We're only here for the beard

This week I was privileged enough, courtesy of Atlantic Books, to meet that doyen of alt.history and postcyberpunk and paradigm of pognophilia*, Neal Stephenson, in anticipation of the September publication of his new book, Anathem. The venue was a dim, slightly stuffy underground bar near Holborn, serving a range of tapas, including a sweaty cheeseboard featuring a cheese so odd I'm not unconvinced I may not have been confusing it with the bread.

(* I am aware that this is a gratuitous piece of sesquipedalianism, but anyone who wishes to accuse me of bombast and magniloquence at the slightest provocation would be right on the money.)

His editor remains the maverick's maverick Ravi Mirchandani, with whom I did work experience when he was at William Heinemann about nine years ago, when I still entertained furtive dreams of editing a Booker winner or two as an editor at Picador. I saw little of him while employed as an ersatz editorial assistant, since he tended to leave for lunch a little after eleven, leaving a trail of unreturned messages in his wake, and return about three days later.

He did, however, give me a proof copy of The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III, which remains one of my favourite novels. I also did a little work on Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, published at the end of my three weeks there; I seem to remember typing out long passages from the manuscript, although to what end I really couldn't say.

The author gave the obligatory sales pitch, an unenviable task even in front of a small audience naturally inclined toward him. Of course, being an author in today's market is almost as much about image and media skills as it is about being able to write; on publication, the usual cavalcade is de rigueur for all but the most established and stubborn writers. I'm told that the Richard & Judy team do bear in mind how an author will come across on the studio sofa when making their selections for the Book Club.

Anyway, after the usual toasts, I took the chance to speak with him. This is one of the perks of the book industry, compared to other media. I doubt I should get the chance to speak, at least without a PR's close supervision, to many stars if I worked in film or music. He seemed a little diffident, but, looking back, I do wonder if assailing him with questions about postapocalyptic dystopias in contemporary British literature - Jim Crace's The Pesthouse, Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, Nick Harkaway's The Gone Away-World - was a little unfair on him. I'm not as familiar with his work as I like to be when meeting an author, so perhaps I was trying too hard to assert my own credentials, for fear of looking ignorant.

Later, when I was saying my goodbyes to the Atlantic staff, he was deep in conversation with a couple of the Waterstone's buying team. I'm not very good interposing in conversations and tend to hand around awkwardly on the periphery for a few minutes until finally plunging in, usually at an utterly unwelcome juncture, so I decided to leave. As I started up the stairs, he came bounding after me, to thank me for coming.

This is a symptom of something I don't really like about the industry. When meeting head office buyers and the gentlemen of the press, an author is presumably given clear instructions to be as amenable and patient, since the impression given will probably end up having some bearing on the enthusiasm with which the book will be promoted. It's not so much the fact that one feels more inclined to support those one finds likeable, but the fact that the whole thing is a symptomatic of the author's being part of the package, part of the product.

We forget sometimes that a book is a commitment of considerable intensity on the part of the author - I know this is a generalisation and a romanticisation of the life of a writer - and that they are the one essential component, the spindle on which the whole wheel turns. Not even Mark Booth at Century - the man who publishes Katie Price and then recently had the gall to announce 'the death of the novel' - has yet devised a way to take that human element from the process, although I wouldn't be surprised if he spends his time these days coding algorithms to generate novels spontaneously.

The author is not a nuisance - certain persistent offenders demanding ongoing front-of-house presence against all sensible retail practice notwithstanding - but a cultural definer, standard bearer and baton passer. My nerves at meeting a senior member of the marketing team at a publisher whose lists I like owes themselves to the wish that I might make a good impression for professional reasons; nerves at meeting a favourite author are more profound and personal because I am responding in whatever small way I can to someone who has shaped my thoughts and has made me contemplate life afresh.

So, when Anathem is published this autumn, I hope the launch will be a celebration of the man, his ideas and his artistic vision.

