The Wired Jester

Masked Penguin T-Shirt

penguin

Graniph’s Penguin t-shirt is described as depicting a ‘masked penguin terrorist’ but to me he looks more like a cross between a luchadore, a bandito and an A-Team extra. And a penguin of course. I bought myself a couple of shirts from one of Graniph’s many Tokyo stores when I was there last year; it’s a bit like Threadless in that the shirts are cheap, cheerful and while the designs change rapidly there’s always a common feel to them. Well worth a look if you’re ever in Japan; and if you do order over the web, order 1 size up from what you usually get.

Two new books added to the wishlist

From the Onion’s very sober round-up of 2008’s best books.

Carl Wilson, Celine Dion “Let’s Talk About Love”:

“Carl Wilson’s startlingly good entry in the 33 1/3 music-book series surveys the work of Celine Dion and functions as an uncommonly honest, unerringly rigorous inquisition into the vagaries of “taste,” and how they manifest in ways we seldom acknowledge.”

David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle:

“The plot of this debut novel drops Hamlet into rural Wisconsin, as seen through the eyes of a mute boy and the pack of super-intelligent dogs his family breeds. But the writing recalls Willa Cather in perfectly capturing the aching clarity of perception and the piercing sting of memory. Wroblewski’s descriptions of sign language, innocence, despair, and survival hang in the air like dust motes, dancing to a simple yet deeply sacred music. All this in a page-turning thriller that builds to transcendent heights of tension. This was a book I never wanted to end.”

Both sound good – The Story of Edgar Sawtelle reminds me I’ve never go round to reading A Thousand Acres, a re-telling of King Lear set in rural America either.

How to create on-the-go playlists on the iPhone

Creating on-the-go playlists on my old 4G iPod was easy – just hold down the central button on song – and as with deleting podcasts, it took me a while to figure it out on the iPhone. As you’d expect, it’s actually pretty straightforward, and more powerful than before, as you can add and delete songs later on, plus change the ordering of tracks.

1. Load the iPod app, then go to Playlists.
2. Find ‘On-The-Go’ – slightly confusingly, it’s no alphabetised, it’s right at the top of the list.
3. You’re then in song picking mode, and although you’re initially presented with a massive A-Z list of all your iPhone’s tracks, you can use the filter buttons at the bottom to search by artist, album etc.
4. Find the song you want, hit the blue + next to it to add to the playlist.
5. Press Done at the top right when you’ve finished.

And that’s it, really. You can also go back to the playlist by selecting it on the list of playlists, and hitting the big grey edit button at the top. This will allow you to re-order tracks, delete (the red minus symbol next to each song), or add more with the + icon in the top left.

The only limitation I can see, compared to older iPods, is that you appear to be limited to just the one on-the-go playlist – you can’t keep on spawning new ones as you could previously.

Previously on the Wired Jester:
* How to delete podcasts on the iPhone

On visiting countries that have been the subject of airstrikes by allies of your home country

The first in a doubtless intermittent series of posts about travelling.

Late afternoon, and the sunlight is drawing triangles of light and shade on the courtyard with such precision it would make a maths teacher proud. From the corner of my eye I can see thick, unruly green leaves and white curls of jasmine falling from the upper balcony. Through them, the light casts scruffy nets of shadow, scribbling lazily over the stone tiles. Beyond the courtyard, beyond the walls of this 18th century house – now a dollar-charging boutique hotel for Westerners – the streets have the same quiet, studious feel as the air. Today is Friday, holy day here in Aleppo in the north of Syria.

My mobile phone bleeps with a text message. The screen is a bright white; caustic, electronic and entirely different from the sunlight in the courtyard. Set into it are chunky black letters:

SHIT DUDE are you still out there or have they flown you out or what?

I read the message from Friend P. to my fiancee, who is reading on the bed beside me. She snaps the TV on. Every channel ripples with static.

The AV button, press the AV button. Have you texted him back? What’s he talking about?

I hammer the buttons and ping a message back. She and I stare at the TV screen, then the mobile screen. Five bars; the signal is strong. When there are revolutions, don’t the phones go down? Or maybe that was only in the old days. Cellular networks are light on infrastructure. Hip tech magazines roll out the story of African countries where mobiles outnumber landlines, because infrastructure is passée. Dealing with the real world, digging trenches for poles and wire – it’s all too much work. You need to cyber it up a notch. Especially when fashion-conscious westerners are throwing away so many good handsets. I once sat in a taxi back in London, driven by a cheerful, chatty Ghanian who told me he went back to Africa as ‘often as he liked’, because he could easily finance the plane ticket by buying cheap second hand phones here, and selling them back in Accra, because there, the UK’s second best was premium.

