Aren't You the Little Middle-Aged Goth?

Yeah - so much so that I'm considering a move to Whitby. Lovely interview this one - and although you might actually learn something from it you still don't feel you've actually found out anything you want to know. I'm certain that PJ doesn't care a jot - she just has to do interviews and if she wants to make everything up like Verbal Kint using the words on the notice board behind her interrogator then that's fine by me. In fact that's better than the truth for me. Just like the brain makes up most of what we think it "sees" than maybe it also makes up most of what it remembers. The point for all those who cannot get beyond a criticism of miserabalism is that even if the darkness it makes a lot of people happy - maybe in that mad Sylvia-Plath/Dark-clothed/And-Yes-Goth way that makes British music so much better than most - happy to live through the pain of previous generations only through music and not having to stand pointlessly in the mud of foreign trenches fighting those you have nothing against.

Anyway - enough of that. Book logs. A Dead Tree one here rather than a Kindle download - The Eye: A Natural History which is a rag-bag of stuff though loosely joined in a rather enjoyable way. And prompted by Kate Bush being allowed to use the real words of Molly Bloom I have started Ulysses again after a few preparatory exercises designed to clarify some of the structure. I am finding it noticeably easier than last time.

Riding North in South Riding

Having been slightly disappointed with the hasty ending of The BBC's recent adaptation of South Riding and thinking something by a friend of Vera Brittain might be interesting I pressed the little button that says "Download Now" and am consequently 50% of the way through the book itself. Even without knowing the plot of the book at all it was obvious from the start of Episode 3 that it would be a struggle to finish the thing off in any decent way. It seemed like an exponential rush to complete the thing by the time people had left, been persuaded to stay, died, been adopted or managed to matriculate all in the space of 5 minutes. V. Poor.

The book is so much richer and, although ostensibly about the possible romantic entanglements of the main players, in reality is about Local Council and the possibility of good government making things better. Having said that it doesn't manufacture heroes and villains - it describes real people with flaws. It understands that behind all the great acts that make the world a better place, are people with their own thoughts and feelings who don't always manage to keep them out of public view.

I've whistled through at least ten books since I got the Kindle. Most of them have been short and a good proportion have been free (H.G. Wells one of the better classics to get for nothing). I was worried that certain popular books were turning out to be more expensive on the Kindle than on paper but that doesn't seem to be true - usually they are the same price or slightly cheaper but that may just be the ones I'm getting.

The Map Room

Listening to Strange the Things by Smoke Fairies (Shh! Don't tell them).

Many Books - too many to list though the last one is worth mentioning it being The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot which tells the story of the black American whose cervical cancer cells became the first immortal human cell line when they were taken from her in 1951. The cell line called HeLa, has been propagated and used for testing many many medical advances from Salk's polio vaccine to modern anti-AIDS drugs. Henrietta Lacks died without knowing any of this and yet today, the HeLa cell line has become a foundation of huge amounts of medical research and is so hardy that without proper procedures it can and does escape to confound other research. All of this happened without consultation with anyone in Henrietta's family who now are understandably angry that many commercial laboratories made money from selling the line. The scientist who first developed HeLa, made it available to anyone who could find a use for it but further down the line it has become a lucrative product for many less-principled people. None of the family's concerns about the financial remuneration that they might have received has any basis in law both in 1951 and now, though rudimentary legislation is in place to try and address this. The most terrible thing is that when some biologists found out where the relatives lived, under the guise of testing Henrietta's children for cancer, they took blood samples which they thought might help them do further research on the cells.

Although this is science writing, the author has started from the direction of Henrietta being a person and not a cell line. It brings alive both all the people involved and the science that has been carried out on HeLa since it was first cultured. I first read about HeLa in Omni magazine in the late 70s and from what I recall, the framework of the article was the general g-whizz amazingness of the fecundity of the cells themselves rather than the human aspect of the woman from whom they came. I am glad that TILOHL has redressed that. The surviving family are made interesting and real through not ignoring their flaws. It could have been easy to give them a free-pass after what has happened to them both at the hands of scientists and the "system" in general. Henrietta's daughter Deborah, is the focus of the family in the story and is funny and tortured at the same time. It is moving to read about the discovery of the medical records of her sister Elsie who was committed to a Hospital for the Negro Insane diagnosed with Epilepsy, Palsy and "Idiocy". She turned from a happy child to a broken shell after apparently being subjected to Pneumoencephalography, a horrific technique for examining the brain involving replacement of the fluid surrounding the brain with air in order to make X-Rays clearer. This practice was only stopped in the 1980's. And we still call ourselves civilized.

I seem to have got off topic simply because that was one of the most memorable sections of the book. This is a science book that reads like a novel and yet does not skip the technical aspects. The academic rigour is plain to see from the exhaustive notes and the careful list of acknowledgments which indicate the amount of work that Rebecca Skloot put into the book.

