Niklas Pivic Stockholm, Sweden

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  • Sorry I Barfed on Your Bed (1)
  • (and Other Heartwarming Letters from Kitty)
  • By Jeremy Greenberg
  • Finished on Apr 2, 2013
    
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  Sorry I Barfed on Your Bed

  

  This book contains a lot for the cat lover in us all. For every cat picture, there's a page with words to complement it, written by the cat to a human being. I think a lot of people would find this to be a cute book with some really laughable (in the best sense of the word) and memorable pictures an ... (continue)

  This book contains a lot for the cat lover in us all. For every cat picture, there's a page with words to complement it, written by the cat to a human being. I think a lot of people would find this to be a cute book with some really laughable (in the best sense of the word) and memorable pictures and words.

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  — Apr 5, 2013 | Add your feedback

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  • Threepenny Memoir (5)
  • The Lives of a Libertine
  • By Carl Barat
  • Finished on Mar 28, 2013
    
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  Threepenny Memoir

  

  I did an NME cover with Morrissey once, and Morrissey said, 'To some people I'll always be Morrissey from The Smiths, no matter what else I do. And you'll always be Carl from The Libertines.'

  Yes, but these are not the words from a panicked man, even though Carl Barât seems ... (continue)

  I did an NME cover with Morrissey once, and Morrissey said, 'To some people I'll always be Morrissey from The Smiths, no matter what else I do. And you'll always be Carl from The Libertines.'

  Yes, but these are not the words from a panicked man, even though Carl Barât seems to be frazzled and afraid at times. In a good way, because he lets his emotions go and reveals himself as another person than the confident man onstage, as he says he often comes across as, according to other people.

  He writes about his special relationship with Peter Doherty, about the greatness, of the "brown" and other drugs that helped to spoil it all (even though all of the responsibility of that use is of course due to Peter himself), and at the very end, on how they reformed. That actually makes this book seem rushed, as though a deadline was set. I'd love to have read more about the Libertines' reformation after the fact, but then we have Roger Sargent's visual documentary, "There Are No Innocent Bystanders", for that.

  Barât delves into what made him and Doherty gel, love and live. The former's heroes - notably Oliver Reed and David Niven - are referred to but mainly, this tome is a book on his own life.

  Even though he'd ultimately kick my door in and try to steal my stuff, Peter gave me security and confidence to go out and do that, to believe that I could go out on a limb, even in prosaic, financial matters. When we were really firing on all cylinders and were together then it really felt like no one could touch us, and that nothing else mattered. As much as I try to deflect it, play it down and be English about it, there was a very powerful romance and beauty to our friendship.

  Yes, and it spawned The Libertines' brilliant first album with a very good second one.

  All in all: reflecting on some Days of Yore while his girlfriend expects their first child, having disbanded Dirty Pretty Things and en route to releasing his debut album, Barât has written a scattered yet very honest book about his life, mostly his musical life, that is.

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  — Mar 28, 2013 | Add your feedback

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  • How to Live (9)
  • A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
  • By Sarah Bakewell
  • Finished on Mar 22, 2013
    
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  How to Live

  

  In one of the logs that I use to note and review books there are "tags". These tags are words and terms used to describe the book, e.g. "analysis", "philosophy" and "war". I've I have never attributed a book so many tags as I have used here, and I'm not exaggerating a single thing.

  This book is abo ... (continue)

  In one of the logs that I use to note and review books there are "tags". These tags are words and terms used to describe the book, e.g. "analysis", "philosophy" and "war". I've I have never attributed a book so many tags as I have used here, and I'm not exaggerating a single thing.

  This book is about Michel de Montaigne, a sixteenth-century nobleman who wrote down his thoughts and ideas in ways that very few other people had done so far. This book provides a somewhat chronological walk through the life of Montaigne, while issuing 20 attempts to twist the question "How to live?" as seen through his ways and eyes, and while being fairly complex, it's extremely simple to read. And I think a huge portion of why it's so accessible and laudable, is because it's unique and understandable:

  From page 293 in the book, where Bakewell describes how Marie de Gournay felt when she discovered Montaigne's "Essays":

  Some time in her late teens, apparently by chance, she came across an edition of the Essays. The experience was so shattering that her mother thought she had gone mad: she was on the point of giving the girl hellebore, a traditional treatment for insanity - or so Gournay herself says, perhaps exaggerating for effect. Gournay felt she had found her other self in Montaigne, the one person with whom she had a true affinity, and the only one to understand her. It was the experience so many of his readers have had over the years:

  How did he know all that about me? (Bernard Levin)

  It seems he is my very self. (André Gide)

  Here is a 'you' in which my 'I' is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished. (Stefan Zweig)

  Time and time again, Montaigne struck me as quite marvellous, simply because of his reasoning; he maintained that everything should be experienced with fresh eyes no matter how many times it has been seen before. And also, he believed that everything should be questioned. Yes, everything, but with a purpose.

  As Virginia Woolf was, according to Bakewell, prone to quote, this is a line from Montaigne's last essay:

  Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.

  In his writing about everything, his examinations of everything, people who read his gigantic work - which I have yet not read - seem to love and critique it, simply because Montaigne continually examined his own flaws, errors and problems - and he stirs, and quickly traipsing from one subject to another in his writing, by following a trail of thought - not because he's trying to be difficult, but rather because he is human; I believe he was truly trying to discover what being human was about, and I think that's why people love his writing, not to forget his fantastic, amazing and provoking reason. All of this is superbly put into historical context by Bakewell; when Montaigne questions that he could have been killed for, it's clear to see that he meant what he said and did (also, while being flawed enough to go against himself at times; what the hell, he was human and knew it).

