Salem's Lot and Half of a Yellow Sun

Vampires. No radioactive cows. Maybe a ghost and a portal of evil. But mostly vampires. I enjoy a classic vampire story. Let me clarify: I enjoyed Dracula and its queasy Romantic-Gothic sexuality. In a sense, Salem's Lot is a classic vampire movie in that it climbs the same brickwork, but it has dirt on the soles of its shoes and it arrives at the wrong window: that of the servants, who make dull vampires.

The title is promising: Salem's Lot. The witch trials, the drownings, the burnings - and the contemporary knowledge that this is where supposed witches were burnt to death because some fools got syphilis and needed  a scapegoat. We also know that supposed witches are a vengeful bunch who come back to pull out the hair of innocent people. So we begin with that stomach-clenching anticipation. Not only are there no ghosts, there are no witches. No animal familiars, not even an animated broomstick or dancing mice.

I am bored already by this topic. You? Which is My Point (We got here faster than usual. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.) Stephen King is a master of his craft. His plot structure, use of characters, foreshadowing and resolution are precise. Which is, again, My Point. His prose carries you along until you find you are already finished (well, kinda). But the foreshadowing hits you in the face like a hand in a boxer's glove, which is delivered by the characters, who (imaginatively speaking) look like Rocky. In other words (if you are struggling to concentrate, too), the story is predictable. Almost (I can hear you shouting objections already) predictable.

From the 1931 film Dracula

The topic is also promising. Vampires are modelled on Vlad the Impaler, who was a piece of work, easily one of the most evil men of all time. Even a cleaned-up version is sickening: the man literally had people impaled, feet to head, for entertainment. Because he was (let's review this ) evil. More evil than a town of vampires or a squadron of Nazis. A thoroughbred psychopath. Even I would rather believe in supernatural evil, not human evil, so I can begin to understand this level of bad. I crave some moral boundary to shove him behind; I need to know that he and his ilk could be vanquished and sent to suffer for their actions for eternity. Which is perhaps where the vampire legend comes from.

Now you are wishing I had not even written than blurb on Vlad's hobby, right? You are also wishing I would continue. Either way you are still reading. Because holding hands with your horror is your death instinct. You know the drill: that we watch movies like Scream and Saw to confront our own mortality. Because we all subconsciously assume we are immortal (don't argue, you - in a simple, childish argument, even denying it proves it) partly because who could live every day with immediate knowledge that we are dying? When we watch movies like Saw, we spend the first hour or so dancing with the knowledge that we could die any moment, and the second hour calmed because someone perseveres and survives, and that someone is metaphorically us.

(Personally, I don't watch movies like Saw because I can't bear the idea that people would maim each other, nevermind enjoy, nevermind imagine these scenarios. The thought of it literally makes me ill. But zombies... I get that.)

Now here is where the promise of the title is really mangled. (I am trying to restrain myself from making glittery jokes, because they're so easy, but feel free to make your own and not tell me about it.)  Salem's Lot was written in the '80s, roundabout Lost Boys and then Blade. Its vampires are the lost-soul and replaced-by-pure-thirsty-evil sort. They need to be staked, not understood. For all other similarities with Dracula, this lot of vampires lacks the lust of its father figure, which makes this version vapid. Isn't that the point of the vampire legend? Repressed female sexuality? (Read Dracula and get back to me.)

I followed this up with Chimanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, as I promised. It is set during the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s - far more frightening than Dracula but on par with Vlad. For me, it echoes the traumas of the more recent Rwandan crisis, which has always disturbed me. As it should, but perhaps more than it should. My conscience cannot understand - not even if you convinced me that half of the population fell ill with the vampiric illness. Please try. I would much rather believe in supernatural evil, than that there is more than a one per cent chance my neighbours could be convinced that I deserve to die, because someone calls me a cokroach or by virtue of some incidental thing like my dialect or accent or clothing, .

Toni Morrison (I am really cramming everything in to this post) wrote that trauma cannot be transcribed; it is a great bawling absence - see, I am already running short of words. This is how she writes (or doesn't write) about trauma in her novels: by writing 'around' it. EM Forster did the same thing in Passage to India, when the main character suffers a nervous breakdown. Adichie (who is influenced by Morrison's work - she's like the Dickens of modern literature) gives trauma her own spin. She describes elements of the trauma matter-of-factly.

(I am about to get kind of juvenile Vlad here, so read on at your own peril.)

One character is evacuated via a train cart like a cow to slaughter. Next to (leaning on) her is a woman with her daughter's head in a pot - we can only assume it was soldiers with knives not bombs. Adichie describes how ashen the girl's skin in, as if it were dabbed in powder. Adiche refers back to this moment often but never with any overt judgement.

The same character finds her way home to her husband and child, but suddenly cannot walk. Her legs just fail as if a nerve has been severed. She has to be carried everywhere, instead. Again, Adiche presents this to us matter-of-factly, as she might a dinner conversation or visit to the market. Trauma isn't contained in time - it spreads out laterally into innocuous events like shopping for food. It can't be confined to memory, temporal space, even emotion. It is processed in some parts of the brain but not others.

There is also a slight thrill to reading a story with macabre mystery. Our death instinct gleefully steps up again. You are alive and dying, it says. As if death has a quota, you have seen death and been spared. You are human; you are special; you will live for ever.

