Exploding helicopters #14 Douglas Coupland - The Gum Thief I was tweeting about reading All Families Are Psychotic last week, and my friend Nathan said that this was one of his favourites by Coupland. I’d had it in my to-read pile (which is more like a to-read bookshelf if I’m truthful) for ages, so I ignored my natural tendency to avoid reading two books by the same author in succession. I don’t agree that it’s one of his best, mainly because the excerpts from the (terrible) novel being written by the main dude stop being amusing very early on. He’s an old alcoholic loser who works in Staples and strikes up this bizarre pen pal arrangement with a young goth girl who also works there. They take the piss out of creative writing classes by sending each other new interpretations of buttered toast - from the toast’s perspective. As usual with Douglas Coupland, it was the bits about how life is utterly pointless that I liked the best, but there were some funny bits (not included here because I could just copy out entire chapters) about going to London and realising that the only food available is packaged sandwiches. Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want. “How did society ever function without you, little Sharpies? Your nibs have the precise amount of give to create a line quality with character, yet not so much character as to be smushy. Thank you, little pens.” I read in a newspaper last week about this scientist who claims that the human race will, over the upcoming millennia, split into two distinct species. One will be a superhuman race, the other, Gollum-like hunckbacked retards. His argument is that selective breeding will produce an underclass that will then become a distinct race. Scientists have already isolated part of our DNA that ‘intelligent,’ ‘sociable’ types have and others don’t. I think these scientists should come into Staples and do some DNA swabbing. I think we’ve already leapt into that future and the rest of humanity needs to catch up with us. Douglas Coupland - The Gum ThiefPublication date: 2007Published by: BloomsburyPrice then: £10.99Price now: I wish I could remember. I’m the worst blogger ever.Bought from: Pretty sure it was Ebay, although it might have come from somewhere in Hay-on-Wye. From the synopsis: “Coupland reminds us that love, death and eternal friendship can all occur where and when we least expect them and that, even after tragedy has hit, one can still find solace in the comedy and strange comforts of modern life.”

Exploding helicopters #14

Douglas Coupland - The Gum Thief

I was tweeting about reading All Families Are Psychotic last week, and my friend Nathan said that this was one of his favourites by Coupland. I’d had it in my to-read pile (which is more like a to-read bookshelf if I’m truthful) for ages, so I ignored my natural tendency to avoid reading two books by the same author in succession.

I don’t agree that it’s one of his best, mainly because the excerpts from the (terrible) novel being written by the main dude stop being amusing very early on. He’s an old alcoholic loser who works in Staples and strikes up this bizarre pen pal arrangement with a young goth girl who also works there. They take the piss out of creative writing classes by sending each other new interpretations of buttered toast - from the toast’s perspective. As usual with Douglas Coupland, it was the bits about how life is utterly pointless that I liked the best, but there were some funny bits (not included here because I could just copy out entire chapters) about going to London and realising that the only food available is packaged sandwiches.

Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.

“How did society ever function without you, little Sharpies? Your nibs have the precise amount of give to create a line quality with character, yet not so much character as to be smushy. Thank you, little pens.”

I read in a newspaper last week about this scientist who claims that the human race will, over the upcoming millennia, split into two distinct species. One will be a superhuman race, the other, Gollum-like hunckbacked retards. His argument is that selective breeding will produce an underclass that will then become a distinct race. Scientists have already isolated part of our DNA that ‘intelligent,’ ‘sociable’ types have and others don’t. I think these scientists should come into Staples and do some DNA swabbing. I think we’ve already leapt into that future and the rest of humanity needs to catch up with us.

Douglas Coupland - The Gum Thief
Publication date: 2007
Published by: Bloomsbury
Price then: £10.99
Price now: I wish I could remember. I’m the worst blogger ever.
Bought from: Pretty sure it was Ebay, although it might have come from somewhere in Hay-on-Wye.

From the synopsis: “Coupland reminds us that love, death and eternal friendship can all occur where and when we least expect them and that, even after tragedy has hit, one can still find solace in the comedy and strange comforts of modern life.”

--Tagged under: douglas coupland--

--Tagged under: exploding helicopters--

Exploding helicopters #13 Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus It took me about 85 years to read this book because of stressful uni times, but Vonnegut’s nice like that; you can appreciate his nuances even if you’ve pretty much forgotten what happened at the start. Hocus Pocus is another one which is big on the anti-war message, featuring a Vietnam vet who is sacked from a school for rich dyslexics just before a massive prison break on the other side of the valley. He sleeps around, but only with older women who are emotionally damaged and hanging on my a thread. I am certainly sorry if I ruined the lives of any of those women who believed me when I said I loved them. I can only hope against hope that Shirley Kern and all the rest of them are still OK. If it is any consolation to those who may not be OK, my own life was ruined by a Science Fair. An appropriate sign to put over the gate to Athena might have been, instead of ‘Work Makes Free’, for example: ‘Too bad you were born. Nobody has any use for you,’ or maybe: ‘Come in and stay in, all you burdens on Society’. If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties, talking about what it felt like to die for other people’s vanity and foolishness. Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus PocusPublication date: 1991Published by: VintagePrice then: £6.99Price now: £0.99Bought from: Ebay

Exploding helicopters #13

Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

It took me about 85 years to read this book because of stressful uni times, but Vonnegut’s nice like that; you can appreciate his nuances even if you’ve pretty much forgotten what happened at the start. Hocus Pocus is another one which is big on the anti-war message, featuring a Vietnam vet who is sacked from a school for rich dyslexics just before a massive prison break on the other side of the valley. He sleeps around, but only with older women who are emotionally damaged and hanging on my a thread.