  Another quote from this book:

  But Montaigne offers more than an incitement to self-indulgence. The twenty-first century has everything to gain from a Montaignean sense of life, and, in its most troubled moments so far, it has been sorely in need of a Montaignean politics. It could use his sense of moderation, his love of sociability and courtesy, his suspension of judgement, and his subtle understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in confrontation and conflict. It needs his conviction that no vision of heaven, no imagined Apocalypse, and no perfectionist fantasy can ever outweigh the tiniest of selves in the real world. It is unthinkable to Montaigne that one could ever 'gratify heaven and nature by committing massacre and homicide, a belief universally embraced in all religions.' To believe that life could demand any such thing is to forget what day-to-day existence actually is. It entails forgetting that, when you look at a puppy held over a bucket of water, or even at a cat in the mood for play, you are looking at a creature that looks back at you. No abstract principles are involved; there are only two individuals, face to face, hoping for the best from one another.

  Perhaps some of the credit for Montaigne's last answer should therefore go to his cat - a specific sixteenth-century individual, who had a rather pleasant life on a country estate with a doting master and not too much competition for his attention. She was the one who, by wanting to play with Montaigne at an inconvenient moment, reminded him what it was to be alive. They looked at each other, and, just for a moment, he leaped across the gap in order to see himself through her eyes. Out of that moment - and countless others like it - came his whole philosophy.

  This book is radiant, a marvellous excursion for a Montaigne neophyte like myself, and I recommend this to everybody.

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  — Mar 22, 2013 | Add your feedback

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  • Bedsit Disco Queen (2)
  • How I Grew Up and Tried to be a Pop Star
  • By Tracey Thorn
  • Finished on Mar 8, 2013
    
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  • Gun Machine (10)
  • By Warren Ellis
  • Finished on Mar 5, 2013
    
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  Gun Machine

  

  While it’s easy to feel for the main character and his cronies, this is a book that has some brilliant moments, keeps the reader fairly interested, but fails when it comes to tempo and where writing easily turns into a clichéd noirish mess. Still, it’s a fun read.
  Ellis, a great graphic novel writer ... (continue)

  While it’s easy to feel for the main character and his cronies, this is a book that has some brilliant moments, keeps the reader fairly interested, but fails when it comes to tempo and where writing easily turns into a clichéd noirish mess. Still, it’s a fun read.
  Ellis, a great graphic novel writer, turns the reader onto an early murder frenzy and a great mystery. While the main character and some of the others reminded me a lot like Ellis himself – notably through his blog book, Shivering Sands – it’s obviously a problem. And smart details feed into the script endlessly, mostly without finesse.
  This book is still to like. His language is easy to read, the tone is simple and makes for intelligent pulp reading, but a lot of details irritated me.

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  — Mar 8, 2013 | Add your feedback

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  • Phoenix (6)
  • By Chuck Palahniuk
  • Finished on Feb 20, 2013
    
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  Phoenix

  

  If you ask me, this is a very good and short introduction to Palahniuk for those who merely want to dip their toe in the water.

  It's a very short read about the relationship in a small family, in this case two parents and one child.

  There are some really scary, suspenseful, dark, sad and funny sce ... (continue)

  If you ask me, this is a very good and short introduction to Palahniuk for those who merely want to dip their toe in the water.

  It's a very short read about the relationship in a small family, in this case two parents and one child.

  There are some really scary, suspenseful, dark, sad and funny scenes in this short story, true to Palahniuk form.

  A couple of quotes:

  <blockquote>Rachel hadn’t invented the dangers of toxoplasmosis; she’d gone online and built an airtight case. This wasn’t crazy talk. Neurobiologists had linked T. gondii to suicide and the onset of schizophrenia. All caused by exposure to cat poop. Some studies even suggested that the toxo brain parasites chemically coerced people to adopt more cats. Those crazy cat ladies were actually being controlled by an infection of single-cell invaders.</blockquote>

  <blockquote>“You’re pregnant?” Ted asked. He put his black napkin to his lips. To wipe them or hide them, Rachel couldn’t tell.</blockquote>

  All in all: completely worth it. I enjoyed the ending.

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  — Feb 20, 2013 | Add your feedback

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  • Going Clear (5)
  • Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
  • By Lawrence Wright
  • Finished on Feb 15, 2013
    
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  Going Clear

  

  <blockquote>When the Dianetics movement subsided, Hubbard was unable to restore the momentum that had given it such a rocket-powered launch. Imitators and competitors came onto the field, some even rivaling Hubbard himself. He was determined not to make the same mistakes with Scientology. From ... (continue)

  <blockquote>When the Dianetics movement subsided, Hubbard was unable to restore the momentum that had given it such a rocket-powered launch. Imitators and competitors came onto the field, some even rivaling Hubbard himself. He was determined not to make the same mistakes with Scientology. From now on, he would exercise total control. His word was law. He was not just the founder, he was “Source”—the last word, whose every pronouncement was scripture.</blockquote>

  <blockquote>MASTURBATION CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 80 succeeding incidents. Mother masturbating with fingers, jolting child and injuring child with orgasm.</blockquote>

  Some times, the line between genius and madness is blurred. With scientology, it is not.

  As with all cults, dismissing them as stuff that only affects weak-minded persons, I think is utterly wrong and dangerous. And yes, I am referring to other things than just watching Tom Cruise freak out on furniture.

  Most of my friends know a lot about the scientology movement thanks to knowledge sources that actual scientologists are not allowed to check, e.g. Internet and TV-series "South Park", where you can find out that theirs is a science fiction world where the intergalactic overlord Xenu rules and has basically trapped the souls of people, and yes, scientology is the only thing that can clear your mind and make you well again.

