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--

--Tagged under: mikhail bulgakov--

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.”

--Tagged under: exploding helicopters--

--Tagged under: cormac mccarthy--

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.”

--Tagged under: exploding helicopters--

--Tagged under: cormac mccarthy--

Exploding Helicopters #3 Douglas Coupland - MicroserfsPublication date: 1996Publisher: FlamingoPrice then: £6.99Price now: a copy of The Cider House Rules by John IrvingPurchased from: swapped via Read It Swap It From the synopsis: “The job may be super cool, the pay may be astronomical, but they’re going nowhere, and however hard they work, however many shares they earn, they’re never going to be as rich as Bill.” Amazing true fact: I have never come across anyone who doesn’t like Douglas Coupland. I’m about half a generation too young to fit into the ‘demographic’ that he apparently became a ‘spokesman’ for when he bottled their ‘slacker zeitgeist’ with Generation X, but I completely related to it for many reasons, not least the fact that I hate the word ‘zeitgeist’ and reject the idea of people as ‘demographics’. It’s a book I read and loved, but then I sat in my bedroom for a week worrying about whether or not my job could be classed as a McJob and whether or not I should ignore my family and move to a squat in Palm Springs. Coupland gets you like that. With Microserfs, a book essentially about some misfit nerds who are working on a web start-up in the early 90s, I read it as an amusing little set of anecdotes which kept me smiling for 300+ pages, but then an hour after I’d finished it I was still thinking about how the geeks will inherit the earth, and about how friendships will surpass all obstacles, and about the basic human instinct to form familial groups and how that changes as we get older. He’s like that, is Douglas Coupland. “Susan said that the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, ‘really aren’t surrealistic, because they’re just random, and there’s no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images’…To this end, I’m creating a file of random words that pop into my head, and am feeding these words into a desktop file labelled SUBCONSCIOUS.” “She said, ‘I don’t believe human beings store memory in our brains exclusively - there simply aren’t enough storage slots or interconnective possibilities. And so if not in the brain, then where? I concluded that another viewpoint on memory was to see our bodies as ‘peripheral memory storage devices’.” “Todd called me a cryptofascist today.In honor of this,I’m formatting this particular paragraphflush right.” “He had another Wallbanger - ‘You know, pal - maybe I should de-wire myself. De-wiring would reconnect me to the world of natural time - sunsets and rainbows and crashing waves and Smurfs.’”
Exploding Helicopters #3


Douglas Coupland - Microserfs
Publication date: 1996
Publisher: Flamingo
Price then: £6.99
Price now: a copy of The Cider House Rules by John Irving
Purchased from: swapped via Read It Swap It

From the synopsis: “The job may be super cool, the pay may be astronomical, but they’re going nowhere, and however hard they work, however many shares they earn, they’re never going to be as rich as Bill.”

Amazing true fact: I have never come across anyone who doesn’t like Douglas Coupland. I’m about half a generation too young to fit into the ‘demographic’ that he apparently became a ‘spokesman’ for when he bottled their ‘slacker zeitgeist’ with Generation X, but I completely related to it for many reasons, not least the fact that I hate the word ‘zeitgeist’ and reject the idea of people as ‘demographics’. It’s a book I read and loved, but then I sat in my bedroom for a week worrying about whether or not my job could be classed as a McJob and whether or not I should ignore my family and move to a squat in Palm Springs. Coupland gets you like that.

With Microserfs, a book essentially about some misfit nerds who are working on a web start-up in the early 90s, I read it as an amusing little set of anecdotes which kept me smiling for 300+ pages, but then an hour after I’d finished it I was still thinking about how the geeks will inherit the earth, and about how friendships will surpass all obstacles, and about the basic human instinct to form familial groups and how that changes as we get older. He’s like that, is Douglas Coupland.

“Susan said that the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, ‘really aren’t surrealistic, because they’re just random, and there’s no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images’…
To this end, I’m creating a file of random words that pop into my head, and am feeding these words into a desktop file labelled SUBCONSCIOUS.”

“She said, ‘I don’t believe human beings store memory in our brains exclusively - there simply aren’t enough storage slots or interconnective possibilities. And so if not in the brain, then where? I concluded that another viewpoint on memory was to see our bodies as ‘peripheral memory storage devices’.”