I am certainly sorry if I ruined the lives of any of those women who believed me when I said I loved them. I can only hope against hope that Shirley Kern and all the rest of them are still OK. If it is any consolation to those who may not be OK, my own life was ruined by a Science Fair.

An appropriate sign to put over the gate to Athena might have been, instead of ‘Work Makes Free’, for example: ‘Too bad you were born. Nobody has any use for you,’ or maybe: ‘Come in and stay in, all you burdens on Society’.

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties, talking about what it felt like to die for other people’s vanity and foolishness.

Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus
Publication date: 1991
Published by: Vintage
Price then: £6.99
Price now: £0.99
Bought from: Ebay

--Tagged under: exploding helicopters--

--Tagged under: kurt vonnegut--

Exploding helicopters #12 Joe Boyd - White Bicycles This book had been on my radar for years, since I’m a devotee of Nick Drake and, even more so, John Martyn, who Joe Boyd produced in the early 70s. I can be a bit snobbish about autobiographies though. Much as I enjoy reading about interesting lives, I can’t help but think that writing fiction is more impressive than writing about some stuff that you did once. I also get irritated when it’s quite obvious that entire careers have been built on being in the right place at the right time. There’s a fair bit of silver spoon about Joe Boyd’s life. He went to Harvard and had enough money to fly across the world several times while still a student. But he’s more than just some rich hippy, because there’s definitely an entrepeneurial spirit there. He dug up a load of old blues dudes and took them out on tour, and opened the UFO club in London when there was nowhere else for the freaks to trip on a Saturday night. It’s the bits about Nick Drake that were really moving though. I prefer things a little louder now, but I listened to barely anything else when I was 16 and 17, so it’s so tragic to read about him slipping off everyone’s radar before his overdose. The drug laws of Britain and America are enforced almost exclusively against the underclasses. In the sixties, the authorities were genuinely rattled by ‘respectable’ kids using drugs: it seemed to represent the end of civilsation as they knew it. Now that stockbroker snort coke, millions of kids take ecstasy every weekend and society continues to function ‘normally’, they can concentrate on the ever dangerous poor, using drug laws as another form of intiimidation and retribution. History today seems more like a postmodern collage; we are surrounded by two-dimensional representations of our heritage. Access via amazon.com or iPod to all those boxed sets of old blues singers - or Nick Drake, for that matter - doesn’t equate with the sense of discovery and connection we experienced. The very existence of such a wealth of information creates an overload that can drown out vivid moments of revelation. Publication date: 2006Publisher: Serpent’s TailPrice then: £11.99Price now: £2.80Bought from: EbayFrom the synopsis: “Joe Boyd’s first proper job at 21 was bringing Muddy Waters to Britain in 1964. When Dylan went electric at Newport the following year, Boyd was stage manager. His first session as a record producer was Eric Clapton’s original ‘Crossroads’. A year later, he produced Pink Floyd’s first single and installed them in his UFO club, the heart of psychedelic London.”

Exploding helicopters #12

Joe Boyd - White Bicycles

This book had been on my radar for years, since I’m a devotee of Nick Drake and, even more so, John Martyn, who Joe Boyd produced in the early 70s. I can be a bit snobbish about autobiographies though. Much as I enjoy reading about interesting lives, I can’t help but think that writing fiction is more impressive than writing about some stuff that you did once. I also get irritated when it’s quite obvious that entire careers have been built on being in the right place at the right time.

There’s a fair bit of silver spoon about Joe Boyd’s life. He went to Harvard and had enough money to fly across the world several times while still a student. But he’s more than just some rich hippy, because there’s definitely an entrepeneurial spirit there. He dug up a load of old blues dudes and took them out on tour, and opened the UFO club in London when there was nowhere else for the freaks to trip on a Saturday night. It’s the bits about Nick Drake that were really moving though. I prefer things a little louder now, but I listened to barely anything else when I was 16 and 17, so it’s so tragic to read about him slipping off everyone’s radar before his overdose.

The drug laws of Britain and America are enforced almost exclusively against the underclasses. In the sixties, the authorities were genuinely rattled by ‘respectable’ kids using drugs: it seemed to represent the end of civilsation as they knew it. Now that stockbroker snort coke, millions of kids take ecstasy every weekend and society continues to function ‘normally’, they can concentrate on the ever dangerous poor, using drug laws as another form of intiimidation and retribution.

History today seems more like a postmodern collage; we are surrounded by two-dimensional representations of our heritage. Access via amazon.com or iPod to all those boxed sets of old blues singers - or Nick Drake, for that matter - doesn’t equate with the sense of discovery and connection we experienced. The very existence of such a wealth of information creates an overload that can drown out vivid moments of revelation.

Publication date: 2006
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Price then: £11.99
Price now: £2.80
Bought from: Ebay
From the synopsis: “Joe Boyd’s first proper job at 21 was bringing Muddy Waters to Britain in 1964. When Dylan went electric at Newport the following year, Boyd was stage manager. His first session as a record producer was Eric Clapton’s original ‘Crossroads’. A year later, he produced Pink Floyd’s first single and installed them in his UFO club, the heart of psychedelic London.”