And so I sit, waiting for a text, with the television saying nothing, concentrating on its own thoughts. The city still sounds like it is doing the same as well. I am not good at staying calm. I am a natural worrier, prone to googling every slight ache and pain, easily convinced I have some exotic syndrome or ailment. The reaction of friend P. when I told him about my trip to Syria comes to mind:

Friend P: I’m just saying I wouldn’t go anywhere for my holidays that’s been the target of an airstrike by a US ally in the last year or so.

Of course, Syria has history with Israel (the Golan Heights and more), and it’s not really history because it’s far from over – just months before we met, the Israelis had bombed a site in the north of Syria, leading to speculation they had seen the Syrians building a nuclear reactor with help from that noted international japester, Kim Jong-Il.

I thought back to our morning in Aleppo: a trip to the citadel, 12th century stronghold agains the Crusaders. To the 7th century Umayyad mosque before that, and the guardian’s two young sons, smiling as they say next to me, shouting the names of their favourite Premiership footballers. The muezzin’s call had seemed sonorous and devout. Not angry. So what had changed? George W. Bush having one last squeeze of the trigger before the world could finally forget him? I remember reading an AP wire story in my RSS reader about a US warship chugging into position off the Syrian and Lebanese coast. And then there was that Israeli airstrike. And, and, and….

The phone beeps.

Friend P: No reason. Was plotting an OMG war wind-up but changed my mind halfway. Hope it is win out there.

It ended with a series of smiley faces and my fiancee muttered something about my stupid friends. We went back to our books and enjoying the warmth of afternoon, me feeling thoroughly foolish and guilty.

From this I learned… to be slightly less credulous, hopefully. And that the disruptive power of mobile phones is nothing compared to the embedded fears you carry in your head. As smart as you might feel back home reading up on the history and current events of the place you’re going to, there is much to be said for arriving in a new place without already knowing what you think. A couple of evenings on Wikipedia make an expert out of anyone, and a fool out of many, me included.

Books of the Year 2008

Previously:

2006 – 25 books, 28% non-fiction, and my book of the year was Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated.
2007 – 24 books, 33% non-fiction, far fewer contemporary novels¹, and my pick of the year was Crime and Punishment.

So how did 2008 go? I read even fewer books than in 2007, which is disappointing, with just 22 finished. I read much more non-fiction than ever before – over 50% of this year’s titles (12) were based on reality². In another break with tradition, all but one of the novels were contemporary; only Don Quixote was older than I was. The reasons for reading less were obvious: work was tough, with a lot of long hours at towards the start of the year, and the fact I spent months reading Don Quixote.

That said, I don’t regret a page of it or any of the time I invested in it; Edith Grossman’s translation is fantastic and if you feel like setting yourself a project I’d highly recommend reading it. Don Quixote was first published over 400 years ago and is now pretty much only known for two things: the word quixotic, and the idea of tilting at windmills. One of the pleasures of reading it is discovering that it’s the reputation that’s stale, not the text itself. Quixote evolves as it moves, changing because of how self-aware it is. It’s not surprising, of course, if you consider that it comes from the same time period as Shakespeare’s plays, which are often about seeing oneself, what’s faked and what’s real, but I suspect I’m not alone (perhaps lazily) in expecting a certain rigidity from older novels. On the contrary, Quixote’s story and tone is supple: at times devious and cruel to its characters, and at others funny and reflective. No more sore than Part two; originally published ten years after the first, in it Don Quixote and Sancho Panza find themselves famous (as a result of the first part) and the victims of infamy thanks to a cash-in, unofficial second volume.

Of the modern novels, some were absolute rubbish – step forward The Foreigner and Crusaders – but in general, I felt like I picked well. Haruki Murakami didn’t disappoint, but neither did the much hyped Tree of Smoke whose author, Denis Johnson, was new to me.

Looking back though, three books stand out as the ones that, after reading, I found myself either recommending to people or plotting to buy as presents: two factual ones, Evan Wright’s Iraq-set Generation Kill and Tim Butcher’s journey on the Congo, Blood River. Generation Kill is marginally the better book – Blood River has a slow start – but both are tremendous as looks at very different worlds. In particular, I really enjoyed Blood River’s way of presenting complex colonial history as a easily digestible travelogue. It’s a great place to start to get to grips with European legacy in Africa. In terms of fiction, one book stood out this year, which was Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. It’s a series of short stories set sometimes in the Vietnam war, sometimes when the soldiers are back in the States, all concerning the men of Alpha Company. The stories do intersect, but they don’t always follow in strict sequence, or link in obvious ways. The effects of the connections are what makes the book as a whole particularly powerful, giving depth, light and shadow to the trusims of how war changes the people fighting, the people waiting back home and all the places in between.