“Todd called me a cryptofascist today.
In honor of this,
I’m formatting this particular paragraph
flush right.”


“He had another Wallbanger - ‘You know, pal - maybe I should de-wire myself. De-wiring would reconnect me to the world of natural time - sunsets and rainbows and crashing waves and Smurfs.’”

--Tagged under: exploding helicopters--

--Tagged under: douglas coupland--

Exploding Helicopters #2 Ali Smith - Girl Meets BoyPublication date: 2007Publisher: CanongatePrice then: £12.99Price now: a copy of Winterwood by Patrick McCabePurchased from: swapped via Read It Swap It From the synopsis: “It’s about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations.” For the second edition of Exploding Helicopters, where I share my favourite bits from a recently read book, it has been very difficult not to simply copy out entire chapters. Ali Smith is one of my favourite writers, because she has this wonderfully understated turn-of-phrase, and she can switch from flippant comments about the globalisation of Inverness to gorgeous passages about a first sexual encounter, its tenderness and electricity. She is awesome. I read her books in a Highland accent in my head too, even though she lives in Cambridge now. Girls Meets Boy is part of a series of books written by a whole load of different writers, each reworking a particular myth. I don’t mean urban myths like swans breaking people’s arms or chicken carcasses festering in Big Macs, I mean like Greek shit. Ali - I feel like we’re on first name terms - chose Iphis, who was disguised as a boy even up until her wedding day, when she worried that she would never be able to pleasure her new wife without a big dangling schlong. This new version is largely about Anthea and her first same-sex relationship, but it’s also about her sister Imogen, a bulimic who stands up to some super-creepy discrimination in the workplace. But then it’s also about the world’s water supply and how it’s manipulated by big business, and about how we all need to speak out about issues that should never go unrecognised. And it’s about Iphis of course. It’s only a short wee book too. Ali Smith gets it all in there. “… Then the chosen boys and girls from last week’s programme come back and talk about their blind date, which as usually been awful, and there is always excitement about whether there’ll be a wedding, which is what it’s called before people get divorced, and to which Cilla Black will get to wear a hat.” “(It’s the fault of the Spice Girls.)(She chose the video of Spiceworld with Sporty Spice on the limited edition tin.)(She was always a bit too feminist.)(She was always playing that George Michael cd.)(She always votes for the girls on Big Brother and she voted for that transsexual the year he was on, or she, or whatever you’re supposed to say.)” “Hi. This is Anthea. Don’t leave me a message on this phone because I’m actually trying not to use my mobile any longer since the production of mobiles involves slave labour on a huge scale and also since mobiles get in the way of us living fully and properly in the present moment and connecting properly, on a real level, with people and are just another way to sell us short. Come and see me instead and we’ll talk properly. Thanks.” “(I feel like we should always be meeting each other on trains, I think inside my head. That’s if we’re not actually on the same train, going the same way.)I say it out loud.I feel like we should always be meeting each other off trains, that’s if we’re not actually on the same train travelling together. Or am I saying too much out loud? I say.” “I wondered if everything I saw, if maybe every landscape we casually glanced at, was the outcome of an ecstasy we didn’t even know was happening, a love-act moving at a speed slow and steady enough for us to be deceived into thinking it was just everyday reality.”
Exploding Helicopters #2


Ali Smith - Girl Meets Boy
Publication date: 2007
Publisher: Canongate
Price then: £12.99
Price now: a copy of Winterwood by Patrick McCabe
Purchased from: swapped via Read It Swap It

From the synopsis: “It’s about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations.”

For the second edition of Exploding Helicopters, where I share my favourite bits from a recently read book, it has been very difficult not to simply copy out entire chapters. Ali Smith is one of my favourite writers, because she has this wonderfully understated turn-of-phrase, and she can switch from flippant comments about the globalisation of Inverness to gorgeous passages about a first sexual encounter, its tenderness and electricity. She is awesome. I read her books in a Highland accent in my head too, even though she lives in Cambridge now.