  And that makes scientology easy to dismiss. Which is partly why it's dangerous.

  When visiting a scientology center or speaking to a scientologist, you will most likely meet people who are very charismatic and very well trained to lure you in, to make you feel safe - in short, way more effectively than any politician will get you.

  Lawrence Wright brings the history of L. Ron Hubbard to the table. What drove him? What were his ambitions? Is it true that he was a war hero God with infinite knowledge?

  As one of the obligatory firsts regarding cults most often includes isolation of the victim from its parents, friends and work place, it's not surprising that Hubbard made his initial followers go on a long boat ride with him; I'm talking years here. While on his boat - the perfect isolation - things gradually got extremely weird:

  <blockquote>When the girls became old enough to start wearing makeup, Hubbard was the one who showed them how to apply it. He also helped them do their hair.</blockquote>

  While the book lets the reader know about the mentally insane stuff, e.g. this:

  <blockquote>Hubbard’s depression had lifted and he seemed completely in control—relaxed and confident, even jovial. The crew were mainly drinking Spanish wines, but Hubbard favored rum and Coke—an eighth of a glass of Coke and seven-eighths rum—one after another through the evening. The heavens seemed very close in the dark harbor. Hubbard would point to the sky and say, “That is where the Fifth Invaders came from. They’re the bad guys, they’re the ones who put us here.” He said he could actually spot their spaceships crossing in front of the stars, and he would salute them as they passed overhead, just to let them know that they had been seen.</blockquote>

  ...and this:

  <blockquote>The years at sea were critical ones for the future of Scientology. Even as Hubbard was inventing the doctrine, each of his decisions and actions would become enshrined in Scientology lore as something to be emulated—his cigarette smoking, for instance, which is still a feature of the church’s culture at the upper levels, as are his 1950s habits of speech, his casual misogyny, his aversion to perfume and scented deodorants, and his love of cars and motorcycles and Rolex watches. More significant is the legacy of his belittling behavior toward subordinates and his paranoia about the government. Such traits stamped the religion as an extremely secretive and sometimes hostile organization that saw enemies on every corner.</blockquote>

  ...it also lets the reader know of torture:

  <blockquote>When Otto Roos, a Sea Org executive from Holland, failed to lash a steel cable to a bollard on the dock during a terrible storm in Tunisia, Hubbard ordered him thrown from the ship’s bridge into the sea, a height of about four stories. Hana Eltringham wrote a concerned report to Hubbard that night, explaining that the storm had been so furious that Roos simply couldn’t hang on when trying to secure the ship. The report was returned to her with the comment “Never question LRH.”5 Roos survived his punishment, only to set a dismal precedent. After that, overboardings became routine, but mostly from the lower poop deck. Nearly every morning, when the crew was mustered, there would be a list of those sentenced to go over the side, even in rough seas. They would be fished out and hauled back onboard through the old cattle doors that led to the hold. The overboardings contributed to the decision of the Greek government to expel the Scientology crew from Corfu in March 1969. That didn’t stop the practice. None except Hubbard family members were spared. John McMaster, the second “first Clear,” was tossed over the side six times, breaking his shoulder on the last occasion. He left the church not long afterward. Eltringham had to stand with Hubbard and his aides on the deck when the punishments were meted out. If the crewman seemed insufficiently cowed by the prospect, Hubbard would have his hands and feet bound. Whitfield remembered one American woman, Julia Lewis Salmen, sixty years old, a longtime Scientology executive, who was bound and blindfolded before being thrown overboard. “She screamed all the way down,” Eltringham said. “When the sound stopped, Hubbard ordered a deck hand to jump in after her. Had he not, I think Julia may have drowned.” Hubbard chose a different punishment for another of the older members of the crew, Charlie Reisdorf. He and two other Sea Org crew were made to race each other around the rough, splintery decks while pushing peanuts with their noses. “They all had raw, bleeding noses, leaving a trail of blood behind them,” a senior auditor recalled. The entire crew was ordered to watch the spectacle. “Reisdorf was in his late fifties, probably. His two daughters were Messengers; they were eleven or twelve at the time, and his wife was there also. It was hard to say which was worse to watch: this old guy with a bleeding nose or his wife and kids sobbing and crying and being forced to watch this. Hubbard was standing there, calling the shots, yelling, ‘Faster, faster!’ ” Hubbard increasingly turned his wrath on children, who were becoming a nuisance on the ship. He thought that they were best raised away from their parents, who were “counter-intention” to their children. As a result, he became their only—stern as well as neglectful—parent. Children who committed minor infractions, such as laughing inappropriately or failing to remember a Scientology term, would be made to climb to the crow’s nest, at the top of the mast, four stories high, and spend the night, or sent to the hold and made to chip rust.</blockquote>

  <blockquote>Other young children were sentenced to the locker for infractions—such as chewing up a telex—for as long as three weeks. Hubbard ruled that they were Suppressive Persons. One little girl, a deaf mute, was placed in the locker for a week because Hubbard thought it might cure her deafness.</blockquote>

  And then, as scientology grew bigger:

  <blockquote>VERY EARLY ONE MORNING in July 1977, the FBI, having been tipped off about Operation Snow White, carried out raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, carting off nearly fifty thousand documents. One of the files was titled “Operation Freakout.” It concerned the treatment of Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had published an exposé of Scientology, The Scandal of Scientology, six years earlier. After having been indicted for perjury and making bomb threats against Scientology, Cooper had gone into a deep depression. She stopped eating. At one point, she weighed just eighty-three pounds. She considered suicide. Finally, she persuaded a doctor to give her sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” and question her under the anesthesia. The government was sufficiently impressed that the prosecutor dropped the case against her, but her reputation was ruined, she was broke, and her health was uncertain. The day after the FBI raid on the Scientology headquarters, Cooper was flying back from Africa, on assignment for a travel magazine, when she read a story in the International Herald Tribune about the raid. One of the files the federal agents discovered was titled “Operation Freakout.” The goal of the operation was to get Cooper “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail.”</blockquote>

  I found it hard to wrap my head around the fact that scientology went all-in where it came to not only toppling minds, but governments and psychiatry, not only by infiltrating, persecuting and brain-washing people, but also by using filibuster techniques to try and drown out all types of critique.

