You Thought Your Weather Was Bad

As some of you may know my little brother is finishing up his tour in Iraq this month. He sent me this picture of a sandstorm. Not a good place to put your contact lenses in I'm thinking.

Those Evil Americans Are Trying To Ruin...

Whenever a newspaper needs filler in England they always dig up the same old meme: Those beastly Americans (or, increasingly, Eurocrats) are trying to destroy our: roadside cafes, chippies, great British sausage, football, Christmas, biscuits, old fashioned class based xenophobia. . . Well this time it's the turn of Bonfire Night. In Monday's Guardian an ill informed man called Andrew Martin wrote a piece on the American tradition of Halloween and why (yawn) it's too commercial, too packaged, too boring and is inferior to the rituals surounding Guy Fawkes Night.
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What is Guy Fawkes Night I hear you beastly Americans ask? Well it's the night of November 5th when they drag an effigy of a Catholic rebel who tried to blow up Parliament through the streets, hoist him on a bonfire, throw things at him, and set fire to him. Lovely eh? Of course from Joan of Arc onwards certain upper class Brits have enjoyed burning Catholics as a hobbby and I suppose it's one of the great shibboleths of traditional England along with darts, Saturday night street brawling and saying rude things about the French, Yanks, Germans and Micks.
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I am a Mick and I grew up not with Guy Fawkes Night but rather with Halloween, as did most Scots and not a few Welsh. Despite Mr Martin's silly claims, it isn't an American invention, in fact Guy Fawkes Night itself only dates back to the seventeenth century and before that all good Englishmen celebrated, yes, that's right, October 31st not November 5th. Martin doesn't appear to know that the Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles have never bought into the pseudo holiday called Guy Fawkes and neither did the colonials on the other side of the Atlantic. Now, if a province with as much sectarian division as Northern Ireland can reject Guy Fawkes Night because of its barbaric, racist, ritual killing aspect what does that say about places that do celebrate it and the people who want to champion it? It says a lot. Catholics weren't allowed to vote in the UK until 1829 and if a monarch (or heir to the throne) marries one it's considered so poisonous that said monarch must abdicate. This is the law of England right now, (no I'm not kidding - it's called the Act of Settlement).
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Martin goes on to lament the growing popularity of Halloween among English children. "Why oh why can't someone brainwash the little loves to embrace the hatreds of their forebears," he seems to say. "Don't they realise that if we lose Guy Fawkes night, they'll come for cricket next?" And the villains responsible for these new fangled notions? Why those insidious Yanks of course.

The trick or treat component of Halloween was built up in the US because it offered the best merchandising opportunities. It is no accident that it is promoted most heavily over here by Asda, which is owned by Wal-Mart, a beneficiary of the billions of dollars spent very year in the US on Halloween.

Can you believe this tired conspiracy nonsense still gets published in papers of record? I would have expected it in the Daily Mail but not The Guardian. Who was the editor on this story? Who was the copyeditor? Well guys, dreary, ill thought out, lazy, hack work like this is killing the mainstream media. And no Mr Martin Halloween isn't a massive conspiracy foisted upon English schoolboys by American corporations, it's a rejection of tribal hatreds by kids who'd prefer to have a bit of fun on All Hallows Eve rather than participating in a sicko, sectarian auto da fe.

McKinty Behind Bars

This review of Dead I Well May Be on Amazon.com caught my eye:

Mesmerizing enough to calm the Block , October 25, 2008
by
G. Love (Bridgeport, CT USA) - See all my reviews I read this book in a mater of hours because I couldn't put it down. Then I read it out loud to a group of older boys incarcerated in Juvenile Detention. This excellent crime thriller kept all of the young men intrigued and well-behaved for days at a time as I parceled the book out little by little. They begged for more when the book was over and I ended up buying copies of each book in the series for their library. This book and the others in the series are extremely well written and instantly captivating. While the subject matter may be above the average high school student, Adrian McKinty's books will captivate even the most reluctant readers!

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Thanks for the review Mr. Love, and I'm a little curious if you read or skipped the long section explaining in detail how to escape from prison.

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Oh and come on Scribner bring DIWMB back into print! Why make people get it used or as a UK import? Don't you care about the future of America?

Coincidence?

