'No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.'

Isaac Babel was certainly right when he summarised the power of great prose. The only problem is, from the writer's perspective, where exactly it is that that 'period' should go.

I'm working on a piece of writing at the moment and am starting to go a bit crazy with it. It is not helped by a book on editing I am also reading. This is a bad match. It makes me feel like every word I put down has to be in its final, finished, polished place, which kills the creativity and also means I am concentrating on the wrong thing for a first draft. The process of actually writing is, for me, mediative and in many ways transcendental - sometimes I feel like I have floated free of my body all together. Editing, on the other hand, is the refining, the afterwork (mostly) - it is a different craft, albeit an essential one for a writer. But it certainly anchors you firmly in the world of the critical - not something you want when your work is still uncertain.

To help me - and you, if you are perhaps also struggling with the written (well, the typed) word - I have constructed a list of what I love in the books I have recently read. This is sort of like the Sacred Sunday Extracts, except that it is a little more like the Cloudy Thursday Commentary.

THE CORRECTIONS - Jonathan Franzen

The EPICNESS. He boldly and insightfully satirises all of modern America, while keeping it real, man, and not losing the tender beats of the human heart. Also, conversely, he concentrates on the microcosm of family life and the difficulties of individual relationships. I feel like its a very 'masculine' book in the sense of its verbal stamina - keep a thesaurus handy and book the week off work, it's over 600 pages long. However, sentences like, '...dry-chafing the head of his erection...' were certainly grotesque highlights.

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES - Jeffrey Eugenides

Everything about this novel is great. The collective narraters recounting the tragic mass suicides of the sisters across the street is enough to make you rethink your primary school years. It's childhood nostalgia manages to be totally specific to one town at one time and what it was like to grow up there, while contradictorily actively asking you to recount your own school years. The language is florid but perceptive - the almost teen-diary-angst metaphors work because of the cutting, yet always sensitively told story of the doomed Lisbon sisters. This is a great inspirational piece, with a big heart, an eye for detail and an ability not to look away when things get rough.

BONJOUR TRISTESSE - Francoise Sagan

I know I go on about this all the time, but it really is supreme. Brief and cutting prose really cuts out all the crap when it comes to the difficulties of human relationships. In true Hemmingwayian fashion, there is not a word out of place and not one extra that doesn't fulfil a function. Beautiful images and metaphors are far and in-between so when they emerge they hold all the more power. Opposite in some ways to The Virgin Suicides, Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness) often doesn't show the main event, again, empowering its simple sentences. A minimalist triumph.

THE BELL JAR - Sylvia Plath

In lines with the rules of Modernist literature, Plath's prose, like Sagan's, too is sparse. It's literalism is heart-breaking in its exposition of a young woman with depression. Made all the more tragic by its highly autobiographical nature. However, it's sense of hope and dry humour are often ignored, and they are the qualities that make they such an enduringly readable work.

THE GREAT GATSBY - F. Scott Fitzgerald

When I first read this I felt like it was overrated. On closer inspection, I can see that I missed much of its depth and subtly. Written with the hindsight of the narrater, a perpetual sense of the impending doom of its characters pervades the narrative until its final (SPOILER ALERT!!), doom-like ending. The plot of its key characters is also a microcosm of America at the time (and most capitalist countries at most times) but never slips over into preaching (something I think The Corrections has a tendency to do) due to the intimacy which Fitzgerald creates between us and his characters. Beautiful, double-edged metaphors abound. Despite its age (first published in 1926) Gatsby is as modern and readable as if it was written now, as an exposition of the wealthy in 20's America. Supreme.

THE OUTSIDER - Albert Camus

On the dust jacket William Boyd states that this is 'one of those books that marks a reader's life indelibly.' And how right he is. Often when I type a sentence, I pause and briefly think, 'WWCD? - What Would Camus Do?' The brilliance of this book is in what is read between the lines - our narrator, Meursault describes his actions and what happens to him with pretty much no commentary on how it makes him feel - which is key. It is why he is 'The Outsider' or L'Etranger as it was first published as - due to his inability to feel. The opening sentence, 'Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know,' pretty much tells you all you need to know about this bloke - or so you think! A mastery in subjectivity and modernity, this is a book that will leave an impression, as William Boyd says, 'indelibly.'

