mjiko

So many new things since Easter!

I moved into my new flat in April, and was without internet for quite a while, hence the lack of posts. The flat's really great, and there's loads of room especially in the living room which is really big. It's so nice having my own place again, I really love the independence. I'm back in Lewisham, which is great. I love that it's a really bustling area, with a great market and loads of shops, but it's not at all trendy like Clapham or somewhere, it's just a regular South London area really.

Here is a picture of the living room, before  I redecorated it (I wasn't really feeling the orange). I'll post an after picture sometime soon...

I got a new job in April, which I managed to stick at for a total of six weeks, which I have to say dragged on endlessly. It was with yet another government department, and really was a big mistake, the job just wasn't what I was looking for. So I managed to get another job, this time with a City law firm, although unfortunately, and oddly, less pay than the government job. The job has been a little intimidating so far, but hopefully I should be able to cope with it. The firm's got a really good atmosphere, and morale seems really high (in contrast with public sector!) so hopefully all good.

I finished the first year of my LPC yesterday, with my solicitors accounts exam. It was the most chaotic exam I've ever been in, as there were loads of mistakes on the question paper, and they had to keep making announcements about amendments we had to make. I'm looking forward to the summer without study, although I will also miss seeing folks at evening classes.

I'll flood y'all with posts now, to update you on all the exciting stuff I've been up to...

One of my favourite songs is Saul Bellow by Sufjan Stevens, from his Illinois outtakes album Avalanche. For me, it's a song that invokes the University of Chicago - "Get in solid walls with the know-it-alls; Get in trouble with Saul Bellow" - and the joy of being within those most solid of faux-gothic walls and of being told off when you're late to class by your teacher who has a nobel prize and who wrote some of the best books ever written in that sombre city.

The Dean's December was written in 1982, and is partly about the difficult issues of race relations in Chicago that caused controversy in Bellow's real life, and led him to leave the city. However, it is also set in Communist Romania, where life suppressed under a cruel totalitarian state contrasts with the chaotic anarchy that the protagonist Albert Corde perceives in the underclass of Chicago. Like all his works, this is a very philosophical book, or perhaps meditative is a better word. Corde is troubled by the state of the world and the human condition and struggles, inevitably unsuccessfully, to reconcile the contradictions and imperfections within modern life. This isn't Bellow's best book, far from it, but it is still the work of a great writer.

Well, so much for resolving to write more...
Have been a bit busy with college, with my business law exam a few weeks ago, which seemed to go okay, although I wouldn't want to count my chickens before they're whatever. Have now started my first elective module, which is employment law. It's really interesting and my teacher is cool, though learning more about employment rights makes me feel kind of annoyed at my current status as a non-employee, being hired through an agency. It's kind of sucky that any employer can get around paying sick leave, holiday pay, etc by using temps, but it's particularly annoying when the government does it. Anyway, shouldn't complain, don't want to get fired like the civil serf...

Let's stick to less controversial turf like the charming Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

This book was recommended to me by an anglophile american friend (am I an americophile? americanophile? Actually that reminds me of a joke about the EU's kids website being stalked by shady europhiles...), and is about nineteenth century magicians who bring about the restoration of the lost art of practical magic. It's written in the style of the time, which works well, although I did find the archaic spelling (e.g. shewed) a little distracting. I suppose it's a bit of an adult Harry Potter, and as with HP one of the things I liked about it was that it doesn't get too caught up in the mechanics of the magical world it's about. I think most fantasy novels (and also science fiction) spend too much time explaining stuff and going into far too much detail. JS&MR is really about magic as a fictitious intellectual pursuit, which I thought was a nice idea. The characters spend a fair amount of their time in dusty libraries and poring over magical textbooks, although we do also get to see magic in action in battle against Napoleon. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is itself a pretty fat book, but it's really readable* and completely enjoyable, so it doesn't feel as long as it is.

*notwithstanding the large number of footnotes 

I don't know why, I haven't written for ages. Not much to say I suppose. Well, I'll try and rectify that by dashing off a few posts today.

The other week I heard a really cool reading of Nikolai Gogol's Diary of a Madman on BBC Radio 7. It was from the 60s and was narrated by Kenneth Williams (of the Carry On films) as the sound for an animated film that actually never got made. It was really weird to hear Williams doing real drama rather than the ooh-er-missus nudge-nudge crap he was famous for, but it worked really well, and inspired me to go out and buy the book.

Diary of a Madman (written 1835) is a short story written in diary format which tells of a minor civil servant's descent into insanity. It's really funny in parts but also fairly disturbing. I guess partly because of the bureaucratic setting, it reminded me a bit of Kafka. Incidentally, upon googling Diary of a Madman, I was disturbed to find that Ozzy Osbourne released an album with the same name. Surely there should be a law against that.

Talking of madness, one of the questions in this year's King William's College quiz was "Who was the victim of a tapeworm's instructions to a schizophrenic?" I was convinced it was something literary, and thought it might well be the protagonist in Gogol's story. Of course, I was wrong and the correct answer is Heinrich Verwoerd, architect of Apartheid. How foolish of me.

2007 was a year of literary departures, as Harry Potter, Inspector Rebus and Nathan Zuckerman all featured in their last ever books. Although Zuckerman, like Potter, doesn't actually die at the end of Exit Ghost (the Guardian's digested digested read of the book was "life's a bitch and still you don't die"), it does provide a definitive farewell to Roth's 33 year and 9 book relationship with his literary alter ego.