From Reuters:New York Times Posts Massive Loss - Stock Falls 10 Percent
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From The Guardian:Bono to join New York Times Editorial Page
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Belfast at the North Pole

Yes, global warming is a problem, but it's only a sideshow when you consider that our present temperate climate is merely a blip between cycles of ice ages which have been occurring for the last million years. We're currently in a fairly typical interglacial period and no matter we do to warm up/screw up the planet, two or three thousand years from now most of North America and all of Northern Europe will once again be under a kilometre thick sheet of ice. If you don't believe me read this. Still, while the short sighted talk global warming and the long sighted talk about the coming ice age, the last laugh must go to geologists, who think not in thousand year increments but in million and ten million year periods. Plate tectonics is changing the map of the world and thanks to Strange Maps, I found this little beauty (above) which shows you what the continents are going to look like in the future. 250 million years from now Ireland will be the most northerly place on Earth, entirely surrounded by sea ice and under a glacier thicker than that currently on Greenland. Sadly there probably won't be any humans around 250 MY from now to witness nature's final triumph over Ireland's recent architectural and road building excesses.

Spread the Word

The uber charming Rebecca Gray, Serpent's Tail's PR guru/marketing whiz/resident genius informed me this morning that The Bloomsday Dead has been long listed for an award. It's The World Book Day's Spread The Word Award which seeks to encourage people to (gasp) read more books. It's a people's choice award, so after the long listing, the people, i.e. you, will vote to make the short list and the winner will be announced on world book day next year. If you'd like to vote for Bloomsday Dead or any of the other nominees then jump on over to their website.
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I just got a rather impertinent email asking me what's in it for you, the reader/reviewer. Well, apart from encouraging people to read books, JF, I'll tell you what, vote for me, or review me and if I make the shortlist, I'll give away my entire box of signed first editions on the blog. Deal?

Among Orange Trees

News from The Times that they are going to dig up Garcia Lorca from the mass grave he was thrown in after being murdered by the fascists. A lot of people in Spain think this is an outrage (including some of Lorca's relatives) but they reinterred Yeats after he died in Paris so that his wishes could be followed and he would be buried "under Ben Bulben". (Or at least they think they did - more on that weird story here. ) Did Lorca want to be buried in a rubbish filled canyon? No, actually, he didn't:

When I die,

bury me with my guitar

beneath the sand

When I die,

among orange trees

and mint plants.

When I die,

bury me,

if you would, inside a weather vane.

When I die!

That's All I Needed to Hear

The geek vote is sewn up.

Body of Lies

With the release of the film Body of Lies, I thought I would post the review I did of the book in the The Washington Post. (Thank you for the idea Dylan). The WaPo hasn't asked me to review anything since, so it's conceivable that I was a little too harsh on one of their star columnists, David Ignatius. Anyway here's what I thought last year:

Roger Ferris, International Man of Mystery
Reviewed by Adrian McKinty,
"Thursday, April 19, 2007; Page C07
BODY OF LIES (Norton)
By David Ignatius