  All in all, it's a good book that is well researched. Check it out if you want to plunge deep into a very different world.

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  — Feb 20, 2013 | Add your feedback

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  • Bit of a Blur (108)
  • By Alex James
  • Finished on Jan 25, 2013
    
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  Bit of a Blur

  

  <blockquote>So Graham and Damon and I met in the studio on the last day of the first term. Damon had the keys, as he was sort of an assistant there. There were a couple of things that Damon and Graham had been working on together that we bashed around for a while. I showed them some chor ... (continue)

  <blockquote>So Graham and Damon and I met in the studio on the last day of the first term. Damon had the keys, as he was sort of an assistant there. There were a couple of things that Damon and Graham had been working on together that we bashed around for a while. I showed them some chords that I’d been strumming in my room. Graham started to play them on the guitar, there was a drum machine going boom whack and I started grooving along on the bass that was lying around. Damon started jumping up and down and saying, ‘Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant! You’re a natural!’ He got his lyrics book out and started singing, ‘She is so high, she is so high.’ It all happened there and then. It was instantaneous, shockingly so. Graham wrote the lyrics for the verse, over the same chords, and sang a backing vocal on the choruses. I’d never been in a band with backing vocals. The two of them sang really well together, they’d been doing it for years. We made a tape and I went home for Christmas thinking, ‘I’m in the best band in the world.’</blockquote>

  Even if you don't fancy Blur or even if you've never heard them, this is a good memoir. Even though James may seem to have his head up his own arse at times because of his wealth and the sheer amount of silly things he's been up to because of it - whether it be purchasing an aeroplane or wasting thousands of pounds per night getting drunk with models - his style of writing drew me in.

  Short sentences telling stuff like it was, according to no-one but himself.

  James saw himself as a rock star, and as such, he wanted to live up to the myth, combining alcohol and bad behaviour all over the globe.

  <blockquote>I was really drunk by that point and I went down to the bar to have a fight. Bruce Dickinson was at the bar. I hate Iron Maiden. They’re devil-worshipping ponces. I said, ‘The devil can suck my cock and you can kiss his arse, you fucking poodle.’ He got me in a headlock and sucked the end of my nose really hard. I was laughing quite a lot, not really resisting. We left it at that.</blockquote>

  Point to Dickinson, there.

  <blockquote>I was still enjoying my lack of responsibilities. Being able to have whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, had made me grotesque and self-centred, but there was a huge upside to being cash rich and morally bankrupt.</blockquote>

  From an art school background to riches as Blur recorded their first album with Stephen Street producing it, alcohol and deviant behaviour led James to be unfaithful to his then-girlfriend. A lot.

  <blockquote>The first time I was unfaithful to Justine was about halfway through the first year at Goldsmiths. I was in London. She was in Bournemouth. I was drunk. It wasn’t premeditated. It was a brief pornographic fantasy scenario with someone I’d never seen before, never saw again. I regretted it terribly and confessed. Justine was devastated, more hurt than angry. We both cried a lot and I knew I’d never do it again. Of course, there were pretty girls at college. I flirted with one or two of them, but I never had any intention of getting involved. I suppose, if I’m brutally honest, if I’d fallen in love with somebody else, I would have been a bit stupid to stay with Justine, but I didn’t. I wanted to be with her. The second time was a real disgrace. I snogged Raych. She wasn’t going out with Adam any more, but he still loved her, I think. He was long gone, but when I thought about it afterwards it seemed like a double whammy of treachery against him and against Justine. It was only a quick affectionate snog, but I definitely fancied Raych, which made it a worse crime. I didn’t tell Jus about that. Andrea, the singer from the Darling Buds, was a pin-up platinum blonde and that was the third time. The world had started to open up to us and it appeared there was no town that didn’t have beautiful women I could have married or interesting people I could have quite happily spent my life with.</blockquote>

  ...and:

  <blockquote>Another one-night stand. It wasn’t like I pursued these women. It was suddenly as simple as not resisting. Still, I was more than willing and it was the same act of betrayal. There were so many reasons to say yes and only one reason to say no, and she was an ocean away.</blockquote>

  There are no swan songs re. the bad times, which is very refreshing:

  <blockquote>The album had stopped selling and Woolworths returned quite a lot of copies. Then a really big bill came from the VAT man and we couldn’t afford to pay it. It was serious. I had no idea what VAT was. I was good at playing the bass and showing off. That was my job. We trusted our manager to make sure that those kinds of unpleasantnesses were taken care of. It turned out that quite a lot of bills remained unpaid. We owed everybody money. We brought in new accountants, who told us we were staring bankruptcy in the face and facing prison if we couldn’t come up with the cash to pay the VAT. Whenever this happens it’s time to start looking for a new manager.</blockquote>

  And there's always a breath of fresh air when James writes about unusual stuff very up front, e.g.:

  <blockquote>There was a bottle of Tabasco on the bar, for Bloody Marys. He said, ‘Watch this!’ and necked the whole thing. Temporarily, he went into convulsions and was sick. Then the hiccups started. They were the biggest hiccups I’ve ever seen. There was an element of sneeze in each hiccup, and each one possessed his entire body. It wasn’t deadly serious, but we were supposed to be onstage in twenty minutes. We went on late. I smashed a guitar and a few drums. Having destroyed backstage, Damon tore into the front of house. Dave swan-dived into the crowd and was devoured, so I finished the drums off. We hadn’t done that for a while. It is very satisfying to make a lot of noise and break stuff.</blockquote>

  On fame:

  <blockquote>I’d done a fair bit of hobnobbing with famous people by this time. They didn’t seem to have anything in common, particularly. Famous people generally seemed like everybody else, only a bit more famous. Rich people aren’t particularly different from anyone else either. They’ve just got more money. Fame is just another kind of money. It can do things that money can’t, but it’s just a currency. No one ever loved anyone because they were rich. No one ever really loved anyone because they were famous, but it’s an attractive quality.</blockquote>

  On what really matters in the end:

  <blockquote>On Boxing Day I went back to London to get Tabitha and took her to a hotel where I’d always wanted to stay, in Corfe Castle in rural Dorset. Suddenly we were alone and it was very still and quiet. Immaculate. We walked to Kimmeridge, my favourite place, and I built a big bonfire. There’s absolutely nothing to do there, just fossils and shells and rock pools. It’s where you realise if you love someone or not. I felt a bit bored. It was surprising. She was possibly the most beautiful woman in the world. I thought success would be the answer to everything. I’d climbed a hill and seen a mountain in the distance. I climbed the mountain and I saw the moon. I somehow got to the moon and realised I’d left what I loved behind in another world. I missed Justine. I’d come all this way to realise I really was happiest with what I already had. It was a journey that had to be made. I wanted it all. I’d never felt I wanted to escape from Justine. I’d just lost her. I just wanted to sit and be quiet with her, listen to her thoughts and make her laugh.</blockquote>

  There are some reminisces on alcohol and adventures:

  <blockquote>When I woke up I was in her bedroom. I was emptying my bladder all over her dressing table. People had told me about this kind of thing. It had never happened to me before, though. She woke up and asked what I was doing. I said it looked like I’d made a big mistake. We cleaned it up. We’d only known each other a couple of hours and I don’t think anyone could have been any more drunk than I was. Usually being that drunk would make you unconscious, but with absinthe you go on expeditions. I did see her again. Some people you try and make a good impression on and nothing works, others you piss all over their make-up and they’ve decided they like you and it doesn’t seem to matter. Anyway, that was the only time I ever went to Richmond.</blockquote>

  On being a tourist:

  <blockquote>We live in a climate of fear, but the world is a safe place as long as you know how to behave like everybody else does. If you stand around holding a map waving a video camera with your shirt tucked into your waist-high trousers, you’re in trouble wherever you go. Millions of people live in Rio, after all, and they eat salad and have ice in their drinks and they don’t get murdered very often.</blockquote>

  Wealth and no morale:

  <blockquote>I’d spent about a million pounds on champagne and cocaine. It sounds ridiculous but, looking back, I don’t regret it. It was definitely the right thing to do. It was completely decadent, but I was a rock star, after all, a proper one, with a public duty to perform.</blockquote>

  <blockquote>Claire was worried about me starting my new drinking campaign in January. She’d only known me sober. I assured her that I was very good at it. It was February and a nice man called Bill was saying, ‘And tell me what you remember about the party.’ ‘Well, I remember swapping shirts with the principal dancer of the Royal Ballet Company.’ ‘OK. Good. What next?’ ‘I think I snogged the dog.’ ‘Right. OK. Then what happened?’ ‘Well, I had a row with Claire and went home. I locked her out, and when she was banging on the door, I pissed on her head from the fourth-storey window.’ ‘Why did you do that?’ ‘Well, that’s what she wants to know.’ ‘Anything else happen?’ ‘No, not that night, anyway.’ Bill was kind and he listened and he helped me and I stopped drinking altogether after that and tried yoga.</blockquote>

  And somehow, the feel of the book is stashed in a single sentence:

  <blockquote>I sometimes found it excruciatingly funny and begged them to stop, and sometimes I just begged them to stop.</blockquote>

  All in all: a really interesting tale of the love for music, but mainly on friendship, the loss of ethics and love due to alcohol and drugs, and little thoughts on life and what matters and not.

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  — Jan 28, 2013 | Add your feedback

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  • Both Flesh and Not (12)
  • By David Foster Wallace
  • Finished on Jan 21, 2013
    
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  Both Flesh and Not

  

  This book - a collection of essays, reviews, monographs and notes, interspersed with words and their meaning as culled from his notebooks - starts off with what is often known as his best piece of non-fiction, "Both Federer And Not", about tennis professional Roger Federer as he plays Wimbledon. To ... (continue)

  This book - a collection of essays, reviews, monographs and notes, interspersed with words and their meaning as culled from his notebooks - starts off with what is often known as his best piece of non-fiction, "Both Federer And Not", about tennis professional Roger Federer as he plays Wimbledon. To be honest, non-fiction is a wonky term here, as DFW often twisted the truth his way.

  In that essay, he wrote miraculously. Sadly, I'm not much into mathematics, so that piece went away. Also, the same thing for "The U.S. Open", which is like the Federer piece but a lot less interesting. I'm not a tennis fan.