--Tagged under: joe boyd--

--Tagged under: exploding helicopters--

Exploding helicopters #11 Norman Mailer - An American Dream I kinda imagined this book as an X-rated Hitchcock movie, with the kind of voiceover that used to be on old public information films. It’s a bit… noir I guess, all police interrogation cells, seedy boarding houses and Mob connections. It was glamorous but massively violent too; definitely felt like I was reading a film. Whether I liked it or not, I still haven’t decided. I like Mailer’s characters, but found my mind wandering every so often, and then then ending was just plain nonsense. An old gangster reveals that he was sexually attracted to his late daughter and then makes her husband walk around on the edge of a tall building? I’m sorry, what? Something in the deep of that full moon, some tender and not so innocent radiance traveled fast as the thought of lightning across our night sky, out of the depths of the dead in those caverns of the moon, out and a leap through space and into me. And suddenly I understood the moon. “French mental hospitals are unspeakable. I almost didn’t get out. I had to threaten my family that I would marry the resident there, a funny little old dark French Jewish doctor who smelled like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I swear he did, and my family sprung me. They weren’t going to have some ratty little French Jew slurping up there soup and telling them how to go on a wild boar hunt, you know the French, they tell you everything whether you know it or not. God, I hate the French.” It had always been the same, love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it, dear friend. “Why, hello, hon, I thought you’d never call. It’s kind of cool right now, and the girls are swell. Marilyn says to say hello. We get along, which is odd, you know, because girls don’t swing. But toodle-oo, old baby-boy, and keep the dice for free, the moon is out and she’s a mother to me.” Publication date: 1994.Publisher: Flamingo.Price then: £8.99.Price now £4.Bought from: Quinto on Charing Cross Road.From the synopsis: “Stephen Rojack lived the American Dream, but his enviable life concealed a strange tension, the constant ‘itch to jump’, and when one day he finally cracks and strangles his luscious wife, he unleashes a personality of undreamt-of ferocity.”

Exploding helicopters #11

Norman Mailer - An American Dream

I kinda imagined this book as an X-rated Hitchcock movie, with the kind of voiceover that used to be on old public information films. It’s a bit… noir I guess, all police interrogation cells, seedy boarding houses and Mob connections. It was glamorous but massively violent too; definitely felt like I was reading a film. Whether I liked it or not, I still haven’t decided. I like Mailer’s characters, but found my mind wandering every so often, and then then ending was just plain nonsense. An old gangster reveals that he was sexually attracted to his late daughter and then makes her husband walk around on the edge of a tall building? I’m sorry, what?

Something in the deep of that full moon, some tender and not so innocent radiance traveled fast as the thought of lightning across our night sky, out of the depths of the dead in those caverns of the moon, out and a leap through space and into me. And suddenly I understood the moon.

“French mental hospitals are unspeakable. I almost didn’t get out. I had to threaten my family that I would marry the resident there, a funny little old dark French Jewish doctor who smelled like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I swear he did, and my family sprung me. They weren’t going to have some ratty little French Jew slurping up there soup and telling them how to go on a wild boar hunt, you know the French, they tell you everything whether you know it or not. God, I hate the French.”

It had always been the same, love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it, dear friend.

“Why, hello, hon, I thought you’d never call. It’s kind of cool right now, and the girls are swell. Marilyn says to say hello. We get along, which is odd, you know, because girls don’t swing. But toodle-oo, old baby-boy, and keep the dice for free, the moon is out and she’s a mother to me.”

Publication date: 1994.
Publisher: Flamingo.
Price then: £8.99.
Price now £4.
Bought from: Quinto on Charing Cross Road.
From the synopsis: “Stephen Rojack lived the American Dream, but his enviable life concealed a strange tension, the constant ‘itch to jump’, and when one day he finally cracks and strangles his luscious wife, he unleashes a personality of undreamt-of ferocity.”

--Tagged under: exploding helicopters--

--Tagged under: norman mailer--

Exploding helicopters #10 Mark Hodkinson - The Last Mad Surge Of Youth This was the damaged copy that I mentioned in my last post about Amazon Marketplace. The little rip is just under my thumb. I know what you’re thinking: THAT little bit of nothing is enough to warrant chucking this book onto the internet scrapheap? Apparently so. There was, however, something more disappointing to follow. The Last Mad Surge Of Youth is interesting because each teeny tiny chapter (sometimes two or three on each page - do they even count as chapters?) jumped backwards and forwards in time, from 1980s working class England, where a group of schoolmates were forming their first bands and making their first fanzines, to retrospective wanderings from a couple of those band members later in life. One was famous, had a drink problem, and was still desperately trying to bring down the establishment from within, and the other had left the band at an early age, got married and divorced, and worked at a local paper. The pair of them were bitter and twisted old has-beens, they were just bitter and twisted about different stuff. Which is why this book was so disappointing. Not only were the passages written about the young, anti-Thatcher Killing Stars so much funnier and more insightful, but the vitality of the characters at the beginning made the sections with Barrett getting wankered while he plays his own records all night long, or the bit where Carey has this empty, soulless shag in the back of a car after his wife’s left him, so very very pathetic. It annoys me that the pair of them are such fools, when just 500 words beforehand you’ve been reading about them standing up for their rights as a support band or slagging off employment statistics. Most of the bits I’m about to copy for you are from those early years. It’s a shame it couldn’t all be about then, but I guess the whole point is to communicate the fleeting nature of fame or the natural human need for recognition in life. It really is quite depressing stuff in the end. “When you get good on an instrument you become a slave to the conventional.”“Definitely,” agreed Carey. “Proficiency is a disease.” Ian announced, his voice solemn, that he and Carl had ‘history’. They had met a week earlier at a nightclub where he had subjected Carl to a eulogy on cybernetics, the profundity of Dr Who and a painstaking, paints-peeling-off-a-my-wall dissection of Gary Numan’s lyrics. Ian’s leg had begun to feel warm and, reaching down, he discovered that Carl had pissed on him under the table. “Let’s have it right, how can a few honkies from Slough or wherever play the blues? What do they know about rattlesnakes and sloshing about in a Mississippi swamp looking for rats to eat? Another thing: mouth organs. I fucking hate them. If you ever hear a mouth organ on one of my tracks you have my full permission to stick it up my arse, sideways.” “Wasn’t it John Updike who said celebrity is a mask that eventually eats into your face?”“I didn’t know you read Updike.”I don’t. I just remember good lines and pretend to have read all these cool authors.” Mark Hodkinson - The Last Mad Surge Of YouthPublication date: 2009Publisher: PomonaPrice then: £7.99Price now: £5.54Bought from: Amazon Marketplace

