The Beer and the Book

I've been reading Greenmantle by John Buchan. It's a hundred year old spy novel set in Germany and the Mid East during World War I and it is a sort of sequel to the 39 Steps. If, like me, you read the 39 Steps and didn't think it was as good as the Hitchcock film Greenmantle will come as a pleasant surprise: it's exciting, fast paced and apart from some unironic jingoism (and an over reliance on coincidence) a very good read. There's an interesting scene early on where Hannay meets the Kaiser at a railway station and the sympathetic treatment of the German Emperor must have shocked many Brits at the time (it was published in 1916).

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But I didn't really want to talk about the book that much, I actually wanted to chat about a unique experience in my life: reading the book while drinking the beer that's been named after it. I know of no other beer which has been named after a book, and didn't know about Greenmantle Ale until I found it in my local beer shop in St Kilda. Greenmantle Ale is a light session ale - malty, hoppy, smooth and very drinkable. To my mind there were caramel and chocolate notes and a pleasant slightly tannic aftertaste. The alcohol content is not high and you could knock back three or four and still concentrate on your novel.

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There are of course Thomas Hardy ales but I haven't heard of another beer/book combination like this. There's plenty of scope for others: War and Peace could inspire a Russian Imperial Stout and surely the Brooklyn Brewing Company could do something with Last Exit to Brooklyn. The lack of a Ulysses Porter seems like an enormous gap in the market, but of course sometimes its the evil of the giant brewing companies that's to blame.

Aren't You A Little Short For A Stormtrooper?

A few months ago Casey Pugh had the idea of remaking Star Wars Sweded style as a collaborative fan based video project. He divided Star Wars into 473 15 second clips and asked for contributions. When its done the movie will be spliced together and called Star Wars Uncut. There are about 50 15 second segments left so if you want to be part of what will be the funniest and best Stars Wars Fan Vid ever jump on over to StarWarsUncut.com. They've released a trailer on YouTube of what they've got so far and I think its got classic written all over it.

The Next King of Scotland?

Without question the Conservative Party is going to win the 2010 General Election in Britain, once again launching the idea of Scottish independence into the spotlight. The Scots have been relatively quiet since 1997 because Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were Scots from the Labour Party (which is strong north of the Border). David Cameron, the Conservative leader, however, is both English and Tory, which bodes ill for the union. The Scottish National Party rules the devolved Scottish Assembly and although opinion polls have fluctuated, probably a majority of Scots now favour independence. If independence happens I wonder if the Scottish would be willing to turn back the clock and take on current Jacobite Pretender to the Scottish crown, this gentleman to the right, Prince Franz of Bavaria.

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As you may know the Jacobites were denied the Kingship of England and Scotland (and Ireland) because they were Catholics and after the defeat of James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 they fled to France. In 1715 (the "fifteen") and again under Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745 (the "forty-five") they tried to raise the clans in Scotland. It didn't work and the English put down the rebellion and Charlie fled back to France. The Jacobites married into European Royalty and they haven't gone away although they gave up their actual claim to the British throne in 1810.

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Prince Franz seems like a decent chap. He's a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and he collects modern art. He spent part of his childhood in Dachau concentration camp where he was sent because his family opposed the Nazis. The Scots really could do a lot worse. (King Mel the First anyone?) Franz (who the Jacobites title King Francis II of Scotland) doesn't however have any kids so the succession would pass to Prince Max of Bavaria and then to the charmingly named Sophie, Hereditary Princess of Liechtenstein.

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Of course a few pro independent Scots are republicans and some favour the current Queen (who is half Scottish after all) but I think there are still some who hanker for "the King over the water." So Prince Franz, here's a question for you, do you take Lowenbrau with your haggis or maybe a nice Schneider Weisse?

Sometimes Even Orwell Nods

When I was a student at Oxford I made a little pilgrimage one day to visit George Orwell's grave at the nearby All Saints Cemetery in Sutton Courtenay. The grave wasn't in very good condition and you could barely read the name Eric Arthur Blair and his dates, but I was well pleased. It was important to me because I had liked Orwell's novels and essays and I still think of him as a model for the clarity of his sense and prose. I was little dismayed therefore yesterday to read this bit in an essay he wrote on Mark Twain:

In Life on the Mississippi there is a queer little illustration of the central weakness of Mark Twain’s character. In the earlier part of this mainly autobiographical book the dates have been altered. Mark Twain describes his adventures as a Mississippi pilot as though he had been a boy of about seventeen at the time, whereas in fact he was a young man of nearly thirty. There is a reason for this. The same part of the book describes his exploits in the Civil War, which were distinctly inglorious. Moreover, Mark Twain started by fighting, if he can be said to have fought, on the Southern side, and then changed his allegiance before the war was over. This kind of behaviour is more excusable in a boy than in a man, whence the adjustment of the dates. It is also clear enough, however, that he changed sides because he saw that the North was going to win; and this tendency to side with the stronger whenever possible, to believe that might must be right, is apparent throughout his career.

