On this day:

Happy Birthday Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), muckraking author of early-twentieth century novels exposing the rotten core of American business and politics. He was also a socialist for a period, standing for Congress and the California governorship in that cause, and founded the Helicon Home utopian colony (rather unsuccessfully).

Personal favourites: The Jungle, exposing the squalid, sordid condition of Chicago's meat-packing industries. If you're a fan of Harry Turtledove's slightly odd alternative American history, he was the President of the US from 1920-28.

If your literary tastes stretch from socialist muckraking to jolly-hockey-sticks girls' boarding school japes (and I know at least one comrade to whom this applies), then you'll be sad to learn that September 20th is also the anniversary of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's death in 1969: author of 60 Chalet School novels. The school itself, under pressure of political events, moved from Austria to Guernsey, thence to two places on the English-Welsh border, then finally to Switzerland. Interesting how many tax havens featured… They're fascinating tales of how rebellious girls have their spirits broken as they learn to conform to the rules of a snobbish, elitist but apparently kind-hearted meritocracy.

Interestingly, there's an unofficial - and rather misanthropist - sequel, The Chalet Girls Grow Up which sounds far more interesting:

A book that updates the stories of The Chalet School Girls into a world of sex, drugs and illegitimate babies bringing characters into the present day with references to Vietnam, Soweto, Greenham Common and the Falklands War.

Poor Elinor must be spinning in her grave.

Update: lo and behold, here's hard-boiled crime writer Val McDermid talking about the Chalet School novels as her inspiration on Radio 4 (brief review here)

"This must be Thursday," said Arthur musing to himself, sinking low over his beer, "I never could get the hang of Thursdays."

I am forsaking you, leaving you to wander the streets clutching bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 (great website, by the way), staring with mute desperation at passers-by, imploring them to pretend to be Plashing Vole for just a few seconds.

In other words, I'm having a long weekend, returning to my keyboard on Tuesday afternoon, probably.

Which means you'll be needing a Friday conundrum to keep you going.

What snippets of high or popular culture summarise your understanding of the world?

There are so many for me. I loved Marvin the Paranoid Android's observation that 'the dew has fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning', and the talkshow host's claim on The Simpsons that 'your tears say more than real evidence ever could'. Arthur Dent is quite a hero, and I'm just not getting into the Peep Show debate. Chris Morris has a peculiarly accurate though misanthropic approach to life.

Arthur Dent (from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series:

I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle. As soon as I reach some kind of definite policy about what is my kind of music and my kind of restaurant and my kind of overdraft, people start blowing up my kind of planet and throwing me out of their kind of spaceships!

"This Arthur Dent," comes the cry from the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a deep space probe thought to originate from an alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, "what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?"

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.

Marvin:

Wearily I sit here, pain and misery my only companions. And vast intelligence, of course. And infinite sorrow.

Why stop now just when I'm hating it?

Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it.

Douglas Adams:

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

George Eliot:

The world outside the books is not a happy one, Maggie felt (from The Mill on the Floss).

Meanwhile, here are a few lines from Iain Sinclair's Downriver, just because I like them:

A shifty unshaven polymath nebbish, with a cocky drone, and a patter so tedious it could have been marketed as a blood-coagulant, was lecturing a dangerously healthy-looking Californian couple. They were shrink-wrapped, sterile, irradiated like a pair of Death Valley grapes. They socked vitamin-enhanced aerobic vitality at you, so hard you could wish on them nothing but a catalogue of all the most repellent diseases of skin and bone and tissue; all the worst back numbers from the cursing books of Ur, Uruk and Kish. You were obliged to super-impose on their boastful skeletons the historic treasures of old London: growths, malignancies, rickets, nose-warts, furry haemorrhoids, palsies, fevers, sweats, bubos, wens, mouth-fungus, trembles, and pox scabs.

It's a great book - much more wordy, as you can see from this excerpt, than my usual taste, but it's got breadth of imagination and a real nasty swipe at the wideboys, bankers, property developers and all that crew who happily demolished old London to build poxy designer flats for yuppies. It's therefore a very good book to be reading in the midst of our current situation.

More insulation

… has appeared in the guise of books. Specifically, Adam Roberts's Yellow Blue Tibia which is a Soviet alien invasion memoir! The other is Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check - a novelised attack on the degraded state of American journalism - from 1920! God alone knows he'd make of today's newspapers.

Matt reminds me that Star Trek is out a week tomorrow, so I'm playing Spizzenergi's Where's Captain Kirk to fill in the void between now and then. I have Star Trekkin' on vinyl so will have to wait until I get home. The b-side (a 'dub' version no less, is even better).