book meme

The book I am reading: Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Penguin). Subtitle: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street. Gripping and trashy, seems headed for Hollywood. There's a sly wit, too. It fleshes out the personalities in that excellent documentary, Inside Job. Sample extract:

Ben Shalom Bernanke was born in 1953 and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina, a small town permeated by the stench of tobacco warehouses. As an eleven-year-old, he traveled to Washington to compete in the national spelling championship in 1965, falling in the second round when he misspelled "Edelweiss."

Wait, no, here's a better example:

John Mack and Colm Kelleher, Morgan Stanley's chief financial officer, were sitting in the backseat of Mack's Audi, having hurried to the car just ten minutes earlier after Mack's secretary had instructed them to get down to the Fed as soon as possible. "This must be Lehman," Kelleher had said as they rushed out.
Not only was the rain pelting the roof furiously, but they were sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the West Side Highway, still miles away from their destination.
"We're not fucking moving," said Mack, repeatedly checking his watch.
"We're never going to get there," Kelleher agreed.
Mack's driver, John, a former police officer, noticed the bicycle lane running alongside the highway -- a project of the Bloomberg administration to encourage walking and cycling.
"Boss, that bike lane on the right, where does it go?"John asked, craning his neck back at them.
Mack's face lit up. "It goes all the way down to the Battery."
"Fuck it!" the driver said, as he found a break in the street divider and inched the car onto the bike lane, speeding down it.

Delightful people.
The book I am writing: Some short stories. Don't know if this counts as a book.
The book I love most: At the moment, Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes.
The last book I received as a gift: A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, based on the outstanding radio series.
The last book I gave as a gift: Hisham Matar's Anatomy of a Disappearance, purchased at the launch last week. It opens:

There are times when my father's absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest. Other times I can barely recall the exact features of his face and must bring out the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the drawer of my bedside table. There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resem­blance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy.

I do not see him in the mirror but feel him adjusting, as if he were twisting within a shirt that nearly fits. My father has always been intimately mysterious even when he was present. I can almost imagine how it might have been coming to him as an equal, as a friend, but not quite.

Like de Waal, Matar is also a poet.
The nearest book on my desk: I don't have a desk as such at the moment, but the nearest book to where I'm typing this is the catalogue of the John Stezaker exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery. I've been meaning to post about the Stezaker exhibition but am still mulling over what it means. The critics in the Guardian, The Independent, The Times, and The Evening Standard have a lot to say that is thoughtful and well worth reading. I liked the exhibition a lot more than I thought I was going to, hence the purchase of the catalogue. Reading about it beforehand, I'd assumed it was facile and gimmicky, but it touches and disturbs on a deep level, and I'm not sure how. Is it simply the assault on integrity? My infant son was upset by a broken biscuit and the eclipse of the moon. He crawled away in horror when he saw me with wet hair. Another small child I know was terrified by the Mother and Toddlers Santa Claus, who was really her own father. It is disturbing when something is different from what we expect. Stezaker's interventions are witty and profound, sometimes utterly mysterious, but they are technically adept. He has a fantastic visual memory, that enables him to match up totally disparate images (eg, the distance between two lovers and a wild ravine) so the disjunction is thematic rather than simply linear.

library users: consumers or citizens?

More than 400 public libraries in the UK are threatened with closure.

"If you think about it, public libraries are all about recycling. Books are lent out to an individual, then recycled through the system to someone else. Public libraries also act as laboratories, allowing individuals to experiment with, and ‘test out’ items before they decide to make any kind of consumer decision itself, such as buying a new book or CD or DVD or indeed, any other type of creative work. Not only this, they function as a democratic access point to information: when you enter a library you are not judged on your background, your status, or your wealth (or lack of it). You have the exact same rights of access to the information as everybody else there too. Do you realise how empowering that is? Such access to information is unbelievably powerful: and why I see public libraries as the bedrock of world citizenship. They are, without a doubt, one of the most important ideas of the 19th century (the UK’s first Public Libraries Act was in 1850 by the way) and inherently stem from concepts of The Enlightenment and The Republic of Letters, that is, universal access to knowledge. The juxtaposition that I am exploring is that although my belief system is founded upon these concepts, I’m actually living in a world and a time where we’ve been shifted from our previous state of individual citizens to individual consumers. This is a crucial distinction: issues of access are now going to be determined by your levels of engagement as a consumer not as a citizen. What might that mean? It might mean that if you don’t have the required level of wealth, you’re not going to have the same level of access to certain types of information, and information can become knowledge… and we all know where knowledge can lead… yes, to power: the power to make informed decisions about your life, your community, your health, your educational and lifelong learning needs, and much, much more.

From The Itinerant Poetry Librarian's interview in Seam 30 (2009) [my bold].
Follow the intrepid and utterly wonderful Itinerant Poetry Librarian on Twitter, Facebook, and see her post today on Baroque in Hackney.

