'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Yesterday I finished a peculiar little book which left me almost more interested in its publisher than itself. Capuchin Classics have borrowed the green Penguin are no longer using for their modern classics - or perhaps one a shade away from it. They otherwise have a more uniform look, though - and not a bad one, pencil drawings for the covers, all very tasteful. The indicia lists not a publisher or editor in chief, but a chatelaine. And their selection includes a few standard, public domain classics - and then a lot of books like this one of which I had never previously heard. Clearly a labour of love; I approve.
The book itself was The Green Child by Herbert Read, of whom I knew little except that he wasn't conventionally known as a novelist - apparently this was his only one. Apparently he was an anarchist poet and critic; of those three descriptors, only 'poet' would you deduce from The Green Child. There are parts where I was reminded of Graham Greene, who supplies the introduction - except that this is a Greeneland where everything works out for the best, in peace. Something about the quality of the light made me think of Firbank, except that there's none of his fussiness in the style or his loucheness to the content. As the title suggests, the story deals with the myth of green children, except updated to the nineteenth century. Or at least, half the story does, because while the protagonist is returning to the sleepy English village where he grew up, he spent much of his life - and more than half the pages - leading the South American republic of Roncador (yes, of course it got namechecked in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) - hence a Study in Scarlet situation where for most of the book we're away from the ostensible interest. Still, it does mean we get two rather unsettling but apparently sincere utopias in one short novel, and that's some going.

Not a week of great eventfulness, unless you count the strictly local excitement of a new Sainsbury's on the Maisionette Beautiful's block. The weekend saw another fine Nuisance and another Dons rehearsal (we shall be on the internet wireless tomorrow at 2pm), and an engagement party en route to which I again took the gamble of a 'shortcut' along the canal. If this has ever worked, it doesn't with the works currently underway, but it can produce other, more interesting results. Such as finding oneself on a floating walkway which leads, ultimately, to St Pancras Old Church and Coroner's Court - two key locations in the Bryant & May book I read recently, as spookily London as one could wish in the autumn twilight.

My free Blockbuster trial* is up now, and the last of the DVDs have been watched and returned. Odd blighters they were too: both Youth in Revolt and Observe and Report star stars of Superbad, but neither is funny. At least in the latter case it seems to be deliberate. The set-up - mall security guard with delusions of grandeur - could easily have been funny. Keep the exact same script and cast Will Ferrell, you'd have a comedy. But the way Seth Rogen plays the part, it's really quite upsetting. And intermittently brilliant, especially when it skewers the standard Hollywood rhetoric about sticking to your dreams &c.
Also seen: Joe Meek biopic Telstar, which is very good though I preferred the early, funnier hour; and Centurion, in which Dog Soldiers director Neil Marshall basically remakes his bonkers Doomsday, except this time it's the real Hadrian's Wall instead of a near future one, and shot in the real Scotland instead of South Africa. Whether it has the right idea about the fate of Rome's Ninth Legion I don't know, but it does have a damn fine cast (David Morrissey, Noel Clarke, Dominic West whom some readers might like to know spends much of his appearance topless and/or in chains), and some Iraq resonances which are fairly deftly handled, and an awful lot of gore. Albeit some of it historically inaccurate gore, because the Roman legionary's gladius was not a slashing sword.

*Not strictly free, in that it's a quid for a month. But because I'm signed up to Cashback Kings, I get £7.50 back, so in fact it works out better than free. I got a tenner from a Lovefilm trial via the same method, but that only lasted half as long. Swings and roundabouts.

Managed to get a bit further afield over the weekend. On Friday, to Old Street - yes, technically it's walking distance, but still. I've never been to the Foundry before, in spite of its KLF connections, but I like it; proper East London eccentricity, as opposed to East London dullards desperately trying to look eccentric like so many venues in the area. Admittedly I did briefly think that the latest Barley craze was for stupidly oversized bags which are really inconvenient in a crowded bar, but then I realised that the place was popular with genuine cycle couriers, which is fair enough. Then on to the Bedroom Bar, which looks like the 'cool club' set from a TV show, and for all I know may have been used as one. Not quite my scene, but in the sort of way where I can still wish it well and feel happy for the people who've found their place there, even the ones who aren't already my friends.
Saturday night was Hackney, specifically the Old Ship, return venue for darkmarcpi's birthday after a break last year. Formerly a pleasantly shabby pub, it is now an 'urban inn'. In brief, that means a gastropub with random capitalisation on the signage, a bit of apostrophe crime, and rooms upstairs. "Why not turn a Good night into a Great night." ask signs in the loos, without a question mark. Translation: "If you've pulled, but you reckon even the taxi ride will be long enough for her to sober up, why not drop £70 on a room upstairs and get right down to it? Yeah, this is Hackney and that's considerably more than you'd pay for a prostitute round here, but the clientele here are considerably cleaner and slightly less likely to nick all your money for crack." Classy.
Then on Sunday, properly out of home territory and down to Putney for the Tubewalk. Sunshine! Riverside! Flowers! Parkour! A large dead fish! A pub with a sign forbidding buggies that implied a terrible past! And no fewer than seven pugs, although I imagine atommickbrane will be blogging them in more detail.