David Ignatius must have one of those passports with extra visa pages in the middle. In the course of his new spy novel, "Body of Lies," the hero, CIA man Roger Ferris, travels to Berlin, Amman, Iraq, back to Langley, Rome, Geneva, Abu Dhabi, Beirut, the Jordan Valley, Ankara, Aleppo, Tripoli, Nicosia and Damascus. All of these locales are described in convincing detail, and the wealth of smells, colors, street names and foods convinces us that Ferris is actually there -- and so are we.
...It has been eight years since the appearance of the last book by Ignatius, who writes a column for The Washington Post -- the underappreciated "Sun King" -- and, of course, in that time the world has changed utterly. For the clever, young Ferris, every day "now and forever is the day after September 11, 2001." A master terrorist known only as Suleiman has been planting car bombs all over Western Europe; Ferris is tasked with penetrating Suleiman's cell and capturing, killing or discrediting the man himself. Ferris is not as ethically conflicted as many a contemporary thriller hero, and although the people he works with are of dubious morality, he himself remains focused on the task at hand. When things take an unpleasant turn or the innocent get hurt, Ferris forces himself to remember the people on the upper floors of the World Trade Center. After reliving the horror of 9/11, he recites his personal mantra: "This is a war. . . . You are a soldier. More people will die unless you do your job."
...Using a ruse that British intelligence fooled the Nazis with in World War II, Ferris begins to worm his way inside Suleiman's network. After being wounded in a bombing in Iraq, he recuperates in one of the more pleasant wings of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. And as he gets better, his marriage begins to fall apart. He seems curiously unfazed by this, but back in Amman, Jordan, we discover that he is already falling for another woman.
...Ferris is an interesting character -- idealistic, passionate, wholly believable -- and his adventures make for a story that is fast-paced and psychologically deep. Ignatius has taken his time over this book and is confident enough in his material to keep the gadgetry and technical jargon to a minimum.
...The novel, however, is not without flaws. Ignatius seems to have swallowed whole the Edward Said pill and made a conscious decision that he will not resort to cliche or condescension in his descriptions of the Middle East. As a result, he bends over backward to portray his Arab characters as wise, honorable and decent. We find few instances of anti-Semitism in any of the Arab countries Ferris visits, and even in the misery of a Palestinian refugee camp, we see only fading Yasser Arafat posters rather than venomous anti-Jewish slogans or Hamas hate graffiti. At times, Ignatius seems almost embarrassed that his villain is an actual Arab terrorist (albeit one with a high IQ and a warped sense of morality), but he needn't be: His portrayal of the Arab world is sensitive, and no one is going to confuse David Ignatius of The Post with the overnight man on Fox News.
...The sexual mores of al-Qaeda's disciples are gently mocked, but the reverent tone toward Islam echoes that of the pious Crusades movie "Kingdom of Heaven" (2005), and it is perhaps not surprising that "Body of Lies" has already been optioned for that film's director, Ridley Scott.
...The book is well researched, but even seasoned reporters sometimes nod. The Jordanian city of Petra was not built by the Romans, as Ignatius implies, but by the semi-nomadic Nabateans; the British evacuation at Dunkirk took place in 1940, not 1939; the gold dome on the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary belongs to the Dome of the Rock, not the nearby al-Aqsa Mosque; and the outskirts of Jerusalem cannot be seen from the Dead Sea, despite what the tour guides tell you.
...Still, in a thriller, these are quibbles. The last third of the book moves very quickly, and the tension becomes palpable. The denouement is surprising, exciting and effective. After being blown up, shot at, kidnapped and tortured, Ferris must suffer yet more horrors to finally get his man, and by this stage we are rooting for him all the way.
...A sterner editor would have cut the final few pages and made the ending of "Body of Lies" more fashionably open-textured and incomplete, but I liked Ignatius's take: Ferris may be young, but he is throwback to an earlier time, and the ending suits him. Hollywood will like it, too. The book works extremely well, and its imagery and characters linger in the memory.
...We need gifted and intelligent thriller writers like David Ignatius. One hopes that he has another book in the planning stage and is already filling in form DS-4085, requesting yet more visa pages for his well-worn passport.

Dick Morris - The New Nostradamus?

Condi vs Hillary - A Review
Last week I was delighted to receive a signed copy of Dick Morris's book Condi vs. Hillary, in which the Fox News commentator explains why the 2008 Presidential Election will be fought between Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party and Condoleeza Rice for the GOP. Prescient and astute as always Morris eschews hyperbole and outlines his case with his customary balanced, forensic, certitude. Unlike so many here-today gone-tomorrow political books Condi vs Hillary contains no trace of unthinking prejudice or hurried punditry. Morris has clearly taken the trouble to present his thoughts in a careful, well organized and logical manner. He did not rush this book into print, rather, like Thucydides or Tacitus, he wants his text to stand the test of time, to be a beacon of nuanced prose and philosophical insight that shines across the centuries. Utilizing his insider contacts and his years of hardwon political experience Morris explains how Hillary Clinton will become President of the United States in 2009, unless Condi Rice is able to stop her. Like his philippics on Fox News, Morris's arguments are impossible to resist and on finishing CvH I put a thousand dollar bet on Hillary for pres (unaccountably she now stands at 1 000 000 to 1 in the William Hill odds). With my winnings I intend to refloat the economy of Iceland or build a bridge from Ireland to Scotland (a pet project of mine). As well as dizzying intellectual analyses and dazzling wordsmithry, the book also has an attractive author photograph. The beaming, elegant Morris generously shares author credit with wife Eileen McGann who must thank her lucky stars every morning when she wakes beside this dashing confederate of politicos, presidents and princes, this good friend and advisor to the Cicero of our era: Sean Hannity.