Exploding helicopters #10

Mark Hodkinson - The Last Mad Surge Of Youth

This was the damaged copy that I mentioned in my last post about Amazon Marketplace. The little rip is just under my thumb. I know what you’re thinking: THAT little bit of nothing is enough to warrant chucking this book onto the internet scrapheap? Apparently so.

There was, however, something more disappointing to follow. The Last Mad Surge Of Youth is interesting because each teeny tiny chapter (sometimes two or three on each page - do they even count as chapters?) jumped backwards and forwards in time, from 1980s working class England, where a group of schoolmates were forming their first bands and making their first fanzines, to retrospective wanderings from a couple of those band members later in life. One was famous, had a drink problem, and was still desperately trying to bring down the establishment from within, and the other had left the band at an early age, got married and divorced, and worked at a local paper. The pair of them were bitter and twisted old has-beens, they were just bitter and twisted about different stuff. Which is why this book was so disappointing.

Not only were the passages written about the young, anti-Thatcher Killing Stars so much funnier and more insightful, but the vitality of the characters at the beginning made the sections with Barrett getting wankered while he plays his own records all night long, or the bit where Carey has this empty, soulless shag in the back of a car after his wife’s left him, so very very pathetic. It annoys me that the pair of them are such fools, when just 500 words beforehand you’ve been reading about them standing up for their rights as a support band or slagging off employment statistics. Most of the bits I’m about to copy for you are from those early years. It’s a shame it couldn’t all be about then, but I guess the whole point is to communicate the fleeting nature of fame or the natural human need for recognition in life. It really is quite depressing stuff in the end.

“When you get good on an instrument you become a slave to the conventional.”
“Definitely,” agreed Carey. “Proficiency is a disease.”

Ian announced, his voice solemn, that he and Carl had ‘history’. They had met a week earlier at a nightclub where he had subjected Carl to a eulogy on cybernetics, the profundity of Dr Who and a painstaking, paints-peeling-off-a-my-wall dissection of Gary Numan’s lyrics. Ian’s leg had begun to feel warm and, reaching down, he discovered that Carl had pissed on him under the table.

“Let’s have it right, how can a few honkies from Slough or wherever play the blues? What do they know about rattlesnakes and sloshing about in a Mississippi swamp looking for rats to eat? Another thing: mouth organs. I fucking hate them. If you ever hear a mouth organ on one of my tracks you have my full permission to stick it up my arse, sideways.”

“Wasn’t it John Updike who said celebrity is a mask that eventually eats into your face?”
“I didn’t know you read Updike.”
I don’t. I just remember good lines and pretend to have read all these cool authors.”

Mark Hodkinson - The Last Mad Surge Of Youth
Publication date: 2009
Publisher: Pomona
Price then: £7.99
Price now: £5.54
Bought from: Amazon Marketplace

--Tagged under: mark hodkinson--

--Tagged under: exploding helicopters--

Exploding Helicopters #9 John Updike - In The Beauty Of The Lilies Just to be perfectly clear, I would never ordinarily read a book with such a shit title if it wasn’t by John Updike. John Updike is awesome. He writes books that are unlike most of the other writers I’m into. They’re normally about shit marriages, and In The Beauty Of The Lilies is different only in that it’s about several generations of the same family having shit marriages, and actually one of the marriages works rather well in an endearing aaaw, aren’t they such wonderfully simple folk? kind of a way. It all kicks off with a pastor losing his faith wholly and suddenly in the opening chapter (brilliant brilliant brilliant). Then you meet the docile son Teddy, his daughter Essie, who becomes a movie star, and then her unloved son Clark, who is involved in possibly the most dramatic storyline in any of the Updike books I have read or even been aware of. It’s structured in four main parts, each for that generation’s protagonist, and when each story comes to an end it’s genuinely sad to say goodbye to that character, even if they do reoccur later. None of Updike’s characters are ever 100% likeable, and I find myself wanting to give some people a bloody good talking too, but that’s because he writes real people that you instantly believe in. This isn’s a normal Exploding Helicopters post because there aren’t millions of take-your-breath-away sentences in the book. But there are take-your-breath-away moments, where you’re genuinely frightened or moved or over the moon. They won’t have the same impact here, without the individual backstories, but these are some of the moments that had me emoting like a bastard. “My poor Dad wanted to believe and needed to believe and God stayed silent.”“He’s not silent with me.”“What does He tell you?”Her hand had gone to the sensitive bump behind his fly. “To love you with all my heart,” she said. “To serve you, in the faith that you’ll serve me.” “The M-16’s what they issued us in Vietnam. She’s a sweetie, when she don’t jam. There were a lot of complaints from deceased users about it jamming, so they renamed it from the M-16A1 to the M-16A2 and it worked much better. Here son. You hold her.” “Clark? G-g-g-” She couldn’t say it, couldn’t get past the ‘g’. This simple word. He hung up while she was still trying. His own mother, and all those FBI eavesdroppers listening to her humiliation. “Goodbye,” she said in her bedroom to herself, looking into one of her mirrors, tilting her head this way and that. “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, you idiot,” furious with herself. How fucking sad is that? It kills me. John Updike - In The Beauty Of The LiliesPublication date: 1996Publisher: PenguinPrice then: £6.99Price now: £2Bought from: Some place on Charing Cross Road, London. I didn’t write the name down because I am a bad blogger. From the synopsis: “transcendence, higher reality, immortality, resurrections… a novel of accumulated wisdoms.”

