Well, did you evah?

Via a post of mine on Flann O'Brien's surreal comic novel At Swim-Two-Birds (on Moonrat's book review blog, The Book Book), I received an invitation the other day to write an article on 'Flann O'Brien and Catholicism' for a biannual Irish Catholic magazine called CHRISTVS REGNAT.

Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. It's very gratifying to learn that anyone thinks my writing is any good, particularly if they're willing to pay me for it (hm, no fee was mentioned, in fact). Alas, I could not in good conscience accept such a commission, since I really know fairly little about Flann O'Brien, and know absolutely bugger-all about Catholicism (except that 'bugger all' appears to be one of the central tenets of its priesthood).

I tried to turn the nice man down as graciously as possible:

Alas, I am only an O'Brien enthusiast rather than any kind of expert. All I know of the man is what I gleaned from Anthony Cronin's excellent biography of him, which, as far as I recall, does not have much, if anything at all, to say on his attitude to religion. I have always liked to think that he was an irreverent pagan like myself, but I can cite no evidence to support that notion.

Therefore, I fear I must decline your kind offer - on grounds of lack of time, lack of knowledge, and lack of interest in matters of religion.

And I am rather hoping that my young friend Mr O'Kane might possibly take up the gauntlet on this. He is, I believe, far more knowledgeable than me in both branches of the suggested topic.

My favourite pun

One of the regular items in the Irish Times humour column written by one of my great literary - and drinking - heroes, Flann O'Brien, through the middle decades of the 20th century was his series of "Keats & Chapman" stories. These were beautifully crafted little anecdotes which imagined the two famous poets as contemporaries, friends, inseparable companions - indeed, they seemed to be engaged in an intimate but sexless cohabitation, rather like Holmes and Watson or Morecambe & Wise.

I'd never known much about George Chapman, other than that he had famously written an early English translation of Homer's Odyssey, and that this had been a major influence on the young Keats, inspiring his poem On First Looking into Chapman's 'Homer'. I knew he was quite a lot older than Keats, but I used to imagine that perhaps if his floruit had been in the mid- to late 1700s, in old age he might just have overlapped with his adolescent admirer. I was shocked and shamed to have a friend point out to me that he lived in fact 150 years earlier than that, a contemporary of Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare. So, these flights of fancy from O'Brien were a particularly outlandish invention, even for him.

The distinctive feature of these pieces was that the stories in themselves were utterly inconsequential; they served purely as a means to arrive at a punchline which was always the most elaborate, outrageous, wince-making pun.

And this is one of my very favourites of them. (And it has an extra special place in my affections because it was also a private joke often shared with my mooting partner, my best friend from my days at Bar School.)

[My apologies to the shade of Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien/Myles na Gopaleen (O'Nolan was his real name, na Gopaleen the pseudonym under which the Irish Times columns appeared, O'Brien the better-known alias under which he published his novels). I am endeavouring to recreate this from my own poor imagination, and in rather abbreviated form. This doesn't begin to do justice to the elegant contrivance of the originals.]



Keats and Chapman are holidaying together in Crete. The younger man - zestful, enthusiastic, naive - spends the morning bounding around the countryside, foraging among the ancient ruins. His companion - cynical, worldweary, curmudgeonly (as in all the great comedy double acts) – disdainfully ignores all this activity, devoting himself instead to a good book and a bottle of retsina.

At lunchtime, the explorer returns, proudly showing off the fruits of his labours - a single tiny fragment of pottery.

"What have you got there?" asks the reclining Chapman, witheringly unimpressed.

"A small thing, but Minoan," comes the defensive reply.

The things that please me

I just recovered one of my favourite books, Flann O'Brien's 'The Third Policeman', from my drinking pal The Choirboy (also a fan, re-reading), after a couple of weeks bereft.

I understand it has recently acquired a new - and much larger - cult following as a result of being referenced in the American TV series 'Lost'. Oh dear - 'my' secret no more.

Although I haven't yet read all O'Brien's books, I have read a fair few, and this one for me stands out head-and-shoulders above the rest. All of them, even his extravagantly praised (by Graham Greene, anyway, in an early review) first novel, 'At Swim-Two-Birds', are fairly random mish-mashes of material left over from his Irish Times funny column, 'The Cruiskeen Lawn'. Only 'The Third Policeman', for me, actually hangs together as a novel (and that only just).

But the writing is just exquisite. Flipping through it just now, mildly pissed and nostalgic for the time of my last reading of it a decade or more ago, I found something striking, marvellous on almost every page. Every page. Every paragraph, almost every line. This is extraordinary writing, and extraordinarily funny - if you get how he is at the same time both pastiching and celebrating traditional Irish phraseology.

I particularly loved this bit, about a momentous, windswept nighttime bicycle ride:



"Other winds were moving about in the stillness of the evening, loitering in the trees and moving leaves and grasses to show that the green world was still present in the dark. Water by the roadside, always overshouted in the roistering day, now performed audibly in its hidings."

Honestly, I almost weep for joy. The observation, the phrasing is so magical. I have to read this book again.

Sunday literary moment

"Tuesday had come down through Dundrum and Foster Avenue, brine-fresh from sea-travel, a corn-yellow sun-drench that called forth the bees at an incustomary hour to their day of bumbling.  Small house-flies performed brightly in the embrasures of the windows, whirling without fear on imaginary trapezes in the limelight of the sunslants."     I have been re-reading Flann O'Brien's comic novel At Swim-Two-Birds over the past few days, and have just posted a review of it over at The BookBook.  I am something of a sceptic about this book: I adore O'Brien, but I think this is probably the weakest of his works, and not worthy of its 'cult classic' status, not worthy comparison to his real masterpiece The Third Policeman.  However, it does have passages of the most exquisite writing in it.  Even when, as here, he's just parodying something, his parody transcends the limitations of the thing it parodies and becomes a thing of wonder.  Pointlessly florid writing was never so beautifully done!