Blurb

The poems have no purpose, though their author is happy should others find them interesting to read. This book collects some early works missing from the Collected Poems (2003). The rest were written since then. They will help the reader lose weight, have an attractive smile, be at ease with members of the opposite (or their own) sex, have relief from constipation, speak in tongues, fillet herrings and ultimately boost the Nation's economy.

I might have to buy this book.

Writer's Choice

My Writer's Choice is on normblog! Don't go there* expecting something highbrow or poetic. Although I wrestled with the idea of doing justice to various books that might make me look intelligent and cultured, I settled for what first came to mind: some of the first books I remember.




*Edit: I should add that of course you will frequently find things highbrow and poetic elsewhere in Norm's Writer's Choice series, and indeed on his blog in general.

Antidote

[Emily asks: Did you enjoy the Blytons? Yes, like a drug. When I wasn’t reading them I’d be trying to work out how I could get away in secret for my next fix. It was the summer holiday, and my mother thought I should be out of doors. Normally I needed no encouragement, so she must have worked out that something was amiss. Inevitably, she discovered me in the act.]



- Said, said, said, said, said! My mother jabs her finger down the page. It’s so boring! She looks exasperated.
- But it’s not boring! It’s very exciting! I want to know what happens next.
- Said Julian, said Dick, said George. Didn't you notice? Proper reading is when you read the words.
She’s right. Why hadn’t I noticed?
- Look at this. She produces another red-covered book, the same size as Five Go to Smuggler's Top. My spirits lift for a moment, then I see the title: Just William. Richmal? Why do these writers all have funny names? The pictures aren’t as good as Eileen Soper’s. The boy doesn't look much older than me. He’s very scruffy. There isn’t anyone who looks as sensible as Julian. At least there’s a dog, but he’s not powerful like Timmy. I don’t think these children will be able to deal with grownup situations like smugglers and spies. But the print is small, which suggests it's for older children. It is confusing. I look again at the boy with his cap askew and his socks around his ankles. His face is grinning and dirty.
- That boy doesn’t look very reliable.
- He's got more life in his little finger than all this lot together.
I stare at his little finger, which is just a blur.
- I think you'll enjoy his company. But you can’t have it yet. Finish that Famous Five and come and tell me all about it. Then we’ll see.

* * *

My mother is right of course. She is always right. There is an art to writing that doesn’t draw attention to itself. But now she’s pointed it out, I can’t help noticing the saids, and that’s done for it.

William hardly ever just “says” anything. He’s forever exclaiming, proclaiming, conjecturing, expostulating, reasoning, arguing, protesting and even ejaculating. (Ah that will get me some Google traffic. But those were the days when social intercourse was polite.) I get the impression of a boy with a very mobile face.

Sometimes I need to ask the meaning of a word, and the tubby, child-sized COD has become a dear friend. But that's another story.

Torch under bedclothes

By balancing the stool on the chair, I can just reach the top of the wardrobe. I know it’s silly and dangerous, but I’m sensible and a good climber. I’ll get into trouble if anyone catches me.

It’ll be worth it.

Up there under the ceiling is a cardboard box full of books the new vet carried into our kitchen when he arrived for supper yesterday, announcing: Anne would like these. Out of politeness he’s allowed to show what’s in there: a glimpse of maroon, occasionally light blue bare boards, dust jackets long gone: a dozen fat volumes – twenty perhaps. All the same size, the same but different. A collection! On the bottom right hand corner is impressed an almost illegible signature, which seems to say Cuid Blyton. Cuid is a funny name, I think, but the titles are irresistible: Five on a Treasure Island, Five Go to Smugglers’ Top. For me! All night, and all the next day, unread adventures torment me: Five Go to Mystery Moor, Five Go Off to Camp, Five Go to Billycock Hill.

My mother deems them “unsuitable”. You can read them when you’re old enough, she says.

It’s not fair. She knows I am a good reader. The headmaster calls us in for reading tests. He says, I don’t know why I bother with you and Christine Simpson, I only call you in to cheer myself up. He puts his arm round me in a fatherly way. I have a reading age of fourteen.

It is only years later that I realise my mother meant when you’re old enough to recognise them for the trash they are.

Meanwhile, here I am, tiptoe on the stool balanced on the chair, stretching for the forbidden books in the cardboard box just too high for me to reach. I try jumping. The stool rocks alarmingly. Only by tugging and tearing a corner of the cardboard can I get a hold on one. It’s alright, no one will look on top of the wardrobe until Christmas time, by when I’ll be old enough to say I was much younger when I committed the crime. They might even think the box was torn already. So I dip in and grab a book.

Five On a Treasure Island. The vet is a methodical man. It’s the first in the series.