Exploding Helicopters #9

John Updike - In The Beauty Of The Lilies

Just to be perfectly clear, I would never ordinarily read a book with such a shit title if it wasn’t by John Updike. John Updike is awesome. He writes books that are unlike most of the other writers I’m into. They’re normally about shit marriages, and In The Beauty Of The Lilies is different only in that it’s about several generations of the same family having shit marriages, and actually one of the marriages works rather well in an endearing aaaw, aren’t they such wonderfully simple folk? kind of a way.

It all kicks off with a pastor losing his faith wholly and suddenly in the opening chapter (brilliant brilliant brilliant). Then you meet the docile son Teddy, his daughter Essie, who becomes a movie star, and then her unloved son Clark, who is involved in possibly the most dramatic storyline in any of the Updike books I have read or even been aware of. It’s structured in four main parts, each for that generation’s protagonist, and when each story comes to an end it’s genuinely sad to say goodbye to that character, even if they do reoccur later. None of Updike’s characters are ever 100% likeable, and I find myself wanting to give some people a bloody good talking too, but that’s because he writes real people that you instantly believe in.

This isn’s a normal Exploding Helicopters post because there aren’t millions of take-your-breath-away sentences in the book. But there are take-your-breath-away moments, where you’re genuinely frightened or moved or over the moon. They won’t have the same impact here, without the individual backstories, but these are some of the moments that had me emoting like a bastard.

“My poor Dad wanted to believe and needed to believe and God stayed silent.”
“He’s not silent with me.”
“What does He tell you?”
Her hand had gone to the sensitive bump behind his fly. “To love you with all my heart,” she said. “To serve you, in the faith that you’ll serve me.”

“The M-16’s what they issued us in Vietnam. She’s a sweetie, when she don’t jam. There were a lot of complaints from deceased users about it jamming, so they renamed it from the M-16A1 to the M-16A2 and it worked much better. Here son. You hold her.”

“Clark? G-g-g-” She couldn’t say it, couldn’t get past the ‘g’. This simple word. He hung up while she was still trying. His own mother, and all those FBI eavesdroppers listening to her humiliation. “Goodbye,” she said in her bedroom to herself, looking into one of her mirrors, tilting her head this way and that. “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, you idiot,” furious with herself.

How fucking sad is that? It kills me.

John Updike - In The Beauty Of The Lilies
Publication date: 1996
Publisher: Penguin
Price then: £6.99
Price now: £2
Bought from: Some place on Charing Cross Road, London. I didn’t write the name down because I am a bad blogger.

From the synopsis: “transcendence, higher reality, immortality, resurrections… a novel of accumulated wisdoms.”

--Tagged under: exploding helicopters--

--Tagged under: john updike--

Exploding Helicopters #8Ali Smith - Hotel World Dear Ali Smith, I love you long time. Seriously, any time you want. I’ve never really had any homosexual tendencies before but your words totally do it for me. Trains go direct to Cambridge (where you live) from Leicester (where I live) so just say the word and I’ll buy a ticket. If you don’t want me for my body, I’ll even come over to clean your bathroom. I guess it’s the least I can do since this little second-hand books project means that you don’t get a penny from me. I can even put a few quid in an envelope if that’s easier. Do you have PayPal? Yours always (but don’t tell Cormac McCarthy - wouldn’t want him getting jealous) Meg. (and this time I’d throw myself willingly down it wooo- hooooo and this time I’d count as I went, one elephant two eleph-ahh) if I could feel it again, how I hit it, the basement, from four floors up, from toe to head, dead. Dead leg. Dead arm. Dead hand. Dead eye. Dead I, four floors between me and the world, that’s all it took to take me, that’s the measure of it, the length and death of it, the short goodb—. Bring me apples, Bring me (something), Bring me hazlenuts, Bring me wheat, Bring me good things, To eat, Kellogg’s Country Store. The voice still sounded (inside her head all these years later) as if its owner had been brought up on healthy, very good things; it seemed to suggest that eating them every day had made her the successful and socially-upwardly-mobile singer of light classical repertoire that she was, and had got her the morally blameless job of singing on television about these good things precisely for the benefit of others. a terrible way to lose someone close like we lost her in a department store in the sportswear dept & if we went to the customer service desk we could put a call out fro her over the intercom speakers this is a message for Sara Wilby your family is waiting at customer services could Sara Wilby please come back from the dead ah shit ah The people who bought prescriptions in Boots the Chemist yesterday are feeling better, worse or the same. Some have colds. Some have infections. Some have nothing wrong with them. Some feel drowsy and ought not to operate machinery today. See? Isn’t she just amazing? As you can probably tell, Hotel World is about death; one death in particular but really about all deaths. How it is just normal and life goes on, and that sometimes ‘normal’ really means ‘rubbish’, but that’s how life is. Totally fucking love you, Ali Smith. Ali Smith - Hotel WorldPublication date 2002Publisher: PenguinPrice then: £6.99Price now: £1.50Purchased from: The dude under the flyover on Oxford Road, Manchester. From the synopsis: “Brought together - and forced apart - by a bizarre incident involving a dumb waiter, we share their very different experiences of life in the aftermath of death, of pain and sorrow, of hope and love - everything, in fact, that the world dares to throw at us.” You know what, you should totally read this book if you’ve lost someone recently. It’s one of those books that might help, like Jonathon Livingston Seagull.
Exploding Helicopters #8