List of the Month - Books I'll re-read

The two chief delights of being on an extended holiday are that I have lots of free time for reading (something that I sometimes neglect for months at a time when I've got a lot of work on) and that I am visiting a succession of friends who are all avid book buyers (as distinct from readers, I fear - buying loads of books that I never get around to reading has often been a vice of mine, too). Hence, I am enjoying lots of opportunities to read new things. And I am delighted to discover that the Book Bank, a most excellent secondhand bookshop in Alexandria, VA., near where I am currently staying, is still going strong when so many other businesses, and nearly all the bookshops, in the area have been failing (the Old Town Movie Theatre, just up the road, another favourite hangout of mine in these parts, has not been so fortunate: it closed down just a few weeks ago); I shall undoubtedly be spending many hours browsing - and buying (hopefully leading to reading) - in there over the next week or two.

However, this sudden splurge of reading has awoken a nostalgia in me for old favourites, and left me rather dissatisfied with the new books I'm trying to read.

There are a handful of books that have so got under my skin, and which are such an intense pleasure to read, that I would happily revisit them again and again. In fact, as a laboriously slow reader, I don't have time to re-read them often, and in some cases have not looked at them in many years now - but I would re-read them if I had the opportunity, will try to ensure that I re-read them at least once or twice more before I die. [Some of these books I have reviewed here or elsewhere online, so I'll provide links where appropriate.]

Books I could read again and again

The Wind In The Willows

(Kenneth Grahame, 1908)

A powerful - and possibly corrupting - influence on my young life, one of the very first books I ever read. I liked it particularly because the anthropomorphized animal heroes were not cutesy talking animals but grown-ups, with grown-ups' problems. It was also a seductive vision of bachelorhood, an existence of complete freedom and endless leisure unencumbered by family or work responsibilities. Yes, very corrupting.

Great Expectations

(Charles Dickens, 1861)

For me, this is the greatest of all of Dickens' works (and a reasonably accessible length, compared to some of his other doorstops). I was required to read this as one of my set books for English Literature O-Level (the main set of exams we take at the end of the compulsory period of high school education in England, at around the age of 15 or 16), but, luckily, this obligation did not arouse any weariness or resentment in me. On the contrary, I was very grateful to have been forced to devote such close attention to it, to have been led to savour its richness so thoroughly.

Life In A Scotch Sitting Room, Vol. 2

(Ivor Cutler, 1984)

I became a fan of the wonderfully eccentric Scots performance poet Ivor Cutler through a few of his radio appearances I heard as a young boy. This, I think, is his very finest work, a slim volume of short prose poems comprising a distorted, often slightly surreal, but still compellingly poignant evocation of his between-the-wars childhood in a Glasgow slum. It had originally been released some years earlier as a spoken word album, but I've never possessed that. Perhaps the best book for re-reading in this whole selection, because it only takes about 20 minutes to read, and it is a pure joy. 

(There was no Volume 1.)

The Once and Future King

(T.H. White, 1958)

My favourite book of my slightly later childhood (I discovered it at around the age of 12, I would say; whereas I'd known The Wind In The Willows since I was 3 or 4); so clever, so funny.

The Bodley Head Saki

(Saki [H.H. Munro], 1963)

This was the definitive collection of the works of the Edwardian master of the short story form, and I'm peeved that I am no longer in possession of the edition I had cherished as a boy. (It's quite a valued collector's item these days, apart from anything else. I particularly liked the informative introduction by a J.W. Lambert, which included an extract from Munro's only 'serious' work, a History of Russia [now lost? I tried to find it in Oxford's Bodleian Library when I was a student there, and if they don't have a copy, then...], in which his sly wit would keep spilling out despite his best efforts to contain it. There's an unfortunate story behind my loss of this book. My favourite teacher at school was a drinking buddy of the writer and columnist Philip Toynbee, who lived fairly nearby. Toynbee had been asked to review a new edition of Saki's stories, and wanted to refer to the Lambert introduction to the Bodley Head collection, but didn't have a copy of his own. My teacher borrowed mine to lend to him, but we never got it back; the poor man was already quite ill with cancer, and died not very long afterwards.) Munro was an exquisite prose stylist, he wrote even more elegantly than P.G. Wodehouse. And his irreverent, often macabre sense of humour was completely in tune with my own. He is the writer with whom I most identify.

Cat's Cradle

(Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, 1963)

My favourite Vonnegut - perhaps because he doesn't indulge in any of his trademark tricksiness here (time-jumps, omniscient Tralfamadoreans, addressing the reader directly, throwing in random story ideas from alter ego Kilgore Trout). I love the bleakness of it - an unusual apocalypse scenario from which there is ultimately no escape. And I love the invented religion of Bokononism (rather like Taoism in its willingness to embrace the essential meaninglessness of life).

The Third Policeman

(Flann O'Brien, 1967)

Another of my great literary heroes, O'Brien (real name Brian O'Nolan) was one of the most dauntingly clever men I've ever encountered and perhaps the greatest parodist who ever lived. His writing is often exquisitely beautiful as well as side-splittingly funny, and this, my favourite of his books, is quite remarkable: I sometimes carry it around in a pocket, just to dip into at random for a quick pick-me-up - there is something delightful on almost every page.

