I'd rather be reading

Reading The Secret Life of Trees, by Colin Tudge. So far quite nice. Very conversational style without being illiterate, which is something that the vast majority of popular fiction and non-fiction writers seem incapable of lately. And it's nice to read a book about trees by someone who evidently likes trees and understands many many people like trees who perhaps couldn't yet tell their haploid from a diploid. That is, me. Early days yet though. We'll see how it goes.

Also making my slow (and during working days, it is very slow, or slow for me, anyways) through the Men At Arms episode of the Sword of Honour trilogy. At this point, mostly fascinated with jacket blurb from Cyril Conolly about how this is the only WWII book guaranteed to survive to posterity. Really? Well . . . anyways it has its moments but I'm not completely enjoying myself and sneaking suspicions keep making their way in that I'd rather be reading the Trees book, and honestly - and maybe this is why it's a really good thing I never went into a university lit programme despite my propensities - I think Spike Milligan's war memoirs are about four times better. There's a sort of innocent cynicism to Evelyn Waugh that makes it almost a burden to wrap up. But it all hangs together very nicely.

The joys of being middle class on a fast train to Paris

Had a smashing weekend in Paris. There's a sentence I never thought would come out of my brain but I guess eventually things just stop doing your head in, which is a good thing to know in the present context. La New Yorkaise is moving home definitively on Wednesday, and like a good former fellow inmate of the fucking madhouse that is Pars when you're underemployed, I swanned down on the Thalys and helped her pack. Which translated into about two actual hard slog hours - she's already shipped most of her stuff - and me getting some really great castoffs that wouldn't fit in her hold luggage, like a camping chair and an awesome sleeping bag and enough good quality acrylic paint to make the F-word's eyes light up. So the time spent with her was lovely and the time spent with Miss C, whose loft we stayed in once more, was even lovelier, in a way. She starts a year-long treatment programme for hepatitis today, and has no idea how it will go, so I suppose she drank her last few glasses of wine for a long while with us . . . both of those women are so dear to me in such different ways.

And discovered my theory about Paris is correct - if you have lots of money, it's actually a great place to be.

And read two books on trains - well, finished one, read the other - Bad Medicine by David Wooton and Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. Decline and Fall - well. Brideshead Revisited was such a nasty little downer (in a good way, though) that I was not expecting that surreal little romp. I enjoyed it a great deal though. Very talky, very visual. I've written before about how awful I think authors like Ian McEwan and that guy who wrote The Hours are, in that their shitty books read like script treatments instead of novels and it's an abuse of the medium. But besides me hating Ian McEwan et al, I think that also has something to do with the way I hate most movies. Because Decline and Fall reads a bit like a treatment for an exceptionally good stage show - very dialogue driven - and I still loved it. But then the narrative voice was still awfully good, so not completely. Anyways. It was ace.

Bad Medicine was alright too but sometimes the argumentation was a little laboured. Wooton keeps so busy reminding you that he has an argument that it can get quite distracting from the actual elements of the argument. He was fitting so much into such a small book that I have a feeling a few conjunctions ended up on the cutting room floor when a few too many protests from Wooton about why he should be allowed to write about progress as a historical fact stayed in when they shouldn't have.

I get it. Progress. You like it. It exists. You wrote about it in your fucking introduction. Please, write a history of medicine, and write a history of the history of medicine, but if you're going to splice them don't do it in a mere 320 pages (though I understand it fits nicely onto the bestseller list at that length, but that's no more excuse for writing an insufficiently readable book than the fact that 'novelists' like McEwan make the big bucks from actually selling their books as film treatments), not unless you've got Darrin fucking McMahon level expressive finesse. And I'll tell you - Bad Medicine isn't a bad book, but Wooton does not have Darrin Fucking McMahon-level finesse.

It's a valid comparison, even if I'm only making it because I got the F-word Happiness for Christmas. McMahon, when he wrote about happiness and the history of happiness, forswore historical accounts of people who didn't write much or who wrote outside of the 'canon' (ie everybody post-Bhagavad Gita in Asia) as it was called back in my undergrad days. Wooton restricted himself similarly. Obviously that still leaves you with rather a lot of material, so if you're going to spend 15% of your words explaining to the reader that you're picking a fight, and if you lack McMahon-type finesse - honestly it's a wonder the book is readable at all. But it is, almost despite him.