Orwell is quite wrong about this. Mark Twain was 22 when he began studying to be a pilot on the Mississippi and 24 when he got his license. By the age of 25 he had already abandoned the Confederate Army had headed west to Nevada. 25 strikes me as still being pretty young. Its also very odd for Orwell to claim that Twain was jumping onto the winning team. It looked like the Confederacy was going to win the war or at least force a negotiated peace well in to 1864, a good three years after the young Sam Clemens had headed west.

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Childhood heroes let you down as you get older, but that's sort of their job and Orwell is no different. Unfortunately he couldn't resist fitting his facts around his theories, a flaw that shines through some of his work. However when he was good he was very, very good. Take a look at England Your England or Such Such Were The Joys as nice examples of his high art.

Literary Trivia To Astound/Annoy Your Friends

I very much enjoyed this account of the baseball trivia world series in the New York Times. With statistics stretching over three different centuries and an ultra geeky fanbase, baseball attracts more trivia buffs than perhaps any other sport, save cricket. My favourite piece of arcana was this question: Which three players appeared in games when they were older than the sitting United States President? Answer: Dan Brouthers and Jim O’Rourke (older than Teddy Roosevelt in 1904) and Satchel Paige who was older than Lyndon Johnson in 1965 (and presumably 1964 and 1963 too?)
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Literature doesn't attract that level of devotion alas and the facts are so well known that they don't really count as trivia, however, thematically following on from my last post, I have compiled a list of 8 facts that may amuse some of you. (Why 8 and not 10? Well, I sometimes think about what life would be like if octopii had used their surprisingly large brains to become the dominant species on Earth and everything was thus in base 8, and, also, to be honest, I got a bit lazy.) And yes I know that's not the plural of octopus. Ok on with the facts:
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1. Marcel Proust and James Joyce once shared a taxi in Paris. (You won't be surprised to learn that both complained about their health and Proust paid.)
2. Samuel Beckett and Raymond Chandler were both cricket playing Irish novelists.
3. Philip Larkin worked as a librarian in Belfast.
4. William Faulkner wrote the plan of his novel A Fable on a bedroom wall in his house in Oxford, Mississippi (and its still there to this very day).
5. JD Salinger once bought Ernest Hemingway a drink in the bar of the Ritz Hotel during the liberation of Paris. The bar of course now (like many others throughout the world) is called the Hemingway Bar.
6. Jonathan Swift was a vicar in my home town of Carrickfergus for about a year, during which he time he wrote A Tale of a Tub and possibly a preliminary sketch of Gulliver's Travels.
7. The focal point of L Ron Hubbard's "novel" Battlefield Earth is the Denver Public Library which is the same place where Jack Kerouac wrote preliminary sketches for On The Road. (And, I, er, your humble correspondent, wrote a couple of novels).
8. Alexander Pushkin's most famous poem is about a man who ruins his life in a duel. Pushkin was later killed in a duel. Mikhail Lermontov (Pushkin's most famous successor) was so incensed by this that he wrote a series of passionate poems about the stupidity of duelling and accused the Tsar of being complicit in the duel which killed Pushkin. Lermonotov, of course, was later killed in a duel.
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Incidentally when I visited the site of Pushkin's duel in a park north of Saint Petersburg a young girl had brought flowers for Pushkin and was weeping for him uncontrollably - proving once again that poets and rock stars should die young and a little bit stupidly if they want immortal fame.
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Ok that's it, we're out, if you can think of any lit triv, I'd love to hear to it.

Some Tidbits From The Paris Review Interviews

I recently got The Paris Review Interviews III to go with I and II. I think this one might be my favourite of them all. Instead of reviewing the books however I thought I would just give you 10 interesting tidbits from the interviews:

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1. Salman Rushdie is a Lord of the Rings geek and speaks fluent Elvish. That, my friends, is clearly how to impress the ladies.

2. Norman Mailer believed in reincarnation.

3. Jean Rhys lived in terror of obeah - West Indian black magic.

4. Simenon wrote a new Maigret novel every 11 days.

5. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up.

