And those were the best ones.
In China, suburbs are populated with gated, self-contained communities. Buyers choose from all inclusive lifestyle estates with Anglicized (and intentionally bourgeois) names like “Latte Town, Glory Vogue, Yuppie International Garden, Wonderful Digital Jungle, and–cutting to the chase–Top Aristocrat.”
From a review by Dave Atkins of The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World by Thomas J. Campanella.
I’m reading Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year at the moment (it’s great), and trying to find out a bit more about him came across this account of an Islamic forerunner of Robinson Crusoe by the Andalusian polymath Ibn Tufayl a.k.a. Averroes, who appears to be due much of the credit for western civilisation as we know it having brought Aristotle and Plato back into prominence in Europe, and who is the sole non-Greek face in Raphael’s barmy but great The School of Athens, the inspiration for School of Rock. Also featured in The School of Athens is Alcibiades, who I only know from his starring role as an attractive maniac in Joseph Heller’s Picture This and who figured in the Peloponnesian War(s), subject of Donald Kagan’s book which Brad De Long links to criticism of while quoting a great passage from Thucydides which is so Heller-esque (Hellenic? Argh) that when an almost identical passage turned up in Picture This I had no idea it was basically a copy. Picture This (which is hard to find, but which everyone should read) is partly about faking history, which obviously got me thinking about Orson Welles’ F for Fake, which everyone should see and which is about faking art and life in general and which you can watch a bit of on YouTube in the form of either an awful trailer or the wonderful final scene at Chartres. And of course F for Fake deals in part with industrialist, movie tycoon, adventurer and noted fruitcake Howard Hughes, who had about as interesting a life as Daniel Defoe, who got me into this mess in the first place.
I’ve just finished Osamu Tezuka’s Apollo’s Song and was going to do a review, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as good as this one from Jog - The Blog. And yeah, the book really is that strange.
I wasn’t sure about Woody Allen’s new book, but now I’m sold:
In one essay, a writer is hired to do a novelization of a Three Stooges movie. The draft he produces contains Mr. Allen’s own version of the existential struggle. Moe smashes crockery “with pent-up fury that masked years of angst over the empty absurdity of man’s fate,” while Curly weeps: “We are at least free to choose. Condemned to death but free to choose.”
Here is a great thing: ‘15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will’, from the Onion AV Club. My favourite:
Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
Shit shit shit. It’s a bad day.
Writer Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84
One of the outstanding figures of modern US literature, Kurt Vonnegut, has died aged 84 in New York.
He became a cult figure among students in the 1960s and 1970s with his classics of US counterculture. He wrote plays, essays and short fiction.
The defining moment of his life was the firebombing of Dresden, in Germany, by allied forces in 1945 - an event he witnessed as a young prisoner of war.
His experience was the basis of his best-known work, Slaughterhouse Five.
It was published in 1969 against the backdrop of the war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval in the United States.
Long-time family friend Morgan Entrekin, who reported Vonnegut’s death, said the writer had suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, he told The New York Times.
Last year, Vonnegut came out of semi-retirement to write his new book A Man Without A Country because of his “contempt” for current US President George W Bush.
Advance copies of Allen’s Mere Anarchy have begun to circulate. It’s his first collection of stories since Side Effects was released in 1982. The book, to be published by Random House in June, includes 18 humorous pieces. Eight have never been published, including Allen’s vision of film camp: “Calisthenics, Poison Ivy, Final Cut.” Also out in June, The Insanity Defense, collected pieces from three earlier best sellers.
It’ll probably include this from last year, which if I’m being honest isn’t all that great.
Over at the BBC, Evan Davis, the slightly-less-barking economics correspondent, has blogged about a book by Stuart Sutherland. He cites the example of the lost theatre ticket, which is an infuriating piece of narrow thinking, made more annoying by the fact that it tries to point out a “logical fallacy”. I was going to point out its many flaws, but the responses to the post on the BBC did that already.
The notion of irrational systems, if you can call them that, is interesting though. I quite like the idea of the unthinking general throwing more troops at something that isn’t working, which seems quite apt these days.
The question is, though, whether or not you can really understand irrationality rationally. Since to look at the causes of irrational behaviour, we would find it becomes rational by the mere fact that it has causes. I suppose that’s where the theatre ticket example falters. In trying to show the irrationality, it strips away the legitimate motivations for the decision to walk away, which make the decision very rational.
I’ve uploaded a bit of a Flann O’Brien rarity as a picture on Flickr: it’s a map of “An Domhan Mór” drawn by Seán O Sullivan for An Béal Bocht (but not included in its translation as The Poor Mouth, apparently) which I think I scanned from UCD Library’s copy about ten years ago. It’s a great illustration of the unique world-view Flann / Myles was describing in the book, with Chorca Dorcha pretty big, Sligo Jail a prominent landmark and special care taken to describe the location of money order offices, poteen deposits, the Buoys of Wexford, and George Bernard Shaw. The far-flung Gaelic diaspora is also well represented in its two principle homes, De Odar Saighd and Thar Lear.