¹ Written after I was born (1980).
² Although I am including Slash’s autobiography in this, so ‘reality’ is clearly a fairly elastic term.

1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read

The Guardian gave away a supplement called “1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read” today; I missed it, but they’re releasing it online. It appears to be separated out into broad subjects, and so far they’ve got ‘Love’ on the site. From 2006 – 2008 I read on average 24 novels a year; at that rate, it will take me over 41 years to get through the Guardian’s list. Even if I assume I’ve read, let’s say 10% of their choices (having taken English Lit at A-Level and Degree, and having an interest in fiction, this seems realistic), the time only drops to 37 years, six months.

The end of the 60s is now

Brian Eno, giving his prediction for 2009/the future in general, focusses not on a scientific, technological, political or economic breakthrough, but essentially, the end of optimism as being the default of the west. Unlike Bono’s blethering mass of words in the New York Times, it’s eloquently put, if briskly bleak:

“Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better. The world was rich compared to its human population; there were new lands to conquer, new thoughts to nurture, and new resources to fuel it all. The great migrations of human history grew from the feeling that there was a better place, and the institutions of civilisation grew out of the feeling that checks on pure individual selfishness would produce a better world for everyone involved in the long term.

What if this feeling changes? What if it comes to feel like there isn’t a long term—or not one to look forward to? What if, instead of feeling that we are standing at the edge of a wild new continent full of promise and hazard, we start to feel that we’re on an overcrowded lifeboat in hostile waters, fighting to stay on board, prepared to kill for the last scraps of food and water? Many of us grew up among the reverberations of the 1960’s. At that time there was a feeling that the world could be a better place, and that our responsibility was to make it real by living it. But suppose the feeling changes: that people start to anticipate the future world… as something more closely resembling [a] nightmare of desperation, fear and suspicion. What happens then?

The following: Humans fragment into tighter, more selfish bands. Big institutions, because they operate on longer time-scales and require structures of social trust, don’t cohere. There isn’t time for them. Long term projects are abandoned—their payoffs are too remote… Survivalism rules. Might will be right.”

A music post: What if Beyonce was your Gran? What if she could predict economic turmoil?

beyonce-is-your-gran1

Yes, what if? Well, wonder no more – this very odd picture (which may or may not be photoshopped) was used by the Guardian to illustrate a story about how there’s apparently an inverse correlation between the stability of the stock markets and the regularity of beats in pop songs:

“Beyoncé’s worldwide hit, Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It), is not just catchy – it may spell doom for international finance.

According to findings by Phil Maymin, professor of finance and risk engineering at New York University, the more regular the beat on Billboard’s top singles, the more volatile the American markets. After studying decades of Billboard’s Hot 100 hits, Maymin found that songs with low “beat variance” had an inverse correlation with market turbulence. Which is to say, the more regular the song, the crazier the stock market.

And Single Ladies is very regular.”

Cue dramatic music. The meme of a link between turmoil and culture is old of course – why else would a researcher even be looking at this field – and is expressed in a well known speech by Harry Lime in The Third Man:

Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The Wikipedia entry reveals the line wasn’t in Graham Greene’s speech, but was added by Orson Welles:

Greene wrote in a letter (Oct. 13, 1977) “What happened was that during the shooting of The Third Man it was found necessary for the timing to insert another sentence.” Welles apparently said the lines came from “an old Hungarian play”; the painter Whistler, in a lecture on art from 1885… said, “The Swiss in their mountains … What more worthy people! … yet, the perverse and scornful [goddess, Art] will none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box!”

Part 2: New Bon Iver

Fine, his album, For Emma, Forever Ago wasn’t the album of the year (wrong OMM! PFork got it right – Fleet Foxes), but his new track, Blood Bank is great. You can stream it from Pitchfork; looks like he’s taken the Iron & Wine route and added cheerier instruments while heaping on the dread and spookiness.

Part 3: A pop star from Blackpool

Being as it’s where much of my immediate family come from, Blackpool is close to my heart, it’s good to hear one of this year’s most tipped pop acts, Little Boots, is a native of that strange, cold and fascinating place. There’s an interview with her in the Guardian, and you can listen to a few tracks on her MySpace. For those interested in the economic ramifications of her music, it’s electronic and quite regular.