Ali Smith - Hotel World

Dear Ali Smith,

I love you long time.

Seriously, any time you want. I’ve never really had any homosexual tendencies before but your words totally do it for me. Trains go direct to Cambridge (where you live) from Leicester (where I live) so just say the word and I’ll buy a ticket. If you don’t want me for my body, I’ll even come over to clean your bathroom. I guess it’s the least I can do since this little second-hand books project means that you don’t get a penny from me. I can even put a few quid in an envelope if that’s easier. Do you have PayPal?

Yours always (but don’t tell Cormac McCarthy - wouldn’t want him getting jealous)

Meg.

(and this time I’d throw myself willingly down it wooo-

hooooo and this time I’d count as I went, one elephant two eleph-ahh) if I could feel it again, how I hit it, the basement, from four floors up, from toe to head, dead. Dead leg. Dead arm. Dead hand. Dead eye. Dead I, four floors between me and the world, that’s all it took to take me, that’s the measure of it, the length and death of it, the short goodb—.

Bring me apples, Bring me (something), Bring me hazlenuts, Bring me wheat, Bring me good things, To eat, Kellogg’s Country Store.

The voice still sounded (inside her head all these years later) as if its owner had been brought up on healthy, very good things; it seemed to suggest that eating them every day had made her the successful and socially-upwardly-mobile singer of light classical repertoire that she was, and had got her the morally blameless job of singing on television about these good things precisely for the benefit of others.

a terrible way to lose someone close like we lost her in a department store in the sportswear dept & if we went to the customer service desk we could put a call out fro her over the intercom speakers this is a message for Sara Wilby your family is waiting at customer services could Sara Wilby please come back from the dead ah shit ah

The people who bought prescriptions in Boots the Chemist yesterday are feeling better, worse or the same. Some have colds. Some have infections. Some have nothing wrong with them. Some feel drowsy and ought not to operate machinery today.

See? Isn’t she just amazing?

As you can probably tell, Hotel World is about death; one death in particular but really about all deaths. How it is just normal and life goes on, and that sometimes ‘normal’ really means ‘rubbish’, but that’s how life is.

Totally fucking love you, Ali Smith.

Ali Smith - Hotel World
Publication date 2002
Publisher: Penguin
Price then: £6.99
Price now: £1.50
Purchased from: The dude under the flyover on Oxford Road, Manchester.

From the synopsis: “Brought together - and forced apart - by a bizarre incident involving a dumb waiter, we share their very different experiences of life in the aftermath of death, of pain and sorrow, of hope and love - everything, in fact, that the world dares to throw at us.”

You know what, you should totally read this book if you’ve lost someone recently. It’s one of those books that might help, like Jonathon Livingston Seagull.

--Tagged under: ali smith--

--Tagged under: exploding helicopters--

Exploding Helicopters #7 Mikhail Bulgakov - Heart Of A Dog This story is pretty inspired stuff really. Dude finds a stray dog and transplants a penis and pituitary gland from some murdered lowlife onto him. Then the dog turns into this semi-feral human who likes a drink and works in a government department to purge the city of cats. Amazing, right? Except it just didn’t seem to flow especially well. I know better than to criticise the writing style of one of the most respected Russian writers of all time, so I’m guessing it’s either down to the translation or the fact that it was written in 1925 and just feels a bit dated. Either way, the book didn’t live up to its synopsis. Out of the forty thousand or so Moscow dogs, only an idiot won’t know how to read the word ‘sausage’. “Eat in the bedroom,” he said in a slightly choked voice, “read in the examination room, dress in the waiting room, operate in the maid’s room, and examine patients in the dining room. It is very possible that Isadora Duncan does just this. Perhaps she dines in her office and dissects rabbits in the bathroom. Perhaps. But I am not Isadora Duncan!” “Doctor, would you please take him to the circus? But, for God’s sake, take a look at the program first - make sure they have no cats.” Mikhail Bulgakov - Heart Of A DogPublication date: 1982Publisher: Grove PressPrice then: $5.95Price now: $8Purchased from: Green Apple Books, San Francisco From the synopsis: “His many misadventures, lecherous behaviour, and final denunciation of the doctor himself, drive the exasperated scientist to take most extraordinary measures.”
Exploding Helicopters #7


Mikhail Bulgakov - Heart Of A Dog

This story is pretty inspired stuff really. Dude finds a stray dog and transplants a penis and pituitary gland from some murdered lowlife onto him. Then the dog turns into this semi-feral human who likes a drink and works in a government department to purge the city of cats. Amazing, right?

