importance and superiority of the novel over other forms of mass media. She also attacks the concept of hyperfiction - the rejection of linear narratives that proponents of new forms of storytelling propose as the answer to the presumed confines and limitations of plot - and manages to blame its emergence on television and rubbish thinking within academia.

Then I picked up this introductory video on Cool Hunting about Jonathan Harris - who has made (virtual) flesh Sontag's worst fears by explorations into real multiple stories via last year's project We Feel Fine, where he harvests and presents extracts of blogs with accompanying photos and data from a number of different blog platforms, with the unifying theme being that extracts are pulled only when people have written the words "I feel" and his new project, Universe, where picking up stories and topics from around the internet, he attempts to find where meanings and new mythologies emerge.

I couldn't help think that had Sontag been exposed to We Feel Fine or Universe she would probably be fascinated, and realise that one doesn't really replace the other at all, although I confess there is some displacement of time spent as there was with television and film.

Created with care, works such as Harris's are much more than entertainment and information distribution (also Sontag's criticism of television). New forms of media such as these represent new ways of exploring the world that don't involve words on pages but that do have the possibility to create works which have deeper meaning. In fact, I would say that new forms, which these two works introduce us to, allow more people with different voices unheard, unpublished to be,

"prophetic and critical, even subversive, ... and that is to deepen and sometimes, as needed, to oppose the common understandings of our fate."

- which Sontag lays claim as the job of the novelist. Admittedly it takes another artist such as Harris to help us find the form, to orchestrate what can feel like a cacophony of voices.

All of which still leaves me to ponder which is the most suitable platform for my own prophecies and criticisms. I might blog occasionally, but I'm no Jonathan Harris - although I am excited to be a part of the world he is opening up. But I aint no Sontag either.

I'll think on.

The Intoxication of the Working Weak

Again I found myself tipping into a slightly destructive pattern. Thankfully all it was this time was a relatively short passage of working too much, which I self medicated with regular doses of Stevie Wonder (at one stage the only non-work mental stimulation I could manage was "Don't You Worry Bout a Thing")

Through this period it became apparent to me how working like this on a more regular basis can have such a magnetic and destructive pull, like the swoon you feel when a tube train thunders into the platform.

There is a brilliant passage in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where Kundera describes one character feeling "vertigo... A heady, insuperable longing to fall" as she tries finally to turn her back on a painful relationship. He goes on to comment,

"We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down."

Obviously things weren't that bad, but I love how he expresses that tipping point of self destruction, the seduction of the self into believing how a conviction, a determination and commitment, can be mistaken as strength in itself.

The character Kundera is referring to also has a total lack of support from anyone else around her, and so I am glad to report I had great support from colleagues and my partner checking on me and pulling me back. I even managed to squeeze in an official engagement, my left hand now a little weightier than at the start of last week.

Thinking of colleagues, possibly the biggest lesson for me was the potential for a weird co-dependency that I saw some glints of as we ping ponged between euphoria and despair during our long working hours.

It's easy to subconsciously drive each other on even if you know what you're doing is kind of ridiculous and it feels like each of you are personally deciding to behave like this.

Weirdly the simile that came to mind was like bulimic sorority girls. As a manager, awful to think I may have been lead "Heather". Apologies to those who haven't seen the film - but I think you'd at least understand we all want to be Winona Ryder really (minus the painkillers and shoplifting).

The Outsider: Saddam Hussein

An existentialist classic I sadly didn't read when studying existentialism, Camus' The Outsider grips you like a cold hand on your heart - your own hand, finally feeling the blood pumping and oozing through and around the organ, the crude nature of that symbol of your loves and passions palpable in its offal nature.

I finally read it for the first time last week when, at the same time, I kept feeling a similar pall of reality observing the brief scenes and frozen shots of Saddam Hussein (about to be) executed that declared all media outlets open for business in 2007.

When I'd seen him in court during the trial, he was visibly shaken, confused and angry, pathetically attempting to disrupt proceedings with his shouts and slogans. The thought kept coming back to me that this was a man who was finally being confronted with the fact that he was just a man, having did what he did because he did and it was wrong; all reasonings, justfications and grand plans whether ideological, spiritual or material, were a nonsense.

Read the book. Watch the footage if you must. Both have enforced some of my increasingly entrenched views. I do not believe in the death penalty. I do not believe in the right of one person to take another's life. I do not believe in the death penalty as a/n effective punishment.

