Doing the Business

Listening to - Floored Genius - Julian Cope

I have worked out that Iain Banks is just using up all his old ideas to complete The Business. It uses the conceit of 'The Business' to allow his heroine to flit from one strange activity in a strange place to another. So we see here taking part in a new form of target practice involving an Oerlikon cannon and and an old drive-in movie screen followed by her on an old ship being driven at the Pakistan Coast where it is to be broken up. She was in Berlin when the wall fell and now she is in a weird high-Himalayan principality which may or may not be based on Zanskar. It suddenly struck me that it was like the novel that Adrian Mole tried to write where his hero found himself at all the significant places in the world. So Adrian went to Moscow (as part of some dairy tour) and his book then had a scene set on a tank when Yeltsin stood up against the Communists. I am feeling a little cheated to be honest.

I always believed that Zanskar was a made-up place. There was a series on the BBC about it and because I had never heard of it, I was convinced it was some sort of joke. Of course the problem is that Zanskar is not actually a separate country, more of an autonomous zone of another nation. Anyway, The Business is nearly finished and so on to Money.

I dreamt of meeting Sylvia Plath the other night and not the Paltrow version either. She wasn't sad or mad or ill at all, just business-like and poetic which probably is my sub-conscious view on what the film has done to her image. I think I dreamt of meeting her mother some time ago but Plath has never been there herself.