Anna Karenina

(Leo Tolstoy, 1877)

I worry that I may never get around to re-reading this, because it is enormously long. I worry sometimes, too, that it might perhaps disappoint on second reading, that it couldn't possibly enrapture me as utterly as it did when I first experienced it, at the age of about 14. I think I should put such fears aside, and schedule the time to enjoy this a second time. It was quite breathtaking. There are so many scenes I remember from it as vividly as if I'd only read it yesterday (though, in fact, I've only read it once, well over 30 years ago; and I've always avoided watching any of the film versions of it). This is the one book I wish I had written myself. 

Favourite Posts from the 4th quarter of 2009

Ah, nearly up-to-date at last with these 'best of...' anthologies for the sidebar!

This one could take a while, though.  These few months seem to have been a particularly prolific - and a particularly rich - period for me.  I am tempted to just say, "Go and read everything I posted in October 2009; it's all gold!"  (And I start to worry that my quality of output has fallen off since then....)

I'm out of Beijing this week, and unlikely to have Internet access - so I hope my readers can keep themselves busy with this selection (while waiting patiently for my return, on or about the 1st March).

Pick of the Archives:

Favourite Posts, October-December 2009

1)  Do you find me WISIBLE? - 1st October

My commentary on the irresistibly ludicrous (and strangely camp) parade to celebrate the PRC's 60th anniversary (preceded by some observations on the extreme weather manipulation required in preparation for this, here and here).

2)  Shameful Pleasures  -  3rd October

My 'List of the Month' catalogues some of my unexpected private indulgences - that I cannot practice when anyone else is around!

3)  The fears that bind us  -  6th October

One of my more serious posts: my view of the Chinese Communist Party and its approach to maintaining its power here.

4)  Whose birthday is it anyway?  -  7th October

A slightly more humorous - but possibly even more bitter - reflection on the 60 years of Communist rule in China.

5)  Come back, Ed Maher, all is forgiven  -  9th October

An observation on the bizarrely mangled pronunciation which characterizes China's laughably bad English-language TV channel, CCTV9.

6)  Let your NO be NO  -  October 15th

My experience of acting in a short Chinese video - never again (until the next time...).

7)  My philosophy of teaching  -  October 19th

A couple of important observations drawn from my long - if intermittent - career 'at the chalkface'.

8)  The sea inside  -  October 19th

A brief appreciation of the latest quirky creation of my artist friend Wu Yuren (unjustly imprisoned since the end of May last year, as a result of his activism).

9)  Good beginnings  -  October 20th

San Francisco literary agent Nathan Bransford's annual competition for opening paragraphs of novels prompts me to ponder on what makes a good opening for a novel, and to dig out some examples from favourite novels that I've read; and also to invite my readers to submit their own favourite opening chapters of novels in an ongoing 'collecting box'.

10)  The wall of silence (AGAIN)  -  October 23rd

I fume (not for the first time!) about the vexing Chinese predilection for avoiding giving you bad news by.... ignoring you altogether.

11)  A Classical Sunday  -   October 25th

A favourite anecdote from my time as a Latin teacher, and a superb poem on a Classical theme, Graham Hough's Andromeda (long lost to me - rediscovered thanks to my wonderful blog-friend JES).

12)  Don't say I didn't warn you  -  October 29th

Some gloomy observations on road safety (or, rather, the complete lack of it) in China.

13)  Let The Right One In  -  October 29th

My review of Tomas Alfredson's impressively creepy vampire flick set in a Swedish small town kicked off an unexpectedly lively comment thread  (which in turn provoked me to write extended follow-ups here and here, on the plausibility - and the population dynamics - of vampires, which led to even more vigorous comment threads).

14)  12 spooky vignettes  -  October 30th

I 'celebrate' Halloween with twelve micro ghost stories (later brought up to the baker's dozen with this wicked pun!).

15)  Up yer bum!  -  October 31st

I flaunt my Classical education again with this essay on the possible implications of rhaphanizo - a terrifying piece of Ancient Greek abuse.

16)  Possible opening for a novel  -  November 7th

A sketch of the first few chapters for a story about sniper duels; an idea I dallied with a dozen or so years ago, but which has long lain in neglect.

17)  Further reflections on a Classical education  -  November 8th

I thank Mr W.B. Yeats and his poem The Scholars for possibly saving me from a life of confinement in The Ivory Tower.

18)  Plumbing the depths  -  November 13th

Amongst the many, many, many very bad 'academic' articles I have had to edit, this is possibly the worst ever.

19)  Chinese plastic  -  November 19th

How do they make it so brittle?  And how do they get away with it, why does anyone buy it??  Unfathomable mysteries!  (There's a companion piece - from my frantic phase of moving house in this month - on the unstoppable accumulation of Dust in a Chinese apartment.)

20)  My Fantasy Girlfriend: Kate Beckinsale  -  November 21st

Less an appreciation of the lovely English actress, and more an excuse for some autobiographical anecdotes about the occasions I nearly met her - when she was a student at Oxford, and later, when I was a trainee lawyer.  Ah, Cruel Fate....

21)  Accumulator  -  November 29th

I analyse why my packing took so long (further elaborated here).

22)  The leaders leave first  -  December 8th

Another of my utterly serious posts, commemorating the 15th anniversary of the appalling Karamay theatre fire, in which nearly 300 schoolchildren were killed.  (I followed up with the text of a scathingly satirical song which references the tragedy, by blind folk singer Zhou Yunpeng; there's a video clip of him performing it posted over on The Barstool.)