Four escape routes

Speaking of escaping into books during a time of fuckery: the bookshop across from my favourite grocery store where I picked up Decline and Fall as soon as finishing Brideshead Revisited is fucking ace. This weekend I got quite a haul besides the Waugh:

Goodbye to All That - sqeeeeeee! Robert Graves is awesome on a stick. No wonder Ava Gardner hit that when it was already old enough to break. And there's so much more of him to read as I've only had the awesomeness of I, Claudius/Claudius the God and his Greek Myths. Both are really really worth reading no matter what sort of relationship you think you have with classical studies, and the Greek Myths is earth-shaking, as far as I'm concerned anyways. Each chapter tells the myth in a way directly drawn and referenced from a range of source texts, and, following the references, gets re-interpreted Gravesianly - through the lense of murderous fertility cults, matriarchies, and hallucinogenic mushrooms. And he is just the silkiest, friendliest writer - a real sort of formality to his phrasing which is nonetheless inviting, engaging - a nice big wingback easy chair; imposing, but upholstered with comfy velvet instead of patrician oxblood leather.

Mummy won it as a school prize some decades ago and it was sitting on my grandparent's bookshelves when I was a bored 13-year-old; one thing led to another, and, well, I don't think there's a single work that's had more of an influence on my symbolic or metaphorical thinking than that one, for better or worse. I didn't buy into it but I swallowed it whole, if you can see the difference. Part of my brain forever.

Grapes of Wrath - for the F-word. He hasn't read it yet. Enough said.

Far From the Madding Crowd - someone told me that this was the least depressing of Thomas Hardy's books and that it was even more or less funny. Well, I'll believe it when I read it. Personally I didn't think the Mayor of Casterbridge was depressing, I thought it was just awesome. Okay, the will at the end from the guy as read by his !!!SPOILER ALERT!!!! pseudo-daughter was tragic - it was a tragic book - but depressing? Anyways. I'm nonetheless curious about Far From the Madding Crowd. And I'm running out of Hardys that I'm willing to read. Tess of the D'Ubervilles - I gave up on that one halfway when I fully realized what a downer that was going to be - and Jude the Obscure - uhm, no. I've heard too much about it.

Murder on the Orient Express - it's a Poirot novel so I was hoping it'd help with my perceptions of Belgian retardation. It didn't. But I enjoy the language - already archaic - it happens so fast! Pukka sahib indeed.

Some histories need to end

Brideshead Revisited, ugh, a nasty little book about horribly nasty people, but such a good read that almost immediately upon finishing I bought Decline and Fall from a lovely new used bookshop that just opened across from my favourite grocery store.

Waugh provides a ghastly cure for anybody who fears that they're finding Graham Greene's bleak and gruelling vision of British Catholic duty has anything convincingly heroic to it outside of the Graham Greeniverse. Mind you I liked it very much, if not as much as the Graham Greeniverse, upon accepting the world of the novel for what it was . . . a place populated by the sort of people Monty Python made fun of, the End of Old Money History.

BTW, the End of History is such an interesting idea, isn't it? You'd think Fukuyama et al would have hestitated a bit more before proclaiming it considering the consistency to which it's been proclaimed over a history of our race and planet which, whatever else you'd like to say about it, certainly hasn't ended yet. As a matter of fact, offhand I have to say they way people Keep! Reporting! The END!!!!!! Of History!!!!! is one of the best advertisements I can think of offhand for postmodern historiography.

People are attached to their world view, to their own lifespan, to the extent that generation after generation can proclaim the End of History with amazing regularity, and re-arrange history to argue that it has led up inexorably to that End Point. I think it's probably a fairly natural instinct, as far as anything we've had an instinct to do since we started wearing clothes is 'natural', but I also think that inclination is a damn good reason to bend yourself into pretzels in the effort to take an objective, distrustful view of history. And people who say otherwise smell bad. But I digress.

Brideshead Revisited, grim, awfully grim. Not utterly without humour though. It is so nice to escape into books these days. Everything continues fucked, as you can imagine.