Except it just didn’t seem to flow especially well. I know better than to criticise the writing style of one of the most respected Russian writers of all time, so I’m guessing it’s either down to the translation or the fact that it was written in 1925 and just feels a bit dated. Either way, the book didn’t live up to its synopsis.

Out of the forty thousand or so Moscow dogs, only an idiot won’t know how to read the word ‘sausage’.

“Eat in the bedroom,” he said in a slightly choked voice, “read in the examination room, dress in the waiting room, operate in the maid’s room, and examine patients in the dining room. It is very possible that Isadora Duncan does just this. Perhaps she dines in her office and dissects rabbits in the bathroom. Perhaps. But I am not Isadora Duncan!”

“Doctor, would you please take him to the circus? But, for God’s sake, take a look at the program first - make sure they have no cats.”

Mikhail Bulgakov - Heart Of A Dog
Publication date: 1982
Publisher: Grove Press
Price then: $5.95
Price now: $8
Purchased from: Green Apple Books, San Francisco

From the synopsis: “His many misadventures, lecherous behaviour, and final denunciation of the doctor himself, drive the exasperated scientist to take most extraordinary measures.”

--Tagged under: exploding helicopters--

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Exploding Helicopters #6 Cormac McCarthy - Cities Of The Plain It has taken me so long to read this book that I can’t actually remember how it started, but that’s no indication of how well I liked it; more that I can’t organise my life at the moment. I feel a little like a broken record on this site, since every other post makes some reference to how Cormac McCarthy is this great Messiah of misery, but he just fucking rules. No exaggeration. Cities of the Plain is the third book from the Border Trilogy, featuring John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, young cowboys who we met in All The Pretty Horses (Cole) and The Crossing (Parham). They have been through some serious fucking shit already, but seem to have finally got it together working on a ranch for a nice guy (Mac) and doing their cowboy horse whispering shit in the sunshine. Then John Grady falls in love with a dying prostitute and you know instantly that McCarthy is gearing up to flex his bleak muscles. I was talking about Cormac McCarthy’s writing style to my housemate the other day actually. She loves the free and easy ‘spontaneous prose’ rubbish by Jack Kerouac, and I was explaining why she was very very wrong. McCarthy doesn’t worry about traditional sentence structure or denoting speakers or even punctuation, but his writing is fluid and poetic and feels like molten chocolate rolling around your head, whereas I just want to send Kerouac to night school. There are some proper beautiful bits in Cities of the Plain. Someone at the far side of the arena touched the brim of his hat and the spotter raised one hand and turned and the auctioneer said now six no six I have six who’ll give me seven seven seven. Anyways the dogs wont hunt on Sunday either. They’re Christian dogs. Mr Parham, he said. Every male in my family for three generations has been killed in defense of this republic. Grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers. Eleven men in all. Any beliefs they may have had now reside in me. Any hopes. This is a sobering thought to me. You understand? I pray to these men. Their blood ran in the streets and gutters and in the arroyos and amongst the desert stones. They are my Mexico and I pray to them and I answer to them and to them alone. I do not answer elsewhere. I do not answer to pimps. If that’s not enough to make you read it, there is an incredible knife fight near the end. Serious can’t-read-fast-enough excitement. Cormac McCarthy - Cities of the PlainPublication date: 1998Publisher: PicadorPrice then: not statedPrice now: £2.99Purchased from: Ebay From the synopsis: “Bound by nature to horses and cattle and range, these two discover that ranchlife domesticity is compromised, for them and the men they work with, by a geometry of loss afflicting old and young alike, those who have survived it and anyone about to try.”
Exploding Helicopters #6

Cormac McCarthy - Cities Of The Plain

It has taken me so long to read this book that I can’t actually remember how it started, but that’s no indication of how well I liked it; more that I can’t organise my life at the moment.

I feel a little like a broken record on this site, since every other post makes some reference to how Cormac McCarthy is this great Messiah of misery, but he just fucking rules. No exaggeration. Cities of the Plain is the third book from the Border Trilogy, featuring John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, young cowboys who we met in All The Pretty Horses (Cole) and The Crossing (Parham). They have been through some serious fucking shit already, but seem to have finally got it together working on a ranch for a nice guy (Mac) and doing their cowboy horse whispering shit in the sunshine. Then John Grady falls in love with a dying prostitute and you know instantly that McCarthy is gearing up to flex his bleak muscles.

I was talking about Cormac McCarthy’s writing style to my housemate the other day actually. She loves the free and easy ‘spontaneous prose’ rubbish by Jack Kerouac, and I was explaining why she was very very wrong. McCarthy doesn’t worry about traditional sentence structure or denoting speakers or even punctuation, but his writing is fluid and poetic and feels like molten chocolate rolling around your head, whereas I just want to send Kerouac to night school. There are some proper beautiful bits in Cities of the Plain.

Someone at the far side of the arena touched the brim of his hat and the spotter raised one hand and turned and the auctioneer said now six no six I have six who’ll give me seven seven seven.

Anyways the dogs wont hunt on Sunday either. They’re Christian dogs.

Mr Parham, he said. Every male in my family for three generations has been killed in defense of this republic. Grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers. Eleven men in all. Any beliefs they may have had now reside in me. Any hopes. This is a sobering thought to me. You understand? I pray to these men. Their blood ran in the streets and gutters and in the arroyos and amongst the desert stones. They are my Mexico and I pray to them and I answer to them and to them alone. I do not answer elsewhere. I do not answer to pimps.