Bookselling: the early years

Going off on one of those irresistible Internet tangents which it is impossible to ignore when a deadline looms, I encountered an fascinating and unrepealed piece of legislation, The Copyright Act (1709). It states that a customer, should he consider the price charged by a bookshop for any particular title to be too high, is entitled to write to the Archbishop of Canterbury and request that he rule on whether or not the price is indeed excessive. Should he deem it to be so, he can fix a lower price and the bookshop shall be fined £5 for every copy henceforth sold at the higher price.

I await my first customer to take advantage of this. I see, however, that www.archbishopofcanterbury.com remains unregistered: perhaps I should set up a bargain bookselling site and claim that prices are set by a higher power.

My star customer of the first Saturday I've worked since Christmas was the gentleman who came in with the details of a book on obtaining one's pilot's licence. He provided all manner of useful bibliographic data to aid in tracking down the correct book, including the fact that it was apparently published in 1900.

It made me think of Wings Over Dagenham, the wonderful Goon Show where Neddy gets carried away building a mangle and accidentally invents the aeroplane - Moriarty laments the passing of the horse-drawn zeppelin - and is immediately contacted by the Air Ministry.

Prose on the underground

(Originally posted on 8th October 2007)

I travel to work by Underground. My point of origin is sufficiently suburban that I get a good half an hour’s reading in to ease me into the day and I find a cosy mental cocoon is the best way to endure commuting.

Short stories seem to be the obvious choice for a short journey, suitably brief and self-contained. But they’re never the right length, of course. It’s, say, two and half stories or just the two and then a twiddling of the thumbs for the last few stops. Besides, short stories aren’t really my thing: oblique, smug little things, far too many of them.

The great writers, the ones whose every sentence cries out to be given its own module on the National Curriculum, are too rich to be digested when queasy from abrupt braking and other people’s sweat. And I can’t, for example, be swept away on an elegiac tide by John Banville in twice-daily fragments over a fortnight. Conversely, something with a bit of pace has its flair rather dampened by the need to nip up an escalator every other chapter.

Non-fiction has to be chosen carefully. It’s no use having one’s elucidation on the matter of quantum physics bisected by eight hours of emails and meetings. My fragile thread of understanding would perish in the meantime. Biographies don’t really suit brief episodes, unless one is prepared to draw up a crib sheet to recall a labyrinth of unfamiliar – as appropriate – aunties or astronauts or Albanian ambassadors.

Of course, there’s also the risk of being sat adjacent to someone with a particularly intrusive personal stereo. I’ve never quite summoned up the cojones to start singing along, but I also find it difficult to concentrate on a book when being buzzed by the treble end of Snow Patrol.

A friend of mine says she uses one herself to blot out whatever anyone else might be listening to, but I can’t see that working for me. I’m as precious about what I listen to as what I read, so I don’t want to employ my music as some sort of noise-cancelling device. My favourite albums would be reduced to the consistency of muzak.

So all I can do is undertake the aural equivalent of holding my breath. Besides, as Gandhi so nearly put it, an iPod for iPod and the whole world goes deaf.

The most recent significant impact on the reading habits of Londoners has been proliferation of free newspapers, flocks of which billow around the carriages with Hitchcockian menace only to settle beguilingly onto the laps of weary commuters with their come hither headlines and double-page spreads of photos sourced from Heat magazine’s dustbins. Before them, most people reading on trains read books. Admittedly though, we had got to the stage where everyone who wasn’t reading Dan Brown was poring over Sudoku puzzles like a student in the Union bar hoping to appear irresistibly intellectual.

I think free newspapers are a great idea. If everyone gets to vote, I’d like think that we should all have at least a basic awareness of the issues of the day. But alarm bells rang when one of them announced its arrival with the claim that it would feature all that one might find in a conventional newspaper but wouldn’t feature too much news as it was felt that young people tend to find that a bit hard going.