6. James Thurber had a photographic memory and could transcribe entire conversations, perfectly, decades later.

7. Until 100 Years of Solitude came out none of Garcia Marquez's books had ever sold more than 700 copies. (There's hope for all of us!)

8. Martin Amis appeared as a child actor in the film A High Wind in Jamaica.

9. Stephen King was drunk during the writing of Cujo.

10. Isaac Bashevis Singer felt that we were surrounded by ghosts and spirits.

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My favourite interviews were with Singer, Faulkner, Denison and Hemingway who all seem pretty likeable. My least favourite were with Graham Greene and William Gaddis who, frankly, seem like jerks.

Meades Meets The Future on the Isle of Lewis

One of my favourite people, Jonathan Meades, is back on BBC 4 with a new series, this time called Off Kilter which is all about the architecture and symbolism of Scotland. Thanks to the Meades Shrine you can watch this and every series on YouTube and you should (just don't tell too many people or the BBC that you're doing it). In the clip to the right Meades has gone to the Isle of Lewis & Harris and found a Ballardian futurescape of rust and beauty. Because the clip has been uploaded in glorious hi-def you'll need to pause it for about a minute after the circle thing stops loading, so that it will play without interruption. (It's worth the hassle.) And check out more Meades on YouTube.

We Have A Winner

Thanks to everyone who entered the Dead Trilogy competition. The actual time it took me to walk the length of Manhattan was a lackadaisical nine hours and forty minutes. I thought I gave a good clue when I said it took me longer than I was expecting but most people under-estimated the time which means, I suppose, that I'm a good bit slower and lazier than y'all think. If you didn't win thank you for participating.

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Enough about those losers, now for the winner...the closest guess was 9 hours 37 minutes from Ryan. Just three minutes out! Freaky. Anyway the trilogy edition of the Dead series goes to him. Well done mate, now do us a favour and give me your email or your address and I'll have those books off to you in tomorrow's post. I hope you don't live in England, I just heard that the Royal Mail is going on strike...

The Dead Trilogy Competition

Thanks to the largesse of those kind people at Allen and Unwin and Serpents Tail, I recently received a couple of copies of the trilogy edition of Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard and The Bloomsday Dead. The books look fantastic in this edition and the covers and artwork are consistent throughout. I'm keeping one set for myself but I thought I might as well give the other set away. It isn't available in the US (Dead I Well May Be isn't even in print in the US) so this might be a nice get for someone. They are all first editions and of course I'll sign them. It might be worth a few bob one day especially if I go onto fame or infamy.
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Ok it's fairly simple competition. I lived in New York for seven years and Dead I Well May Be mostly takes place there. To get to know the city, one day I decided to walk the whole length of Broadway from the top of Manhattan to the bottom. I stopped off to eat a couple of times and there were a couple of bathroom breaks but mostly it was just me walking. My question is this: how long did it take? I noted my start time way up on 220th street and my finish time when I met the missus at South Ferry. The person closest to my time in hours and minutes gets the books. Just leave your guess and name and an email address in the comments below, or if you have a blogger account just your name, answer and tick the email follow on button.
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Unless someone gets the exact time in hours and minutes the competition will close forty eight hours after this post goes up and I'm only going to allow one guess per person. Finally, here's a wee hint: I did the walk all on one day but it took much longer than I was expecting. Good luck!

Richard Dawkins Is Not Really An Atheist

Richard Dawkins was on BBC 5 Live recently talking about his latest book and he said something that struck me as rather odd. Paraphrasing (because the BBC's podcasts disappear after a week) he mused that there may be super beings out there in the universe indistinguishable from gods, who are the end products of a long period of evolution on their home worlds. He said something similar on Fresh Air two years ago. And although he thinks it unlikely Dawkins speculates that life here on Earth may have begun because one of these superbeings got the ball rolling with an initial seeding.

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Now Dawkins says that he doesn't believe in God because he thinks that God has to be infinite, and has to exist prior to the Big Bang, but he is, apparently, willing to believe in a finite god who is the end product of evolution. This doesn't seem an enormous distinction to me. Let's say a god-like being did kick off evolution on this planet and he or she has been watching us closely for the last 4 billion years (those first three billion must have dragged). Wouldn't it make sense then to worship and pray to this entity in the hope that we could benefit from the entity's largess? If sufficiently advanced couldn't this entity do just about anything including preserving our mind states and transmuting these mind states into another form after our deaths? Dawkins consistently mocks the efficacy of prayer and the belief in resurrection, but these are the logical outcomes of what he's saying here. Furthermore in a universe of 10 000 billion suns with billions of Earth like worlds that's been knocking around now for at least 13 billion years doesn't it seem more likely than not that these god-like beings have evolved somewhere and indeed are out there right now? Wouldn't prayer and worship seem like sensible, precautionary steps in dealing with these potentially terrifying entities? And what exactly does Dawkins's atheism mean if he is prepared to believe in gods, but not an infinite God? In the strict sense of the word Dawkins is not an atheist, he's an agnostic. Theism is the belief in at least one god, atheism is the certain belief that there are no gods.