Girls Meets Boy is part of a series of books written by a whole load of different writers, each reworking a particular myth. I don’t mean urban myths like swans breaking people’s arms or chicken carcasses festering in Big Macs, I mean like Greek shit. Ali - I feel like we’re on first name terms - chose Iphis, who was disguised as a boy even up until her wedding day, when she worried that she would never be able to pleasure her new wife without a big dangling schlong. This new version is largely about Anthea and her first same-sex relationship, but it’s also about her sister Imogen, a bulimic who stands up to some super-creepy discrimination in the workplace. But then it’s also about the world’s water supply and how it’s manipulated by big business, and about how we all need to speak out about issues that should never go unrecognised. And it’s about Iphis of course. It’s only a short wee book too. Ali Smith gets it all in there.

“… Then the chosen boys and girls from last week’s programme come back and talk about their blind date, which as usually been awful, and there is always excitement about whether there’ll be a wedding, which is what it’s called before people get divorced, and to which Cilla Black will get to wear a hat.”

“(It’s the fault of the Spice Girls.)
(She chose the video of Spiceworld with Sporty Spice on the limited edition tin.)
(She was always a bit too feminist.)
(She was always playing that George Michael cd.)
(She always votes for the girls on Big Brother and she voted for that transsexual the year he was on, or she, or whatever you’re supposed to say.)”

“Hi. This is Anthea. Don’t leave me a message on this phone because I’m actually trying not to use my mobile any longer since the production of mobiles involves slave labour on a huge scale and also since mobiles get in the way of us living fully and properly in the present moment and connecting properly, on a real level, with people and are just another way to sell us short. Come and see me instead and we’ll talk properly. Thanks.”

“(I feel like we should always be meeting each other on trains, I think inside my head. That’s if we’re not actually on the same train, going the same way.)
I say it out loud.
I feel like we should always be meeting each other off trains, that’s if we’re not actually on the same train travelling together. Or am I saying too much out loud? I say.”

“I wondered if everything I saw, if maybe every landscape we casually glanced at, was the outcome of an ecstasy we didn’t even know was happening, a love-act moving at a speed slow and steady enough for us to be deceived into thinking it was just everyday reality.”

--Tagged under: ali smith--

--Tagged under: exploding helicopters--

Exploding Helicopters #1 You know how you go to the cinema and there’s a trailer for something with Christian Bale and a lot of hand grenades that looks amazing and for two minutes you get some sweet quick-fire explosions and some CGI shit and maybe a robot sidekick and a sweaty woman with big tits who knows kung fu and the dramatic rescue of someone’s dog and a few vampire killers and Rage Against The Machine on the soundtrack. And then everyone eating popcorn is like ‘woah’. Well, this new blog feature is a bit like that ‘woah’ feeling, as I share some of the best bits from a book I’ve read (minus all the CGI explosions and slow-motion running that will ultimately mean you are disappointed because Megan Fox doesn’t jump out of the book’s pages when you decide to read it yourself). Because I am nothing if not wholly appropriate at all times, I have chosen to mark this inaugral edition of Exploding Helicopters with a second-hand book about second-hand books. *cue audience tittering* Helene Hanff - 84 Charing Cross RoadPublication date: 1980Publisher: FuturaPrice then: £1.25Price now: £2.50Purchased from: Richard Booth’s Bookshop, Hay-On-Wye From the synopsis: “The very simple story of the love affair between Miss Helene Hanff of New York and Messrs Marks & Co, sellers of rare and second-hand books, at 84 Charing Cross Road, London.” “Thank you again for the beautiful book. I shall try very hard not to get gin and ashes all over it.” “DO YOU MEAN TO SIT THERE AND TELL ME YOU’VE BEEN PUBLISHING THESE MAMMOTH CATALOGUES ALL THESE YEARS AND THIS IS THE FIRST TIME YOU EVER BOTHERED TO SEND ME ONE? THOU VARLET?Don’t remember which restoration playwright called everyone a Varlet, I always wanted to use it in a sentence.” “All I have to say to YOU, Frank Doel, is we live in depraved, destructive and degenerate times when a bookshop - a BOOKSHOP - starts tearing up beautiful old books to use as wrapping paper… You tore that book up in the middle of a major battle and I don’t even know what war it was.” “WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS’ DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS?this is not pepys’ diary, this is some busybody editor’s miserable collection of EXCERPTS from pepys’ diary, may he rot.…PS: Fresh eggs or powdered for Xmas?” The edition I have includes the sort-of sequel, when Helene finally visits London after the publication of 84 Charing Cross Road and the death of her primary correspondent, Frank Doel. It’s in diary-form, and it felt more real to me than the letters did, because she worries about what to wear when she goes to publisher’s meetings and gets pissed off with people when they give her tours of places that she doesn’t give two shits about. But maybe it just felt more real to me because I was reading it on a sunny afternoon in Hyde Park and when she mentioned going to see the Brontë painting in the National Portrait Gallery, the one where Branwell has painted himself out, I was like ‘Dude, I was just there’. Anyway, don’t take my word for it. Above is a photo of my friend’s budgie, Yoshi, getting stuck in, and he’s a fucking bird-brain so what’s stopping you? (Also, because life is shit, 84 Charing Cross Road is now something called a Med Kitchen, but there is a nice history of the building and the Marks & Co business here.)