23)  Poetry, with Chinese characteristics  -  December 13th

A recent lecture I attended on the interplay between Chinese and Western poetry leads me to post a fascinating rendition of a well-known piece by the great classical Chinese poet, Du Fu (Chinese original text added later in the comments); the fine English version is by an America academic, Frank Bidart - who speaks/reads no Chinese.

24)  Go out and buy!  -  December 15th

An anecdote of my father's about his National Service in Palestine in the 1940s illustrates the power of advertising - and especially the power of a good, cheesy slogan!

25)  A motto, or a name?  -  December 16th

I am asked to translate a bon mot into Latin.  It is hard, I tell you, hard.

26)  My favourite pun  -  December 17th

Of course, it could only be from Flann O'Brien's masterful Keats & Chapman series!  And yet another Classical reference!! (I attempted my own pastiche of O'Brien's genre here.)

27)  My Fantasy Girlfriend: Dorothy Provine  -  December 19th

The '60s actress/singer is inducted into this series primarily because of her turn as Western saloon floozie Lily O'Lay in the Blake Edwards comedy The Great Race, performing the rambunctious showstopper He Shouldn't-a Hadn't-a Oughtn't-a Swang On Me - check out the video.

28)  Waking to strange sounds  -  December 20th

After only three weeks in the new apartment, I'm struggling to get used to its idiosyncrasies; but at least it teases a new poem out of me for the first time in.... many, many months.

29)  Scary Santa  -  December 24th

My Christmas 'treat' for my readers this year is the terrifying opening sequence from Jeunet et Caro's dementedly Gothic fairytale La cité des enfants perdus. (There was some rather more lighthearted seasonal fun with this post on snowball fights.)

30)  The Tea Tower (A Christmas Story)  -  December 27th

An anecdote about my first-ever Christmas in China.

31)  Among the musicians  -  December 29th

My new digs are in a building owned by a Chinese classical musicians' guild; being surrounded by people practising music almost constantly arouses some guilt in me about my long neglect of my guitar, my harmonica, my paper-and-comb, my....

32)  Guanxi explained  -  December 30th

I describe the Chinese approach to 'networking', with the invaluable help of a cartoon diagram by the Chinese artist Yang Liu.

Dissing the poets

I run the risk of being 'flamed' by any Irish readers out there for the slighting remark in my last post on their exalted poet Patrick Kavanagh.

But I find from the Wikipedia article on Kavanagh that my great literary (and boozing) hero, Brian O'Nolan (also known as Flann O'Brien, the nom de plume under which most of his books were published, and Myles na Gopaleen, the comic alias under which he wrote a long-running humorous column in the Irish Times called 'The Cruiskeen Lawn'; I have commemorated him on my other blog Barstool Blues as one of my 'Unsuitable Role Models', here and here, and he has earned at least one previous mention on Froogville, here) did a much better job of denigrating him.

As it says in the Wikipedia entry:

Arriving in Dublin in the late 1930s, Kavanagh often found his rural mannerisms and imagery the subject of mockery by the city's literary community. When the Irish Times published an early Kavanagh poem, "Spraying the Potatoes", Myles na Gopaleen responded caustically:

"I am no judge of poetry - the only poem I ever wrote was produced when I was body and soul in the gilded harness of Dame Laudanum - but I think Mr Kavanaugh [sic] is on the right track here. Perhaps the Irish Times, timeless champion of our peasantry, will oblige us with a series in this strain covering such rural complexities as inflamed goat-udders, warble-pocked shorthorn, contagious abortion, non-ovoid oviducts, and nervous disorders among the gentlemen who pay the rent."
[This last expression was a common Irish euphemism for a pig.]

Another nun dyed the bust

You can make up your own stories to go with this!!

It came from a BBC Radio comedy show I listened to in distant childhood (I forget the name of it at the moment... but perhaps a commenter can remind me), which featured a challenge to its panellists/participants to contrive an extended story leading with inexorable logic to a punchline such as this - not always quite a pun, but a playful variation on (some might say a 'mangling of') a well-known phrase or saying. Hours of fun!

Another I recall particularly fondly was: "This creation is Tibet.... or part of Ella."

(Harder to surmise the story behind this one; something to do with aerial reconnaissance photography and furtive romantic assignations in a dark-room on an RAF station during WWII, I think.)

This game was rather similar to the "Keats & Chapman" stories, one of the regular-ish features in the Irish Times funny column written by Flann O'Brien, one of my favourite comic writers. I don't have time to give examples now; but do go check them out some time.

A man of principals

The other week in the recording studio, my partner DD had to read a short passage which was supposed to be a list of school notices being announced over a tannoy by the head teacher. At the end of it, she had to sign off as Principal Victoria.

Of course, being a man of a certain age, I could not help but be reminded of this other Victoria.

[PS I discover, alas, that this pin-up of my adolescent years is not looking nearly so appealing these days: one of those awful warnings against the perils of too much plastic surgery.

PPS One of Flann O'Brien's punning Keats & Chapman vignettes featured a schoolboy who - through some convoluted prank involving honey and/or glue - had become inseparably attached to the academic gown worn by his irate headmaster. Chapman sagely observed of the incident: "I admire a boy who sticks to his principals."]

My favourite book - The Wind In The Willows

A week or so ago, I did a guest post for my blog-friend, Moonrat, as part of her 'Celebrate Reading' Month. The original post is here, if you want to go and check out the comments (and add one of your own) - but I thought I'd reprint it here on Froogville (because I'm feeling lazy today....).

********************************

Darn, this is a tough challenge our Moonie has set us! It seems invidious, impossible to choose just one book to celebrate from a lifetime's reading.

