Dirty Tricks

Dirty Tricks is an intelligent tale of greed and deceit by Michael Dibden. I've read Dibden's Aurelio Zen Italian detective novels and liked them so I grabbed this cheap paperback from a remainder bin and immediately sat down to read, prepared to be entertained - and I was.
The protagonist is a pallid anglo version of one of Michel Houellebecq's amoral and detestable characters. Also like a Houllebecq character the trajectory of his life parallels the socio-economic curve. He is a forty-something teacher of English as a second language who has returned to Oxford after years abroad, lives in student-type digs and is dissatisfied with the life he has made for himself. He both envies and detests those who are more successful than he yet lack taste and class. Almost accidentally he gets sucked into the vortex of a group of striving bean counters. Adultery, murder and revenge ensue. Dirty Tricks is included on the Guardian's list of 1000 must reads and it deserves to be there. Regrettfully Dibden died two years ago at 60 years of age so there'll be no more of his crime fiction to look forward to.

'Oldest English words' identified

Reading University researchers claim 'I', 'we', 'two' and 'three' are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.See more at BBC NEWS

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Sylvia Plath Meets Ted Hughes

Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. . . . And then it came to the fact that I was all there, wasn't I, and I stamped and screamed yes . . . and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off, my lovely red hairband scarf which had weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face.

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Jack Kerouac on the Steve Allen show

Via Nag on the Lake

Why can't a woman write the great American novel?

Every few years, someone counts up the titles covered in the New York Times Book Review and the short fiction published in the New Yorker, as well as the bylines and literary works reviewed in such highbrow journals as Harper's and the New York Review of Books, and observes that the male names outnumber the female by about 2 to 1. Elaine Showalter, "A Jury of Her Peers"

The Vineyard in Winter

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks delights in the allure of Martha's Vineyard's off-season.

Atwood left with egg on her face

Plot thickens in case of 'censored' author, gay sheikh and a Booker prize-winner
"It is, according to Margaret Atwood, a 'dog's breakfast', and she can scarcely have written a truer word. The Booker prize-winning author should today have been packing for a trip to Dubai, to appear on Friday at the first ever literary festival to be held in the Emirates. Instead, she will remain in Canada, following an international literary storm over censorship and freedom of speech that has spiralled into unseemly accusations of moral cowardice, publicity seeking and folly."

Why So Curious?

Via My[confined]Space

In the footsteps of Aimée Leduc

I like to read Aimée Leduc detective novels when I'm in Paris. Love them.
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The Mortgaged Heart

The Mortgaged Heart
Carson McCullers

The dead demand a double vision. A furthered zone,
Ghostly decision of apportionment. For the dead can claim
The lover's senses, the mortgaged heart.

Watch twice the orchard blossoms in gray rain
And to the cold rose skies bring twin surprise.
Endure each summons once, and once again;
Experience multiplied by two--the duty recognized.
Instruct the quivering spirit, instant nerve
To schizophrenic master serve,
Or like a homeless Doppelgänger
Blind love might wander.

The mortgage of the dead is known.
Prepare the cherished wreath, the garland door.
But the secluded ash, the humble bone--
Do the dead know?

Via wood s lot

Game Control

Lionel Shriver has written some very good novels. My favourite,We Need To Talk About Kevin, is disturbing yet riveting. Game Control is discomfiting but I found myself fighting the temptation to put it down. A treatise on the morality of demography couched as romance just doesn't work. In fact it misses the mark bigtime. Eleanor, a dogood American aid worker in Kenya, falls for Calvin, a misanthropic yet seductive wannabe mass murderer. She is so hot for him but he gave up sex long ago when his African lover/ mercenary soldier died. Or maybe it was all the elephants he killed - I don't know. A preposterous plot and cliched characters ruined this novel and Africa for me.

30 Novels Worth Buying For the Cover Alone

More great cover art

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Walt Whitman

This American Experience tells Whitman's life story, from his working class childhood in Long Island, to his years as a newspaper reporter in Brooklyn when he struggled to support his impoverished family, then to his reckless pursuit of the attention and affection he craved for his work, to his death in 1892.
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Top 10 Works of Postmodern Literature

Postmodernism has become widely recognized as a movement consisting of an epic scope, innovative techniques and wide ranges of psychological and intellectual impact. The beginning of postmodernism is uncertain, but for the sake of continuity, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake has been chosen as the chronological starting point for this list. Books have been decided upon by overall excellence rather than impact.