I'm reading Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop - A History of the Hip Hop Generation and, after the preamble setting the scene in the Bronx and Jamaica, I'm just at the part where DJ Kool Herc invents hip hop. The best bit of which is that, in a music subsequently so handicapped by an obsession with "keeping it real", Herc tells us about how important it was to lose his Jamaican accent, a process which in places involved singing along to his parents' Jim Reeves records.
(And the godfather of subway graffiti, Cornbread, was apparently just doing it to impress a girl called Cynthia. Just like poor bloody Davis in that Graham Greene book I was reading. Similarly, while reading about Kool Herc I also find myself with another volume of Marvel's The Incredible Hercules, featuring the original Herc. Connections everywhere)

Bruce Sterling interview which I strongly suspect has been filleted for a 'death of the novel' angle. The death of decent interviews in the mainstream media might be a better topic; see also that Pet Shop Boys interview in Saturday's Guardian mag, which devoted about half as much space to interviewing one of the best and most readable bands in Britain as it did to pictures of them in £1300 parkas which look functionally indistinguishable to the ones various of my friends have and which, in the cases where I know how much they cost, seem generally to have been in the low double figures. Still, not quite as offensive as the Alexa Chung 'recession chic' special a couple of weeks back (buy British - but designer British, ie still hundreds per cardigan and 45 frakking pounds for socks).

Off to Devon for most of this week; see you all on the other side.

New Bill Drummond participatory performance piece, running November-December on Kingsland Road - anyone else interested in attending?

Next Wednesday, ITV are showing a modern take on Frankenstein by Bodies' Jed Mercurio. The comparison's not exact, but if you think roughly in terms of Jekyll, you'll get there. After watching the first half, I was itching to plug it to all and sundry. It's incredibly well-timed, bouncing off the (arguable, possible) creation of artificial life into Jon Gibbs' prize-winning picture of lightning hitting a windmill at Scroby Sands. The cast is excellent, including Cherie Blair from The Queen as Frankenstein, that bloke from Drop The Dead Donkey, Servilia and Anthony from Rome, and Errol from Fifteen Storeys High. The monster's design is cunning, playing the same trick Dagon pulled when it based the Deep Ones on octopodes rather than fish, making the comfortably monstrous truly uncanny again. The sets and atmosphere have something of the same near-future despair as Children of Men, and the skies (post-volcanic storms such as those prevalent around Mary Shelley's writing of the original novel) are brilliant.
And then I got chance to watch the second half and...maybe it's my own fault for breaking the mood, but the magic was gone.

Every now and then I read a Graham Greene; I opted for A Gun For Sale this time mainly because I'd read a JM Coetzee piece claiming Brighton Rock as its sequel, and the idea of a famed book being the sequel to a less-known one interested me*. Finding an edition with an introduction by a fellow I used to know was a bonus, though personally I'd prefer to give away rather less of the plot, and restrain myself to saying that the book's conspiracy thriller plot is startlingly modern. Though perhaps it would be truer to say, in the field of human failure, we've yet to produce a writer who's advanced past Greene.
I had never really thought of the industrial Midlands as a territory of Greeneland, but really that was foolish of me; they're awash with the broken and the bitter and the compromised, bully boys "living in their vulgar, vivid way for five years before the long provincial interment of a lifetime".

Even with the humourless prigs up in arms about any chink in the smoking ban*, and the poisoning of hearts and minds against alcohol well underway, I was still quite amazed by the latest news from the fat front:
"In this environment it was surprising that anyone was able to remain thin, Dr Susan Jebb of the Medical Research Council said, and so the notion of obesity simply being a product of personal over-indulgence had to be abandoned for good."
If you're going to take that line, if you're going to abandon any belief in personal choice or free will or human willpower, then surely it is inconsistent to persevere with democracy? How can the British people possibly be trusted to choose their leaders but not their lunch?

Plugging the NME's predictably dire 'Love Music Hate Racism' CD (if you loved music, you wouldn't be putting out CDs with The Enemy and both ex-'Libertines' on), Kele from Bloc Party says "there are lots of people who would be happier if I wasn't in this country". True, but that's got nothing to do with the colour of your skin, Kele - they just heard your album.

*As much as anything because it would spite the sort of lit-crit snobs who disdain sequels. Turns out it's more of a spin-off, but I suppose one shouldn't expect a Serious Writer to be competent in the use of such terms.
**And I think it's worth mentioning here - you know how one of the justifications was to protect those obliged (by our archaic unemployment laws) to work in pubs? The other night I passed a pub whose staff were enjoying the time-honoured afterhours staff pint. Two of them were also savouring fags; the others' faces betrayed no sign of discontent with this.