I'd already reviewed a couple of my special favourites over on The BookBook - LIFE IN A SCOTCH SITTING-ROOM, Vol. 2 by Ivor Cutler and THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O'Brien - so I felt I ought to omit them from consideration here.

I've always had a weakness for the 19th Century classics, and so was sorely tempted to go for one of those - but a little daunted, too, somewhat constrained by a sense of unworthiness. If you really pin me down on what I think is the best book ever written, I have to say ANNA KARENINA; but I don't think I could begin to do it justice. I considered also some of the other great books from that period - and from that period of my life, my most prolific spell of reading, my last years at high school - MADAME BOVARY, SCARLET & BLACK, THERESE RAQUIN, A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION, CRIME & PUNISHMENT, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, PRIDE & PREJUDICE. Prior to that, I'd had a brief, intense love affair with Melville and Conrad (I dreamed of running away to sea, until I discovered there were no tall ships any more): BILLY BUDD, MOBY DICK, LORD JIM, NOSTROMO, THE SECRET AGENT. Then there were the American greats that I mostly discovered just a bit later: THE GREAT GATSBY, AS I LAY DYING, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. And then there were all those more contemporary, more oddball, more risqué bestsellers, many known to me for years only as unfathomable titles from my elder brother's bookshelf: ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE, ON THE ROAD, JONATHAN LIVINGSTONE SEAGULL, CATCH-22 (JES has done that one for us now - thanks), LOLITA (God, I hope someone chooses to review LOLITA!), PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5.

I even contemplated, as more obscure possibilities, a couple of books that I'd loved using in class when I was, briefly, a schoolteacher in the early years of my working life, two of the greatest adventure novels ever written: ROGUE MALE by Geoffrey Household and THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE by B. Traven.

And the 'big three' I was focusing on for a long time - three books that really stimulated me with their ideas, haunted me with their bleakness, turned on its head my conception of what a novel could be - were CAT'S CRADLE, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, and THE TRIAL.

But you know what? They're all a bit serious, aren't they? Maybe even a bit pretentious? And I'm sure if MR repeats her 'Celebrate Reading' festival once or twice a year from now on, before too long somebody else will cover all of these.

First thoughts are usually best. When MR approached me to ask if I wanted to contribute to this series a month ago, my initial response was, "Oh, I suppose I could do THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS." So be it.

I can't now recall if this was part of the brief MR gave us, but most contributors so far seem to have chosen something that had a big impact on their life, and most particularly on their development as a reader. I'm going way back here. THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS was the first proper book (other than picturebooks and learn-to-read primers) that I can remember my mother reading to me. Though I can't distinctly recollect the very first time I heard it, it was already a familiar story that I was demanding to have read to me again by the time I was 4 or 5 years old. By the time I was 7 or 8 it had become one of the first proper books that I read for myself. It is almost certainly the book that I have re-read most often. It is one of the few books - the only children's book, I think - that I continue to re-read to this day, once every few years or so.

It is also one of the few books from that distant era of my life that I have jealously preserved (although, alas, it is now in storage with a friend; I don't have it here with me in China, and I'm missing it). Even in my childhood, there was a hallowed air of antiquity about this volume: it was a soft-cover paperback of at least '50s vintage, perhaps considerably earlier (I rather suspect, but can't now verify, that it was in fact a '30s edition from my mother's own childhood), the pages yellowed and slightly musty-smelling, desiccated and crisp to the touch. The feel of that book in my hands, and all the memories of home and family and childhood tied up in it are much of the reason that I love it so.

It is some time since I last read it, and I'm not able to consult it now to refresh my memory. I suppose I've never really read it critically, but more for the nostalgia-wallow it induces. I can't really say if it is especially well-written, or if it is a particularly good children's book. It is, however, an undeniably captivating story, one which has stood the test of time (gosh, this year is the centenary!). There is suspense and adventure and plenty of broad humour and the quirky charm of anthropmorphized animals; but it is also a surprisingly adult story: these are adult characters in an adult world, dealing with very adult problems (addictive behaviour, debt, criminal charges, lost children). Children, I always felt, made very dull and irritating protagonists for children's stories; this was much more satisfying.

Above all, the book is - and this, of course, is a prime interest of our beloved Moonrat - the most marvellous celebration of friendship. (Indeed, cynics may carp at the closeness of the affection between Ratty and Mole, suggesting that it smacks of a romantic or sexual attachment; and at least one stage version I've seen transforms the houseproud Mole into a female character, to play up on that tension more openly.) Toad is really not a very nice character: he's pompous, vain, deceitful, undisciplined. Although he does have his more winning qualities - a certain buffoonish charm, a childlike innocence, an acute vulnerability - that earn him endless forgiveness from his long-suffering associates, it's rather difficult to comprehend how they became friends. Yet friends they are, and however much the irresponsible Toad strains that friendship, they loyally stand by him. It is the most touching and inspiring template of male camaraderie I've ever encountered (though the central relationship between Ratty and Mole is a purer, less morally challenging representation of the ideal).

