How did I get here?

I finished reading Searching for John Ford by Joseph McBride yesterday. Coincidentally, as the BFI noted on Facebook, the great American director's birthday.

Today, I will be starting on Toby Harnden's Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story of Britain's War in Afghanistan.

This is the tale of the Welsh Guards in Helmand in 2009. Underequipped and overstretched, guardsmen from the coal mining valleys and slate quarry villages of Wales found themselves in Helmand in some of the most intense fighting by British troops for more than a generation. They were confronted by a Taliban enemy they seldom saw, facing the constant threat of Improvised Explosive Devices and ambush. Leading them into battle was Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, destined for the highest ranks. He was a passionate believer in the war but was dismayed by how it was being conducted. Dead Men Risen will unnerve politicians and generals alike. In chilling detail, Toby Harnden reveals how and why Thorneloe was killed by an IED during Operation Panther's Claw. Harnden, who had known Thorneloe since they met in Northern Ireland in 1996, was on the ground in Helmand with the Welsh Guards. He draws on a trove of military documents, including many written by Thorneloe, the first British battalion commander to die in action since the Falklands war of 1982. Major Sean Birchall left behind an unvarnished assessment of the shortcomings of the Afghan forces that represent Nato's exit strategy. Lieutenant Mark Evison wrote a diary that raises questions from beyond the grave. It was more than half a century since a British battalion had lost officers at these three key levels of leadership. By the time the fighting was over, almost no rank had been spared. A visceral and timeless account of men at war, Dead Men Risen conveys what it is like to be a soldier who has to kill, face paralysing fear and watch comrades perish in agony. Given unprecedented access to the Welsh Guards, Harnden conducted more than 300 interviews in Afghanistan, England and Wales. From the searing heat of the poppy fields and mud compounds of Helmand to the dreaded knock on the door back home, the reader is transported there. Harnden weaves the experiences of the guardsmen and their loved ones into an unsparing narrative that sits alongside a piercing analysis of military strategy.

Dreams with sharp teeth

I used to love Harlan Ellison when I was a kid. At least one of us has mellowed.

My brow has lowered further this week, as I am taking a break from Ray Monk's biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, to read Mark Kriegel's life of Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini.

From Youngstown, Ohio, Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini
A lightweight contender, like father like son
He fought for the title with Frias in Vegas
And he put him away in round number one

Hurry home early - hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon

Prodnose: What we can't say we can't say, and we can't whistle it either.

Remember this

The Bomber has been on a judo course (ten til three, Monday through Friday) for the last couple of weeks with Winston Gordon - semi finalist in the Athens Olympics and current British international. I find this utterly amazing, and want to make sure I don't forget it. Even more amazing is the per diem cost of two quid. His packed lunch costs more than that to assemble.

As I recall, all the members of the moribund el grupo are ex judoka. "The Pyjama Game: A Journey into Judo" is a book to make you fall in love with the sport all over again.

Bits of me are falling apart

One morning in August 2007, William Leith wakes up and realises that something is wrong. He is not in a bed, but on an old mattress on the floor. He is not in a house. He is in his office. He is alone. He no longer lives with his little boy and the mother of his little boy. Mentally, he is at the end of his tether. Physically, he is fraying at the edges. Bits of him are falling apart. But then again, so is everything else - the economy, the environment, the very fabric of society.With his trademark darkly humorous mix of personal story and social commentary, Leith attempts to answer the question: is everything really falling apart? Or is it just him? He examines the ageing process in humans, and in everything else as well, from the universe to the banking system. And he comes to realise that, even if he can't solve the problems of the world, at least he has a thorough understanding of failure.

I finished Bits of Me are Falling Apart- a book that spoke to me after working too long and hard since Christmas. I recommend it to my contemporaries in the moribund book club.

Airing Our Laundry

Chris: Please sir can I be let off reading "Daniel Martin"?

Myself: That my boy is a matter for you and your conscience. Looking through your records for this term, I also notice that you have asked to be excused "A Fighter's Heart". Very well, from my authorised list I assign you "Alexander the Great" by Robin Lane Fox. As homework, however, I expect an essay at http://grumunkin.blogspot.com/ on the rewards of the biography of a man who, among other things, introduced crucifixion and decimation across his empire. In particular, why should that be less disturbing than the tale of a comparatively guileless working stiff who merely trains for Muay thai in Bangkok, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Rio, boxing in Oakland and MMA in Iowa?