If that’s not enough to make you read it, there is an incredible knife fight near the end. Serious can’t-read-fast-enough excitement.

Cormac McCarthy - Cities of the Plain
Publication date: 1998
Publisher: Picador
Price then: not stated
Price now: £2.99
Purchased from: Ebay

From the synopsis: “Bound by nature to horses and cattle and range, these two discover that ranchlife domesticity is compromised, for them and the men they work with, by a geometry of loss afflicting old and young alike, those who have survived it and anyone about to try.”

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Exploding Helicopters #4 Cormac McCarthy - All The Pretty HorsesPublication date: 1994Publisher: PicadorPrince then: £5.99Price now: £2.43Purchased from: Ebay From the synopsis: “The ride is exhilarating, the journey fetching, haunting and draining, like any great step worth taking.” I’d first heard of Cormac McCarthy when the Coen brothers adapted No Country For Old Men a couple of years ago, but the first of his books that I read was The Road. I think they’re currently making a film of that too, with Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron, although I can’t imagine how they’ll manage to sell a film featuring a baby roasting on a spit that isn’t some kind of sick gore-porn thing. I don’t believe any film will capture the unrelenting and ever-mounting tension from the book, especially when you consider the fact that nothing much happens. It is purely McCarthy’s incredible prose that makes it what it is. But I’m here to talk about All The Pretty Horses, not The Road. I’ve been struggling to remember if I’ve ever actually read a western before this, and I certainly can’t think of one, but then this isn’t exactly your standard Clint Eastwood-at-the-saloon kind of affair. It the story of two teenage boys who take off from their ranch homes in Texas and travel into Mexico, getting into trouble and falling in love and staring death in the face in bandit-run jails. McCarthy has a way of writing that brings vast country to life, including its problems and threats. He links long sentences together with loads of conjunctions and builds sweeping imagery really well. And the way he talks about shocking violence as if it’s just another thing to survive, like a summer lightning storm or a long day’s ride, is almost frightening in its intensity. It takes a lot for my to overlook his lack of apostrophes, but he’s just brilliant enough that it doesn’t matter to me. Or, I should say, it dont matter none. “His father took out his cigarettes and lit one and put the pack on the table and put his Third Infantry Zippo lighter on top of it and leaned back and smoked and looked at him.” “There was a show was supposed to come through Uvalde, town of Uvalde, and I’d saved up to go see it but they never showed up because the man that run the show got thowed in jail in Tyler Texas for havin a dirty show. Had this striptease that was part of the deal. I got down there and it said on the poster they was going to be in Ardmore Oklahoma in two weeks and that’s how come me to be in Ardmore Oklahoma.” “You like chicken and dumplins Mr Cole?Yessir I do. I been partial to em all my life.Well you’re fixin to get more partial cause my wife makes the best you ever ate.” “The hacendado was less sure. But there were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to a man.”
Exploding Helicopters #4


Cormac McCarthy - All The Pretty Horses
Publication date: 1994
Publisher: Picador
Prince then: £5.99
Price now: £2.43
Purchased from: Ebay

From the synopsis: “The ride is exhilarating, the journey fetching, haunting and draining, like any great step worth taking.”

I’d first heard of Cormac McCarthy when the Coen brothers adapted No Country For Old Men a couple of years ago, but the first of his books that I read was The Road. I think they’re currently making a film of that too, with Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron, although I can’t imagine how they’ll manage to sell a film featuring a baby roasting on a spit that isn’t some kind of sick gore-porn thing. I don’t believe any film will capture the unrelenting and ever-mounting tension from the book, especially when you consider the fact that nothing much happens. It is purely McCarthy’s incredible prose that makes it what it is.

But I’m here to talk about All The Pretty Horses, not The Road. I’ve been struggling to remember if I’ve ever actually read a western before this, and I certainly can’t think of one, but then this isn’t exactly your standard Clint Eastwood-at-the-saloon kind of affair. It the story of two teenage boys who take off from their ranch homes in Texas and travel into Mexico, getting into trouble and falling in love and staring death in the face in bandit-run jails.

McCarthy has a way of writing that brings vast country to life, including its problems and threats. He links long sentences together with loads of conjunctions and builds sweeping imagery really well. And the way he talks about shocking violence as if it’s just another thing to survive, like a summer lightning storm or a long day’s ride, is almost frightening in its intensity. It takes a lot for my to overlook his lack of apostrophes, but he’s just brilliant enough that it doesn’t matter to me. Or, I should say, it dont matter none.

“His father took out his cigarettes and lit one and put the pack on the table and put his Third Infantry Zippo lighter on top of it and leaned back and smoked and looked at him.”

“There was a show was supposed to come through Uvalde, town of Uvalde, and I’d saved up to go see it but they never showed up because the man that run the show got thowed in jail in Tyler Texas for havin a dirty show. Had this striptease that was part of the deal. I got down there and it said on the poster they was going to be in Ardmore Oklahoma in two weeks and that’s how come me to be in Ardmore Oklahoma.”

“You like chicken and dumplins Mr Cole?
Yessir I do. I been partial to em all my life.
Well you’re fixin to get more partial cause my wife makes the best you ever ate.”

“The hacendado was less sure. But there were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to a man.”

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--Tagged under: cormac mccarthy--

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