If you think that people collect your recycling because they care about the environment, you may find my interview with Adam Minter about his new book Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Global Recycling Trade a bit surprising. Sorry about that.

In what will probably be my only publication as a literary scholar (i.e. I wrote it ages ago, when I was still doing my PhD) I have a chapter in a beautifully designed book: Thomas Pynchon & the (de)vices of global (post)modernity.

My chapter is ‘You can’t always blame zombies for their condition’: Utopian escapes in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice‘.

Also see my piece on attending the conference that the book is based on….

Great photos from Yamaliq in Urumqi

Kashgar’s Old Town, as it was…

My piece on the destruction of Kashgar’s old city is now up on the the London Review of Books Blog.

And here’s a more reportage-based piece from 2013.

For more on Xinjiang, see my book The Tree That Bleeds: A Uighur Town on the Edge.

My blog on the Zagreb Subversive Forum is up now at  CITSEE.EU and on the Forum website.

My story ‘The False River’ has been shortlisted for The Commonwealth Short Story Prize. I had completely forgotten about this, so it’s almost a shock, though a welcome one. I think the way judging works is that they pick a regional winner (mine would be Canada and Europe) then an overall one. The story in question is about a man obsessed by numbers who is driving a Greyhound bus and is very much in love. 1st round of judging takes place on May 22nd. Please cross your eyes.

Once again, I am the bridesmaid in this excellent competition. My story ‘Half’ was shortlisted and appears in the 2012 Anthology, which can soon be ordered here. The Willesden Herald is a very good competition because a) it’s not expensive to enter b) it’s judged anonymously c) The word limit is usually much higher than usual (7/8000) for short story competitions and d) if you get shortlisted, you at least get a publication out of it, rather than the whole ‘honourable mention’ thing which is like being told you’re a bridesmaid without being allowed to come to the wedding.

My story is an incredibly joyful tale of acceptance, personal growth and warm, enduring love, as the begining suggests:

Ruth stood at the end of the pier, looking back at the shore. Beyond the beach, above the road, she saw the line of hotels: white castles topped with flags, slightly blurred in her vision. She squinted, but they weren’t just distant: they appeared to be retreating. As if she were at the stern of a ship that was slowly cruising away.

She touched her hair, then checked her watch. Perhaps Sam wasn’t going to come. Perhaps, despite the way he’d sounded, things had not improved.

She leaned on the railing and wanted to shut her eyes. But the pier, for all its ironwork, did not feel like something to trust, not against so much water.

Five minutes, then she’d go; the London train was at half past.

She went to the telescope and pushed a coin in its slot. She bent and peered and turned it slowly. Windsurfers, waves, a dinghy. A single swimmer on his back. Then the grey of the water blurred to the yellow ochre of sand. More sand, then the freckled limbs of a woman without hair. The woman was wearing small dark glasses. She absently picked her nose. Then she looked directly at Ruth with a stare that said, Fuck off. Ruth jumped and the telescope skipped to waves that lifted, hung, then fell. The woman had, of course, not seen her. If she moved the telescope back, the woman would be squeezing sun cream onto her speckled arms.

She turned the scope till she was seeing down the pier. A pushchair, a rubbish bin, a cloud of candyfloss. Then she raised it and saw faces. White, black, lumpy, old, then, as the shutter dropped, the face of her half-brother.

He’d told her a year ago, just after he passed the bread, right as she started to butter.

“I’m using heroin,” he said.

There’s a nice review of The Tree That Bleeds in the April issue of Literary Review, which doesn’t even accuse me of bigotry or treachery.

There’s a new blog post on the CITSEE web magazine about the situation of the Roma in Europe.

One book begets another, at least that’s how it seems. You have intentions to read about Egypt, to start to educate yourself about a country you know little about but are soon going to visit. You have already bought several books, they are by your bed, but first you decide to read a book about Mongolia in the 1920s,

not because you have any pressing need to learn about this subject, but because it is a large hardback at the bottom of the pile of non-fiction you are definitely going to read (as opposed to the piles and shelves of stuff you might one day read). This book has been there so long (at least three years) that the sight of its spine induces a kind of shame, like that caused by those emails you receive from good friends, that you click on eagerly, that you enjoy, and then do not respond to for weeks, months, even though it would only take a few moments, five or six sentences, to adequately reply. And so you drag it out, dust it off, see how many pages it has, then dutifully start to read. You find yourself enjoying it. You did not know about the Czech Legion during WW1. You are amazed at the atrocities of Baron von Ungern-Sternberg. When you finish you look at the Egypt books,  try to decide which to read first. You are not sure, and while you think, you look at the pile you will definitely read, then at the might-read pile, and there you find a book you only bought because it was £1, Peter Fleming’s, ‘The Fate of Admiral Kolchak’.

Again, you had had no thought to read about White Russian armies, but it does relate to what you have just read, and if you do not read it now, then when? And so you begin. You read about the armoured trains used on the Trans Siberian railway.