I've come to the conclusion that postmodernism is not the genre for me. I've struggled with all of these at one time or another. I got through American Psycho, Catch 22, Breakfast of Champions and Fear and Loathing. The others had me saying "uncle" halfway through.

Rushdie and the fatwa

Twenty years on, we look back at events surrounding Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and how they shaped multicultural Britain. See the Video

Reading Gravity’s Rainbow

Gravity’s Rainbow is a book that I’ve tried to read a couple of times. Every time it goes like this:

Oh hey! Man, I bet I could get through Gravity’s Rainbow this time! I do have a long train ride to work, after all! So what if it takes me a month or longer, I can handle that! More at Uncertain Times v.ii

Top 10 Most Overrated Novels

There are many titles given to great literary works, and many awards to recognize truly great literature. This list wants to concentrate on the other side of the board: those books that are considered “classics,” but are in fact heavily overrated. These could be wildly popular books that were best sellers, but just weren’t that good, or books that are considered “among the best ever” by academics but fail as being readable or good literature beyond some fancy literary trick. In at least one case (see #10), this list also includes good books that are fun reads, but are rated way above the actual quality of writing. Here is the list of 10 Most Overrated Novels.

A Confederacy of Dunces and One Hundred Years of Solitude on the list alongside The Davinci Code?
I beg to differ.

Hemingway in Literary History

On this day in 1926 Ernest Hemingway ended his contract with his first publisher, Boni & Liveright; this enabled him to sign with Scribners a week later, and so complete the double-deal he had orchestrated by means of his satiric novella, The Torrents of Spring. While the novella is little-read now, scholars regard it and the double-dealing as an early peek into the puzzle of Hemingway's personality.

One cigarette

The connections I make via the internet never cease to amaze me. Robert contacted me about a post on my other blog. Unfortunately I wasn't able to provide him with the information he was looking for but he recommended Scottish poet Edwin Morgan to me and I'm so glad he did.

One cigarette

No smoke without you, my fire.
After you left,
your cigarette glowed on in my ashtray
and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey
I smiled to wonder who would believe its signal
of so much love. One cigarette
in the non-smoker's tray.
As the last spire
trembles up, a sudden draught
blows it winding into my face.
Is it smell, is it taste?
You are here again, and I am drunk on your tobacco lips.
Out with the light.
Let the smoke lie back in the dark.
Till I hear the very ash
sigh down among the flowers of brass
I'll breathe, and long past midnight, your last kiss.

Can you spot the Salingers from the challengers?

These days indie lyrics aren't just mumbled complaints about girlfriends - they're works of art, by widely-read musicians. Quizmaster Sam Richards sees if you know your Kapranos from your Bulgakov...

Hipster Haiku

From Amy Shearn, Humorist

When the tattoos creep
Past the sleeve line to knuckles,
Time to quit retail.

My bike frame tangles
With yours on the curb outside
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

It remains so cold
In the space between my Vans
And footless leggings

In the dirty bar,
At midnight, we forgo Pabst.
Coke drifts like new snow.

....and loads more

The day I was nearly shot dead by my mother-in-law

When I got married in the April of 1954 - a union which was not to last long - the date was chosen purely because one got tax relief if it was before the 26th of the month.

I met my husband's mother for the first time at the wedding and for the second when she was invited for Christmas dinner the same year. More

Stop-Motion Bookshelf

Stop-Motion Bookshelf - Miss Cellania - Miss Cellania

The fading world of books

Charing Cross bookshops - the fading world of books

Joyce's Birthday Books

On this day in 1922, James Joyce's fortieth birthday, Ulysses was first published -- although only two copies of the book actually arrived by train to anxious publisher Sylvia Beach. Although Finnegans Wake was not ready for publication on Joyce's fifty-seventh birthday, as he had hoped, a bound copy was delivered to him. Both birthday books relieved Joyce's superstitious fears, and occasioned a party.