Other key elements of the book's lasting hold on me are: the idyllic picture of rural life, and particularly of a life of leisure on the river ("There is nothing - absolutely NOTHING - half so much fun as simply messing about in boats," as the Water Rat famously says; I did not learn the overwhelming truth of this adage until I discovered the joys of punting as an undergraduate at Oxford years later); the stark counterpoint of the scary darkness in other areas of life (the depiction of The Wild Wood is utterly, ravishingly terrifying to a small child); the poignancy of a lost world of innocence (I didn't realise this until much later, but the ease and tranquility of the life shown on the riverbank is found also in much of Edwardian literature: it's hard now not to bridle at the naivety of such carefree idylls, not to sense the latent tragedy of the looming World War somewhere between the lines); the finely balanced tension between the allure of a life of travel and adventure on 'the open road' (most powerfully seen in the episode where Ratty meets The Wayfarer, a vagabond sea rat who briefly seduces him with his glamorous tales of world travel) and the comforting familiarity of home (the 'Dulce Domum' chapter, where Mole finally returns to his own house after a long absence, regularly used to make me cry, and probably still would); and, of course, the greatest picnic scene in literature (with the comprehensive list of foods provided rendered stream-of-consciousness style as a single, irresistible word).

I worry, though, if this is perhaps too much of a "man's book". All of the main characters are men. Indeed, all of the main characters are lifelong bachelors. We do get a few glimpses of the cosy domesticity of wife and family as an alternate ideal, but our heroes seem quite happy as they are. Theirs is a world almost entirely without responsibilities, a world of pure leisure. That is certainly the key to the book's fascination for me; but I do get a little concerned sometimes as to how much this may have influenced - corrupted - the course of my adult life. Here I am, approaching middle age still a bachelor, and - despite occasional pangs of dissatisfaction with this status - the dominant obsession of my life is always wondering when I'll be able to get out on the river again.

A micro-anecdote to close. Around the time I first came to know this book - the age of 3 or 4, I guess - there was a 'Wild Wood' which my mother would often take me to for a walk. The wood seemed huge and dark and threatening, and I wouldn't have dared to set foot in it alone. Accompanied by Mum or Dad, I could contain my fear, play with it, savour it. That was a big expedition for me back then. The wood was miles away, across an endless field of corn that stood higher than my head. I returned to that spot ten years ago, for the first time since my childhood. The cornfield, of course, was of a fairly regular size, not limitless as the Russian steppes; and it grew only waist-high, at most. The 'Wild Wood' that had overwhelmed my senses as a small boy was a simple copse of only half a dozen or so trees. The world is so very different when you're 3ft tall.

And yes, I'm still waiting for my t-shirt, MR.

A Miscellany

After 7 or 8 weeks of shameful idleness, I suddenly find myself absurdly busy this week - the cultureshock is daunting (though my bank manager is no doubt delighted).

It is therefore entirely likely that I won't be doing much if any blogging again until the end of the week. To tide you over, I offer a few amusing bits and pieces from elsewhere on the Net that I've been meaning to recommend (in some cases, for ages), but somehow haven't quite got around to.

In my recent peregrinations through the back numbers of the excellent Other Men's Flowers I particularly liked this piece on holidays out of the sun. The spirit of Beachcomber and Flann O'Brien lives on.

The Peking Duck a while ago referred us to this interesting post on China's Worst Laws (most of them are pretty bad, but these might be seen to be the core of the problem) on the Foreign Policy Magazine website. (Guess what? It appears to be blocked in China at the moment! Go try your luck with a proxy.)

On a more positive note (never let it be said that I am a China-basher!), the Duck also ran this thread about why people love Beijing (or Shanghai, or both, or neither) - which prompted my own 'list of the month' on this topic back in September.

The Virtual Forbidden City (hat-tip once again to the estimable Jeremiah, this time from his own Granite Studio blog rather than the Duck) could keep you happily diverted through many a long winter evening.

If you don't have quite that much time to waste, you could instead check out this interactive webpage that gives you a scary peek into Sarah Palin's Oval Office (thanks for that one to my buddy Tolstoy's Webside Gleanings).

There - don't say I never do anything for you.

More Keats & Chapman

Some years ago, I ventured to make a few attempts to emulate the elaborate punmanship of the great Irish humourist Flann O'Brien's Keats & Chapman stories. This was my favourite of these efforts.

Keats and Chapman, continuing their warm but occasionally fractious companionship into the 1930s, are discussing the recent phenomenal success of the film 'King Kong'. Keats, brimming as ever with the enthusiasm of youth, is eager to go and see the film, but the older Chapman is wary of the huge crowds at the cinema. Also, more generally, he decries the crude populism of the film's producers, which, he feels, is sullying the artistic potential of the promising new medium - or, as he puts it, "Odi profanum vulgus, et RKO."

[For the benefit of Moonrat, perpetually perplexed by puns, and of any other readers who were denied the delights of a Classical education, "Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo" (pronounced 'RKO') is a famous opening line of one of the Odes (III.i) of the Roman poet Horace, meaning something like "I disdain the unholy mob, and fence it out." RKO Radio Pictures was the company which produced the first - and best - King Kong in 1933.]