A friend bought me The Outsider a relatively short while ago. I would recommend it to anyone who feels the disquiet of the current cultural atmosphere (whatever is post- post-modern vs. fundamentalism) and especially anyone affected by the brutal execution of this misguided world leader.

Coming soon: how I learnt to forget about world worries and love Google's RSS reader.

Martin Amis - House of Meetings

I imagine being commissioned to write a review of a Martin Amis novel is as daunting as painting a portrait of the Queen. So for this post, consider me at best an amateur Rolf Harris.

My love of such masculine writers as Amis borders on pathological. It’s no doubt an extension of my child-of-divorce habit of picking up father figures as friends and confidantes (you don’t have to be older than me, incidentally, if any of you have just counted yourself out).

I’m pretty sure Amis mentioned the impact of his parents’ divorce being somewhat responsible for his own collection of fathers in Experience – the likes of Saul Bellow, Nabokov and another of my favourites, Philip Roth. His later books, including this latest - House of Meetings - feel a little like homage to this collection of fathers with their tales of Russia, immigrants, America, Jews. Ageing plays a stronger role here than in past books, too.

Still the biggest theme of House of Meetings and all other Amis novels – maleness – is the anchor. And as it’s addressed to a daughter, Venus, I found one of my literary fantasy fathers was finally talking me just as I’d always wanted.

The book explores the two sides of man (and Martin), the aggressive, single (one-track) -minded beast and the gentle, at times feeble, reasoning, kind intellectual. Each side is represented by one of two brothers consigned to over a decade of life in a Soviet gulag and their reactions both inside and later in life to the horrors and pleasures they witnessed and participated in (much more of the former than the latter).

Amis works hard to further expose the Stalinist regime (after Koba the Dread), and the horrendous conditions endured by the enslaved brothers are hard reading at times, at others barely comprehensible. It is akin to tales of the Holocaust, and I confess there were times when I really wanted to see a picture and look and look and look to ensure I had fully understood exactly what went on.

More than a tale of deprivation and violence, however, the depth of the book comes from it being a kind of fucked-up love story of power imbalance between all the major characters; Stalin and Russia, Russia and its Jews, Russia and Russians, man and woman, brother and brother, encapsulated by the main thread of the relationship – or lack thereof – between narrator and Zoya, the sensual “Jewess” he is obsessed with before and after camp, who he finds to his disgust has married his younger, feebler brother.

There is so much going on past and present throughout the novel, that it can be an exhausting read at times – although it picks up to a gallop by the end. But it’s how Amis writes, as ever, that still makes me sigh; I was so delighted with the following illustration of a handshake I looked up from the page, looked back down and pointed at it:

"White and humid, the flesh seemed about to give, to deliquesce. It was like holding a greased rubber glove half full of tepid water."

I noted tons more examples of wonderful writing that I would love to pore over as poetry, from descriptions of Arctic summers as anxious-to-impress late-running housewives, to scenes of extreme violence compared to the explosive snap within a reptile house.

Occasionally I find myself angry when he uses phrases that I feel like he’s been waiting to slot in somewhere – he describes American teens wearing “the shat-myself look they all favoured, with the loose jeans sagging off the rump” and despite its simple brilliance and accuracy my gut reaction was a strong desire to slap his smug face.

It was at times like these I wondered whether I heard too much of Martin Amis in the narrator to the detriment of the fictional character. I also thought there was something missing from the depiction of Russians and Russia somehow – in my experience of Russian ex-pats, there is always a bit more noise, absurdity and colour than you ever expect - although that could have been deliberately drained away given the extraordinary life experiences this story depicted.

But overall, whilst not the greatest of his books, House of Meetings is extremely good, and lots of the comments, themes, ideas and language will stay with me, some to positively haunt me (unlike, for example, Yellow Dog, which I enjoyed but haven’t really retained). Engendering sympathy for a rapist, for example, is no mean feat.

You can rarely knock the ambition of Amis’s novels nor his tactics. In House of Meetings, the enormity of subject matter coupled with some delicate portraits of brutalised individuals, makes for a rich – if, at times, depressing - feast.

Back in the Saddle Again

In the past month access to computers and connection to the Internet have been intermittent, and latent anxiety levels have crept up. Now Toshiba has handled the tea incident for me and I've returned home after dog sitting in an internet-free Essex house, I feel a lot more relaxed.

