Books on my bedside table

The following books are currently on my bedside table:

1. The Case Of The General’s Thumb – Andrey Kurkov
2. The Hundred And Ninety-Nine Steps – Michel Faber
3. Short Stories – W. Somerset Maugham
4. Fup – Jim Dodge
5. The Virago Book Of Twins And Doubles – Penelope Farmer
6. The Penguin Dictionary Of Curious And Interesting Numbers – David Wells
7. Complete Prose – Woody Allen
8. Pun Fun – Paul Jennings
9. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
10. Limericks For All Occasions – Linda Marsh
11. Forgotten Voices Of The Great War – Max Arthur

Number 7 is quoted in number 9. I can’t recall any other relationships at the moment.

Can you guess which books the following come from?

To the delight of numerologists, the primitive Pythagorean triangle whose sides are 693, 1924 and 2045 has area 666, 666.

Sticks float, but then, they wood.

Potato Picking: The Glory Years

D. tells me he has ghostwritten a book for Laurie Cooper about her grandfather’s days as a potato picker. It sounds riveting.

PG Wodehouse

The colourful paperback cost me £5.99 a few years ago. The twenty shiny hardbacks (each containing the equivalent of two paperbacks) cost me £10 for the lot. A saving of over £200; and the writing is pretty good too.

“What ho!” I said.
“What ho!” said Motty.
“What ho! What ho!”
“What ho! What ho! What ho!”
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.

The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry

The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry is a huge collection of “Beat” poetry from the last half of the 20th century. It contains offensive poems, weird poems and redemptive poems. Much of it is rubbish although I concede that some of the poems were written to be performed rather than read.
The best stuff mainly comes from people I would probably not have heard of had I not read this book. But there are also contributions from people better known from non-poetry fields, such as Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Tupac Shakur, James Dean, Che Guevara, Norman Mailer, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor….
The final section contains poetry by various members of The Unbearables; here is an unbearable poem by Sparrow:

Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain
Kurt Cobain
Backwards his name is
NO I BAC TRUK

Kurt Cobain
He never backed up the truck

He was young
He often sung

He was in Nirvana
They never played Havana

If he had embraced
Marxist revolution,
he might still be alive today

But then he would’ve
had to give
all his money away

Better to be rich and dead
than poor and alive,
so said Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain
He should’ve backed up the truck

You know the lady no?

I just found this poem screwed up in a folder. I wrote it when I was fifteen. I wonder if I once knew what it meant.

You know the lady no?
(Not the no I know now)
(Yes) No. (No)
No I don’t think so.
I asked the lady called askme
(she said ask me)
(that is askme no)
She said no you know? No.
Askme no answered no.
(No that is askme no)
(No) Yes. (No)
Don’t ask me askme.

Amaztype

The above text was created by using images of Pixies’ album covers. Amaztype did this for me. Type in a phrase and it will display it using the covers of books, CDs or DVDs that relate to it.

Opening Lines

I wrote two wonderful short stories during the Christmas holiday: The Ramshackle Clocktower Mystery and The Phoenix. I continue to work on my first novel, Duke. I sometimes find it difficult to write a convincing first line. I think of some memorable opening lines… Are they convincing?

"All children, except one, grow up."

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York."

"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since."

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

Re-reading Books

An article in today’s Independent reported that Oxfam and Barnado’s intend to open dedicated book stores to benefit from booming sales in second-hand titles. A survey by Oxfam showed:
30% of people had more than 500 books in their homes.
18% of people frequently re-read books.
35% of people rarely or never picked up a book for a second time.

I used to read a novel and then put it on the bookshelf to collect dust. My thinking: I have so many books that I have not yet read, that to re-read an old favourite would be a waste of my precious free time.
However, this year I have returned to a number of books that I have enjoyed over the years. They are not the same books at all. Suppose I read the same book twice, with a pause of ten years in between. Then everything that I have experienced in the intervening years causes me to approach the book afresh, offering new understanding and enjoyment.
As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said: no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

So, I recommend re-reading old favourites – and those that are unreadable to you may be just what Oxfam and Barnado’s shoppers are looking for.

Cheese

G. K. Chesterton once wrote “Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

May I introduce the great Canadian James McIntyre, who I discovered in that delightful anthology The World’s Worst Poetry? Included is his epic poem entitled Ode On the Mammoth Cheese (weight over seven thousand pounds), including such verses as:

Cows numerous as a swarm of bees,
Or as the leaves upon the trees,
It did require to make thee please,
And stand unrivalled, queen of cheese.

James McIntyre has apparently inspired the Online Dairy Ode Competition: The contest is exclusively for dairy odes, which are poems written about cheese, milk, yogourt, cows, goats, cheesemaking, dairy farming, or anything else to do with dairying and dairy products.

What would GK Chesterton make of it all?

The Nose

Now I am so nearly unemployed, I have vowed not to buy any more books – I already have so many unread ones and there’s a library just down the road.

However, I think I need to get a copy of Diary of a Madman, and Other Stories… by Gogol. I need this as it contains “The Nose”, which apparently tells the story of a nose transforming into a civil servant and back into a nose. I love these kind of stories, although I can’t think of many others just now.
I am told that Gogol himself had a long nose and am aware of some of his writing on the subject:

“The moon is made by some lame cooper, and you can see the idiot has no idea about moons at all. He put in a creosoted rope and some wood oil; and this has led to such a terrible stink all over the earth that you have to hold your nose. Another reason the moon is such a tender globe it that people just cannot live on it any more, and all that’s left alive there are noses. This is also why we cannot see our own noses – they’re all on the moon.”
(from Diary of a Madman)