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Hold on a minute, you may be saying to yourself, can the world's most famous atheist really not be an atheist at all? Uhm, yeah, I think so. I also think that if you believe in evolution by natural selection (and the evidence is overwhelming folks) and if you believe that the universe is 13.5 billion years old (again lots of evidence) then strict atheism (belief in no gods or god-like entities) is not very logical. Somewhere, somewhen they must have evolved.

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And don't even get me started on Dawkins's colleague, Professor Nick Bostrom and his theory that none of this is real to begin with and that we are all very probably living in a computer simulation controlled by god-like beings from the future.

Kids Say The Creepiest Things

Unfortunately I grew up in the era when film directors realised the full potential of having creepy children in their movies. I think it may have begun with the blonde geniuses in Children of the Damned but by the seventies Damien in the Omen really took the prize for terrifying toddlers. Damien freaked me out and then at a very vulnerable age I happened to see Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and that was the icing on the nightmares.

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Of course since then we've had The Sixth Sense and The Ring so that now the scary supernatural child is almost the default position in horror films and the trope is so pervasive you begin to suspect it even in your own life. Tonight my daughter and I were out for an evening walk in a tumbledown part of St Kilda when we passed a house covered in ivy with a decrepit roof, old fashioned shutters and windows that had a vague, oddly sinister fairy-tale appearance. The garden however was full of wild flowers, so I said "Oh what a lovely house." My daughter replied, "Yes, but the gate is talking to me and wants me to go in." I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't been conditioned by The Ring, The Omen etc. I would have just ignored this remark; as it was, a chill went down my spine. "What do you mean the gate was talking to you?" I asked. "Oh you know, the way everything talks to you," she explained.

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I was scared and did not press the matter further. I decided that I didn't want to know. Finding out accelerates you to Act 2 and for the present I want to stay in Act 1. Of course it's nothing more than the innocent ramblings of an imaginative seven year old, but then again...

Blood's A Rover

I reviewed James Ellroy's Blood's A Rover for today's Australian newspaper. The first few paragraphs are below and you can read the full review here. Spoiler Alert: I liked the book. Also in today's Australian there's an interview with the Napoleon of Irish fiction, John Banville, talking about genre writing.

The Heavyweight in the Red Corner

Boxing aficionado, James Ellroy, is a little like the Joe Frazier of American letters. While Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy get spoken of as contenders for the title of America’s Greatest Novelist, Ellroy often gets dismissed as a mere crime writer. His amour propre, his past as a teenage neo-Nazi, and the fact that he writes about that most gauche of places, Los Angeles, has never endeared him to the literary establishment.
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Blood’s A Rover, however, may just well change their opinion. It is the completion of Ellroy’s near two thousand page American Underworld trilogy that began with the evocative American Tabloid and continued with the extraordinary The Cold Six Thousand. American Tabloid is a technically impressive and often brilliant novel structured around the Cuban Revolution and the Kennedy assassination, written in a clipped ultra telegraphic prose style that reinvents American crime fiction in a way no writer has attempted to do since the 1920's. Harsh, single word, verb-less sentences pile on top of one another like the dripping tap of a water torturer, producing a hypnotic, trance-like effect which repels as many readers as it seduces. But where American Tabloid is a book teetering on the edge of a cliff, The Cold Six Thousand jumps completely into the abyss with an even sparer haiku-like prose style and a complex narrative of conspiracies, invasions and cover-ups starting with JFK’s murder and ending with the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
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Blood’s A Rover breathlessly continues the story in the days following King’s death in Memphis. The central characters in the book are the ones we got to know (and in most cases dislike) in The Cold Six Thousand - the conspirators who planned the hits on both Kennedy brothers and MLK. If this sounds a bit crazy, well, it is. In Ellroy’s America (and one assumes he does not actually believe this) Dr. King was shot by Hoover’s FBI working with the mafia, Cuban exiles and the CIA. King’s murder incites rioting in America’s black ghettoes and Richard Nixon rides the conservative backlash to get elected with a little help from the mob, Dominican drug dealers, an ex FBI macher called Dwight Holly and a murderous ex Las Vegas cop, Wayne Tedrow Jr. who ended book two of the trilogy by helping beat his father to death with a golf club.
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To complete the Freudian trio of central protagonists in Blood’s A Rover we are introduced to the new character of Donald Crutchfield, a neophyte private investigator, voyeur and pervert. Ellroy has described himself as the ‘Tolstoy of crime fiction’ and Crutch is transparently Ellroy’s Pierre Bezukhov - a mostly sympathetic avatar of the novelist himself, who gets his kicks (as Ellroy once did) by breaking into women’s homes to sniff their underwear.
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We follow these diverse sociopaths on a wild ride through the politics, controversy and insanity of America in the seventies with Ellroy gleefully libelling the conveniently deceased Nixon, Hoover, LBJ and Howard Hughes who were all in on the whole Kennedy thing. And yes I know this is a novel and not actual history but I still find it a little disturbing that Ellroy absolves such real life individuals as Sirhan Sirhan, Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, all of whom are mere patsies in the wider conspiracy. Then again, though, maybe that is the point, as in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Ellroy’s world is not quite our world: this is an alternative 1970's, a slightly darker America where intelligence agencies, the military industrial complex and very rich men are the sinister puppet masters. (One shudders to think what Ellroy could do with 9/11 as subject matter.) ...
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(You can read the rest of this review over at The Australian)