To The Gills

Even with the Kindle I'm still left with a huge pile of books by the side of the bed. I know I really need to do something about. And now the logical-yet-ephemeral collection inside the Graphite Slabette is growing at a rate fare higher than the normal acquisition of reading matter. I like the idea of having all sorts of reference matter on hand.

Anyway, this entry is by way of bring up-to-date the reading log.

Polished off on Christmas Day between various gift and food frenzies was the now-traditional QI Annual - this year H for Heroes (and some villains). Next came Bill Bryson's At Home which was not the encyclopedia of Household Gadgets which I had imagined but a book about whatever the author wanted to talk about that he hadn't already covered in other books, triggered by loose association with the rooms in his own house. Interesting and moreish it was. After that comes the also-now-traditional Schott's Almanac 2011, still unfinished but being consumed in an unnaturally linear way for what is really a dip-in volume. Now we are back to Quite Interesting Limited with The Second Book of General Ignorance which of whistled by like one of Douglas Adams' beloved deadlines. It's not all purchased literature - from the library is Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World which while interesting leaned into spittle-flecked sophistry at times (I don't believe I just dissed Carl Sagan). Now into The Human Voice by Anne Karpf.

Just found the 1000 Journals website which is packed with superior versions of my own scrapbook.

/ˈlɪnʌks/ (/ˈlɪnʊks/) /ˈsəks/

Book Log - The Rachel papers - popped 22/11/2009
An Impartial History of Britain by John O'Farrell - pushed 22/11/2009

Dear oh dear - more pushing but then again same amount of popping which makes it all square. The Rachel Papers was excellently written, heavily fruity and ultimately pointless other than for the delight in language that it contained. So in best vicar-speak - life's a bit like that isn't it. I suppose you could describe the book as the work of a literary courtesan - all teasing but departing before the logical conclusion. However, the idea that it is autobiographical just makes you realise that any books which follow are just more windows on a life which will one day end without complete fulfillment. And on that dreary thought we move on to a funny history book which still gets its fact right - a sort of Horrible History for grown-ups. While we're here, a link to JoF's website.

Both Specious and Spacious

I polished off The Tent, The Bucket and Me in a few days and very funny it was too. Just the right level of scatology to be funny without being off-putting. It is one of those books you don't want to end. Actually, thinking more deeply about that, it must be rare for a book to end exactly when you think it should. I have been making an effort to finish books I start and it seems to be working though as part of this I hope I am being more selective. Back into Desperate Romantics now though I lost the bookmark and was struggling to work out whether stuff I had read was because I was re-reading passages or because it was just generally familiar from the Lizzie Siddal Biography. Back on track now though.

While I struggled to fill up the previous notebook I am now loathe to start the next. I just can't think of anything to put that will allow the thing to start in the way I want which is all very sad.

An Old Boiler

Lots of book reading here in la-la-limboland. I finished the Roger Deakin book - Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees which included a magical sojourn to various Ex-Soviet Republics for the Walnut harvest - more magic realism than a straight travelogue and have now found out that Alice Roberts is planning a programme about another of Deakin's books - Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain. Having finished the Wood book I was planning some light relief in the form of Emma Kennedy's The Tent, The Bucket and Me but there was a last-minute substitution in the form of Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel though this seems to be a bit pedestrian compared to Desperate Romantics and of course a model of decorum when compared to the TV version of Desperate Romantics. There hasn't been this much bare flesh on TV since Mary Whitehouse died. Hook her up to The National Grid quickly!

Lots of ideas as well though mostly just as scribbled notes. I had another thing to note last night but it sank back into the murk of my cortex almost before it had surfaced leaving me quite upset at its loss. I have this though :

A plotless description of a town in a Magic Realist style. Imagine a town you know but process it in your mind until it seems like a picture on a scraper board - a barley populated place, seemingly set in a permanent afternoon - describe all the places, all the routines, and all the people you can be bothered to have living there inside your mind. Have events but only those which are regular - make it like a travelogue - a travel book like Last Letters From Hav. Imagine it perhaps in the detail that Sylvia Plath gives to the hotel room in her Journal exercises; make nothing bad happen and make nothing related to bad things be a part of the routine.

This article chimes exactly with how I feel about rain. Why does the rain put the kibosh on almost everything? I love being out in the rain - inside watching the rain. Maybe getting absolutely soaked isn't that nice but that rarely happen. Forecast is heavy showers and then prolonged rain. Happy days.

Reading .....

I've just looked back through this blog and it appears that I only read Paradise News two years ago. I don't remember it at being that recent but I've just finished it again which must make that about the fifth time I've read it. Must be a good book. Go and read it. This gets lumped together with that odd feeling you get when you discover that someone celebrity you thought was dead is still alive (or vice versa).