Prodnose: It must be tremendously interesting to be a schoolmaster, to watch boys grow up and help them along; to see their characters develop and what they become when they leave school and the world gets hold of them. I don't see how you could ever get old in a world that's always young.

Myself: Silence! Silence! I'll have no more of it!

Prodnose: No more silence, sir?

Myself: I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

Daniel Martin

As I opened my latest Amazon parcel today, I realised that - although I finished it some little time ago - I hadn't recorded my opinion of the 700 page Daniel Martin on the blog. Suffice to say I didn't like it. Mostly I imagine, as I did not share the eponymous character's high opinion of his own aesthetic sensibility. He seemed rather a tawdry figure to me.

I've adapted the book for the attention span of the MTV generation below. I don't think I've missed much out, for all that Daniel sits around interminably feeling condemned to pursue emotional dead ends:

Jane: Uggh, that woman in the reeds is like totally drowned.
Daniel: Gross!
later
Jane: I'm still like totally freaked out. D'you wanna like ... hook up?
Daniel: But I'm like with your sister and your like with my friend, Anthony. Isn't that a bit like gross? Um, alright, I s'pose.
25 years later.
Jane: I'm calling 'cause Anthony's got like cancer and wants to see you?
Daniel: What 'cause me 'n you got jiggy back in the day? Gimme a break! These days I pimp movie stars.
He flies to London never the less
Barney: Dan, remember when you totally nailed Jane in College dude? Now I'm totally nailing your daughter!
Daniel: Gross!
Anthony kills himself conveniently
Daniel: Jane, now Tony's dead do you fancy coming to Egypt you old tart? I gotta - you know - write like a screenplay exorcising the ghost of Imperialism and all that lot.
Jane: Sounds lame. Um, alright but no funny business.
They cruise down the Nile.
Daniel: Everyone except us is like a total loser man. Germans, Arabs, Russians, even the Yanks; everyone they're all total losers.
Jane: They can't help it, they didn't go to Oxford.
Daniel: Like that's my fault! Makes me think we oughta like ... hook up again? I'll tell that slapper in LA to sod off.
Jane: Um, alright, I s'pose. Whatevaaaah.
They live happily ever after

Busy Louie

Having finished "The Colour of a Dog Running Away", I allowed myself a treat from my current favourite participatory-martial-arts-memoir genre, before embarking on the seven hundred odd pages of the el grupo mandated "Daniel Martin".

The New York Times says:

In the ring his nickname was Busy Louie. In the classroom, where he spends much more of his time these days, it is easy to see why. Confined by street clothes, his feints and jabs accompanied not by leather gloves but merely by a dwindling piece of chalk and a blackboard eraser, Loïc Wacquant, a professor of sociology at the University of California campus here, all but dances his way through a seminar on the criminal justice system.
Twisting, turning, hopping, scribbling, he is in constant motion, demonstrating, for an oblivious audience of a half-dozen sleep-deprived graduate students, the fleet-footed agility that fueled his brief, abortive stint as a pugilist and nearly derailed his academic career.

Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer is the work in question. It is an extraordinay combination of yada yada yada:

Just as one cannot understand what an instituted religion such as Catholicism is without studying in detail the structure and functioning of the organization that supports it, in this case the Roman Church, one cannot elucidate the meaning and roots of boxing in contemporary American society-at least in the lower regions of social space, where it continues to defy an extinction periodically announced as its imminent and inevitable fate-without canvassing the fabric of the social and symbolic relations woven in and around the training gym, the hub and hidden engine of the pugilistic universe.

..... with precise, local and evocative reportage.

Check it out, you won't regret it.

Hair of the Dog

An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.

I finished reading "The Colour of a Dog Running Away" this morning through the fog of a gentleman's head occasioned by last night's AbbeyFest, and reflected that this was the first book I've read since Sean's "Deadwater" in which the central character drinks as much as, if not more than, me. What is it with Welsh authors and protagonists and booze?

I can't say much about the book pre el grupo meeting, but it certainly contains a scene worthy of a Bad Sex in Fiction Award; whenever I read about tongues "flickering" I get a mental image of monitor lizards rather than any sort of erotic charge.

Welsh fiction is a bibulously libidinous bibliography, and if your tongue can twist that without tripping (or flickering) you are not drunk.

And the nominations are ....

El Guapo

After my unexpected success with "American Shaolin" I've hit a bit of a lean spell in the book club department with my peers failing to finish - never mind enjoy - both "Crime and Punishment" and "Bombay: Maximum City".

