mjiko

What Makes Sammy Run?

nobody@vox.com(mjiko) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:21:13 +0100

When my grandparents moved out of their house, I inherited some of their paperback books, including this one with some awesome cover art...

The book isn't nearly as racy as the pulp fiction type cover suggests, and it's actually a really good novel. It's about a hyper-ambitious and ruthless guy who (literally) races his way from newspaper copy boy to 1930s Hollywood mogul.

Apparently Samuel Goldwyn offered Bud Schulberg money not to publish the book, as he felt the character perpetuated an anti-Semitic stereotype. But in fact most of the people Sammy treads on to get to the top are also Jewish, so it's actually a pretty interesting story about the different aspects of the Jewish-American experience.

In Sammy was everything I hated most: dishonesty, officiousness, bullying. But I felt I wasn't only staring at him with dislike, I was staring at him with actual awe for the magnitude of his blustering.
He sat there smiling as I came over to him.
"Sammy, were you scared?"...
"I was just thinking about me. I just kept thinking nothing but me. I just kept saying Sammyglicksammyglick over and over inside my head and it kept growing louder SAMMYGLICKSAMMYGLICKSAMMYGLICK. I guess that don't quite make sense, does it?"
Oh, yes. I thought to myself; oh, yes, that makes sense all right. It makes the most fearful horrible frightening sense I ever heard.

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Crystal Palace Jurassic

nobody@vox.com(mjiko) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:07:33 +0100

Robin Hood gardens didn't get listed, so the demolition ball swings closer... But here are some lumps of concrete that are grade 1 listed, and quite right too. Created in 1854, they were the first ever life size dinosaur sculptures

Crystal Palace dinosaurs

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What I done red

nobody@vox.com(mjiko) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 21:45:46 +0100

Given the paucity of recent posting, I haven't been updating my online reading record. No gold star for me.

here's what I've read in the past few months

The Minotaur

The Minotaur - Barbara Vine: Unthrilling thriller. Completely predictable and not particularly engaging - generally disappointing

The Razor's Edge

The Razor's Edge - W. Somerset Maugham: Strange title. Bought largely because partly set in Chicago, though actually mostly in Europe. Very thoughtful and philosophical. About a young man "in search of the Absolute". Well, aren't we all?

Shalimar the Clown

Shalimar The Clown - Salman Rushdie: A definite return to form for Rushdie, though not quite a classic. A story of Paradise not lost but crushed, trampled and ripped from limb to limb...

Burn Marks

Burn Marks - Sara Paretsky: Yet again, feisty female private investigator V.I. Warshawski is fighting the forces of corruption and white collar crime in Chi-town. And yet again, she ends up discovering dead bodies and escaping from burning buildings. As always, a gripping read

The Blind Assassin: A Novel

The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood: A great book by my new favourite Canadian novelist. Well, to be honest, she was only up against Elizabeth Smart, so the competition wasn't that fierce...

Bleeding Kansas

Bleeding Kansas - Sara Paretsky: A great title, but a bit of a messy book with too many ideas in it, nothing like the smooth efficiency of the V.I. novels. But I did love the story of the Red Heifer, which reminded me of one of my favourite TAL episodes

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Robin Hood Gardens

nobody@vox.com(mjiko) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:31:15 +0100

Robin Hood 2

Tear it down or save it? Easy for architectural buffs to claim it's an important part of our architectural history when they don't have to live there I suppose...

Robin Hood bw

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New home, new job, new job

nobody@vox.com(mjiko) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:13:30 +0100

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...

P1010017

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...

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Snow

nobody@vox.com(mjiko) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:39:39 +0000

Easter Snow

The first proper snow of the winter comes on Easter Sunday. Got to be something to do with climate change innit

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The Dean's December

nobody@vox.com(mjiko) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:25:44 +0000

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

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.

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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

nobody@vox.com(mjiko) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:38:40 +0000

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.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel

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

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Diary of a Madman

nobody@vox.com(mjiko) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 14:24:34 +0000

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.

The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, and Selected Stories (Penguin Classics)

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.

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Exit Ghost

nobody@vox.com(mjiko) — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 14:34:17 +0000

Exit Ghost

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...

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