When We Were Orphans – Kazuo Ishiguro. The story of a post-war detective who got into his career after the disappearence of his parents. A lot of the story is told in flashbacks, from the antagonist’s childhood friend Akira to his return to Singapore to track down his parents. Very readable and more accessible than Remains of the Day, Kazuo’s more famous novel.
Category: Musings
and other Short Stories and Tall Tales – Groucho Marx. A collection of Groucho’s letters and short columns written for industry rags during his long career. The Marx style of humour is rife throughout the book, although it doesn’t translate so well into the written word. Worth reading if you’re a fan of Marx brothers comedy. Plus there’s quite a lot of back history on the brothers’ careers.
British Slummer
When, oh when is this summer going to stop being so schizophrenic. One minute it’s gorgeous, next minute it’s pissing down. I guess I’m just not used to British summers after four years of sweltering heat in New York with pretty much guaranteed sunshine. Well, between the amazing thunderstorms anyway.
Farmer’s Tan
Just got back from Glastonbury 2002. Smashing. The new fence kept trouble down to a minimum, the weather was lush, people were great and the event itself was sublime. Perfect Glasto really.
In the meantime, having shelved my travel plans I took a great holiday in Vassilliki (a place called Club Vass) for a couple of weeks and learnt to windsurf. Had a great time, and you can see the pictures at the usual photos link. Having returned though I’ve had absolutely no joy at finding a job. Seems like the touted recovery of the job market in IT related work isn’t quite as strong as everyone keeps telling me. Ah well. It’s not so bad, but I do miss working on things.
So, as part of my efforts to keep up with things, I read all about IBM’s latest marketing concept – Autonomic Computing. Basically it just talks about self managing computers, in an effort to free up intelligent human folk to do other work that computers can’t do themselves. Reminds me in a lot of ways for the work we were talking about doing at AW a while back. I think that makes me glad that we never attempted to actually build it if IBM are only now getting onto it!
American Gods – Neil Gaiman. Another borrowed book, this time from Jon. I’ve been a fan of Gaiman’s work on Sandman for a long time and so had been looking forward to this novel. His novel with Terry Pratchett (Good Omens) was a great cross over, with their individual styles complementing each other extremely well. Gaiman’s new book extends his particular theological approach from Sandman, although it is in no way directly affiliated to that series – the similarities are hard to miss though. The story is of a jailed criminal, Shadow, who gets out of jail to find himself taking up a job with a shady character called Wednesday who claims to be the god Odin. What follows is a journey round the dark under-psyche of America stopping off to visit various gods of the old world who arrived in the new country in the minds of immigrants. It’s all very readable and you learn a lot about various old gods but, at the end of the book, I felt a bit cheated. There was no real meat to get your teeth into and a lot of the ideas are re-hashed, albeit well, from his earlier works. Finished it in a few hours – good holiday read.
The Life of Mahatma Gandhi – Louis Fisher. The story of Mahatma Gandhi, told against the backdrop of developing India seperation from the British empire. I picked this book up randomly one night when I couldn’t sleep and started tidying out one of Stephen’s cupboards. Gandhi is an amazing character by all accounts and this book describes his core beliefs extremely well. This belief system centres around the need to act on what you believe in, otherwise you obviously don’t really believe in it. Pretty simple and it paid off well for Gandhi who throughout his life continued to question everything around him and never get stuck into safe, familiar patterns. The book starts of well and the first half is pretty easy going as Gandhi moves from being a well paid lawyer to fighter for civil rights. The second half becomes a lot harder going, with a lot more detail as to what Gandhi did and a lot of subtlety in who he interacted with. Overall an excellent read and fascinating to see strong self belief in action.
The Celestine Prophecy – James Redfield. A story of a spiritual quest to awaken skills within the human mind that aren’t normally considered. The book goes through nine insights, each of which build on the last one, that indicate how people should try and live to be more in sync with themselves and the rest of the world. It’s traditionally seen as one of those books that you are recommended to by other people, ignore for a bit, then pick up and read at some point in the future when you’re ready to hear what it says. Although the ‘story’ itself is very basic and not exactly high prose it is good for illustrating the author’s insights, which vary from the importance of meditation and feeling love for yourself, through seeing auras and directing energy to others and finally arriving at a proposal for how everyone in the world should live. I found all of the insights to be interesting and matching a lot of what I had recently read and seen, the last insight however seems to go a bit too far at one time. Maybe it’s right though. Definately worth a read.
