Friday conundrum

OK, a nice one for you.

A book or other literature, piece of music and work of art you think I absolutely have to experience.

My recommendations for you:
Book: Walden, by H. D. Thoreau.
Music: Steve Reich's Different Trains.
Artwork: Holbein's The Ambassadors. A complex display of cultural and temporal power shockingly subverted with a skull slashed across it.



See you next week.

At last!

It's snowing! Only delicate little flakes, but at least The Dark Place is going to be obscured for a short time. Call it God's Photoshop. I wonder how many students will turn up for my lecture on Celtic mythology. I left them hanging last week with the promise of the Three-Penised God.

Yesterday I did a lecture on new media which saw me saying complimentary things about Twitter, within reason. I'm sure @benjaminjudge would be proud. I see from his feed that he's reading Thoreau's Walden. It's one of the very few books which I would say changed my life and my philosophy. Not only that - I recently bought the t-shirt!

Wear your heart on your sleeve

As those of you who know me personally will attest, I'm a little limited in the sartorial style stakes. Whether I'm teaching or playing, I wear basically the same clothes.

Not any more. I've found a very cool t-shirt vendor, Out of Print: taking beautiful book designs, and donating a book to African children for every purchase via this charity. So I've kitted myself out with some class, and bought books for somebody else! If we must have capitalism, this is the way to do it.

Do the same.

I bought these: Walden because it's the book that changed my life, and the Henry Miller because the design is, to me, a perfect summary of the joys of modernism.

What a relief Walden's a fictional university, eh readers?

I love Doonesbury. Click on the image for a larger version.

A literary question

What book has changed your life? What one book should people read? What one book shouldn't anyone read. I tried these questions on my first-year students and discovered that nobody likes 19th-century novels any more.

My answers:

Changed my life: Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

Book everyone should read: more tricky - so many good ones, so many for particular reasons. The Communist Manifesto? The Wind in the Willows? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

Don't touch with a bargepole: The Lord of the Rings. Atlas Shrugged. The Book of Mormon. Left Behind. Any of Dickens' 'funny' novels. The Narnia novels. Loads more…

I live in the first circle

Not of Hell. Though in Dante's Inferno, I'd be in good company because this is where all the Greek and Arabic philosophers dwell - all those who haven't sinned but weren't Christian and therefore can't be saved. Saladin's there, as are the Hebrew figures from the Old Testament and of course, unbaptized babies.

No, apparently I qualify for the first circle of bookbuyers who are saving publishers from the worst of the economic crash. According to the Literary Review, for which my parents gave me a subscription for Christmas,

First-circle book buyers are stubborn in their habits. The largest proportion of them are women over thirty, and they are the chief sustainers of the fiction market. On average, first-circle readers buy up to twenty books a year, and if there is a twenty-first or a twenty-second that takes their fancy, they will buy that too. If they really like a book they buy multiple copies of it to give as presents.

Now apart from being a woman (and let's face it, life takes us to strange places so let's not rule it out yet), I fit most of this bill. I've bought a lot of copies of Thoreau's Walden for people in my time, I'm over 30 (hard to believe, looking at my angelic, youthful complexion) and I buy … oh, more than 20 per year. It's 105 so far this year which is just over one per day, not including books bought for other people.

So OK, you could, as Laura has done, describe this as a disease, or an addiction (thanks Neal), but I prefer to see it as a) doing my economic and literary duty and b) saving the environment by insulating my hovel. They make me happy too. Except for the ones which depress me (pretty much anything on politics and the environment: we are clearly all going to die slowly, miserable and avoidably because we'd all rather stick our fingers in our ears, shout la-la-la and then drive our SUVs to the airport for a weekend break - if that's you, kill yourself. I mean that, you selfish, evil, poisoning bastards).