'sirpeter', he of the book-distributing canalboat (see below) took a photo of me in return. which seems like a nice little metaphor for the workings of world book night as a whole. using books as a way of starting conversations and building links and making contact with strangers and celebrating community in all its strange and wonderful manifestations.i hope he doesn't mind me borrowing his photo.
i've just been out for a walk. coming down the oxford canal was this boat of 5 cheery blokes giving away copies of the reluctant fundamentalist by mohsin hamid for world book night. my heart soared. this whole thing is genius.
big open air event last night in trafalgar square to inaugurate world book night. a huge crowd of people gathering to hear readings by margaret atwood, monica ali, philip pullman, john le carré and myself among others. we all felt a bit like rock stars, but edna o-brian and alan bennet and edna o-'brien got warmer receptions than the actual rock stars nick cave and rupert everett.
by alexandra harris
a documentary by eva weber which i was watching the other night. tranquil, poetic, beautiful, weird, revelatory. none of that talking heads bollocks you get with most documentaries. no narrator at all, in fact. just film of, and from, cranes in the centre of london, with music and with commentary from the drivers. this amazing world of sunsets and roofs and silence and a hundred tiny human dramas behind a hundred windows. it's rather like being an angel.
the interrogative mood. an addictively readable experimental novel, which is not a sentence i write very often. funny, surreal, intriguing and peculiarly moving in places. but no narrative, no characters, no location. just questions. about 3,000 of them. one after the other. and nothing else.
martin amis on the bbc other day: if i had a serious brain injury i might well write a children's book... i would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register that what i can write.
wind in the willows: one, time's arrow: nil.
though i'm never sure whether he actually means these things or suffers from a form of intellectual tourette's.
the weasly word is register, self-aggrandising whilst being vague about his own superior skills. register meaning more intelligent? register meaning more sophisticated?
on saturday morning I went to blackbird leys library in oxford to take part in a read-in as part of the national day of protest against the planned library closures. it was very very sad to stand in a building full of books and light and warmth and passionate people that will, if the government and the local tory council get their way, be boarded and shuttered and left to rot. i feel i should write something more about it here.
darcy padilla has won the w eugene smith award in humanistic photography for this. it's heartbreaking. but there are real human beings out there living these kind of lives
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