  I am, however, into film, so reading his piece on "Terminator 2" is insightful and fun. As is "Twenty-four Word Notes", about words and their meaning. His bit about a few note-worthy prose books - "Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. Novels >1960" - makes me want to go seek them out.

  All in all, there are a few really great bits and bobs in here. DFW's use of language is always truly wonderful and he is really good at writing non-fiction, but I much prefer his prose to this, completely speaking.

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  — Jan 21, 2013 | Add your feedback

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  • Och en månad går fortare nu än ett hjärtslag (1)
  • By Bodil Malmsten
  • Finished on Jan 5, 2013
    
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  • Crash (68)
  • By J. G. Ballard
  • Finished on Jan 4, 2013
    
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  • The Unwritten Vol. 6: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words (7)
  • By Mike Carey
  • Finished on Nov 19, 2012
    
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  The Unwritten Vol. 6: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words

  

  This is a lot better than volume 5, which to me was more of a fevered sprawl of a collection rather than this, a focused epic tell that leaves behind a trail of the unknown and a waft of promise of what might turn into a more complicated turn of plot.

  Tommy goes further into the maze that is the ca ... (continue)

  This is a lot better than volume 5, which to me was more of a fevered sprawl of a collection rather than this, a focused epic tell that leaves behind a trail of the unknown and a waft of promise of what might turn into a more complicated turn of plot.

  Tommy goes further into the maze that is the cabal, while trusting his companions; the enemy gains ground also, and a Mesopotamian fable is unfurled.

  All in a day of the life of, you might say. The seasoned reader knows what to make of this.

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  — Nov 19, 2012 | Add your feedback

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  • The Pale King (135)
  • By David Foster Wallace
  • Finished on Dec 7, 2012
    
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  The Pale King

  

  <blockquote>Wallace had been mulling the possibilities for a third novel since the mid-1990s, even as he began the stories that would form the heart of Brief Interviews. The setting had come early, possibly even before the publication of Infinite Jest: he knew he wanted to write about the IRS. ... (continue)

  <blockquote>Wallace had been mulling the possibilities for a third novel since the mid-1990s, even as he began the stories that would form the heart of Brief Interviews. The setting had come early, possibly even before the publication of Infinite Jest: he knew he wanted to write about the IRS. The agency fit well with Wallace’s Pynchonian appetite for clandestine organizations and hidden conspiracies. And like the tennis academy and recovery house in Infinite Jest, it was a world unto itself, where characters would be in charged apposition to one another. Wallace himself had had numerous small brushes with the agency over the years, usually involving trivial errors on Form 1099s that he or his accountant had to get corrected. These encounters touched off the same anxiety within him as communications from lawyers and fact-checkers. He had an idea as well of the IRS as a secular church, a counterpart to Alcoholics Anonymous in Infinite Jest.14 But, finally, he probably settled on the IRS for the most obvious reason: it was the dullest possible venue he could think of and he had decided to write about boredom.</blockquote>

  It's hard to review anything by David Foster Wallace to me, so far. His books are life-changers in a way that they skewer your mind and, at the least, force yourself into questioning your own ways but also those of others. It's a bit like listening to how Bill Hicks started reacting at the end of his life, when he received word that he would die from cancer: everything's tinged with timelessness, written passionately, carefully and with love. It's a very berth that doesn't really have anything to do with throwaway culture (which is funny, considering how much Wallace immersed himself in popular culture, especially TV) but with human emotions and the intellectual.

  "The Pale King" was published posthumously. Having said that, the book had to be published. I think even Wallace wanted that, considering how he left the book just before committing suicide. And it's not only the best posthumous book I have ever read, but reading 10-20 pages into it, it was clear to me that the form and content was a clear, bested leap from "Infinite Jest".

  <blockquote>Wallace in his final hours had "tidied up [his] manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel." On her blog, Kathleen Fitzpatrick reported that the Pale King manuscript edited by Michael Pietsch began with "more than 1000 pages ... in 150 unique chapters". The published version is 540 pages and 50 chapters.</blockquote> -- From the Wikipedia article on "The Pale King"

  Still, it's extremely good form. And I can't imagine how tough it must have been to edit the book. Pietsch, a long-time editor with Wallace, must have done a terrific job. Wallace's notebooks from writing "The Pale King" are available online, thanks to the Harry Ransom Center, to help the reader see what was there.

  <blockquote>In the process of writing the novel he came to call The Pale King, he laid out its central tenet in one of his notebooks: Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.</blockquote> --From D. T. Max's biography on David Foster Wallace, titelled "Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story"

  To paraphrase Bill Hicks again: it's a ride.

  You get the intimate feel from people inside the IRS, people brought there by a life-long drive towards the bureaucratic, presenting them as humans rather than something out of a Kafka book. You get luck, love, death, life, music, and details that made me cry. The first pages of this book made me want to laud Wallace above and beyond.

  And the people. Always the people. While reading the book, I often felt "I wouldn't want to be any of these", but at the same time, I could definitely relate to the mundane and be touched by how Wallace made it feel beautiful. Filing copies and making copies and going through the same routine over and over, while looking at the clock trying to think of ways to make time go faster, or thinking about home, night and the day after, when you will, no doubt, clatter forward in despair, tediousness and silence around you while there are people scattered only an arm's length from you.

  Wallace's inclusion of himself as a character who made it into the IRS by chance is better than imagined. The footnotes - oh yes, there are footnotes, and not endnotes - are here as explanations, comments, another world looking in and at the same time anything but pretentious garbage.

  Who other than Wallace, in modern times, had/has the ability to write something this complex without making the reading boring and the financial aspects of being an IRS worker utterly uninteresting?