Exploding Helicopters #1

You know how you go to the cinema and there’s a trailer for something with Christian Bale and a lot of hand grenades that looks amazing and for two minutes you get some sweet quick-fire explosions and some CGI shit and maybe a robot sidekick and a sweaty woman with big tits who knows kung fu and the dramatic rescue of someone’s dog and a few vampire killers and Rage Against The Machine on the soundtrack. And then everyone eating popcorn is like ‘woah’.

Well, this new blog feature is a bit like that ‘woah’ feeling, as I share some of the best bits from a book I’ve read (minus all the CGI explosions and slow-motion running that will ultimately mean you are disappointed because Megan Fox doesn’t jump out of the book’s pages when you decide to read it yourself).

Because I am nothing if not wholly appropriate at all times, I have chosen to mark this inaugral edition of Exploding Helicopters with a second-hand book about second-hand books. *cue audience tittering*

Helene Hanff - 84 Charing Cross Road
Publication date: 1980
Publisher: Futura
Price then: £1.25
Price now: £2.50
Purchased from: Richard Booth’s Bookshop, Hay-On-Wye

From the synopsis: “The very simple story of the love affair between Miss Helene Hanff of New York and Messrs Marks & Co, sellers of rare and second-hand books, at 84 Charing Cross Road, London.”

“Thank you again for the beautiful book. I shall try very hard not to get gin and ashes all over it.”

“DO YOU MEAN TO SIT THERE AND TELL ME YOU’VE BEEN PUBLISHING THESE MAMMOTH CATALOGUES ALL THESE YEARS AND THIS IS THE FIRST TIME YOU EVER BOTHERED TO SEND ME ONE? THOU VARLET?
Don’t remember which restoration playwright called everyone a Varlet, I always wanted to use it in a sentence.”

“All I have to say to YOU, Frank Doel, is we live in depraved, destructive and degenerate times when a bookshop - a BOOKSHOP - starts tearing up beautiful old books to use as wrapping paper… You tore that book up in the middle of a major battle and I don’t even know what war it was.”

“WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS’ DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS?
this is not pepys’ diary, this is some busybody editor’s miserable collection of EXCERPTS from pepys’ diary, may he rot.
…
PS: Fresh eggs or powdered for Xmas?”

The edition I have includes the sort-of sequel, when Helene finally visits London after the publication of 84 Charing Cross Road and the death of her primary correspondent, Frank Doel. It’s in diary-form, and it felt more real to me than the letters did, because she worries about what to wear when she goes to publisher’s meetings and gets pissed off with people when they give her tours of places that she doesn’t give two shits about. But maybe it just felt more real to me because I was reading it on a sunny afternoon in Hyde Park and when she mentioned going to see the Brontë painting in the National Portrait Gallery, the one where Branwell has painted himself out, I was like ‘Dude, I was just there’.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it. Above is a photo of my friend’s budgie, Yoshi, getting stuck in, and he’s a fucking bird-brain so what’s stopping you?

(Also, because life is shit, 84 Charing Cross Road is now something called a Med Kitchen, but there is a nice history of the building and the Marks & Co business here.)

--Tagged under: exploding helicopters--

--Tagged under: helene hanff--

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