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway – Susan Jeffers. A series of exercises designed to help you break through your own fear, whatever it prevents you doing. A lot of the advice is very straightforward and obvious but it’s good to read it anyway. I was feeling pretty distracted and unfocussed when I started reading this and it really helped bring my thoughts and direction more together. If you feel like you need a bit of a push have a go with this.
Weight
Had a grand old day today helping my friend Kirsteen with her running job at the BBC. She’s helping the Home Front team by doing all their random tasks such as making tea and buying 5 amp plug tops for 13 amp lamps. Having met her at 9.30am on Tottenham Court road we them drove pretty much all the way round London picking up pieces of furniture and other items that shops were willing to lend for the show and hence have some TV coverage. Got to see some places that I’d never seen before, and some that I happen to live round the corner from. Excellent fun.
I’m seriously contemplating cutting down the amount of ways I use electronic media to present myself at the moment. Although I quite enjoy writing to this diary it’s been hard to keep up with what I want to say when I don’t have a fast Internet connection. I’m also starting to wonder how important it is to my own self to keep this stuff in a more private journal. I know a few people would miss reading it apart from me (hi mum).
This reduction in use of electronic channels was also brought home to me the other day when I was looking through old love letters that some of my ancestors sent each other. These are wonderful Victorian cards, with beautiful words in flowing script. The thought of how similar shared words between myself and people I love would never be found in such a permanent manner brought me up short for a moment. Can you see your great grandchildren huddled over an old antique hard drive they found in the attic feeling such a connection to words held as ones and zeros? There seems to be to be so much less weight and importance attached to e-mails, when the reality is that these quickly written and sent words can often have a huge impact that changes lives one way or another. I was going to say ‘for better or worse’ there but change is just change, there is no ‘better or worse’ unless you treat it that way.
Watch out for my new diary written on stone tablets – coming soon to a prehistoric delivery channel near you.
Weekend (+ 1/2)
Another bank holiday weekend draws to a close.. Not that I notice such things in my current general state of unemployedness. It was only when Stephen reminded me on Friday that it was a bank holiday that I twigged. It’s been a good one.
Been out doing much clubbing since Thursday night when we went down to the ‘quality’ Crazy Larrys down in Chelsea. When the ‘DJ’ finally worked out how to use the decks they did play a few fun tunes but generally a night of lo-fi cheese. Saturday started with the free cannabis coalition festival in Brixton – a mini Glastonbury with lots of dance tents and the usual array of food stalls to keep everyone amused. This has only been going on the last three years so this was my first one, having missed the last ones during my time in New York (which I’m still missing stupidly and keep getting very mopey whenever I see that skyline on TV, which is about once every ten minutes).
After the festival we hung out in the Living Room in Brixton for a while before I wandered on my own up to Islington. I’d seen a flyer for Sir Real playing at the Garage, and having fond memories of his sets at Third Eye back in ’92, decided to go and see him again. The venue, actually Upstairs at the Garage, was like a Scout hall painted black, an image that was emphasized by the clientele all being about 16 (except me and the DJ). After a few beers, well – Smirnoff Ices, I got up the courage to dance like a nutter on my own in the middle of the dance floor. Ah, bless.
Sunday caught up with Helen in the afternoon, teaching her the important life skill of how to make water bombs. The pootled back down to Brixton for a bit more clubbing at Dog Star. Randomly bumped into Zen, a friend of Chris in the queue so ended up not being on my own. Good laugh, but the place is a total meet market to the max. Today I was slightly less clubby – cycling for about two hours round Richmond Park and now feeling decidedly achey for my troubles. Nice.
So a good weekend all in all – but I’m still in London and still not really sure what I’m doing with life. I’m contemplating buying a Hasselblad camera (500 C/M body secondhand with basic lens/back) having seen some second hand kit in a camera shop and getting very excited. I have a ticket sorted out for Glastonbury now and that’s also very exciting. No big ‘flash’ of revelation as to what to do in general though – travel? Get a job? What kind of job? Where do I want to live? Had a very cool vision of living in a big loft with huge windows looking out over trees the other night. Felt very comfortable there – just not sure where ‘there’ is. Maybe I’ll find it one day, along with other turtles that I’m not expecting to find.