The Canons of Culture (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

But to return to Humboldt's Gift. The book really took off when the protagonist forsook Humboldt and described a day in Chicago dealing with a gambling debt. Breathtakingly interesting, sociologically authentic. For me, anyway.

But here's the thing. Me and Saul Bellow have more in common when it comes to the literary life than we do when it comes to the lowlife. He can beat the pants off me re the former but I could follow him every step of the way without breaking sweat when it concerns the seamy side. And dull it was.

I've spent so many years working in so many casinos I've acquired a decent grounding in the subworld. I would think it a fair bet that I have acquired more knowledge about, say, the Mob than he has just because it happens to be a minor hobby of mine. Though when it comes to films, we'd prolly be about square.

In fact I'll give you a Day in the Life...

[Mick Harper]

Like all croupiers, we were at a loss about what to do when the tables closed at 4 am. As they have to by law in every British casino. Like all workers we were up for some fun when work was over for the day and there's not much fun to be had at 4 am even for Playboy croupiers spilling out onto Park Lane.

"Who wants to come to my drum for some cards, it's just round the corner," said someone. We all did. We piled into a basement in one of those posh streets south of Hyde Park and started playing three-card brag. A much less exacting game than poker and infinitely more exciting to play. We all steadily got ripped on a combination of drink, drugs and doing our brains losing our wages. Things got pretty raucous.

"Oy," I said, glancng out the window on hearing the milk float trundle past, "There's a policeman looking down at us."
"Oh, don't worry about him. He's guarding Lord Carrington next door. They're worried about the IRA blowing him up now he's Foreign Secretary. We slip 'em a bevvy from time to time."

[Pete Jones]

The Andelope, an excerpt from A Reader's Manifesto by B.R. Myers (2002).
(subtitle: an attack on the growing pretentiousness in American literary prose)

(Mick, since you can't open images in your email, you must tolerate some large images here.)

Check out this critique of "and." I only know of two people who have ever bothered making one.

NOTE: the "McCarthy" referred to in the first pic is Cormac McCarthy, the American always at the top of the Nobel Prize odds at Ladbrokes

[Mick Harper]

I don't mind any use of 'and' as long as it's with malice aforethought and not just conjunctivitis.

[Mick Harper]

Two of my favourite authors when I was in my early twenties were (a) Mordecai Richler, a Canadian who wrote novels about Jews growing up in Montreal and (b) Len Deighton, an English author specialising in spy fiction. Not, you might think, exactly 'two of a pair' and a testament to the breadth of my youthful literary interests.

Len Deighton, I discovered yesterday, first came to publishing prominence as a book cover illustrator, notably the British edition of Mordecai Richler's The Incomparable Atuk. This allowed Deighton to slip a manuscript of The Ipcress File, written in a few weeks while he was on holiday, on to someone's desk with some prospects of it actually being read.

You couldn't make it up.

[Mick Harper]

Talking of coincidences I had another the day before. Michael Connolly is in the canon of American hard-boiled crime novelists (he does the Lincoln Lawyer series among others). After a recommendation from one who knows -- he's in a Washington crime family himself -- I was reading Connolly's Fair Warning (with great enjoyment).

The only other unrelated person I know in North America lives in an obscure suburb of Los Angeles called Northridge. Imagine my consternation at coming across a character in the book called Lieutenant Harper working out of the Northridge division of the LAPD.

I see the breadth of my literary interests has not widened much since my twenties.

[Mick Harper]

I mentioned this coincidence to the bloke in Northridge, somebody who has had a childish need to be constantly one-up on me for the whole of our fifty-year friendship.

He told me he had first editions of all Connolly's books, signed by the author. Except Fair Warning. Like the time he couldn't find the football signed by the England 1966 World Cup squad.

[Mick Harper]

I have just finished listening to six and a half hours of The Valachi Papers by Peter Maas, read on YouTube by a speak-your-weight machine. This was the first (in 1968) of the tell-alls about the Mafia, or 'Our Thing' as we call it.

It's pretty accurate as far as I can judge -- I was only a soldier in Hoboken until I entered a witness protection programme and sent off to live in Ladbroke Grove. Stupendously fascinating.

[Mick Harper]

Our Friends From The North (BBC)

This is in the dead centre of the canon of British TV kitchen-sink political drama, vying with Boys from the Black Stuff for best-in-class. It even has the accolade of becoming a catch-phrase.

It is the story of a tight-knit group of political Geordies and their lives in the period 1964-1994, the latter date being when it was written. It has some strange resonances, for us now, because

* it starts when Labour is just ending a long period of Tory rule (in the 1964 General Election)
* it ends when Labour was on the verge of ending a long period of Tory rule (in the 1997 General Election)
* it is being viewed when Labour has just ended a long period of Tory rule (in the 2024 General Election)
* on each occasion when 'the North' is complaining of being left behind irrespective of prosperity elsewhere
* and is being promised redemption by a northern politician (Wilson, Blair, Burnham)
* but it is considered axiomatic Labour will be just like the Tories.

What lifts Our Friends from the North from cliché is that the protagonists are right in there selling out the comrades like good 'uns.

[Pete Jones]

I had one moment in this life where I felt educated. I was listening to David Bowie (for the first time, really) in the summer of 2013.* The song was "Up the Hill Backwards," and there was a line I immediately recognized because I had just read it in Nietzsche, who I had also just gotten around to in 2013. Pretty impressive, you admit.

The line was "more idols than realities," a quote, I think, from Ecce Homo. The next line cuts the seriousness real quick, with "I'm okay, you're so-so." (Which tickles me every time ((because it's so true)).

Anyway, this Nietzsche line looks to me like Mick's assessment of ideology, specifically the line "there is something true about racism, while anti-racism is pure ideology." We have a lot more anti-_______s than we have realities.



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* I decided to listen to Bowie because of an anarchist blogger I was reading at the time, who took his fake internet name from Diamond Dogs. This was enough to cause me to memorize every Bowie album in about a 2 year span. Even danced to "Young Americans" at my own wedding, humiliatingly.

[Mick Harper]