Frankly, I wouldn’t wrap my chips in them. Any publication which derives the majority of its correspondence from text messages is unlikely to encourage particularly trenchant debate on any topic.

It’s a great pity that this is what has replaced book reading for a huge number of commuters. Whatever my own dilemmas about suitable book choices for the tube, the capacity in books to show us what critic Samuel Hayakawa called “as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish” is their principle wonder. I never go anywhere without a book – who knows when I’ll be stuck in a queue? – and so I’m more sanguine than most when faced with a monopoly on trains to Edgware at the expense of anything remotely imminent to High Barnet. It’s not the destination that matters, you see, it’s the journey.

On stalking and other social interactions

(Originally posted on 5th October 2007)

I've been poring lasciviously over a feature in the latest issue of Record Collector magazine on the 60 "most interesting" David Bowie rarities (I have two!), which reminded me of a rather endearing authorial encounter a few weeks ago.

We'd been promised a visit from Sebastian Horsley, the artist best known for having himself crucified and, in true Libertine spirit, spending tens of thousands of pounds on prostitutes; he recently published an autobiography, Dandy in the Underworld.

I'd first seen him at Sceptre's party back in February, when he'd swept in wearing a floor-length mink coat, teetering on outrageous stack-heeled boots and dripping in make-up, accompanied by his amanuensis, Rachel, resplendent in very little at all.

My participation in the evening's glamour was restricted to sharing an ashtray with Tracey Emin and reluctantly dancing with colleagues so drunk that the next day they had no memory of, in one case, her own dancing, let alone (mercifully) mine, and in the other, of how he had come by the bruised knuckles (enthusiastically punching a pillar, I was able to reveal).

We had a couple of dozen copies for him sign: a few minutes' work with another few for pleasantries was all I expected. Twenty-five minutes after his arrival, he'd managed six, owing to his racounteuring (sorry, I know verbing weirds language) like an amoral and quite filthy Peter Ustinov and an insistence on adding a message, different in each case, to his signature.

Struggling a little for aphorisms, he decided that one book should be inscribed with his home address and the next with his telephone number. He regularly finds death threats on his answerphone, he explained, but he feels that people who give advance warning of murderous intentions rarely carry them out. Indeed, he likes to phone them back, which I should imagine would deter all but the most psychopathic of stalkers.

By this time, his publicist was slumped in the seat next to him, clearly resigned to the fact that fulfilling their next appointment on time had been a plan born of unjustified optimism.

Now, David Bowie's extraordinary 1995 album, 1.Outside, came about in part because of Bowie's ongoing interest with those who inflict violence upon themselves in the name of art. Wondering if Sebastian Horsley's self-crucifixion might just have ushered him into Bowie's circle and hoping that maybe this was the man to help me fulfill my quest to meet him, I probed as subtlely as I could about a link.

"Why do you ask?" said Sebastian. "Is he a friend of yours?"

Will Self describes Horsley as "simultaneously enthralling, charming and fantastically annoying". I couldn't have put it more perspicaciously myself.

Zuckerman's dying swansong

(Originally posted on 15th September 2007)

Given my almost lycanthropic relationship with sunshine, last week's release from summer's clammy embrace has been quite blissful. Thursday morning saw me quite joyous as I beheld the mist hanging over the railway cutting and I struck out with crisp strides to the tube station.

Befitting such an autumnal turn, I decided to read Exit Ghost, Philip Roth's forthcoming final chronicle of Nathan Zuckerman. I'd given a quote to The Bookseller, admittedly somewhat mischievously, that it was "the Deathly Hallows of serious literature" and anticipated a masterpiece comparable to Updike or Bellow.

I read it with burgeoning disbelief. It's the worst book I've read all year.

The pivotal relationship of the book is that between Zuckerman and Jamie, the wife of the couple with whom Zuckerman has arranged to swap houses. He remembers her from some lecture he gave when she was a student, although her recollections of the encounter are not noted. He too had the privilege of meeting a literary idol when young, the now forgotten E I Lonoff, whose biography Jamie's sometime lover - and is he still? - is intent on writing.