We've had the hardy perennial "The Great Gatsby" and Fowles' "Daniel Martin" nominated for the next meeting. Fair enough. Chris and I still have to step up to the plate, so I'm going back to the genre that's worked for me in the past with A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting

I read it last year and by coincidence there's an extract from it in The Times this morning.

What about it guys, will you follow Sam Sheridan (and the shade of George Plimpton) as he trains for Muay thai in Bangkok, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Rio, boxing in Oakland and MMA in Iowa?

An Amazon reviewer of a previous edition said, "how can someone so obviously intelligent say such dumb things?"

Irresistible.

stream of unconsciousness

I've found the copy of Black Swan Green that I lost, I thought I had left it in Virgin Active as I was reading it during a half hour on the recline exercise bike, but when I asked at reception I was told that they hadn't got it, yesterday however I found it on one of their bookshelves, it was unquestionably mine as a page was turned down at the exact point I was up to, I've been training at Virgin Active as it is so near the office for just over three years now , ever since it opened, sometimes I do weights and sometimes I do cardio, I find that I sweat more on the bike than on the treadmill or rowing ........

Prodnose: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Myself: I accept that, as an anecdote, it does lack vim and panache; probably not worth pitching to a Hollywood studio then?
Prodnose: Probably not no.

The Road

I've finished Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". I read so much science fiction in my youth that the barren post-apocalyptic landscape in which is set seemed almost cliched. At its heart the story is a fable about a father and a son and their love and sacrifice in a wicked world; think Life is Beautiful refracted through A Boy and His Dog.

Reviews always comment 0n the spareness of the prose. I think that this is because someone shook the typescript until every quotation mark and about one apostrophe in two fell out, leaving us with dialogue along the lines of:

Are you talking now?
Yes.
But you're not using quotation marks?
No.
Or apostrophes in negative contractions?
I wont use them ever.
But we'll use them elsewhere.
I'll always do that.
Do you want to die?
Yes.

Prodnose: Not exactly a barrel of laughs then?
Myself: This is a shocking and brilliant work, at once terribly pertinent and impressively universal. (I wonder what I mean by that?)

High Rise

I had to replace my original el grupo book choice a few weeks back because "A Solider's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point" isn't published in the UK yet.

I'm now recommending Suketu Mehta's account of Bombay, "Maximum City". Thanks to the blog I have a record here of what I thought when I read it myself three years ago.

The post also reminds me that in February 2005 the BBC was reporting on Bombay slums being forcefully cleared. In 2008 The Times reports:

A flagrant style of luxury living is springing up above Bombay’s densely populated slums for a select few prosperous enough to spend up to £5 million on a designer apartment.

Bombay is the seventh most expensive place in the world to buy an apartment, according to the Global Property Guide, despite half the 18 million population living in slums without a lavatory or running water.

I propose a new HTML tag to be used a follows:

That's <irony> progress </irony> I suppose.

Light of My Life, Fire of My Loins

The wonder of woolies:

The Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about 6, was on sale on the Woolworths website for £395.

I'm reading Lolita at the moment, as Chris has assigned it for the next book club meeting,

I generally carry a paperback around with me to help kill quiet moments travelling or waiting.

Lolita is proving quite problematical in this regard. Even I am sensitive enough to realise that its not really being the thing to be seen pulling out while sitting on a park bench watching your seven year old and chums cavorting on the swings, slides and roundabouts.

Whereas many mothers were familiar with Vladimir Nabokov and his famous novel, it seems that the Woolworths staff were not. At first they were baffled by the fuss. A spokesman for the company told The Times: “What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either. We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now.”

Quite so.

Also, in "only connect" mode, I see that Mark from my neighbouring Wheelhouse Theatre Company impersonated Humbert Humbert at the Edinburgh Festival in 2006. Perhaps I'll bend his ear about Lolita as well.

Battle at Kruger

Chris having already taken care of documenting the next lot of books we are to read, I thought I would commemorate my trip to Swansea by digging up a YouTube video Dave recommended. It has been viewed over 23 million times to date.


Wikipedia: The video begins with the herd of buffalo approaching the water, unaware of the lions resting nearby. The lions charge and disperse the herd, picking off a young buffalo and unintentionally knocking it into the water while attempting to make a kill. While the lions try to drag the buffalo out of the water, it is grabbed by a pair of crocodiles, who fight for it before giving up and leaving it to the lions. The lions sit down and prepare to eat, but are quickly surrounded by the reorganized buffalo, who move in and begin charging and kicking at the lions. After a battle which sees one lion being tossed into the air by a buffalo, the baby buffalo (which is miraculously still alive) escapes into the herd. The emboldened buffalo chase the remainder of the lions away.