Good beginnings

San Francisco literary agent Nathan Bransford (a blog I discovered through the indispensable Moonrat) was running a competition last week for opening paragraphs for a novel.  I had been thinking I might have a go myself, but was caught out by the very brief window for entries.    It may be just as well.  The event was really intended for people who already have a completed novel to peddle - rather than for dilettantes like me who just knock off isolated first paragraphs for fun once in a while.  [I have, in fact, been toying for a while with an idea for a 'novel' to be called An Anthology Of First Paragraphs.  Don't tell me someone's already done it!  Borges, maybe?]   Also, I'm afraid, Mr B's tastes seem to be not at all in tune with my own.  Frankly, I thought his 10 'winners' were 10 of the least engaging that I'd read.  Not badly written, but trying just a tad too hard; not naturally winning of reader involvement. There were many, many more that I personally preferred, from the couple of hundred submissions I glanced through (but christ, he had over 2,500 entries!  Respect for wading through that lot!).  His choices, I felt, were all a little bit too self-consciously 'literary' (a common vice, I find, in 'creative writing group'-crazy America), a bit over-elaborate, straining too much for descriptive effects or distinctive quirkiness.  Not one of them gave me much idea what the rest of the novel would be about.  And not one of them really inspired me to want to find out.   It's a fascinating exercise, though.  Do check out as many of the entries as you can.  Then compare with Nathan's top ten.  You can also read his comments on his selection process, and the opinions of his blog readers on what makes a good first paragraph.   Pondering this last question myself, I feel it's too complicated an issue - and with too diverse a range of possible 'answers' - for it to be worth trying to formulate any set rules.  But I know a good one when I see one.  Or, I know what I like.     I had a quick look through the books I have in my apartment (not that many, alas) to try to find an example or two.  Breakfast at Tiffany's might have been a contender, I thought; but when I dipped in to remind myself, I found the first paragraph (establishing the setting of the narrator's first apartment in New York) to be just a bit too leisurely, almost ponderous.  I much prefer the brisk immediacy of the second paragraph (but perhaps that's partly because we all know Holly Golightly now?): It never occurred to me in those days to write about Holly Golightly, and probably it would not now except for a conversation I had with Joe Bell that set the whole memory of her in motion again.   One of my absolute favourite opening paragraphs is this, in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman: Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.  Divney was a strong civil man but he was lazy and idle-minded.  He was personally responsible for the whole idea in the first place.  It was he who told me to bring my spade.  He was the one who gave the orders on the occasion and also the explanations when they were called for.   Amongst the Chinese novels I have, only Zhou Weihui's Shanghai Baby stands out as immediately arresting.  The book overall is a disappointment: it uses sex too cheaply for titillation (well, don't we all...?), there's no real plot to speak of, and the narrator is too shrill and self-centred to be good company for long.  But there's a wonderful verve and self-assurance about this first paragraph (and credit, too, to the translator Bruce Humes for capturing this voice): My name is Nikki but my friends all call me Coco after Coco Chanel, a French lady who lived to be almost ninety.  She's my idol, after Henry Miller.  Every morning when I open my eyes I wonder what I can do to make myself famous.  It's become my ambition, almost my raison d'être, to burst upon the city like fireworks.     Any recommendations, readers?

Another excerpt from 'The Third Policeman'

Today was another gorgeously sunny day (and the last day of the week-long Labour Day holiday), so I went for a long afternoon of idle dawdling and work avoidance. I took my favourite, fabulous Flann O'Brien book with me for a bit of dipping, and was entranced by this lyrical passage about waking on a sunny morning. Perhaps a narrow second favourite to the bicycle ride through the country in the dead of night which I posted on here last month, but still wonderful. This is the kind of stuff that makes me throw up my hands in despair and abandon all foolish hopes of becoming a 'real writer' myself.

I lay back and took to my habit of gazing out of the window. Whichever day it was, it was a gentle day - mild, magical and innocent with great sailings of white cloud serene and impregnable in the high sky, moving along like kingly swans on quiet water. The sun was in the neighbourhood also, distributing his enchantment unobtrusively, colouring the sides of things that were unalive and livening the hearts of living things. The sky was a light blue without distance, neither near nor far. I could gaze at it, through it and beyond it and see still illimitably clearer and nearer the delicate lie of its nothingness. A bird sang a solo from nearby, a cunning blackbird in a dark hedge giving thanks in his native language. I listened and agreed with him completely.

Apologies for obscurity

A couple of times recently I have used especially arcane references as post titles over on my companion blog, Barstool Blues.

The first, It is true that I do not, I was confident that at least my ridiculously well-read drinking buddy The Weeble would get. It is an archaic turn of phrase much favoured by legendary Irish hero Finn MacCool, as he appears in Flann O'Brien's dementedly brilliant comic novel At Swim-Two-Birds. This character has a poetical bent, and coins a number of brilliant metaphors to brag of his resilience in facing trouble: I particularly cherish I am a hound for thornypaws and I am a tree for windsiege. A great book.

Then, last week, in advertising my evolving plan to conduct an epic bar crawl in Beijing shortly, I proclaimed I have in mind a business. This comes from a programme for the opera Carmen, in a deliriously bad English translation supposedly produced by the Paris Opera many years ago - reprinted by John Julius Norwich in the first of his Christmas Crackers anthologies - which begins "Carmen is a cigar-makeress in a tabago factory" and degenerates from there.

The summary of Act Two is as follows:

Enter Escamilio, a balls-fighter. Enter two smuglers (Duet: 'We have in mind a business') but Carmen refuses to penetrate because Don José has liberated from prison. He just now arrives (Aria: 'Slop, here who comes!') but hear are the bugles singing his retreat. Don José will leave and draws his sword. Called by Carmen shrieks the two smuglers interfere with her, but Don José is bound to dessert, he will follow into them.

And, of course, in the last Act the toreadors enter to the rousing song "All hail the balls of a toreador!" Priceless stuff.

More 'meme' madness

I'm not really a fan of this use of the word 'meme' (as I complained when Jeremiah tagged me for one last year), nor of the practice of tagging in general (a non-code virus is still a virus, and our Internet service in China is rickety enough as it is without being inundated with these chain-letter shenanigans), but......

Well, I was just checking out the reliably diverting 'Dave's gone China' (one of the few Sinocentric blogs I have any time for), and he's just been hit with a literary one (he sounds even less enthused about the whole process than I am, heading his post 'More Meme Drudgery') that I thought I might try out. Well, 'literary', but in a bizarrely random kind of way - perhaps really more of a cryptographer's 'meme'?? But, you see, I've just got back from a 2-hour jog, and have nothing better to do with my time while I warm down and soak my feet in hot brine for the next hour. It's either this or watch the lunchtime news on CCTV9 - what's a boy to do?