So here, slightly off-topic is a song by Joanna Newsom that mentions Camus. Yeah ... end on a good quote or whatever...

OK - that's all for now. I gotta go freak out over some fullstops ... < AAAHH!!!!!

10 things I love about you (my readers)

When I say, 'about you,' I really mean, 'for you.' But I just can't resist a good 90's teen movie pun, because, I love you baby.

In honor of my ten thousandth page view a couple of weeks ago, I have compiled a short list of ten things I want to share with you. It has, apparently, taken me two weeks to do this. Please enjoy each of these. Consider it as a gift of gratitude for reading this blog in the first place. The Ten Commandments of Pop Philosophy. You guys waste your spare time wisely.

The list is as follows:

1: A musical collaboration revolving around humorous crotch-wear.

2: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.


I finished this about a week and a half ago and am still joyously drifting on the brilliance of the prose. Obviously I can't read it for you - but I am strongly persuading you to sidle over to Amazon and purchase a copy, because it is just so very good.

Despite numerous claims that Lee's one and only novel was actually penned by her equally famous literary friend Truman Capote, it is hard to feel jaded by any associations of dishonesty due to the overwhelming sense of justice and clarity that are the driving force of the story. Told through the eyes of young Scout Finch, a girl growing up in in the Deep South of America during the Great Depression, we are witness to the triviality of small town life set against the backdrop of the racial injustices of the time. The story of the real 'mockingbird', a black man convicted of the rape of a white girl, is told with such perceptive realism as to make you feel like you are wedged in the back of the stuffy Alabama court room, straining to hear every word of the trial.

"The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash."

- Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird

It's playful, charming, sad, troubling, funny and heart-breaking. It has certainly been the best book I have read for a long while. It really reminded me of our simple humanness - which is perhaps the greatest praise one can give to a piece of art. And also Happy Birthday to Nelle Harper Lee, who was totally eighty-five at the end of last month.


3: The Execution of All Things by Rilo Kiley.

By no means a new song. But a great one that I cannot stop listening to.
In fact, the whole album is great. Buy that after you buy Mockingbird!

4: Indulging my fetish for nicely packaged products - Tik Tok Rooibos tea.


I love it. And I love the packaging. And you can drink it while relevantly (if guiltily) listening to this song.


5: Random Old Images of Gaga.

Now, I tap my toes to Judas in time with the next person, but I ains't so down with this whole alien/religious thang Lady Gaga's going on about at the mo. It all seems so passe, especially for her. The Judas video is practically a cliche on a pop crucifix, as well as containing some terrible, terrible choreography more in-keeping with Steps than Stefani Germanotta.

I'm fine with her always ripping people off. Indeed, every 'artist' can only naturally be inspired by their forebears and contemporaries. I'm a lot happier with oblique references to Tarantino, Warhol and even Madonna, at least there was no pretense at originality, as with many of her press statements about the release of Born This Way. One of her comments that it would, 'Revolutionize pop music forever,' when all we have seen so far are shoddy, disco-infused replicas of sledgehammer eighties anthems is also fairly presumptuous.

I've been rewatching videos Gaga made when she was relatively unknown and promoting her first single Just Dance. One of these videos is a promo for The Fame album, which I like a great deal more than her more recent, evidently much more cash-infused efforts.

It's fun, kind of stupid, kind of original, kind of art-house, much more intriguing than the whole Born This Way thing, in my opinion. Of course, this is partly because I had no idea who she was or what she was about at this point, only that Britney never did something like this.

There are also three promo videos along the lines of Pop Ate My Heart, My Brain, and so on, which explicitly reference Warhol's pop art videos of the Factory era. She used to play them at her first concerts. They are part of her commentary on pop culture and its all encompassing, darker side, along with Beautiful Dirty Rich and Paparazzi.

It is as if she has grabbed hold of the entire history of pop culture, swallowed it while staring into a fun house mirror, then taken claim to it by force, knowing that it might very well kill her in doing so. These have been the most conceptually astute, musically interesting points of her career for me so far. And I do not think she will be returning to them from the clutches of Mother Monster any time soon.


6: Pop Poetry.

The Poet who first got me all excited about spoken word and slam - Laura Dockrill. I was bigging her up to a friend the other day, and, just in case you've never heard of her, her I am again, bigging her up to you.