Deciding what to read, start of 2009 edition

Normally, I’ve got zero interest in what the press write in previews for books of the year – the combination of the fact few papers have book journalists and the need to add some celebrity spice to any and every piece means they normally turn over the preview to vaguely well known writers and politicians, who in turn use the space to plug their mates. And of course, all the books they’re plugging are pricey hardbacks. The Millions’ recommendations for 2009 has a couple that caught my eye:

* New Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, which is a cycle of short stories, a format I love.
* The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li. Set in China, it’s described as “magnificent and jaw-droppingly grim”, which centres “on the 1979 execution of a Chinese counterrevolutionary in the provincial town of Muddy River and spirals outward into a scathing indictment of Communist China.”

Neither of those are out yet, and as always when it comes to books, my eyes are bigger than my stomach (bigger than my bookshelves, maybe?) so I have lots from last year, and from Christmas to tackle.

I’ve decided to start with a book called The Dark Volume; it’s the sequel to ‘The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters’, which I read at the end of 2006; although I ended up criticising it for pretty much the same reasons as everyone else – it was too baggy, needed an edit, the good guys never seemed to ever get on top of the bad guys, it was tricky to tell what motivated the heroes – I was grabbed by the first few pages of the sequel. Although it’s still the kind of book you could whallop a burgler with, and be safe in the knowledge he’d never get up, it was obvious from the first few pages the editing was tighter. Secondly, I don’t often read sequels or serials and I can’t deny it was nice to get that sense of familiarity from re-meeting characters. Finally, having survived hundred of pages of machinations in the Glass Books, the three heroes have motivation now: revenge.

After that, the road ahead is less clear. I need to read a book called Rogue Leaders, which is a history of LucasArts games – shouldn’t take too long as it’s filled with a lot of illustrations. Then I’ve got Scarlett Thomas’ The End of Mr Y – you’ll recognise it if you’ve been into Waterstone’s recently, as it has black-edged pages. Plugged on the back by Coupland and Pullman it looks like a good mysetry with some pop-philosophy thrown in.

Then it depends on what I order next from Amazon; a couple of last year’s books have resulted in some proliferation on the wish list, with Tim Butcher’s excellent Blood River spurring me on to find out some more about colonialism in the Congo via Adam Hochschild’s Leopold’s Ghost; Richard Holmes, who was a wonderful tutor when I was at UEA has a new book out whose title alone – ‘The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science’ – is the literary equivalent (for me at least) of the tastiest ingredients. Hardback only at the moment though, so I might go for some more Tim O’Brien after enjoying his ‘Things They Carried’ last year. A quick scan through the earlier pages of the wishlist also reveals a promising looking sci-fi novel called The Sparrow, which is about what happens if you send the Catholic church into space, The Last Summer of the World, which focuses on an aerial photographer in WW1 and Sandor Marai’s The Rebels – Marai was an obscure Hungarian writer who’s books have only just been translated into English. I read the first one made available, Embers, in 2003 and it was terrific. Genuinely haunting, a tale of two old friends coming back together in a spooky, mist-shrouded house for a reckoning; finally, there’s a bunch of motor racing books as I have a vague plan this summer/autumn of driving to see some old circuits…

Books I’ve Read, 2009

In keeping with pretty much the only tradition I keep , there will now follow a list of the books I’ve read this year, with short reviews, and even shorter star ratings. This year I’m going to photograph all the books I read in a suitable location/situation as well: 2009 cover project.

Previously: Books from 2005 and 2006, 2007, and 2008.

5th January – 11th January. The Dark Volume, G W Dahlquist. (Amazon) Sequel to ‘The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters’, and far better – pacier, more focussed and meaner, it’s a breathless charge through a weird steampunk adventure that holds the attention and this time round, probably does give 24 a run for its money.

Small star

12th January – 26th January. The End of Mr Y, Scarlett Thomas. (Amazon) Full review here.

Small star

27th January – 12th February. Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. (Amazon) Controversial one this… In many ways, it really isn’t that good. I didn’t have such a problem with its combative take on its subject, declaring him guilty of being responsible for 70million deaths in peacetime, but most frustrating for the general reader is that this approach clearly sets out to contrast with (Chinese) establishment views of Mao, and yet there’s little in the way of context. Reading it feels like listening to one side of an argument. The history itself is fascinating, horrific and bizarre but the telling is a letdown.

Small star

13th February – 24th Feburary. Lust, Caution, Eileen Chang. (Amazon) Lust, Caution is actually a short story, so it’s partnered by four others in this book. It’s worth the price of admission for the title story alone, which is a stunning piece of work that compressess a lifetime of obsessions, thoughts and feelings into a few short pages.