You read about rearguard actions against the Bolsheviks, and the stresses of command. This is Baron Wrangel’s description of General Slachtov, who was holding the Perekop Isthmus in the Crimea in 1920:

A lot of wonderful looking films at the Toronto Film Festival, including Werner Herzog’s new documentary about death row inmates, which The Guardian bills as almost a comedy, a judgement supported by some of the clips. ‘Tell us about his hands.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OJB-9B1b0o

Mr Leonard Bernstein’s eloquent disclaimer regarding certain aspects of  Mr Glenn Gould’s interpretation of the Brahms No. 1 Piano Concerto, before a concert in April 1962. He was particularly referring to Gould’s insistence that the entire first movement be played at half the indicated tempo. Gould was no lover of public recitals. He called them ‘the last remaining blood sport’. He gave his last public performance in 1964. He was 31. This perhaps give some indication of why he found it distasteful:

I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity

Here are some pictures of Gould during recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Gould soaking his hands before playing. He began with lukewam water then gradually raised the temperature.

Gould laughing as engineers let him hear how his humming spoiled his recording of the Bach Goldberg Variations– after which he offered to wear a gas mask as a muffle. Gould would not let engineers remove the sound of his voice ‘humming’ in the backgound over fear that doing so would diminish the recording’s quality

Gould eating his lunch (graham crackers & milk cut with bottled spring water) while sitting at the sound engineers table

Oh, and if you’ve made it this far, here are the sounds themselves:

The end of the 1st movement of the Bach Concerto in D Minor

From the 1982 Recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, on which you can clearly hear Gould’s singing/humming:

This first appeared on the TV version of This American Life. Cartoonist Chris Ware teams up with animator, John Kuramoto, to make a cartoon version of a true story about how a bunch of first-graders become warped by pretend-TV.

David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King opens thus:

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-​brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-​print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.

(from The Millions)

Contractual wrangling means that the next season of Mad Men probably wont air until 2012 (gasp). In the meantime, here’s a kind of spoof/public service announcement that Vincent Kartheiser and Rich Sommer made, which isn’t exactly funny, but feels right enough.

There’s a new David Foster Wallace story in the latest New Yorker. It begins

Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.

The story has a plain, dry descriptive tone in places, as it lists muscle groups and bones, that then switches to one of direct emotional appeal. After only one reading, I hesistate to draw conclusions, but there was a wonderful openness to the way that the boy’s painful attempt of the impossible is put alongside holy equivalents from history (or ‘facts’ that are presented as such) without any direct linkage. The boy, for some unspecified reason, seems more contained and focusessed than his father who makes a living out of selling motivational material of his own devising. The boy seems to have no capacity for boredom- he pays attention to everything, and functions well socially, but is also wholly detatched. The first line’s mention of the ‘whole person’ can be taken to mean that what the boy’s father, and many of us have, are not ‘ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals’ but something more twisted by doubt and fear. These are what push us through life, not the clear synonyms mentioned.

Right wing of the diptych Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels by Jean Fouquet, c.1450. Wood, 93 x 85 cm Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.

Yukio Mishima once wrote about a picture of St. Sebastian whose ‘only purpose had been to lie in wait for him’. Whilst I disagree with Mr Mishima about many things- for example, the irrelevance of women, the need for emperor worship, the advisability of staging a coup -I did feel ambushed when I saw this on the cover of a book about 15th Century European painting. The angels’ faces are sullen, threatening. I don’t know if the angels are red and blue because they represent different types, or if this is just for visual impact. As for the enthroned Virgin, she is said to be modelled on Agnès Sorel, mistress of Charles VII, who died of mercury poisoning aged 28, and whose cousin took her place after her death.

As for Mr Fouquet (1420–1481), he is thought to have been the inventor of the portrait miniature.

‘Tippoo’s Tiger’ is a life-size tiger of carved and painted wood, seen in the act of devouring a prostrate man in the costume of the 1790s. Concealed in the bodywork is a mechanical pipe-organ with several parts, all operated simultaneously by a crank-handle emerging from the tiger’s shoulder. Inside the tiger and the man are weighted bellows with pipes attached. Turning the handle pumps the bellows and controls the air-flow to simulate the growls of the tiger and cries of the victim.

Tipu (Tippoo Sahib to his European contemporaries) was Sultan of Mysore in South India from 1782-99. He was the implacable enemy of the East India Company, a commercial enterprise with its own armies and civil administration, which during the late 18th century was engaged in extending British dominion in India. Tigers and tiger symbols adorned most of his possessions, from his magnificent throne to the uniforms of his guards.His armoury included mortars shaped like sitting tigers, cannon with tiger muzzles, and hand weapons decorated with gold tiger heads, or inlaid in gold with tiger masks formed by an arrangement of Arabic letters meaning The Lion of God is the Conqueror.

The tiger is currently in the V & A in London, and if you don’t think it’s scary enough, listen to them play the organ inside it.