This is her performing a satirical poem about try-hard trendy mums and their unfortunate urges to remain young.

7: The English by Tony Ray-Jones.

This wonderful selection of photographs from 1965 really highlight the British in all their absurdity. Ray-Jones wanted to capture them before they, 'Became too Americanized.' No danger of that, if the Friesian-themed picnic is anything to go by. They are on show at the Guernsey photography festival from 1st June.





8 (unexpected number eight!): The real Kryptonite.

At the moment I work in a rock shop. This is not a joke. And neither is this one particular rock. It's called Moldavite and it is pretty much the closest thing in real life that resembles Superman's nemesis.


It was formed when a meteor hit the Bohemian Plateau in the Czech Republic 14.6 million years ago, fusing with the Earth to create a natural glass called a Tektite. It's kind of green, gross and somewhat resembles snot. But the weirdest thing about it is that, due to its extra-terrestrial nature, the atoms in it oscillate at a faster rate than most solids on our planet, thus sometimes seeming warm or inducing a sensation of nausea when held. Of course the rock spiritualists go mental for it, but the facts remain the same - I SELL KRYPTONITE AT WORK!!


9: Have One On Me by Joanna Newsom.

Yes, I am still listening to this.

Listen to it like eight times and you suddenly get it and can't be without it in your life.

10 (surprising sudden final entry!): Southland Tales by Richard Kelly.

We've all seen, marveled/ yelled at Richard Kelly's indie cult debut Donnie Darko. But few of us have repeated the procedure with its clandestine follow-up, Southland Tales.

This seems to me to be for one, quite distinct reason: it's really shit.

I watched it recently and after not a lot of thought came to the conclusion that all the critics were correct to slate it when it premiered at Cannes in 2006. It basically IS Donnie Darko in a slightly different setting, with less appealing characters and situations for us to identify with. Kelly's preoccupation with time travel and The End of The World become overriding and pretentious without really justifying their existence at all.

I won't go into it in too much depth here, other than to make the generalization that any film in which a voice-over by Justin Timberlake was believed to enhance the plot is pretty close to the bottom of the sludge pile for me.

This one dance sequence, however, I found very enjoyable indeed, and might even inspire in me a future post based solely around amusing dance sequences in movies. Watch, enjoy, and don't see the movie.

And I hope these were as good for you as they were for me.
Because those were my ten things I'm into t them moment, direct from me to you.

LOVE

Just got this a year late. And love it already.
It reminds me a bit of Joni Mitchell's Song to a Seagull Album.
Both will enhance your life. Get them now.

London as a Stranger

It's coming up to nearly ONE WHOLE CRAZY YEAR since I moved out of my wonderful dilapidated old South London pad, with its peeling walls and quivering doors of questionably worthwhile functionality. I even miss the hole in the kitchen ceiling, through which you could chat to whoever was in the bath - or on the loo. In late summer it all seemed so romantic and bohemian - like a time recaptured by a Modernist novelist as they reminisce their early years trying to make it as a writer with no money. Which it kind of was like, except a lot colder and with a great deal more junk mail and bothersome fundamentalist Christians knock-knock-knocking on the door noon and night with a leaflet that would SAVE OUR SOULS.

Now when I go back to London to visit friends (or make music videos!) I have gradually felt myself slipping into the sensation of being an outsider, a visitor, who has no home there any longer, who wanders the streets wondering where they'll sleep tonight, without a set of keys in their pocket and only a very overused travel card. So, I thought I'd share some memories with you in black and white. Memories that already feel like they belong to another life, of someone I read about.

(Maybe look at them while listening to this. It makes them make sense some how, and its what I'm listening to while typing this.)

OK, these last two had to be in colour!

I know everyone else already knows, but I just discovered Joanna Newsom

She's like a little Prairie Elf, isn't she?

You don't know about my thing for wolf headdresses, but let me tell you, this endears her to me a lot.

What i instantly love about her the most are her amazing, obscure and humerus lyrics, which, in their ambiguity speak to you like a parable or the best kind of metaphor. In her song The Book of Right On she effetely sings,

"I killed my dinner with karate
Kick 'em in the face
Taste the body
Shallow work is the work that I do"

AMAZING!

She's also secretly sexy. Who'd have thought it??