Zuckerman's attitude to the biographer Kliman is aloof, condescending and obnoxious to the point that his valid concerns about the motives for reintroducing Lonoff to the canon are undermined. Kliman and Zuckerman are diametric: young and old, extroverted and introverted, full of vim and full of bile. Kliman represents how tawdry the relationship between the artist and his audience has become.

Now I'm all for a bit of misanthropy from time to time, especially if it's done with the sort of élan which demarcates its author as occupying the sort of high ground which validates it. Roth, as a great twentieth century writer, has that, but Zuckerman does not. I think Roth has here allowed Zuckerman to become a mouthpiece for his views on the sanctity of literature. I'm sure there are students of Philip Roth who might say that I've completely misjudged where Roth ends and Zuckerman begins. But both Zuckerman and Roth, who are similarly reclusive, evidently feel that the man and the writer are entities to be considered separately and, in that fundamental kinship, Roth, to my mind at least, undermines that very idea.

I'm not going any further down that route. It'll only end in tears and discussion of Wagner. Every reader reads his own book, and I'll gladly leave it at that.

The oddest thing about Exit Ghost, though, is the passages where Zuckerman, each time he has spoken with Jamie, writes these imagined conversations between the two of them in the form of a playscript. I'm not sure if these passages are also meant to indicate some of extrapolated subtext to their conversations. It's more than likely I've missed the point altogether, but to make proper sense of it all, I'd have to read it again, and I'm not sure I've done anything to deserve that.

I must confess at this point that this is only the second Roth I've ever read and the first was a much earlier work I read about fifteen years ago. I really ought to try American Pastoral or The Human Stain or indeed just about anything else he's written, going by his exalted reputation.

I do seem to have a knack for homing in on the dodgy ones when I make a foray into the backlist of big name authors I've hitherto managed to avoid. William Boyd? I read Armadillo. Absolute rubbish. Matthew Kneale? Small Crimes In An Age Of Abundance. One first-class short story and eleven wearisome ones. Margaret Atwood? Oryx and Crake. Bloody tedious and certainly amongst the odder choices by a Booker panel to make the shortlist; it's a weak dystopian short story dragged out to novel length, like one of those dreadful 80s 12-inch extended remixes.

I'm quite sure in all three cases that their reputations do not rely on the books I happened to try and that I'd be as smitten as anyone else by Any Human Heart or English Passengers or The Handmaid's Tale. They're on to the 'to read' pile, the only downside of that being that if it were just the one pile, it'd be a hazard to aircraft, so I can't guarantee a second chance to any of them before the Tories get back into power.

Or, by way of a more recognisable time scale for any Americans who've stumbled across this, before the Rapture.

Incidentally*, I was reading in Have A Nice Doomsday, Nicholas Guyatt's despatches from America's Bible Belt, that there are hundreds of thousands of Christians who are so convinced that Jesus will whisk them up to heaven at a moment's notice that they won't take jobs like piloting aircraft or driving buses because they don't want to condemn their passengers to the rather messy fate that awaits people when the person in charge of their vehicle they're in suddenly vanishes in a puff of sanctimony.

Well, that's the evangelical for you: a couple of disciples short of a Last Supper but considerate with it.

I've been listening to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy by Elton John while writing this. I'll steadfastly defend Elton John up to a point, but that point is 1976. Floreat 1972-76 and there's not been a song worth growing ears for since. But his early stuff is extraordinarily beautiful, even if the remastered versions out now still don't hide the fact that the drumming sounds like a frankfurter on an upturned bucket.

*Oh, all right, I confess: it was just a very contrived link. Still, Eddie Izzard would be proud of me.

The second self-help book you've ever bought

(Originally posted on 28th August 2007)

I've been suffering from Booker overload. Writing a leaflet on the longlist and concocting ready-made quotes for the newspapers for shortlist day has prompted me to attempt to make some headway on the disparate heaps of non-fiction I've been stockpiling.