The Five Million Dollar Woman

It's been a truism for a few years now that most book buyers are women. When I worked at Barnes and Noble it was the Romance Section that had the briskest business and those Sneaky Pie Brown Mysteries (and other cozies) sold like hot cakes. Some men do read Sneaky Pie Brown and romance novels but no man has ever bought one. This story below from The Chicago Sun Times confirms what I've suspected for a while now - male book readers are an endangered species. What do men do with their time? Nobody knows. Watch TV, play video games, go to the driving range, kill prostitutes in back alleys? They're certainly not hanging out in bookshops. The Sun Times story has a couple of interesting angles for me. I read The Time Traveler's Wife a few years ago and quite enjoyed it - its basically a romance novel with a college education. Also Niffenegger's agent Joe Regal was my old agent back in the day and her publisher Nan Graham was my publisher for Dead I Well May Be - both of them are very smart people. Anyway it's food for thought - don't be surpised if you never hear from Adrian McKinty again, but Adrianne McGinty suddenly becomes a well known romance novelist...


'Time Traveler's Wife' author hits jackpot
By Teresa Budasi, Chicago Sun Times

Chicago author Audrey Niffenegger, who wrote her way to the best seller lists six years ago with The Time Traveler's Wife, has apparently snared a $5 million advance for her followup novel, Her Fearful Symmetry. Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, was the big winner in a hot bidding war, which also included Time Traveler publisher MacAdam Cage and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which published the paperback.

Audrey Niffenegger is also a visual artist and faculty member at Columbia College Chicago. I would say it's a bit of a gamble for a publisher to shell out so much money for a second novel, not only in this climate of a crumbling economy. . .but Scribner VP and editor in chief Nan Graham isn't worried. "She really has defied custom and written a spectacular second novel, which is one of the hardest things to do in this universe," Graham told the New York Times.

Strange Maps

Until Marco posted a comment here last week I was blissfully unaware of the blog called Strange Maps. Now instead of working on important things I should be working on I've been reading through the last 300 posts on SM. If you like maps you'll enjoy the site, if you're a map fanatic like me you're in big big trouble. I particularly enjoyed the Unnamed Methane Sea on Titan and Country Music's Favourite States. Oh and the soda pop one (right) which you can click to make bigger.
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One plea to Mr Strange Map himself, please more maps for those of us who are red/green colour blind.

The Most Emailed Story on the BBC Today

Is The Big Lebowski a cultural milestone?
The Dude, Donny and Walter (photo courtesy of Universal Pictures)
By Finlo Rohrer BBC News Magazine
It's 10 years since the release of The Big Lebowski, a film that split cinema audiences down the middle but created a strange cult. Is The Dude a slacker prince for our times? Not everybody likes The Big Lebowski. The Big Lebowski is a cult film. That is to say, not everybody likes it but those who do, in the main, have a special relationship with it. When it was released, as the follow-up to the Coen brothers' well-regarded and academy-impressing Fargo, many critics found themselves underwhelmed. Fargo was a film that hung together well - tightly paced and plotted, full of dark humour and moments of pathos. The Big Lebowski, on the other hand, could be viewed as two hours of wild self-indulgence, packed to the gills with bowling, White Russian cocktails, and swearing...
The rest of the story here.
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1:30 pm update. Now its only the third most emailed item after the world financial meltdown and something about Sarah Palin. What's the matter with you people, don't you know a real story when you see it?

Fifty Grand - A Mystery

Something odd happened yesterday on Amazon.com. My book Fifty Grand has had an Amazon listing for about two weeks now and its sales rank has been chugging along at about 1, 300, 000 i.e. there are 1 299 999 books, videos, cds, shoes, sausages etc. on Amazon that sell better. Not terribly impressive but not that bad for a book that doesnt have a cover, reviews, isn't 100% finished, and is still 7 months from release. Anyway yesterday Amazon, for reasons unknown to me, changed the title from Fifty Grand - A Novel to Fifty Grand - A Mystery and within a few hours the book's sales rank moved from 1 300 000 to 259 000, which is still low but it represents a jump of over 1 million places! I haven't contacted Holt so I don't know if they initiated the title change, or whether this was Amazon's idea. As you can see from the provisional cover (right) the subtitle was going to be "a novel of suspense" but if calling the book "a mystery" can effect its sales to such an extraordinary degree I think I might have to go with that. And it is a mystery novel, though perhaps not a conventional one. I have a question for you dear readers - do you think subtitles matter? Is it important for you to know that a book is more of a mystery than a thriller? Does calling a book one genre rather than another define it in your mind, or is that an old fashioned idea? Please let me know and I'll pass on what you think to the powers that be. Thank you.