  Just read this. Don't give a toss about this review, really. His words excel most I've ever read. This is basically human, touching and moving beyond my feeble attempts at explaining what "The Pale King" is about.

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  — Dec 11, 2012 | Add your feedback

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  • Unknown Pleasures (7)
  • Inside Joy Division
  • By Peter Hook
  • Finished on Oct 26, 2012
    
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  Unknown Pleasures

  

  <blockquote>When I saw Control, all those years later, I didn’t even notice it was in black and white because it was exactly what my childhood had looked and felt like: dark and smoggy and brown, the colour of a wet cardboard box, which was how all of Manchester looked in those days.</block ... (continue)

  <blockquote>When I saw Control, all those years later, I didn’t even notice it was in black and white because it was exactly what my childhood had looked and felt like: dark and smoggy and brown, the colour of a wet cardboard box, which was how all of Manchester looked in those days.</blockquote>

  This is a seemingly honest look at how things were back in the day when Peter Hook started out in not only Joy Division, but in life. He writes about having lived in Jamaica, in Manchester and of meeting Bernard Sumner, Ian Curtis and a plethora of drummers before coming across Stephen Morris.

  He writes of the good, bad old days, and not so much of the current situation - where Hook and Sumner have communication issues that prevent them from functioning together - which is good. This is after all a book on Joy Division.

  Hook has done a lot of thinking, maybe not because of Curtis' death, but maybe because he has re-hashed everything now that he's no longer part of New Order.

  There's a lot of piss-taking of himself here, e.g.

  <blockquote>You know what? It was the same being in a group. Just goes to show that you can take the boy out of Salford but you can’t take Salford out of the boy, because we were terrible for nicking things in Joy Division and New Order. We used to go to these wonderful gigs with all this beautiful stuff backstage and nick it all. Now you’ve got bands like the Happy Mondays, or Oasis (in the early days), who had big scally reputations, but they had the same background as us: just working class thieves. You never had anything so you took it. Same attitude to music: you’ve got to start somewhere. The difference was that nobody expected that sort of behaviour from us in Joy Division or New Order because we had the arty intellectual image. These days I restrict it to hotels.</blockquote>

  At the same time, it's great to see another angle of Ian Curtis, which is not the apotheosised person we often see today:

  <blockquote>But looking back that’s exactly what he was: a people pleaser; he could be whatever you wanted him to be. A poetic, sensitive, tortured soul, the Ian Curtis of the myth – he was definitely that. But he could also be one of the lads – he was one of the lads, as far as we were concerned. That was the people pleaser in him, the mirror. He adapted the way he behaved depending on who he was with. We all do a bit, of course, but with Ian the shift was quite dramatic. Nobody was better at moving between different groups of people than he was. But I also think this was an aspect of his personality that ended up being very damaging to him. He had three personas he was trying to juggle: he had his married-man persona, at home with the wife, the laddish side and the cerebral, literary side. By the end he was juggling home life and band life, and had two women on the go. There were just too many Ians to cope with.</blockquote>

  The book also displays what it's like being in a band, even one which has been lauded since after Curtis' death:

  <blockquote>22 September 1978

  Joy Division play the Coach House, Huddersfield. “One person turned up. It was diabolical.”</blockquote>

  Plus some other details on other bands, e.g.:

  <blockquote>14 November 1978

  Joy Division play the Odeon, Canterbury, as part of their tour with the Rezillos and the Undertones. “The Undertones – they were so young. They’d bought an air pistol and were having target practice backstage, shooting cans off the stairs. Then someone brought in letters from home because they’d been away touring for a while, and next thing they were all crying in the dressing room reading letters off their mums. Me and Ian were looking at each other like, Aw, isn’t that sweet?”</blockquote>

  I love the bits about how the tracks came about, e.g.:

  <blockquote>‘Shadowplay’ happened in a similar way: Bernard had been listening to ‘Ocean’ by Velvet Underground and wanted to write a track like that, with the surf sound, a rolling feeling in it. So we started jamming and that’s how we came up with ‘Shadowplay’. You wouldn’t say it sounded anything like Velvet Underground, but once you know you can hear the root.</blockquote>

  And a bit on how very little money was very good:

  <blockquote>So that was two days to record Unknown Pleasures. Closer took three weeks. Movement took about two months and Waiting for the Siren’s Call, New Order’s last, took three years.</blockquote>

  ...and:

  <blockquote>The beauty of Joy Division is that we never made much money while the band existed so there was nothing to sully it – no piles of drugs or cases of booze in the dressing room. We went everywhere in a convoy of knackered van and Steve’s Cortina and stayed with friends – no hotels for us, just the odd B&B. Even when we went to London to record Closer we stayed in a quite scruffy pair of flats with £1.50 per diem: you could spend how you wished, dinner or a couple of pints but not both. We didn’t yet have any money from the record. (Publishing, as in who wrote what in the songs, brings nearly all bands down. I remember the immortal quote from the Mondays: ‘Why is the one playing the maracas getting as much as me who writes the songs?’ Ironically Bez is now as important as all the songwriters, if not more. How the world turns.)</blockquote>

  So how reliable is the book? Hook answers that himself, and I deem him to be quite reliable just by judging on how he writes, e.g.:

  <blockquote>I liked Annik, though, and still do. Years later we talked about that interview she did at Dave Pils’ flat. It was featured in Control and my character’s sitting there saying dopey things about the name ‘Buzzcocks’, which I hated when I saw it. Made me look a right twat. I told Annik I would never have said anything so daft and she said to me, ‘Ah, but I have the tape, ‘Ooky, and zat is exactly what you said.’ So there you go. You shouldn’t trust a word I say.</blockquote>

  And in ending:

  <blockquote>But we didn’t do it the normal way, of course. We did it the Factory way. Not that I’d change anything, mind you. I’d stop Ian hanging himself, obviously. But otherwise I really wouldn’t change anything.</blockquote>

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  — Oct 26, 2012 | Add your feedback

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  • Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (27)
  • A Life of David Foster Wallace
  • By D. T. Max
  • Finished on Dec 10, 2012
    
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  Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story

  2 people find this helpful

  

  This is a really engaging book on David Foster Wallace. Sure, people might say that Wallace's life is what makes this book good, but it's not. There would be too much of it to make sense of it all without a good deal of sifting, editing and moulding, which D. T. Max has done here.