It’s always good to be reminded about Flann O’Brien. Here’s a great bit from this essay I stumbled across on themodernword.com.
There is scarcely a single word in the Irish…that is simple and explicit… Here is an example copied from Dinneen and from more authentic sources known only to my little self:
Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m. – act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting…the act of inflating hare’s offal with a bicycle pump…a hawk’s vertigo…a wooden coat, a custard mincer…a stoat’s stomach-pump…
In Donegal there are native speakers who know so many million words that it is a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a life-time.
These are most of the books I’ve finished, in no particular order.
Borstal Boy. This could have been sub-titled “The craic I had the year I spent in chokey”. Behan not only doesn’t repent of his murderous IRA ways, he all but wins over any number of admiring sassanachs with his wit, warmth and way with a song. But maybe that’s a virtue of the book - with no time for moralising, Behan gets on with telling the simple story of his tour of WWII-era British penal institutions for wayward boys. It’s the dialogue I liked it for - loads of old regional slang and proof that teenage boys always talk about the same things but just invent new words for it.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - like a considerably less fun version of Borstal Boy, this is a very slightly fictionalised account of a typical day during Solzhenitsyn’s time in the gulag. Like Behan, he highlights the countless little battles between inmate and guard that life becomes in prison.
Purple Hibiscus - a girl grows up in Nigeria torn between her violent and overpowering Catholic father and her more free-thinking aunt. Actually, that’s a terrible summary - it’s about the internalisation of repression of all kinds, the sterility of totalitarian relationships, and the richness of everyday life if you’re not riddled with guilt the whole time. That’s probably a terrible summary too. Anyway, I loved it.
Ode to Kirihito - Grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, unprecedented. I don’t know whether the ease with which this 800-page graphic novel jumps between studious medical drama, psychological torment, jolly escapism and unspeakable depravity is a sign of wisdom or dementia, but in any case I’ve never read anything like it.
Buddha - also by Osamu Tezuka, This is an enormous 8-volume manga biography of / comic fable about Siddhartha / Buddha and the colourful cast of characters Tezuka peoples his life with. It’s beautiful, compassionate, endlessly dramatic, amusingly scatological and ultimately very moving. It also seems to me rather humanist for a supposedly religious story - I don’t know if Tezuka intended it this way, but to me Buddha and Kirihito are about both why people resort to religion and why they shouldn’t have to.
Shadow of the Sun and Another Day of Life - both by Ryszard Kapuściński, these are two very evocative, very beautiful and completely unsentimental books about how awful life in Africa often is and how it keeps dragging him back. Both full of memorable detail and interesting perspectives on how culture and mentality are moulded by nature.
War With the Newts - an eccentric but eerily prescient satire of all the various vanities and tyrannies of the 1930s, and which would still make a cracking film today although they’d probably cast Matt Damon as the leader of the newts or something.
Heat - basically, we’re fucked.
Fun Home - this was a great recommendation from Abbie. A comic book autobiography, but very different in style and content. Funny, sad and uncomfortably perceptive.
Car Sick - How we can improve public transport and drive our cars a bit less, if we lived in countries where people gave a shit about that kind of thing. Could be subtitled “If you’re reading this you should probably move to Denmark”.
Austere Academy - formulaic and mildly amusing fare for kids who think they’re clever.
Salvador - Blurbed as a ‘Classic of Reportage’, but I can hardly remember it now except for its dubious implication that magic realism is an appropriate style of journalism in Central America.
Homer’s Odyssey - so-so re-telling of that hoary old tale in modern speech, with a few great bits surrounded by no little filler, much like the original I imagine.
The Birthday Riots - strange and not-all-that-good tale of infidelity, spin-doctoring and picturesque political violence.
The Penguin History of the United States of America - Consistently brilliant history by Hugh Brogan; gets you thinking about everything else as well as the subject matter, which is hardly dull. I want to read it again.
A New Vision for Housing - How to fix social housing. My kind of book obviously, but with lots of useful history and context it might be a good intro for others new to the subject.
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Dress - reasonably hilarious Irish version of American Psycho.
Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories - Ernest Hemingway really was a deeply weird man, and his funless stories seem to teeter between transcendent austerity and hateful tedium.
Alan Moore’s Future Shocks - gag-ridden sci-fi piss-takes from the 1980s, including a short story Martin Amis probably ripped off to write Time’s Arrow.
So, not very much really, and largely comics and books for kids, with a smattering of reassuringly short ’serious’ stuff thrown in. This year was also the one where the divide between the books I read and the books I bought become unavoidable - I’ve got any number of weighty new tomes on my shelf on economics, town planning, 19th century history, sociolinguistics and the like which will probably never get read and will just be there to impress visitors, which if I’m being honest was probably the point in the first place.
So, what about you lot? Read anything particularly good or bad this year?