I've finally made a start on Waterlog by Roger Deakin, a proof copy of which has been slowly yellowing on my shelves for eight years. Synopsis: environmentalist and documentary maker living in a Suffolk cottage with a moat - please bear with me - conceives of swimming anywhere and everywhere in Britain where there's room for the breaststroke.

Deakin's profound knowledge of and love for nature makes him a fantastic guide to Britain's inevitably vanishing wilder locations. Essentially, it's a millennial restaging of William Cobbett's Victorian paean to a lost age, Rural Rides, minus the incipient racism.

I've always felt a claustrophobic discomfort in the water, but I do envy Deakin's ability to feel part of the shifting waterscapes of coasts and rivers, ancient and immovable yet restlessly kinetic. It's hard not to feel a twinge of loss when he tracks down a Fenland sinkhole in which for many years Baptists anointed their flock but is warned off further investigation by dire warnings from the Department of the Environment of leptospirosis and all manner of delinquent bacteria.

At a time when sparrows and hedgehogs have recently been designated endangered, it seems ever more urgent that we try to understand how human moulding of the landscape fundamentally skews ecosystems. Deakin laments that the banks of chalk streams are bought up by wealthy trout anglers when in France all land within twenty metres of a riverbank is public property. He stands vigil over a river diverted past a factory via a concrete channel.

But he's no misanthrope. The book is written literally from a frog's eye view but informed by a mind steeped in folklore and nature. As he drifts through the duckweed, exchanging curious glances with the newts, he is comforted by the amniotic quality of the water and it is a pleasure to imagine accompanying him on these eccentric field trips, listening to him point out the linnets and the blackcaps in grandfatherly tones.

Deakin died only last year - a great loss - but fortunately not before completing a second book, Wildwood, a comparable elegy to woodland and all manner of arboreal magnificence. My mother instilled in me a fascination with nature from a young age and I still remember racing through all her Gerald Durrells and leafing for hours through the twenty-part encyclopedia of animal life we kept on shelves in the hall. It is the wide-eyed wonder of passionate people like Deakin which is ever more vital at a time when schoolchildren are taken to city farms to encounter such exotic fauna as the cow and the pig, creatures which they are then horrified to learn are present in their packed lunches.

Anyway, I've inveigled both of Deakin's books to Front of House in the shop, Wildwood enjoying an Indian summer in New Titles and Waterlog crowbarred into the 'Other' section of Popular Biography alongside other unclassifiables such as Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and Pimp by Iceberg Slim.

There's been another upsurge in people asking for The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. For anyone fortunate enough to have had this pitiful excuse for an ISBN as yet pass them by, it's another of these manuals of positive thinking dressed up in pseudo-spiritual mumbo jumbo and shot through with moronic references to 'energy' and 'centredness'.

"Our job as humans is to hold on to the thoughts of what we want, make it absolutely clear in our minds what we want, and from that we start to invoke one of the greatest laws in the Universe, and that's the law of attraction. You become what you think about most, but you also attract what you think about most."

Thus writes John Assaraf, yet another Californian peddling a blend of basic common sense and scientific travesty. The whole book goes on like this, repeating the idea that visualising what you want to the exclusion of all negative thoughts will inevitably make those dreams come true. Want a flash car? Visualise it long enough and, so long as an image of some decrepit jalopy doesn't interpose, it's yours. Honestly, it's like cosmic ordering for dummies. Richard Dawkins may be an arrogant tosspot - and, boy, wasn't he just when I had what I had expected to be the privilege of meeting him last year - but frankly he sits on the fence too much for my taste. I'm not sure a full-on assault of pinpoint ratiocination is sufficient deterrent to these charlatans.

This week's Private Eye sends Dawkins up quite deliciously, having him harangue a woman for making a birthday wish:

"But how could blowing out candles on a cake have any influence over a future event? Isn't that just the most crude, primitive, infantile, unscientific superstition?"

