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This doesn't sound like Scott 3
Oct. 11th, 2010 10:52 am"You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see there will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone 'Give me the gun', etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone's asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don't mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg - that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of 'life'.Now, with eery day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors - GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE - keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn't necessarily need to be closed..."
An early passage which goes some way to summing up the sprawling, glorious boarding school tragicomedy of (extended) adolescence that is Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. Set in a boarding school, the perspective shifts between a young teacher, wondering if he's supposed to have grown up yet, and the boys - Skippy among them - at the other end of the same inconclusive journey. Even if it were a lot less ambitious than it is, the sheer verve with which Murray catches the dynamics of schoolboy interaction would make this worth reading; I was especially taken with alleged lothario Mario, and his friends' gradual realisation that you should never take advice on girls from anyone who has a lucky condom. But Murray is going for something much bigger than that; I would say that his critique of the modern managerial approach to schools, embodied in acting head 'the Automator', is heavy-handed, except that I recently heard about my old school's new motto 'Together Everyone Achieves More (TEAM)'. And it takes a while for the M-theory subplot to make clear what it's doing in the book except providing a hobby for Skippy's room-mate, the rotund genius/bullsh1tter Ruprecht. There is, as well, a little too much event, and not quite the same charm, in the book's final third, once the eponymous event has come to pass. Still, it was a Booker longlist entry which looks a lot better than most of the shortlist* and, given this was only his second novel, I will take great interest in Murray's further work. So much quotable stuff in there, but I shall restrain myself to one more:
"Violence solves everything, you idiot, look at the history of the world. Any situation they have, they dick around with it for a while, then they bring in violence. That's the whole reason they have scientists, to make violence more violent."
Beyond that, plenty of pubbing this weekend and one rather splendid gig at which, for the first time, I saw the Video Club and the Art Goblins, two noughties indie outfits I feared I had missed forever. And what outfits - the Video Club resplendent in Regency frills and a flashing green line protruding from the keyboardist's fly, Art Goblins in matching jackets like a fifties US street gang. Plus Small Crew, Dream Themes and Mr Solo, and possibly too much of the Buffalo Bar's house white. Happy times.
Trinny & Susannah: From Boom to Bust is a lot better than a spoof documentary about makeover presenters has any right to be. The chap who played Nathan Barley is especially brilliant/odious as their faithless agent.
*I do also have Tom McCarthy's C out of the library - and while I've yet to start it, it's pretty unprecedented that I would even attempt two books from a modern Booker longlist, so they're doing something at least that right.
An early passage which goes some way to summing up the sprawling, glorious boarding school tragicomedy of (extended) adolescence that is Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. Set in a boarding school, the perspective shifts between a young teacher, wondering if he's supposed to have grown up yet, and the boys - Skippy among them - at the other end of the same inconclusive journey. Even if it were a lot less ambitious than it is, the sheer verve with which Murray catches the dynamics of schoolboy interaction would make this worth reading; I was especially taken with alleged lothario Mario, and his friends' gradual realisation that you should never take advice on girls from anyone who has a lucky condom. But Murray is going for something much bigger than that; I would say that his critique of the modern managerial approach to schools, embodied in acting head 'the Automator', is heavy-handed, except that I recently heard about my old school's new motto 'Together Everyone Achieves More (TEAM)'. And it takes a while for the M-theory subplot to make clear what it's doing in the book except providing a hobby for Skippy's room-mate, the rotund genius/bullsh1tter Ruprecht. There is, as well, a little too much event, and not quite the same charm, in the book's final third, once the eponymous event has come to pass. Still, it was a Booker longlist entry which looks a lot better than most of the shortlist* and, given this was only his second novel, I will take great interest in Murray's further work. So much quotable stuff in there, but I shall restrain myself to one more:
"Violence solves everything, you idiot, look at the history of the world. Any situation they have, they dick around with it for a while, then they bring in violence. That's the whole reason they have scientists, to make violence more violent."
Beyond that, plenty of pubbing this weekend and one rather splendid gig at which, for the first time, I saw the Video Club and the Art Goblins, two noughties indie outfits I feared I had missed forever. And what outfits - the Video Club resplendent in Regency frills and a flashing green line protruding from the keyboardist's fly, Art Goblins in matching jackets like a fifties US street gang. Plus Small Crew, Dream Themes and Mr Solo, and possibly too much of the Buffalo Bar's house white. Happy times.
Trinny & Susannah: From Boom to Bust is a lot better than a spoof documentary about makeover presenters has any right to be. The chap who played Nathan Barley is especially brilliant/odious as their faithless agent.
*I do also have Tom McCarthy's C out of the library - and while I've yet to start it, it's pretty unprecedented that I would even attempt two books from a modern Booker longlist, so they're doing something at least that right.