My Nicole Kidman Stamp Collection

In the St Kilda post office this week I was slightly taken aback by a gigantic display of the new Australian postage stamps featuring four of this country's finest actors. (Well, ok, three of them.) But why only these guys? Take a look at the picture and tell me who's missing. Yes, I know, where's Naomi Watts or freakin Wolverine or Mad Max and where oh where is bloody Elrond? AKA Hugo Weaving, star of Lord of the Rings, the Matrix and one of my favourite Australian films Proof (no not the one where Gwyneth Paltrow plays the, heh, math genius or the one where Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a kiddie fiddler), no the one about the blind photographer living in St Kilda that also stars a self effacing and humble Russell Crowe.
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Elrond and Naomi ain't there not because they weren't born in Oz (neither were Nicole or Russell) but because the Australian Post Office seems to have picked winning an Academy Award as its sole criterion for success. If you don't win an acting Oscar you don't get a stamp. (Mel Gibson didn't get his statuettes for acting.) Come on Australia, are you really going to let two thousand people who mostly live in nursing homes in Arizona decide who goes on your stamps? It isn't right guys; next you'll be putting an octogenarian English lady on your money...oh, wait...

Things You Cant Say In the UK

Every culture has its shibboleths. If you deny them you're less of a man, or an outcast, or something. But since I havent lived in the UK for a while I feel I'm finally free to speak my mind about some sacred cows:

1. Football is really boring. All that passing back and forth, the droning commentary, the goalless draws. Either make the nets bigger or the players smaller. Your choice Premier League.

2. Top Gear is rubbish. Why can't you people see it? Jeremy Clarkson is Terry Wogan with worse teeth, worse hair and worse gags.

3. British Tabloids are the best in the world. Despite crippling libel laws and constant snooty attacks from the high brow press they get the job done better than anybody. Gordon Ramsay, Gordon Brown, Gordon Bennett, no one is safe from those grubby hacks and their checkbooks, even people not called Gordon.

4. Stephen Fry stopped being interesting in 1994. And I like Fry, but the crap he's been shoving at us for the last decade. Gimme a break. If you ever want me to crack make me watch four hours of QI in a row.

5. Noel Gallagher. Ok, I'll give you Jeremy Clarkson if you want, but when are you people going to realise that NG is an utter and complete no talent. My non existent, illiterate, tone deaf, dead cat could write better melodies and lyrics. NG is to contemporary music what the Cretaceous–Tertiary Event was to dinosaur music.

6. Brummies are the new Irish. Nobody makes Irish jokes anymore, but all you need to hear is a Brummie accent and suddenly everyone's a comedian. Brummies lack the regional identity of Geordies, Yorkshiremen and Cockneys and if they want to make it in the big world they all are forced to drop their native dialect. You ever hear a scientist or a brain surgeon with a Brummie accent? No, didn't think so.

7. British Post Pub Food Rules! Yes it's derided but those derideders are wrong! The kebab van, the curry house, the chippie - no country I've lived in comes close to having such terrific post pub options. It may not feel great on Saturday morning, but Friday night - bloody delicious.

8. Wallace and Gromit aint what they used to be. All down hill since the train chase in The Wrong Trousers.

9. Ok I'm bored with this concept now but you get the idea. Food for thought, eh? No? Oh to hell with ya, ya Brummie hating, football playing eejits.

I WAS RIGHT!

Kind of. This is what I predicted: two days ago.

FROM THE AP: STOCKHOLM, Sweden - French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (right) won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for his poetic adventure and "sensual ecstasy." The Swedish Academy called Le Clezio, 68, an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity." The Swedish Academy said Le Clezio from early on "stood out as an ecologically engaged author, an orientation that is accentuated with the novels 'Terra Amata,' 'The Book of Flights,' 'War' and 'The Giants.'"

The italics are mine. Ha, ha, ha. . .

Next year Karl Lungvist Hammerskjold whose 10 000 verse Faroese epic on over fishing of herring stocks "shines a penetrating sensual light on the strange, unknown erotic world of a Rigsfællesskab fisherman."

Our First Few Months in Melbourne

A 42 second slide show of our first few months in Melbourne. The music is Badly Drawn Boy.