Anyway, all this codswallop gives me another idea for a Christmas novelty title. It'll be called The Second Self-Help Book You've Ever Bought and every page will be blank, save one with the words 'You Mug' in an uncompromisingly bold typeface.

I should state at this point that I claim copyright on the concept and text, before Michael O'Mara Books add it to their illustrious roster of humour titles. (I came across the highlight of their September list today: Nosepicking For Pleasure.)

I really shouldn't write these posts while a police helicopter circles endlessly overhead like some sort of enormous luminescing mosquito. It has left me with an imbalance of the humours. I'm going to listen to Arcade Fire at mildly antisocial volume now and play 'air organ' on Intervention and My Body Is A Cage.

Afternoon of the living dead

(Originally posted on 19th August 2007)

It's after lunch on a Saturday that shopwork really starts to grate. The ill-tempered and witless seem to move onto the high street en masse: another afternoon of the living dead. By about half three, most of us on the servile side of the counter become convinced that surely anything would be less soul-crushing: working in an abattoir for kittens perhaps.

And being Duty Manager for the day just makes it that little bit more... well, even Roget can't help me here, but it's bloody relentless, whatever it is.

Competing for the day's star customer accolade were the Russian woman who accused a member of staff of stealing the bag she'd actually left on a different floor, and the student who kept trying to get a refund to which he certainly wasn't entitled and who only gave in when he realised that it would me who'd be called upon to adjudicate at whichever desk he went to and that I was quite prepared to play the game of saying 'no' in as many different ways as possible without hesitation, deviation, repetition or just telling him to sod off.

This week's cavalcade of the clueless seems to have made me a soulmate in misanthropy of Michael Bywater, the recent paperback publication of whose Big Babies, Or Why Can't We Just Grow Up?, has been my Tube reading for the last few days.

Essentially, his argument is that we live in a culture whose sole aim is entertainment, passive and puerile, baby food for the brain. (He doesn't like marketing's fancy for alliteration so perhaps I'd better modify my rhetoric here.) From the vacuity of musicals and reality television to the patronising pictograms of warning signs which proliferate in every public space, we are discouraged at every turn from taking any responsibility about the way we live.

I came across a perfect example of such a sign at London Bridge station this week. A poster drawing attention to the hazards of unattended baggage juxtaposed a picture of a bench with a lone suitcase beside it with one identical but for the presence of a man sitting next to the bag: the first had a big red cross beside it, the second a tick.

Being a slightly fusty alumnus cambrigiensis, he does occasionally misfire when laying into certain pop-culture phenomena: his tirade against The Spice Girls, while of course nobly motivated, did rather need a copy editor to point out that he was taking a step too far outside his realm of expertise. And his assertion that "good sex shouldn't be fun" does rather fly in the face of the field research of millions.

I've been listening to Talk Talk's Laughing Stock while writing this, a speculative purchase of a band whom I had hitherto only encountered when marginally misshelved in the Talking Heads section of record shops. I can't remember now what provoked my investigating them, but they certainly have their passionate adherents on Amazon. (Mind you, so does everyone on Amazon, but Talk Talk's reviewers seemed mostly to have at least a familiarity with polysyllabism and the concept of punctuation).

I'm at a loss as to how to describe the album: woozy blues, classical mithering, a vaguely ambient jazziness at the abstract end of the Eno scale and the sort of wilful atonality which Scott Walker has spent the last couple of decades honing. Anyway, I'm enjoying being confounded by it.

I've not had any particularly memorable contributions to Photos of Dinosaurs in the last few days. But I did unearth one of my own that I'd forgotten about.

Where do you have books on music and rock stars from the sixties?
- Up in the music department on third floor.
Then why does it say 'Books and Music' over there?
- Because that's Borders over the road. It's a different shop.

That's what Saturday's like. All bloody day.