fiction

Book on my Christmas list

Its the nicely titled ‘Riding with Rilke’ by Ted Bishop. Here’s (what I think is) the opening paragraph:

It wasn’t a mid-life crisis: it was mid-life money. I had inherited some cash and was desperately afraid I would do something sensible with it, like put it on my mortgage or into mutual funds. So I bought a Ducati Monster. I had the fall term off and planned to go to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, the improbable location of the best archive in the world of British modernist writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, and T.E. Lawrence. Then I got a travel grant from the Ransom Center. They didn’t say how I had to travel. September would be perfect for a ride.

Good eh? As the reveiws say, a book about biking for people with an A level in English Literature.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008)

I finally saw this bio directed by Alex Gibney. It has a strange aesthetic – busy backgrounds, constant music track, very ‘live’ looking interviews that all did not make me feel very close to Thompson. However, one or two figures stood out as being very clear and passionate about his role in critical American culture and mourned his demise (by suicide – he shot himself in 2005) on this count. For me the most moving point was a young fellow journalist from Rolling Stone who told us how much America needed a figure like him today and read excerpts from one of his books with tears in his eyes. Thompson’s texts are read by Johnny Depp. Worth seeing to get more informed about this strange figure though not an engaging film in the normal sense.

The last night of the Proms

I looked away, I felt sick. I was watching David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, with typewriters turning into ghastly monsters dripping foul fluid. After the end late tonight, I turned on the radio to blow away the nightmare images and I hear …. Jerusalem. Its the last night of the proms ‘as always the national anthem is the climax of the last night of the proms’, the commentator says. I can’t believe it is over already, with its horns and conductors and stamping of feet. For many years, on and off, I had marked the end of the summer with that last night and this year it just slipped by, I discovered it too late for the spell to work on me.