Here are some of the things that I have written about mentally in the past month and may expand on at a later date:

• The RSC's latest production of The Tempest - I've never seen the play before and was really moved. The set is incredible and the portrayal of Ariel as a tragic Nosferatu character inspired. It's coming to London next year.
• Banana Yoshimito's Hardboiled Hard Luck - clean writing portraying complex emotions. My second Japanese author after Murakami and one I will read again.
• Understanding philosophy via In Extremis - a poignant and thrilling love story with more enduring lessons than the handful of lectures I sat through at university
• Is email the new fax? Interested to read this story about how the preference for instant messaging and social networks may sound the death knoll for a technology that my age group and older thought revolutionary
• Whether or not to start driving - after discussion with a fellow non-driver, I am considering a one-week residential crash course to get me started.

More in the coming week. I'm drooling over the new Martin Amis book on the shelves and will be purchasing this week, so they'll be a no-doubt adoring review coming soon.

Good for me

When I explained to someone that I had spent my two weeks off pottering around our flat, and staying for a few days each in the Cotswolds and Devon, their response was the limp "Good for you". Faint and damning maybe but also correct - it was good for me.

During the first couple of days, still buzzing with surges of stress-related adrenalin, I ended up transferring all work energy and anxiety into bizarre creative personal projects including the pointless ambition of the development of a new literary form - the cross-genre review mashup.

This was inspired by a conversation I had with some colleagues where, possibly through the medium of wine, we seamlessly moved between chatting about the amazing online game/experience/community/world Second Life and a book I'd started to read, Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island. Before I embarked on my ambitious plan, which I may attempt at a later date if the idea isn't manic nonsense, real life got a hold of me and my virtual creativity occupied less and less of my headspace.

I confess, even when real life did kick in, my boyfriend and I still couldn't shake work ways. On Day 3, we sat gazing at the view from Parliament Hill, the remains of a picnic in front of us, then proceeded to fill out coloured pieces of paper with "what we want to achieve during the rest of the holiday" - one idea per piece of paper, all ideas are valid - and then prioritised our list by scoring for urgency, impact and ease on a criteria grid. And before anyone anonymously comments "you are sad" - yes I know, that's the point of confessing this.

So what did we achieve? In descending order: 6 nights away from home in a good hotel and with family; 5 ok books read (between us); 4 mostly terrible films watched; 3 great walks (5 miles +); 2 good plays seen; and 1 great meal out.

We might not have purchased a sofa, gone to the chiropodist or plastered the ceiling in the spare room, but I think we prioritised ruthlessly and effectively.

Everyman - Philip Roth

I’m way beyond being able to review any Philip Roth books objectively. There are those that I love and those that I want to devour again and again and will never be able to get enough of.

His latest book, Everyman, is a dead man’s reflection on his life, how it was for him to be alive - making mistakes, being in pain, taking pleasure, leaving desirous and intentional imprints as well as their direct opposites, and is less than two hundred pages. And falls into the latter camp of my Roth book types.

With his usual evocative language and descriptions, the reality of the life he retells and its resonance with me - young white English woman vs old Jewish American man - could be seen to prove his title’s goal is achieved (if it could be considered as such).

There are echoes of characters I have loved in books before – the tall, athletic successful Jewish businessman of American Pastoral makes another appearance as Howard, the brother, the lusty Polish Catholic late-in-life lover from Sabbath's Theater appears here, only this time she is an Irish nurse. But coming to them again does not tarnish the depiction for me, working with uniquely illustrated archetypes is well suited to a book seeking universal truth through an individual’s life pickings.

What struck me most was that if all drama is about a situation where protagonists are trapped, never before for me has a book expressed so elegantly that life is always a drama within which we are trapped, repeating patterns that could be interpreted as themes, echoing past lives and promising future change, through which others may make sense of their lives or may simply leave them untouched, doomed to deepen the coastal shelf. And it explains, ultimately, how each life is really just a moment, an inexpert performance – more am dram than RSC.

If you are so inclined, read it and tell me what you think. I am planning to read again – in my pleasure and greed I inhaled it a bit too quickly and have been left giddy so apologies if this doesn’t give you enough to be getting on with – Guardian and Independent reviews no doubt more enlightening.

Lastly, am in Essex this week without broadband so updates are sporadic but will be coming - more on a later date about St George flags and villages where the only black face is on the peeling Neighbourhood Watch stickers.