Woody Allen Used To Be Good, Honest

I was quite excited by the idea of the new Woody Allen film Whatever Works. It's about a misanthropic scientist played by Larry David - of Seinfeld and Curb fame - but when I finally saw the flick over the weekend I was disappointed. It's not so funny or interesting and as I talked to a few people about it I realized that there was an entire generation out there who only know Woody Allen from his scandalous personal life and his weak later period works. He's also in the news this week for being the first signature on a creepy list of people who want the immediate release of Roman Polanski. Anyway it sometimes helps to divorce the artist from his work and as a very small corrective, here's my list of the Top 10 best Woody Allen films:

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1. Annie Hall (1977): Woody at the height of his powers. A bittersweet geek-meets-girl romance containing such classics as: Marshall McLuhan, the JFK conspiracy sex excuse, the Grammy Hall dinner, the party at Paul Simon's house etc. Genius. A+

2. Hannah and Her Sisters (1985). The story of Hannah and, er, her sisters. Funny, twisted, dark, very sad, and then funny again with a kick ass happy ending. Brilliant. A+

3. Love and Death (1975). Woody's take on classic Russian literature.
Sonja: You were my one great love.
Boris: Oh, thank you very much. I appreciate that. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm dead.
Sonja: What's it like?
Boris: What's it like? You know the chicken at Tresky's Restaurant? It's worse.
Sonja: There are many different kinds of love, Boris. There's love between a man and a woman; between a mother and son...
Boris: Two women. Let's not forget my favorite.
Sonja: And I want three children.
Boris: Yes. Yes. One of each.
Anton Inbedkov: Shall we say pistols at dawn?
Boris Grushenko: Well, we can say it. I don't know what it means, but we can say it.
A

4. Sleeper (1973). A health food store owner from the 70's wakes up in the twenty third century. The giant pudding scene may the funniest thing ever put on celluloid. A

5. Crimes and Misdemeanors (1991). Martin Landau hires Lenny from Law & Order to murder Angelica Huston and that's when his troubles really begin. Nice subplot involving Woody and Alan Alda. A

6. Radio Days (1986). A sentimental favourite of mine. Woody captures the universe of pre war radio stars. The War of the Worlds bit is LOL hilarious as the kids would say if they could stop tweeting for five minutes and watch a good film for a change. B+

7. Manhattan (1979). Beautifully shot, bittersweet somewhat troubling romance between a young girl and an older dude. (No prizes for guessing who plays the older dude) B+

8. Take the Money and Run (1969). Early anarchic comedy about an incompetent criminal. The scene with the cello and the marching band just about kills me. B+

9. Play It Again Sam (1972). All the old Woody cast in a kind of prequel to Annie Hall. Its mostly shot in San Francisco and its a bit wackier than the mature Woodman, but there's some great stuff in there. B+

10. Match Point (2003). Much derided in England because Woody dared show the Swiss Re Building and had a lot fun with a London setting. Great central performances and Scarlett Johansson appears in a wet T shirt. Whats not to like? B+