(There's a pretty good chance this will only be of interest to grandmothers, so dont come running to me if you want those 42 seconds back.)

Carla, peut je chuchotent quelque chose dans votre oreille?

It's Nobel Lit Prize time again and they're not going to give it to Philip Roth or Thomas Pynchon or James Ellroy because the Swedish Academy has been going through a rather sad anti American hissy fit for the last decade or so. Who are they going to give it to? Well, I'll tell you but first I'm going to look at who they have chucked it at recently and give you my views - not in any meaningful depth mind you but rather in a lazy list fashion something like this:

2007 - Doris Lessing: she's not bad actually.
2006 - Orhan Pamuk: an elliptical Turkish novelist, who writes about tedious people in tedious situations, tediously. But maybe it's just the translation - my Turkish isn't what it was.
2005 - Harold Pinter : delighted the Academy with his off the hook rant about George Bush, America, etc. You want to know how good Pinter is today? Watch the remake of Sleuth. Yikes.
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek : A fellow Serpents Tail author. Honour behooves me etc.
2003 - J. M. Coetzee : Coetzee? Really? Thin little books about South Africa, with a few fairly obvious observations about human nature.
2002 - Imre Kertész: The award that should have gone to Primo Levi.
2001 - V. S. Naipaul : Who doesn't love the grumpy Trinidadian misanthrope? I agree with this one whole heartedly.
2000 - Gao Xingjian : Yikes again. Soul Mountain has been staring at me from my bookcase for eight years. Once I took it on a longhaul flight to force myself to read it. I ended up watching The Graduate five times.
1999 - Günter Grass : Would they have given him this if he'd admitted that he was a volunteer in the Waffen SS? Probably not. Dog Years is ok.
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So who is going to win this year? Four clues:

1 No one with an X or a Z in their name has won for a while.

2 Of the last 17 winners most have been ardent enemies of Imperalism(this ain't going to be Christopher Hitchens' year).

3 Every decade or so they give it to a random Frenchman.

4 To balance out the intellectuals who write vague pop psychology books cloaked in impenetrable language a la Elias Canetti (1981) they often give prizes to muscular earthy writers like Hemingway and Laxness.

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So don't be shocked if the winner is Xavier Zscent-Benardin, a former bricklayer turned radical rive gauche playwright whose Iraq War play Booshed shocked the 11 people who went to see it. Either him or Carla Bruni Sarkozy, poet, author, song writer, muse, friend of Sweden, and chic first lady of France. Mark my words.

Colour Me Happy

I got the cover mock up for Fifty Grand over the weekend. I absolutely love it. I've had good covers and bad covers in the past and this, to me, is up there with my favourite, the hardback of Dead I Well May Be. They're both mood covers, not giving away any plot but giving you an idea of the tone of the book. You need a cover that will work on Amazon and something that will make a good 'face out' * in Barnes and Noble or Borders or the local mystery bookshop.

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I did have an initial concept that I wanted the book to have a Cuban feel to it but the more I thought about those ideas they looked too much like the cover of Lonely Planet Havana or something. So instead the designer went with the notion of ice and wasteland, which plays a major part of the geography and mood in the latter part of the story. I also like the fact that the cover appears to be in Futura Sans Serif, Stanley Kubrick's favourite font.
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Tuesday update: I forgot to mention the artist's name. He is called Nick Caruso. Thank you Nick. The consensus around here is: great job!

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*A face out is when you have the book's cover pointing outwards on the shelf - not the spine. When I worked at B&N we only faced out bestsellers and covers we particularly liked, esp Chip Kidd.

The Presidential Candidates' Favourite Authors And Me

I am convinced that what did Mitt Romney in was a confession that his favourite novel was Battlefield Earth. Those of us who have read B.E. can only speculate on the depth of Romney's madness. Without a doubt the worst book I've ever read and a good candidate for the worst book ever written; if it was shorter it could be so bad it's actually good, but eventually the sheer volume of its horribleness gets you down (more from me about that here); but unless McCain drops Palin and calls for Mitt, that's the last we've heard of him for a while so what of the actual final four candidates?
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Governor Palin recently revealed that she's a fan of Belfast born polymath CS Lewis. Lewis favoured Christian allegories both in his superior science fiction and his Narnia books. His Christian apologia essays aren't my taste but they're well written and sometimes funny. My Lewis connection isn't just that he's from my own fair city, but also my local in Oxford was his local - the fabulous Eagle and Child pub, where Tolkien and Lewis and the other 'Inklings' used to drink real ale, smoke pipes and read bits of their novels at each other. Somehow I don't think this was as fun as it sounds.
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Barack Obama's favourite author is Herman Melville (though he also likes Tony Morrison according to his MySpace Page (which also, BTW, reveals impeccable musical taste: Miles, Coltrane, Dylan etc.)) Me and Herman go way back. I used to visit his grave in the Bronx on a regular basis. (The grave had pussy willows growing on it which for Moby Dick fans is pretty hilarious.) And once I drove out to his house in the Berkshires, a gorgeous farm, that was filled with memorabilia. Clive James is one of the few critics I've read who has admitted that he doesn't like Moby Dick but I sense that the book isn't quite as popular on the right hand side of the Atlantic. I love Moby Dick though and read it about every two years in a lovely Norton edition which has a plan of the ship and lots of extras. Funnily enough the moral centre of the book is the exotic black guy. The villain? A grizzled maimed navy veteran. Coincidence? Er, yes.
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Joe Biden is a slippier customer. On Facebook he says that his favourite books are Irish America (a title with no Amazon listing) and American Gospel a history book from 2005, but with a little further digging I found that that Biden is a massive Seamus Heaney fan. Heaney was the Professor of Poetry when I was at Oxford but more importantly he's from Toomebridge only a hop, skip and a jump from Carrickfergus. Biden quotes Heaney's Cure at Troy with approval and who can blame him? Heaney is not only Ireland's greatest poet but he's kicked the door down for a whole coterie of brilliant followers: Muldoon, Carson, Paulin, Mahon, the Longleys etc. (All of whom, of course, speak in the silky diphthongs of Ireland's wettest, dourest, most northerly province.)
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Speaking of dour - John McCain's favourite writer is Ernest Hemingway and his favourite book is Papa's For Whom The Bell Tolls. I too am a huge fan of EH. About nine months ago I was in a taxi heading to Hemingway's house in Cuba the Finca Vigia (reading Declan Burke's The Big O funnily enough) a house Hemingway bought from the proceeds of FWTBT. While I was there a Cuban secret policeman offered me for sale, cheap, any of the books in the crumbling Hemingway library. I refused out of moral decency and because I'm a big chicken. (The rest of that story is here.) Anyway FWTBT is a terrific book about a bisexual American Communist who commits terrorist acts against a right wing central government. Wait a minute, that's McCain's favourite novel? That's freaky enough to send a chill through Cindy McCain's hair extensions. Better move on to my conclusion.
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Ok, so what have we learned from this troll through the candidates' favourite authors? Two of them are from Northern Ireland, I urinated in another one's toilet and the final one is buried near Duke Ellington. Does that help you make your choice on election day? No? Well, just for that, I'm going to vote Nader.

Attack Chimps On Fire Off The Shoulder Of Orion

The Constellation Orion is visible in Australia, except that what we see is the reverse of the northern hemisphere view. The shoulders are at the bottom and Orion's legs are at the top. I'm not going to pretend to understand how this is possible, but it was while I was calmly observing this phenomenon the other night from our roof when I was suddenly set upon by what appeared to be a large lemur-like monkey. My fear of chimps and monkeys is well known to readers of this blog, perhaps generated by stories like this or this or the fact that an angry chimp once threw excrement at me at Regents Park Zoo. Apparently our roof is the domain of tree dwellers and this particular one didn't like the fact that I was on his turf. He appeared from nowhere and ran at me, screeching. I too screamed and tried to scramble back to the step ladder but that's when he sprung his trap. Another lemur-like thing was waiting by the top rung of the ladder. Cornered and panicking I had no option but to jump. I landed in the garden twisting my ankle to the evident delight of the creatures, who gyrated triumphantly for a hubristic five minutes. Of course they weren't monkeys at all but (I think) large wild possums. I had a brick handy but in Australia possums are protected by law and you can't harm a hair of their not so little heads. (In New Zealand, funnily enough, there's a bounty on the buggers.) As I lay there clutching my ankle watching them dance I thought of Livy's commentary on the Battle of Cannae - round 1 of this war may have gone to you possums but vincere scis, Hannibal; victoria uti nescis, and then as I struggled to my feet I thought, hey this could be a blog post with a pretty decent pun in the title.