Mea Culpa

I'm off to Wales today for some book talk, but I am ashamed to say that - although I have polished off the other three nominations - I haven't reread 'Crime and Punishment' even though I am the one who recommended it. I remember it reasonably well even though I first read it years ago, so a little internet revision and a flick through the paperback will have to take the strain.

On the importance of reading - now that I am feeling remorseful for ducking Dostoevsky - I was very struck by this review of 'Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point' last week.

While freshmen down in Manhattan at Columbia and NYU think about jobs and paychecks they'll secure after graduation, and hook-ups they make before it, cadets have a rigorous regimented existence in class and out, and they know they will assume command of 30 men and women when it's over, probably in a hot zone.
The prospect throws them into hard questions of life and death, duty and sacrifice, courage and leadership, and they probe great works to figure them out.

Another stereotype bites the dust.

Drinking and Writing and Reading

I've finished A Thousand Acres, Chris's el grupo recommendation. The novel is a retelling of King Lear set in Iowa twenty odd years ago, and it is a very accomplished work.

I can't talk any more about the book until we hoist the Jolly Roger at the next meeting, so until then divert yourself at The Drinking & Writing Brewery, a site that "works to keep the tradition of the hard-drinking writer alive, and to explore the connection between creativity and alcohol."

Between the sheets (Phnarr Phnarr)

Today is devoted to books.

First off the bat, I've finished Rob's El Grupo recommendation Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453. Obviously I can't write about in detail until we have met to discuss it, but it is full of practical information. On impaling technique for example:

The Grand Turk [makes] the man he wishes to punish lie down on the ground; a sharp long pole is placed in the rectum; with a big mallet held in both hands the executioner strikes it with all his might, so that the pole, known as a palo, enters the human body, and according to its path, the unfortunate lingers on or dies at once; then he raises the pole and plants it in the ground; thus the unfortunate is left in extremis; he does not live long.

Ouch! So now you know Vlad.

Next up, I have ordered this year's books from the Folio Society as I continue to assemble the library of handsome volumes to which I intend to devote my twilight years. The books will be published over the next twelve months. I can't provide links as they aren't on the Society's website yet, but my choices are:

• Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
• Best of Saki
• Shelley: Collected Poems
• Food in History by Reay Tannahill

Finally, I dropped Sean a line yesterday after discovering that he was implicated in introducing messy, emotional Welsh to the prim and proper Oxford English Dictionary, and learned from the reply that his magnum opus "The Ethics of Writing" is now at proofs. He's split it into two books, and the first has a definite publication date of January 2008.

If you pre-order it via this link - The Ethics of Writing: Authorship and Legacy in Plato and Nietzsche - I get to wet my beak as well via the Amazon affiliates scheme. (I'm not holding my breath.)

It is always good to have the smart as a whip Dr. Burke back in the loop. Far too often with other acquaintances, as my mind wanders while talking to them, I find myself wondering if they might count towards my five vegetables a day .

(If you are an acquaintance reading this, then I obviously don't mean you.)

Kirk Out

I finished reading The Testament of Gideon Mack today, and thought it very fine. The usual el grupo embargo applies. There is a website devoted to the book at http://www.scotgeog.com/ if you're interested. See also "The Generous Gambler".

Drinking Bitter

We gathered at The Castle on Friday to discuss our latest batch of books. The Castle has only just reopened after a refurb, and the ubiquity of blogs is proved by the availability of a "'warts & all' account of the transformation of a run-down pub in Bradford-On-Avon into a 'proper' Inn" at http://thecastle-boa.blogspot.com/.

Rob raised the bar early on by coming up with the idea that the aristocratic nurse who shares a flat briefly with Barbara in "Winter in Madrid", is intended to be Cordelia, sister of Sebastian, Julia, and Bridey from Brideshead Revisited. I think that he must be right, so I'm reasonably put out that I didn't notice it first.

I was also surprised when American Shaolin - my suggested read - came out ahead of Slaughterhouse Five as our overall favourite book. Dave's antipathy to Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians, playing no small part in the decision.

We've introduced a new rule for the next meeting; the obligatory nomination of one stone cold classic.

The next set of books, which will be discussed while sailing the Solent (details to follow) later this year comprises:

• Crime and Punishment - nominated by me as the classic
• The Testament of Gideon Mack - put forward by Dave
• A Thousand Acres - Lear in Iowa from Chris
• Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 - courtesy of Rob's interest in Asia Minor