  It's a chronologi ... (continue)

  This is a really engaging book on David Foster Wallace. Sure, people might say that Wallace's life is what makes this book good, but it's not. There would be too much of it to make sense of it all without a good deal of sifting, editing and moulding, which D. T. Max has done here.

  It's a chronological book that undoubtedly puts Wallace up front, even though I get the feeling that's what Wallace would least of all have wanted, during his lifetime.

  Having read "Infinite Jest" and "The Pale King" before I read this biography, I must say it was completely eye-opening at times, when it comes to his works.

  Starting off with Wallace's childhood, we learn of his connection with language and play:

  <blockquote>No one else listened to David as his mother did. She was smart and funny, easy to confide in, and included him in her love of words. Even in later years, and in the midst of his struggle with the legacy of his childhood, he would always speak with affection of the passion for words and grammar she had given him. If there was no word for a thing, Sally Wallace would invent it: “greebles” meant little bits of lint, especially those that feet brought into bed; “twanger” was the word for something whose name you didn’t know or couldn’t remember. She loved the word “fantods,” meaning a feeling of deep fear or repulsion, and talked of “the howling fantods,” this fear intensified. These words, like much of his childhood, would wind up in Wallace’s work. To outside eyes, Sally’s enthusiasm for correct usage might seem extreme. When someone made a grammatical mistake at the Wallace dinner table, she would cough into her napkin repeatedly until the speaker saw the error. She protested to supermarkets whenever she saw the sign “Ten items or less” posted above their express checkout lines.</blockquote>

  Yeah, his mother was a language nazi, which he also turned into. Although Wallace seems to have been very gentle about that, except when admonishing his own work and correcting his students (and his editors and proof readers).

  He was great at learning stuff that seemed finite, but in other cases he faced problems:

  <blockquote>His teammates were more successful with girls than Wallace, and, frustrated, he would try to solve the complexity of attraction the way he solved the trajectory of a tennis shot: “How do you know when you can ask a girl out?” “How do you know when you can kiss her?” His teammates told him not to think so hard; he would just know.</blockquote>

  While discovering life and earning top marks in school, he started writing.

  <blockquote>One story he worked on, according to Costello, was called “The Clang Birds,” about a fictional bird that flies in ever decreasing circles until it disappears up its own ass.</blockquote>

  His literary turn to honesty as a main driving force is clearly visible throughout his growing up, partly because he was an alcoholic, but also because lying seemed to permeate society:

  <blockquote>A typical line from an ad featuring the pathologically inaccurate spokesman: “Hi, I’m Joe Isuzu and I used my new Isuzu pickup truck to carry a two-thousand-pound cheeseburger.” The prospect that horrified Wallace most was that Americans were so used to being lied to that any other relationship with media would feel false.</blockquote>

  He answered letters from fellow authors - notably writing with Don Delillo and Jonathan Franzen - and was often apologising:

  <blockquote>He made amends wherever he could, sometimes to excess. He wrote to his Arizona sponsor that “I struggle a great deal, and am 99.8% real,” then crossed that out and wrote in “98.8%,” noting in a parenthesis in the margin, “Got a bit carried away here.”</blockquote>

  When writing about boredom in "The Pale King":

  <blockquote>As he wrote in a notebook: Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. The problem came up when he tried to dramatize this idea. How do you write about dullness without being dull? The obvious solution, if you had Wallace’s predilections, was to overwhelm this seemingly inert subject with the full movement of your thought. Your characters might be low-level bureaucrats, but the rippling tactility of your writing would keep them from appearing static. But this strategy presented its own problem: Wallace could make the characters vibrant, but only at the risk of sacrificing what made their situation worth narrating—the stillness at the center of their lives. How could you preach mindful calmness if you couldn’t replicate it in prose? A failed entertainment that succeeded was just an entertainment. Yet Wallace had never really found a verbal strategy to replace his inborn one. In more ways than he cared to acknowledge he remained the author of The Broom of the System.</blockquote>

  It didn't seem like Wallace would ever fall victim to hubris:

  <blockquote>In time these early Internet users took up Wallace for their fan communities too, a transition that particularly discomfited him (though to be fair anything that reinforced the masonry of the statue did). When in March 2003 a member of Wallace-l told Wallace about their email list at a taping of a reading for The Next American Essay, a compilation of creative nonfiction edited by John D’Agata that Wallace had contributed to, his response was, “You know, for emotional reasons and sanity I have to pretend this doesn’t exist.”</blockquote>

  And, in the very end:

  <blockquote>They joked about the unthinkable. Green warned him that if he killed himself she’d be “the Yoko Ono of the literary world, the woman with all the hair who domesticated you and look what happened.” They made a pact that he would never make her guess how he was doing.</blockquote>

  It's a lovely book, it really is. It's easy to draw parallels between the lives of DFW and Bill Hicks, both persons being gentle, humble, passionate, thinking and self critical.

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  — Dec 11, 2012 | Add your feedback

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