Anyway, the formula is: You're supposed to pick up the nearest book to hand, turn to page 123, and transcribe sentences 6, 7, and 8 from that page. Oh yes, and then you're supposed to tag 5 other people to do likewise - but the hell with that!

I have piles of books all around me, which gives me a perfect excuse to 'cheat' and compare the results from several different volumes.

Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone (the last book I finished - mental note: must return it to Tulsa, must return it to Tulsa):

He fell on to the ground and blood slowly leaked out of his head. We cheered in admiration of the corporal's fierceness and saluted him as he walked by. Suddenly Lansana, one of the boys, was shot in the chest and head by a rebel hiding in the bushes.

Mo Yan's The Garlic Ballads (the book I read before that):

"Stop that crying," said the guard. "And stop calling me 'miss'. Call me 'Guard' or 'Officer', like the others do."

Neil Belton's A Game With Sharpened Knives (which I tried to read a few months ago: one of the very few books I have ever abandoned unfinished):

She had closed herself off again by the time he had joined her in bed. [The next day] She told Anny that she and Ruth were going to the National Gallery, and half an hour later he heard the front door close. He went into the living room and, parting the net curtains slightly, watched the two figures in their black woollen coats, perfectly matched, turn left along the tree-shaded street and walk into the light that waited in the open space before the castle gates.

That's a pretty good example of why I gave up on it. It's certainly well-written, but with no sense of proportion or restraint: everything is described in inordinate detail, but nothing ever actually happens. Here, for example: your mistress is pissed off at you, and takes your child out for a walk without inviting you to join them. OK, we get it. Why does that take over 80 words to describe? Why do we need to know what colour coats they are wearing? And it carries on in this vein for page after page after page - really, quite excruciatingly tedious.

James Shapiro's 1599: A Year In The Life Of William Shakespeare (the last non-fiction book I read):

The master carpenter Peter Street had carefully measured the exact dimensions of the Theatre's foundations after the timber structure had been dismantled. Once the location and centre-point of the Globe had been decided upon, Street took his surveyor's-line and, probably sprinking lime to indicate where the exterior wall would stand, marked off a ring with a diameter of seventy-two feet. The 'charmed circle' stopped there.

Alain de Botton's Essays In Love (the best book I have read recently):

In the typical scenario of betrayal, one partner asks the other, 'How could you have betrayed me with x when you said you loved me?' But there is no inconsistency between a betrayal and a declaration of love if time is taken into the equation. 'I love you' can only ever be taken to mean 'for now'.

Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (probably my favourite funny book, and one of my favourite books - period):

As they wrangled on about sweets and passed to chocolate bars and sticks of rock, the floor was pressing strongly from underneath. Then there was a change in the pressing, two clicks were heard, and the Sergeant started to undo the doors while explaining to MacCruiskeen his outlook on Ju-jubes and jelly-sweets and Turkish Delights.

With sloped shoulders and a face that was stiff from my dried tears, I stepped wearily out of the lift into the little stone room and waited till they had checked the clocks.

Well, that will give you some flavour of the weirdness of it, I suppose.

Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled (a witty poetry-writing primer I am currently working my way through):

For others rhyme is formulaic, commonplace and conventional: a feeble badge of predictability, symmetry and bourgeois obedience.

There are very few poets I can call to mind who only used rhyme in their work, but I cannot think of a single one, no matter how free-form and experimental, who never rhymed. Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, e e cummings, Crane, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Hughes - not an exception do I know.

And finally.... Kate Teltscher's The High Road To China (a history I just bought and intend to read next):

It would be his home throughout the winter months, until the road down to Bengal was passable once again. Like much of the palace interior, the hall glowed with colour: the walls were plastered green with bands of yellow and blue, the wooden pillars streaked red to appear fluted, and the capitals and ceiling beams 'curiously carved, gilt and ornamented with Festoons of Dragons and Flowers'. The clay floor shone like marble, polished by a young monk who 'every morning gets his Feet upon two woollen Cloths, and exercises himself for three or four hours in Skating about the room'.

An interesting selection of extracts - well representative of the overall tone and content of the books, and mostly quite a good hook for the browsing reader considering a purchase. I wonder if there's some magic about Page 123? I suppose in most cases this is going to be well over a quarter and possibly more like half-way in, so the writer should be hitting his or her stride; and, in a novel or narrative non-fiction, you can expect to be plunged into the middle of a key part of the action at this point.

Of course, it doesn't always work. Dialogue tends to make for dull quotations, and can be almost incomprehensible, certainly uninvolving, when stripped of context. I tried this game with David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (a book I read some time ago, but was thinking of using for my next review on the Book Book), but hit a piece of dialogue I didn't think was worth repeating (although, in this book, any page taken at random is not going to be representative of the whole because it's such an odd concept - not a single novel but a portmanteau of interlocked but essentially unrelated novellas, in many different genres and narrative styles). And the book I'm currently trying to finish, José Saramago's Baltasar and Blimunda (a book I got bogged down in half-way through, and then managed to mislay for 18 months!), is completely resistant to this rule of excerpting: Saramago has a trademark stylistic quirk of severely rationing his use of full stops, so you rarely get more than 4 or 5 'sentences' to a page.

And yes, I have reviewed - or will review - all of these titles over on the Book Book, so please go and check that out if you are curious to learn more about any of them.