It was, finally, just me and my bookshelf. At first it wasn’t even a shelf at all, but piles of books scattered around my room on the floor, as orderly as I could manage and as high as they’d get before tumbling…I would find myself turning to those stacks in desperation for a connection, a memory, or the loosest association. What suddenly became most evident were the absences, the missing books I could hazily remember having read and digested, yet which would need referring to again. They had turned, terrifyingly, into phantom limbs.

- In Defence Of The Memory Theatre, Nathan Schneider

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

- Gustave Flaubert

Sarah sees my White Lady and raises me a French 75, named after some WWI heavy artillery:

2oz London dry gin

1oz simple syrup

1 1/2oz lemon juice

5oz brut Champagne

cracked ice

Shake, and strain into flutes.

Haven’t tried it yet, but sounds delightful.

The only way to endure life is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

- Gustave Flaubert, via John Adams’ Hellmouth

The synopsis of Electric Eden on Faber’s website is frankly gibbering but if former Wire editor Rob Young can capture the ineffable deep-rootedness and otherness of the UK folk musicians of the ’60s and ’70s then he’ll have something to equal Lipstick Traces, Rip It Up & Start Again or England’s Dreaming.  It seems almost obligatory to set up a blog to accompany the publication of these books – Rob’s is here.  I suspect that Nick Drake, the Aphex Twin, and even John Martyn will turn out to be marginal figures in the narrative but I suppose that a name like Ashley Hutchings would be unlikely to ring many bells with the general public.  Hutchings seems to have been an incredible catalyst for folk-rock, constantly moving on in new directions, sparking new bands that would still be consolidating his ideas years after the man himself had moved on to something new.  Hopefully there’ll be plenty about him in the book.  In anticipation, I pulled a disc at random from the Shirley Collins box set Within Sound last night, and was arrested by this song from the album she recorded with the Albion Country Band (Hutchings’ third band, having previously founded, and left, Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span).

Go into any of the little cafés or horlogeries on Paris’s Left Bank (make sure the Seine is flowing away from you, otherwise you’ll be on the Right Bank, where no one is ever seen) and sooner or later you will hear someone say, ‘Les choses sont contre nous.’ ‘Things are against us.’ This is the nearest English translation I can find for the basic concept of Resistentialisin, the grim but enthralling philosophy now identified with bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed Pierre-Marie Ventre.

- Report on Resistentialism, Paul Jennings

The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.

- William Faulkner

Readers who think The Sound Of Music is entirely expletive-free, however, are not listening closely.  Rather shockingly, in one scene, Maria tells one of the nuns she can’t face it. “Vot ees it you cunt face?” the nun says.

- Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books.

Dyer doesn’t touch on a crucial issue that hugely affects the claim to veracity of these books, that they are (largely) the work of journalists who were embedded in combat units.  Which is to say that they were permitted to see what they saw by an increasingly media-aware military, presumably on the assumption that journalists sharing the experience of soldiers on active duty would come to identify with them, and present their experiences such that readers would identify with them too.  Judging from the synopsis of Black Hearts in the article, this hasn’t prevented the journalists from seeing and recognising some appalling events, but you have to suspect it has severely limited the breadth of their experience.  For all the vividness of the writing, the picture presented is inevitably going to be one-sided, inevitably going to ignore the larger-scale influences on these conflicts.  This is a fundamental weakness of this reportage, that it must present a single facet of a complex situation and make that serve for the whole.  It is dependent on the good fortune of finding a story – where the story is not present as a diamond in the rough, then it has to be manufactured, manipulated, invented.  The characters can be “fully realised in flesh” as Dyer puts it, but though a journalist can witness the development of a character over the course of several months in a situation of life-changing intensity, they are still only seeing a brief snapshot of a human life.  This is not to claim that a novel will succeed any more in analysis of the deeper political currents underlying the wars, or somehow present the war in toto, just that reportage has not necessarily driven it entirely from the field.  Claims that the novel has been rendered superfluous tend to stake their claim on a deliberately limited conception of the novel – it’s hard to imagine reportage producing an equivalent to The Trial or A Dance To The Music Of Time, while we might yet hope to see an Iraq war novel that presents a vision of that conflict to match the account of the Miners’ Strike in GB84.