In placing the narrator at the centre of the narrative, and in self-referentially playing with the fault lines between the real and fictional, Exit Ghost has much more in common with the earlier Zuckerman books than with Roth's late nineties masterpiece "American Trilogy", in which Zuckerman stands at the sidelines as a (relatively) straight narrator. The title and plot of Exit Ghost refer to and follow on from 1979's The Ghost Writer. I'd definitely recommend reading that book before Exit Ghost, not because it's that integral to the plot, but because I for one was genuinely shocked by the deliberately provocative plot of Ghost Writer, which a bland summary in Exit Ghost (along the lines of "I had a fantasy that Anne Frank was still alive and I could marry her so as to prove to my family I wasn't anti-semitic") does absolutely nothing to convey. And also reading some of Roth's early work gives you perspective on the conflict in Exit Ghost between the aging Zuckerman and the young turk Richard Kliman, which forms the backbone of the book.

Exit Ghost is a book about aging, and it is pretty bleak. Zuckerman is in his seventies and is both impotent and incontinent as a result of prostate cancer. (I heard an interview where Roth was talking about how in a typical example of inability to separate truth and fiction, he'd had people commiserating with him about his prostate...). Zuckerman also struggles with a failing memory and a subsequent dread that he will lose the ability to write. It made me think of the apparently illiterate character Faunia Farley (who in no one's mind could ever look like Nicole Kidman) in The Human Stain, whose literary inability or apathy seems so pathetic and in a way threatening to the protagonist college professor who lives his life through words. To those of us who in large part experience the world through reading or writing about it, one of our greatest fears must necessarily be to lose that experience, to be cut off from the world in that way. Although Roth is as much a master of words as ever, he recognises that there may come a time when he will not be able to write so beautifully. I suppose that theme was particularly on my mind as we spent Christmas with my Grandfather who has Alzheimer's disease, and is gradually losing his power over words. It's such a cruel disease, and seems particularly so as my grandfather has always had an incredible love of language, and in his career as a journalist and foreign correspondent learnt French, Spanish, Arabic, and some Vietnamese (when he covered the war there), it's hard to see him losing his vocabulary.

For all its bleakness I did enjoy Exit Ghost, but it's probably one mainly for existing fans of Roth's work. It doesn't touch upon the flat out great storytelling and accessibility (in a good way) of the American Trilogy (I Married A Communist, American Pastoral and The Human Stain) or The Plot Against America, which I'd recommend to anyone, but it's a different kind of novel. Exit Ghost is a fundamentally reflective book, both in looking back upon Roth's own work, but also looking to great works of literature he read as a young man. In particular, there's quite a lot of discussion of Joseph Conrad, of which I heartily approve...

Move into London
Lose weight
Save money
Study harder
Go to the cinema more
Take more photos

I didn't enjoy this as much as other Marlowe stories I've read. I thought it was a bit too long and the complete lack of sympathetic characters meant that it was kind of hard to stay engaged. 

Not a very cheery festive title, but perhaps suited to the melancholy time between Christmas and New Years. Richard Yates is my new obsession to enthuse about, I'm determined to convert as many people as I can to his writing. Actually, he's likely to rise in prominence in 2008, as there's a film version of Revolutionary Road coming out, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio, which should be great. I'm slightly worried about Titanic fans going to see it expecting a similar kind of film, since the book is essentially a 300 page domestic argument, and one of the most depressing stories ever (and I highly doubt there'll be any Celine Dion on the soundtrack). But perhaps it will do them good to get a heavy dose of melancholia.

Anyway, this collection of short stories is as beautiful and sad as its wonderful title, which if I'm honest probably was my main reason for buying it. Some people like to pretend to be tortured intellectuals by tucking a paperback of Sylvia Plath or Albert Camus under their arm, but my literary pretensions of choice tend to err more towards semi-obscure American literary masters. There's nothing more impressive than sitting on the Jubilee Line reading a Bernard Malamud, John dos Passos or Richard Yates. Or so I'd like to think. But to get back to the point, these short stories are beautifully observed and written with a clarity and straightforwardness which in one of the reviews on the back is described as "translucent", which although I'm not entirely sure what it means I feel like I agree with.

Many of the men were a revelation in one way or another when they appeared in their street clothes. McIntyre had grown surprisingly humble, incapable or sarcasm or pranks, when he put on his scarcely worn accounting clerk's costume of blue serge... and Travers, who most people had forgotten was a Yale man, looked oddly effete in his J. Press flannels and his button-down collar. Several of the Negroes had suddenly become Negroes again, instead of ordinary men, when they appeared in their sharply pegged trousers, draped coats and huge Windsor knots, and they even seemed embarrassed to be talking to the white men on the old familiar terms. But possibly the biggest change of all had been Tiny's. The clothes themselves were no surprise  - his family ran a prosperous restaurant in Queens, and he was appropriately well-turned-out in a rich black overcoat and silk scarf - but the dignity they gave him was remarkable...
...He remained Harold until the pass was over and he strode away from a clinging family farewell, shrugging the great overcoat around his shoulders and squaring the hat. He was Harold all the way to the bus terminal and all the way back to the hospital, and the other men still looked at him oddly and greeted him a little shyly when he pounded back into C Ward. He went to his bed and put down his several packages... then headed for the latrine to get undressed. That was the beginning of the end, for when he came out in the old faded pajamas and scuffed slippers there was only a trace of importance left in his softening face, and even that disappeared in the next hour or two, while he lay on his bed and listened to the radio.