Small star

7th – 8th March. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. (Amazon) Geek confession: I’d never read Watchmen up until now; blitzed through it one weekend in preparation for seeing the film. I loved how formally inventive it was – parallel stories, shifting timelines, invented documentary sources – and the characters are compelling. The impending nuclear doom backdrop never quite gelled with the rest of the story for me, though. It seemed like a real product of its time, out of step with how things are now and not convincing enough to transport you back to a time when the danger was real.

Small star

25th February – 20th March. The Last Summer of the World, Emily Mitchell. (Amazon) Fictional account of pioneering American photographer Edward Steichen, who lived in France just before the First World War. The plot – rendered somewhat predictable by the flashback structure – is about the disintegration of Steichen’s first marriage, but it touches on a lot of affecting things; photography and memory, the challenges war poses to visions of creativity, Americans in Paris… Comes together beautifully in the end. It may be understated but it’s a compelling and haunting piece of work. I’m surprised it didn’t get more attention from the press and awards types.

Small star

21st March – 30th April. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li. (Amazon) Highly praised (as in ‘she’s as good as Chekov’) book of short stories set in contemporary China that I just completely and utterly failed to get in to. No idea why – maybe my own frame of mind at the time – but I just couldn’t get very far with it at all.

(DNF)

1st April – 29th April. The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell. (Amazon) Feted by io9 as one of the 20 Science Fiction Novels That Will Change Your Life, The Sparrow certainly has an excellent premise: a radio telescope picks up haunting alien songs, and while the UN dithers about what to do, the Catholic church steals a march and despatches a ship full of Jesuits (and their friends, thanks to some plot ropey contrivances) to see what’s going on. Things go horribly, horribly wrong, and only one person makes it back. The narrative is divided between the investigation into the expedition and the expedition itself; hard not to feel disappointed because everything appears tuned to make the awful acts of the denouement seem as terrible as possible. Great ending, but you’ve got 500-odd pages of overwritten prose to wade through to get there.

Small star

30th April. Chess (aka The Royal Game), Stefan Zweig. (Amazon) Brief but compelling novella written in the 1940s by an exiled Austrian Jew; it works as an allegory about power, but also as a driving, mysterious story about two adversaries at chess.

Small star

1st May – 28th May. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami. Easily the best thing I’ve read all year. An amazing book.

29th May – 7th June. The Housekeeper and The Professor, Yoko Ogawa. A very short novel about the relationship between a housekeeper and a genius maths professor who has only 80 minutes of memory thanks to an accident; sounds cliched, but some wonderfully delicate, ambivalent and detailed scenes bring the relationship to life. Only the slightly flat ending lets it down.

8th June – 16th June. Red Dust, Ma Jian.

17th June – 2nd July. High Rise, JG Ballard. Fascinating concept – the inhabitants of a high-rise building become cut off from the real world, and the physical deterioration of the high-rise mirrors their moral collapse. Sadly it’s dull to read, with little in the way of shades of grey, stiff characters and not enough plot to sustain it.

July. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz. A brilliant read by a terrific writer, the story of a Dominican geek and the curse on his family.

July. The Ghost, Robert Harris. Entertaining thriller.

August. Bartelby the Scrivener, Herman Melville. Superbly creepy. Ending unfilling, though.

August. Another Bloody Love Letter, Anthony Loyd. Second volume of autobiography from war correspondent/on-off heroin addict. Exciting and bleak to the point of nihilism, yet grounded in flesh and blood love and loss. His attempts to deal with the death of a friend are moving and insane in equal measure.

27th August – 31st August. In The Miso Soup, Ryu Murakami.

11th – 15th September. Nobody Move, Denis Johnson. Brilliant dialogue, but the plot is pointless and the characters are weak.

16th – 23rd September. Shout! The Beatles in their time, Philip Norman. Outdated – the bulk of the book was written in 1980 – with a rushed update chapter and a prologue with portentous, cheesy 9/11 references, it’s unfair to Paul and George, infatuated with John and lacks rigour (and interest) in the music.

25th September – 3rd October. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne.

4th October – 17th October. The Blind Side, Michael Lewis. Terrific story telling.

17th October. The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Terrifying and hugely affecting.

25th October – 9th December. Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon. Following The Road was always going to be tough, and despite the fact it’s a book that’s featured on many ‘Best of 2009′ lists, Await Your Reply, a literary thriller about identity theft, was still something of a let down. I blame the turgid first half; three (apparently) unrelated sequences that of drifting, endlessly passive characters with no real purchase on the world. When the book kicks into gear, it is terrific, at least for a little while, Chaon managing to remove the bottom from the characters’ world and let them fall a long way. As good as this part is, it struggles, like so many modern books, to end, and mostly fritters away the menace and meaning of these highlights.

9th December – 30th December. The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes.