Hail To Thee Backstroker!

Last year I read a book called The Swimmer As Hero and since finishing it, I've tootled along, three days a week, to swim at the charming St Kilda Sea Baths just down the road from my house. The building is attractive, the staff helpful, the water buoyant. The number of hairy, obese Russian men is higher than I would have thought strictly necessary but the Russian guys are mostly there to argue with one another in the hot tub so they dont really bother me. I generally swim in the slow lane because you never see those nutters who do the turny flips and you seldom feel the pressure of people behind you (one of the reasons I gave up golf).
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It's lovely and except when St Kilda FC comes by to show off their impressive physiques my only menace is the backstroker. Ah, the backstroker - I am fascinated by these bold adventurers who choose that odd method of locomotion in a small community pool. When I'm doing the crawl or the breastroke I'm very careful about keeping to the left hand side of the lane lest I touch someone or disturb anyone with my arm motion. Backstrokers however are a different breed. Like Polynesian canoeists they launch themselves into the unknown without map or compass, caring naught for anything but their own progression down the 25 metres of the pool. I couldn't go 2 metres without worrying that I was about to bump into something or that my leg kick was splashing in some poor devil's face. The rugged individuals of the backstroke fraternity (actually mostly sorority) have however obviously read and digested their Ayn Rand. Ayn didn't show mercy and neither do her acolytes. Regardless of your lane they will kick you, slap you, sideswipe you, kick you again - sometimes it's like an aquatic Three Stooges out there. While everyone else is looking forward at their fellow man, buying into the notion that Friedrich Hayek was wrong and that there is such a thing as a society, the backstroker is off in her own realm, staring at the ceiling and only vaguely aware that other human beings are in the pool or indeed that they exist at all. This impresses me no end. We need backstrokers in our civilization: we need them up on Mars erecting geodesic domes or digging wells in Africa or exploring jungles looking for new medicines.
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We certainly need them in the St Kilda Sea Baths to show us how to live. This afternoon when I was at the end of a lap, a large man with a magnificent swathe of back hair was trying to climb up the ladder thus blocking the lane to my immediate left; coming towards me in a gold swim hat was a backstroker. She couldn't see me of course so I was trapped between a rock and a hard place. Or more accurately between a hairy, wet buffalo-like hide of back hair and an Ayn Rand torpedo. Naturally I got the worst of all possible worlds. She crashed into me and the hairy guy and he fell backwards onto both of us. Flustered I got out and huffed for a second and moved to the Medium Lane. She, what did she do? She just grunted, turned around and carried on backstroking as if nothing had happened.
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Would you be upset? Not, I. I for one salute these brave backstroker types who grunt and move on. They are out there every day landing on Plymouth Rock, making the desert bloom, humiliating subordinates in boardrooms etc. and if it wasn't for their aggressive torpedo practice in the local swimming pool Plymouth Rock would probably stay completely unlanded upon and the desert would remain that dull yellow colour. Anyway that's what I think about all of this, her grunt in lieu of an apology bespeaks her take on the matter and history, alas, does not record what the hirsute Russian gentleman had to say.

La Peste

My oldest daughter Arwynn was sick with swine flu on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of last week. She had a high fever, the shakes and vomiting. It's funny how it takes something like that to throw everything into a proper perspective. Nothing else mattered to me but that she got better. And slowly as her fever broke and we held her hand she did get better.
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Life is so tenuous. My mum is a cancer survivor, my little brother right now is serving with the British forces in Afghanistan. I don't have these problems. The writer's life is easy by comparison. I'll be the first to admit that things are pretty bad out there at the moment, the economy sucks, no one's buying books and much of the time the work of the mediocre and the connected gets the attention of the mediocre and the connected; but death is long - as Stanley Kubrick has Private Joker say in Full Metal Jacket "the dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive." We are all lucky to be here, the odds were stacked against every one of us being born. Some day of course we are all going to die and our sun is going to die and all the suns are going to die. Given enough time matter itself breaks down into its component particles so that eventually nothing of humanity will be left. The whole history of our civilization's rise and fall and rise and fall and all of its characters good and evil won't even be a rumour. Shelly's Ozymandias at least had something left in the desert, we won't have anything, there won't even be a desert. Which is why living itself in Camus' phrase is "heroic" - we struggle and fail and struggle again but we, like Sisyphus, should consider ourselves happy - in the face of eternal darkness, life is a brief, defiant flickering candle. To live at all is miracle enough.

I'm in a Transitional Period and I Don't Want to Kill You

Transition by Iain Banks

The fun of an Iain Banks novel is largely in its plot which makes it hard to review this book without giving away spoilers. I read none of the literature which came with the galley kindly sent to me by Little Brown so that I could ride the twists and turns of the narrative with genuine surprise. Perhaps then read this paragraph as one long SPOILER ALERT. (I am however only going to give the basic premise below so with that in mind read on or not as you wish).
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Whew, ok, if you're still with me and you don't know who Iain Banks is that means you're probably living in North America because most of the rest of the world has been on the Iain Banks express for a couple of decades now. Let me briefly catch you up. Banks is Scottish and lives in Fife well outside the orbit of the London literary set which largely inoculates him from their solipsistic bad habits and allows him free reign to give us stories and characters without a lot of lit-crit baggage. In other words he produces page turners. Banks writes contemporary fiction often with a political or conspiratorial thrust under his own name, but he also writes science fiction novels under the name of Iain M. Banks.
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To slightly confuse matters his new book Transition is available as an Iain Banks novel (the edition I got) and as an Iain M Banks book. I think the reason Banks isn't just calling it straight sci-fi is because his science fiction novels are mostly space operas set in a high tech universe whereas Transition takes place on contemporary Earth - actually, as we'll see, Earths. I've been a fan of Banks since I read the first two of his Culture books in high school and I slightly prefer the sci-fi stories to the contemporary ones which made it all the more exciting to find myself in the middle of an Iain Banks novel (no M.) which was a cross dimensional romp across alternate universes.
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The premise of Transition is the logical extension of Hugh Everett's Many Worlds hypothesis in which every quantum reaction creates an entire new universe. This idea was concocted to explain some aspects of the collapse of the quantum wave form and it's one that I've never really bought into, although the device has been used as a staple in science fiction for decades. It means that are an infinite number of alternate Earths existing in a multi-verse: there's the Earth where Napoleon won Waterloo, the Earth where dinosaurs didn't go extinct, the Earth where Nazis won the war (a depressingly popular place for writers) and so on. Banks however only uses this idea as the geography and his book is about a group of agents who jump between the multiverses using a synthetic drug, which frees their minds to float across the dimensional barriers. They jump to fix things, killing potential Nazis, rigging elections etc. so that the bad guys lose a little ground in the universe and the good guys make incremental gains.
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Banks builds his story polyphonically showing us several different points of view, including those of an assassin, a torturer, an agent controller and a mysterious patient in a hospital bed. The book takes place in 2009 and was evidently written last autumn which gives it a breathless quality I very much enjoyed. Transition in fact is vintage Banks: fast, exciting, funny and every enjoyable. There's a bit more sex than usual and this being Banks it's sex with an interdimensional twist. Banks juggles the characters well and keeps the story ticking along nicely. In terms of pace, diversity of voice and Big Ideas Transition reminded me of his underrated Feersum Endjinn which I think is the best of his non Culture science fiction novels.
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A few minor quibbles: Banks does not explain the hard science of the jumps between worlds (just as he never explains the hard science of the hyperdrives in his Culture novels) and this will either be a relief or an irritation depending how far up the geekdom Y axis you happen to be. Banks's politics too can sometimes be a little intrusive and although in Transition he mostly keeps his views on the back burner his swipes at libertarianism would be a bit more sophisticated after a look at, say, Robert Nozick. And I'll admit that I groaned as soon one particular character said that "Mrs Thatcher was a Saint" and that "Scotland was a miserable land full of midges and Scots," - from that moment on I knew the poor fellow was as doomed as a random red shirt on a new planet. But these are minor issues. Transition is a taut, assured novel from a writer at the top of his game; for my money it is Banks's best book in a decade and is far and away the most original thriller of the year.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - A Metaphysical Detective Story

Following the rather unexpected interest in my piece below about Dashiell's Hammett influence on the Coen brothers, I thought I'd reblog an older post I wrote about Hammett's influence on Philip K Dick, which originally appeared on Crime Always Pays.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – A Metaphysical Detective Story

Like his near contemporary, the poet Philip Larkin, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick predicted his own death, dreamed about his death and of course wrote about his death. Dick wondered what being alive really felt like and whether death would kill that state of consciousness; sometimes he believed that death was merely a transition between states and other times that it was the final destination. Perhaps he hoped it was the former but knew it was the latter. “I’d rather be a living dog, than a dead science fiction writer,” he once said. DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (DADES) is one of his best known novels and it was here that he explored in some depth notions of dying and consciousness and why a good, decent man was trying to track down and murder sentient creatures who just wanted to be left alone.
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Dick’s death obsession began early. Born in Chicago in 1928, his twin sister Jane Charlotte Dick died when he was only a few weeks old. All his life Dick felt Jane’s absence and her loss is frequently referenced in his fiction. Jane was buried in a lonely grave in the bleak Colorado plains town of Fort Morgan with, morbidly, a space left on the headstone for baby Phil. The grave awaited Dick for five decades and when he died in 1982 sure enough the twins were reunited in death. In middle age, after years of amphetamine abuse, Dick even flirted with the idea that in a parallel universe he was the one that had died and Jane had survived – he was already buried in the grim Fort Morgan cemetery, next to Interstate 76, and Jane was the science fiction writer living in California.
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In our universe, after Jane’s death, Dick and his family migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area. He went to the same high school as Ursula Le Guin and after a brief period at UC Berkeley he dropped out and quickly began selling science fiction stories to magazines and newspapers. Dick’s adult life was fragmented to say the least. He moved often, he was married five times and even though he wrote constantly he was not good at keeping money. His default paranoia was exacerbated by his experiments with drugs, his dealings with local street thugs, and his anti-government activities during the Nixon era.
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DADES was written during the period 1966-1968, probably the two most turbulent years America has experienced since World War II. Assassinations, riots, Vietnam, hippies, drugs, counter-culture, scandals and the Cold War were the context for Dick to write his novel, which is actually a pretty straightforward detective story set in a nightmare future. Dick had read Dashiell Hammett and admired his style and it’s not a big stretch to compare DADES with THE MALTESE FALCON. The McGuffins are different but we’re in the same world: missing people, a shot partner, a femme fatale, trouble with the local cops and a bleak cynical universe from which no hope is expected and none is given. Perhaps it’s not even that big of a coincidence that when the movie version of DADES was filmed – as Blade Runner – the cameras rolled on the same set where they shot the Maltese Falcon forty years earlier. Both novels take place in San Francisco and both movies were filmed on the New York streets of Warner Brothers’ Burbank lot.
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The plot of DADES is complex but basically we follow the story of Rick Deckard in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco as he tracks down runaway androids, deals with his Virtual Reality-addicted wife, and keeps up the pretence that his electric sheep is in fact real. The latter storyline is the most interesting thematic element of the novel. After World War Terminus, real animals are rare and caring for and protecting any kind of a real creature gives one incredible status. For someone with low self esteem in a job he hates, Deckard hopes to fool everyone, including ultimately himself, about the sheep; perhaps if he pretends hard enough that his sheep is real and that he is a good man these things might actually come true.

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Deckard meets up with the beautiful and deceitful Rachael, who turns out to be an android and later in one extraordinary scene he is taken to a police station where he either has a mental breakdown or else he sees the world for what it really is: everyone in this precinct appears to be an android – it’s the humans that are unusual and in this place it’s Deckard himself who is the fake like his sheep. Shaking off this strange vision he pursues the final runaways, becoming more disillusioned than ever as he realizes that cracking this case will bring not happiness but only further existential crises. Where is he going? What is he doing with his life? What are any of us doing with any of our lives? Like Sam Spade at the end of THE MALTESE FALCON, Deckard has no solutions. He wonders what all of it means and comes up with nothing. Following Hammett, Philip K Dick doesn’t give us any answers either except for the vague but possibly deep idea that the meaning of life is to be found in the search for the meaning of life. The best we can do is to strive for the truth, although we are constantly reminded to be wary, for falsity is everywhere: the Maltese Falcon is a fake, the electric sheep is a fake, Deckard is a fake and maybe even brash, confident, hardnosed Sam Spade is a fake.
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Many of Philip K Dick’s books were written hastily under the influence of speed and are of dubious quality, but the books that he took trouble over – DADES, THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, A SCANNER DARKLY, FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID – are all well-crafted mystery stories usually with a cop protagonist. Yes, he was a science fiction writer, but also a genre-busting detective novelist too.
Unfortunately (and unlike Hammett) Dick did not live long enough to see the critics lionize him as an American original. His final years were spent in an increasingly eccentric investigation of the true nature of God and the cosmos. In a March 02 1980 diary entry, Dick predicted that because he was close to uncovering the secrets of the universe, God would pull the plug on this version of Philip K Dick; two years later, on March 02 1982, the plug was literally pulled on a brain-dead Dick as he lay in a hospital after a stroke. Dick’s obituary in the New York Times was a brief three paragraphs long but since then his reputation has grown, first in France, then the UK, and then, belatedly, in the US. Almost a dozen Dick stories and books have become films and Blade Runner is regularly voted the greatest science fiction movie of all time. However, Philip K. Dick still gets a bad rap as a writer. A recent New Yorker piece described his characters as hollow and poorly crafted and his prose as pedestrian at best.
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No one would argue that Dick was a great stylist or an inventor of an American idiom, like Hammett, but he was the purveyor of brilliant concepts and his talent was exceptional. Students of American noir will enjoy Dick’s better novels and will judge him not by his prose but by his gift for originality and his ability to convey extraordinary ideas in even more extraordinary worlds.

My 10 Favourite Female Detectives

Last week at my mum's house in Carrickfergus, I had the odd and quite pleasant experience of drinking tea, eating toffee shortbread and watching UFO, Murder She Wrote and Countdown on TV before going up to Belfast for a reading at No Alibis bookshop. The toffee shortbread and tea were excellent as usual and those TV shows were a portal to a different time. UFO was a crackpot Gerry Anderson series from 1970 set in the distant future of 1980 when aliens were attacking the Earth and everyone wore wigs. I loved this embarrassingly hokey show and had all the Dinky toys. The episode I saw was about a blind woman in the west of Ireland who has an alien in her house and doesn't even know it. Genius. Murder She Wrote alas was not my favourite episode which was also set in Ireland, but an Ireland that looked suspiciously like Southern California and featured the worst Irish accents in the history of the performing arts. Bad? Brad Pitt bad. It was still a pretty good episode though - it was those annoying young people that done it. Countdown of course is that words and numbers game which is a boon to shut ins and the unemployed everywhere in the British Isles, but the last time I saw it both Carol and Richard were on the show; now Carol's left and Richard, alas, has passed on. It just wasn't the same. How does this tie into the title of this blog, I hear you ask? Well a couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece for The Times on my 10 Favourite Female Detectives and in it I mentioned both Murder She Wrote and Countdown in fairly glowing terms. The piece was published yesterday and last week's viewing confirmed all my happy memories from my days of signing on at the dole office.

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You can read the My Favourite Female Detectives article in The Times, here and you can read a little about my adventures at No Alibis on Ger Brennan's CSNI here.

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BTW the girl on the right in the UFO pic is Gabrielle Drake who is the brilliant English folkie Nick Drake 's sister.

Is It Possible That They're Rebuilding an Abandoned Fairground Next Door?

From CNN World today:

Saudi family sues genie, claims harassment.

(CNN) -- A family in Saudi Arabia has taken a genie to court, alleging theft and harassment, according to local media.

The lawsuit filed in Shariah court accuses the genie of leaving them threatening voicemails, stealing their cell phones and hurling rocks at them when they leave their house at night, said Al-Watan newspaper.

An investigation was under way, local court officials said. "We have to verify the truthfulness of this case despite the difficulty of doing so," Sheikh Amr Al Salmi, the head of the court, told Al-Watan. "What makes this case and complaint more interesting is that it wasn't filed by just one person. Every member of the family is part of this case."

The family, which has lived in the same house near the holy city of Medina for 15 years, said it became aware of the spirit in the past two years. "We began hearing strange noises," the head of the family, who requested anonymity, told Al-Watan. "In the beginning, we didn't take it seriously, but after that, stranger things started happening and the children got really scared when the genie began throwing stones."

A local charity has moved the family to a temporary residence while a court investigates, the newspaper said.

12000 Miles To Carrick

(Some reflections at an internet cafe in Kuala Lumpur Airport)

The legend is that Dylan Thomas drank 16 whiskies at the White Horse Tavern in Manhattan, announced "I think that's the record," keeled over and died. It's a good story but it's not true, Thomas probably died from an overdose of morphine which a doctor injected into his abdomen to 'help' with his hangover. Why am I bringing this up? Well I was thinking about DT the last few days because one thing about his life that it is true is that he went to a lot of parties, met a lot of writers and drank and brawled in a parody of Celtic tropes that unfortunately is still alive today particularly in the "heroic" alcohol inspired shenanigans of certain Irish actors. A little to my chagrin, my life has been a Thomasesque walking stereotype for the last few days; last night at the charming and well lubricated Profile Books party in London I met 4 writers whose books I very much admire: Roy Foster, Aifric Campbell, Chris Mullen & Garth Cartwright and the previous night, after my reading in Belfast, I went for a session with Dave Torrans, Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville and Gerard Brennan. While I had a blast at the Profile Party it was very nice to drink and ride the zeit with other Northern Irish writers - Ulster in the 70's, 80's and 90's is a lost world that most people in Britain and Ireland would like to forget about, yet whose resonances are continually being played out in the contemporary scene in such diverse places as Rwanda, Tehran and Xinjiang.
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Before I go, I should mention the generosity of everyone at Serpent's Tail who put together my journey from Australia to Carrickfergus, Belfast and London with special thanks to Anna-Marie, Rebecca and Pete. One very bitter sweet aspect of this 24000 mile round trip was getting to spend a few hours in Carrick with my brother Gareth who shipped out for Afghanistan on Tuesday night. Go mbeire muid beo ar an am seo aris.

From The Fine People At Serpents Tail & Mr Dave Torrans...

Tonight (Wednesday July 8th) I'll be reading at Dave Torrans' No Alibis Bookshop on Botanic Avenue in Belfast at 6:30 pm for the British and Irish launch of 50 Grand. If you've been to one of my readings at No Alibis before, you'll know the drill. There probably isn't going to be much actual reading. I'll be spinning some old nonsense about something and there will be a Q&A which will be your opportunity to heckle me and complain about the swearing, violence and endings to my books.
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It should be fun, but if that's not incentive enough, there will be booze.
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Oh and before anybody asks, no it ain't soft porn, its Klimt's Water Serpents II.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Apollo, God of the sun and of the morning and, er, mice, gave humanity one piece of advice at his sacred shrine at Delphi: "Know Yourself". 19 hours on a plane will teach you a lot about yourself, perhaps things that you don't want to know. My love of life is suprisingly tenuous and my fear of hijack and diversion to a random airport is not as high as one would expect. I flew from Melbourne to Dublin to do some book readings and since I have done this journey a couple of times before I at least was prepared. I downloaded two movie rentals onto my iPod nano and I brought along 3 books: Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (excellent so far), Tony Judt's Reappraisals (ok so far) and thanks to the largesse of Seana Graham, James Ellroy's Blood's A Rover (which I'm saving for the return flight). The iPod films I watched were ones I had seen before as I didn't think I could take the risk on a new movie: Man on Wire and Waltz With Bashir (two favs from last year). On the plane I watched Mr. Brooks, which looked like a good idea but was clearly committee-ed to death by the producers. In order to appeal to America's alleged puritanical streak (just like in cheesy American horror films of the 70's) every person serial killer Kevin Costner kills sort of deserves it because they are sexually open or have a moral weakness; of course we don't get to see the grisliness of these murders or their consequences - it's a cowardly film and was rightly panned when it came out but the worst aspect is a frankly insane subplot with Demi Moore as a detective who early on survives being thrown from a van at 50MPH into another car's windscreen, without even messing up her hair. It's very nice hair, but still...

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My neighbour on the flight was a Melburnian woman fluent in Sicilian going to spend the summer with her sister south of Siracusa. I haven't been to Sicily but anyone who's read Thucydides will never forget the disastrous Athenian invasion of Syracuse which destroyed the Athenian Empire and basically led to Athens becoming an occupied city for the next 2400 years. My neighbour told me that the ruins are spectacular and definitely worth visiting and some day I hope to do just that.

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A final word about Man on Wire. Highly recommended if life's been getting you down lately. You'll say, as Woody Allen says at the end of Hollywood Ending, "thank God for the French."

How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up?

In the Victorian Era 62,457 novels were published in the United Kingdom*. No one has read all of them. I managed most of the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and the under appreciated Wilkie Collins but it was Thomas Hardy who killed Victorian fiction for me. The unhappy ending was always telegraphed ahead (with one notable exception) and Mr Hardy had the minaturist's ability to spend 16 pages describing a particular section of a particular heath. Victoria died in 1901 and the novel has undergone many changes for the better and worse since then and we certainly do not need any more Victorian novels. Still every year a few do come out. (The Quincunx is an example of a particularly good one.) By Victorian I mean, at the very least, the historical period but not merely that: the difference between a historical novel and a Victorian novel is the attempt the author makes to reproduce Victorian prose, or in the case of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a Victorian Boys Weekly. It's a tricky balancing act, you want to be authentic but your pastiche can't seem phony and certainly should not be irritating.
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Fingersmith, is one of those rare novels which succeeds as a piece of faux Victoriana, a historical novel, a mystery and a great page turner. I'm always nervous starting a book like this, but Fingersmith exudes intelligence from every page and I quickly relaxed. Sarah Waters is a gifted, thoughtful novelist whose impeccable prose style, assured voice and devious plot make this an enjoyable read. I'm not a big fan of spoiler reviews, so here I will only give the initial set up: Sue Trinder, is an orphan raised by her adoptive mother, Mrs. Sucksby in an Oliver Twist like den of thieves. She is sent to help conman Richard Rivers seduce a wealthy heiress, Maud Lilly, by posing as a maid in Maud's house and gaining her trust (with the idea that she will eventually advise her to run off with Richard). Once they get married, Rivers will commit Maud to a madhouse and everyone will split the loot. This I emphasise is only the initial set up and the novel charts an exciting and bumpy course from then on in. Sarah Waters has a rather unjustified soft core reputation (at least in this novel) so don't read her for those reasons; however if you do like smart, slightly challenging mysteries I couldn't recommend Fingersmith more highly. Sarah Waters new novel The Little Stranger is now in shops.
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*BTW I could not be bothered to do the research on the exact figure of novels published between 1837 - 1901 so I just made this number up, but it's bound to up there in the high tens of thousands, isn't it?

Give Up Your Bloody Seat

More and more men are reading magazines like GQ, Men's Health, Men's Fitness, Esquire etc. to learn how to primp and clean, how to apply discreet moisturizer, how to work on their pecs and abs and other crap like that, which they hope, ultimately, will get them girls. I'm in favour of men looking after themselves (although I draw the line at Pierce Brosnan's depressing ads for male make up) but what men in their twenties actually need instead of muscles is to learn some goddamn manners.
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GQ and Esquire and the like should start telling young men how to behave around women because clearly they have no bloody clue. I was riding the #16 tram to St Kilda after taking my daughter to the World of Barbie Exhibit at Federation Square (yes you're right I should get some kind of Parenting Medal (feel free to nominate me for Father of the Year)) and I was stunned to see a tram full of women and children having to stand while all these young men just sat there reading their magazines or texting their friends or teasing their hair into interesting points in the window reflection. Not a single man got up to give a woman their seat. There were pregnant women on the tram, women with very young children, elderly women. Some of the men had a seat for themselves and a seat for their bag. All of them, by the way, looked great.
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From the time of Aristophanes onwards people have been complaining about "kids today" but just because people have been complaining for 2500 years doesn't mean there hasn't been a real decline in standards of behaviour. I imagine if the Titanic went down this weekend, the young men would push the women and children out of the way as they swarmed for the lifeboats. And they wouldn't even know that they had done anything wrong. They'd just be laughing and high fiving that they'd made it while other poor suckers drowned.
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Our society has obviously completely failed to teach young men basic manners. So, please, if you're an editor at GQ and the like maybe you could have a little section in each issue that outlines the rules of civilized behaviour. Here's your first three rules gratis: 1. You say "please" and "thank you"; 2.You don't bully waiters and clerks; 3 You give up your seat to women or elderly people. Why? You don't need to know why, asshole, you just bloody do it!

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BTW I'm off to the UK and Ireland tomorrow for a couple of readings so I probably won't be able to respond to your comments from Saturday onwards. I'm sure some kind person will take up the mantle for me. Oh and if you're in Belfast on Wednesday come see me at No Alibis bookstore. (Plenty of seating will be on hand).

Nonplussed About Nonplussed

I was on Nate Silver's blog at the weekend reading about his take on the Iranian election. Nate is hyped as one of the smartest people in America. Using complex mathematics he predicted the US Presidential Election down to 1 vote and his analysis of statistical trends has been impressive. So you can imagine my surprise when in an article about the Mark Sanford sex scandal he mentioned how "nonplussed" the French were by such a small thing as having a mistress in Argentina. Oh no, I thought, et tu Nate? And then it dawned on me. Almost no one in America or England or anywhere else for that matter knows what the word nonplussed actually means. After spotting Nate's blunder I did a Google "news" search on nonplussed and sure enough a dozen stories came up and in 10 of them they used the word incorrectly. Only the Associated Press talking about Larry King cancelling his Farrah Fawcett show and the New York Times describing how upset a tennis player had been at Wimbledon used it properly. You see nonplussed actually means the opposite of what everyone thinks it means. It doesn't mean "unimpressed" or "unmoved" as The Daily Mirror, The Traverse City Record Eagle etc. etc. believe, it actually means "upset" or so upset that you're stunned into silence. I'm nonplussed right now, because clearly the usefulness of this word has reached its end. I did the Google News search rather than regular Google because to get a story in a newspaper, in theory, you've got to get it past an editor and a copyeditor first; I'm sure that out in the blogosphere and real life the situation is even worse. When you've got a scenario in which the vast majority of the population think a word means the opposite of its actual meaning then the word is toast. So let's stop embarrassing ourselves as a culture (at least over this) please join me in searching for an Old Yeller solution to this once proud coinage.