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

As many of you will doubtless already have seen all over your friendslists, the New Royal Family once again decided to use my 'unconvincing disapproval' face to spice up the video to their latest smash, which for all I know may be the last music video Britons can watch on Youtube. The NRF are also playing the Gaff on Holloway Road this evening, so why not come along and see if I can look as unconvincingly disapproving in the flesh? Or alternately just watch the band, which would probably be a better idea all round.

Which item leads because it at least makes me look halfway cool, and since last posting, I have been otherwise been engaging in high-grade geekery to such a degree that even I still feel a little nervous about admitting to it. Well, OK, and I did go to lovely Soul Mole. But still, too many dice. As has been pointed out, compared to the various other midlife crises on offer, it's less deleterious than most.

I'm reading Graham Greene's The Human Factor - not one of his best, thus far. But it is a late effort, coming from 1978. Which feels weird right off - Graham Greene, whose Greeneland always feels so thoroughly mid-20th Century, was writing during my life. I'd...not even forgotten when he died, just never even considered the notion that he might not have passed with his age, like the Elves departing Middle Earth for the Grey Havens. But he had a book out in 1988. He died in 1991 - the same year Will Self published his first book (which I mention not as a passing of the baton but because Self is one of the few writers anywhere near the modern British literary mainstream whom I think worth reading). 1991 is, of course, 18 years ago, which is odd because in my head the eighties are still only circa ten years ago. And is Greene being anachronistic by having MI6 business sealed over grouse shoots in 1978, or am I forgetting how much of old England still persisted then? Especially given recent musings on Black Box Recorder and Red Riding, I suspect it's at least as much the latter.

Been a while since I woke up in the afternoon! Testament to the majesty of Soul Mole, I would say.

You ever read one of those print-on-demand books? I can see the appeal of the idea, certainly - there are books where it doesn't make economic sense to have a warehouse full of ready stock, but where the long tail means you can make money by having one ready to roll when someone flashes the cash. I was glad to see some when I realised Westminster libraries, presumably on the same jag that led them recently to acquire what looks suspiciously like the complete works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, had bought in a couple of POD editions of stories by the great Arthur Machen (acquaintance of Wilde, inspiration to Lovecraft, and inadvertent originator of the legend of the Angels of Mons). One of them I hadn't read; 'The Terror'. Which (in with the mixture of essential conservatism, structural imbalance, genuinely queasy horror and strange, pagan poetry one expects from Machen) manages, with its references to Huvelius' De Facinore Humano, to anticipate Ken MacLeod's conception of the True Knowledge - a philosophy founded on the most pessimistic cynicism about human nature which breeds utopian results. But, typically, I digress. The edition was not the one I had on my Facebook bookshelf, but one from www.kessinger.net and blow me, it was a disaster. I don't mean the cheapo production or binding, I expected that from POD. I mean the text. Words change spelling within a sentence, even the word which gives the story its title sometimes becoming 'tenor'. Paragraphs break
at random points in sentences. or punctuation appears where it is not wanted,, or already placed. It is, as best I can tell, the same text available free online here - though in an appropriately Machenical turn of events, such errors are, for no reason on which one can put one's finger, somehow less of an affront on screen.
Still, enough - the publishers distracted me from the text once, I should not let them so totally distract my account from it too. Over to Machen for the close, as he explains why conventional ideas of detection tend to let us down when confronted with the unprecedented:
"You can't believe what you don't see: rather, you can't see what you don't believe...mere facts, without the correlating idea, are nothing and lead to no conclusion."

Who could have guessed that "one of the world's most wanted men" would be a nasty piece of work called James Bulger? Makes me wonder whether Jon Venables and Robert Thompson really were just children-gone-wrong; I'm thinking in terms of a story about a time traveller's embarrassment at going back to the early twentieth century and bumping off a perfectly innocent baby who happened to share the name Adolf Hitler.
(In other dead child news, the McCanns' latest attempt to point the finger at anyone but themselves would seem to implicate cult superhero and Rorschach inspiration The Question. Who did always come across as a bit strange, but this really doesn't strike me as his style)

Anyone looking for a smallish, scuzzy but workable venue in North London - I can make a recommendation (if not an unreserved one) of Bar Monsta in Camden. I was there to see the Indelicates on Wednesday and while the sound wasn't perfect for the live bands (a bit of mic trouble, mainly), I've seen much worse in venues with better reps. The band themselves were charming as ever, opening with what I gradually realised were the lyrics to 'Breakin' The Law' over the intro of their own 'Fun Is For The Feeble-Minded'. Later I feared they were about to sell out by doing an encore, but having hushed the crowd's applause, Julia whistled briefly, then went back to putting her keyboard away. Heroine.