© Semiotic apocalypse, via http://semioticapocalypse.tumblr.com/: Biafran soldier during Nigerian civil war circa 1967

Some books are like orange vegetables

Oh, don't worry - the dinosaurs were a one-time gush of hindsight. Don't we all think "What if...?" and imagine we are world-renowned doctors or engineers... or archaeologists? Since world-renowned archaeologists are rare, perhaps (wait for it) extinct(!), I would have my pick of endorsements: concentrated sugary drinks aspiring to be fruit juice, outdoors wear, watches or casinos. I imagine I would be famous for uncovering the metal skeleton of a robotic dinosaur, somewhere with a temperate climate, hot water and fuzzy duvets. ('Imagine' being key when considering my mental health. I don't really believe my car could transform into a laser canon-wielding Autobot and my best friend. Unfortunately.)

Ok, ok, I'm done. But remember this when next your inner child pipes up because you confiscated her toys.

For cutting me short (you), here is a list (even the word sounds ominous, as if a vowel has been snatched from between the 's' and 't', and so the book lists (har!) to one side). A listing list of books I hate. Truly hate. We say things like "I love your blend of wit, sarcasm and cynicism" or "I loved reading Night Film" when really (as someone pointed out to me) 'love' is an emotion belonging to relationships that is best wielded with caution (you may lose something, like a vital organ). With animate beings. Not made of metal.

But 'hate' is more versatile. It covers everything: "I hate orange vegetables" or "I hated reading Atlas Shrugged" (not really. Because I haven't read it yet). Listing the things you hate is easier and more productive than listing the things you love. Unless you are one of those unblemished souls who have yet to encounter the pains of hindsight. "I am soooo happy for you," I mumble through clenched teeth. Also, 'love' and 'hate' are not exact opposites: I hate orange vegetables, but that doesn't mean I like yellow ones (actually, they fall in the same class, like poisonous caterpillars).

While I could do this all night (I am a font of positivity tonight because I only had two cups of coffee today, followed by a chocolate muffin), you no doubt have many Important Things To Do today, after this Very First Important Thing (reading my blog, you!). But first a quiz to see whether you have been listening, or are just a good guesser: rank these books from Hate to Tolerate to... Love.

A   Something Happened by Joseph Heller
B   Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein
C   Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
D   The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

You know me too well: D is a red herring. If you have been studying my blog (I am offering a course on Coursera next semester), then you know I am still reading The Corrections and have not formed a clear opinion although I can predict bouts of boredom and character bashing. The other three you can figure out yourself (you need to earn your credits) by looking left and then all the way down to the bottom, to the cloud of gnat-like tags.

My point is that the bit about love does not apply here because I love all books, even the ones I love to hate. Books stand apart from all reason. In towers that by the laws of physics should topple over but by the laws of knowledge and 70 gsm paper and PUR binding don't. And way in the distance is a stack of 10 books, like children being disciplined, but children who deserve to be in juvenile detention. From weathered top to sand-encrusted bottom, they are:

1. Atomised by Michel Houellebecq. This is hands down the most gratuitous collection of violence and sex called a plot I have ever. Ever. Read. Although the conclusion (only worth two pages or so) is enlightening, it will never clean those blackened charred nerves in my prudish brain. The copy sits on my bookshelf and I do not know what to with it. Read only if you can read American Psycho in one go.
2. Boyhood by JM Coetzee. The writings of my favourite 'refugee' have in the last decade experimented with memoir (ah, how post-modern) and how memory is at least partly fictionalised and vice versa. This memoir about Coetzee's childhood is enlightening - most children become less egoist as they grow up and encounter a more selfish world. Not him! No! He is the character from Disgrace, which is deeply disturbing. There is a second, sequel, apparently. Read the Wikipaedia page instead. 
3. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein. See above. You know where to look.
4. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. We studied this book in my first or second year, as part of a course in post-colonialism (they picked topics for which they had lecturers, methinks). A man travels to the swamps of Africa where he meets mute, lazy Africans and decisive colonialists and catches some illness, from the swamps, but doesn't die. I agree with Chinua Achebe (he says Conrad was racist (which I think is a no-brainer) and other people say he was a product of his times (which were racist)), but partly because the prose is exhausting, like listening to a person on the brink of death breath for days and days. And days. And days. Read Achebe's criticism instead.
5. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Confession: I have never read the adult novel, but we did study it and that was enough to remind me why I didn't like the children's version. I don't know why I don't like the children's version, actually, except that it is creepy. This man lives among pygmies and giants, whose communities he will never be part of. The pygmies and giants have a beef with each other, but why they would bother to fight each other when neither has anything the other wants is beyond me. Then there are some other societies with unpronounceable names (except Japan) and with minute political subtexts that, frankly, I don't care about. Read the picture book.
6. Mao's Last Dancer by Li Cunxin. I was sick when I read this weighty book (weighty because it was printed on paper that 'bulks' well i.e. looks thicker). Desparately sick. My sinuses were attacking my brain again and then relying on my lungs for cover and my throat had been lacerated in the war and my stomach was marching in protest. And I was alone over a long weekend with not even a cat to comfort me. I thought I felt bad. Then I read this book. And realised that I was living a dream life because life in China is apparently unbearably bad. All the time. But the real dream life is in America with apartments and fast food and Oprah. Read only when you are the kind of calm that can stare down a refugee camp during a civil war.
7. Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers. Another varsity setwork, but part of our third-year Post-modern course (we worked our way along the eras). This book is so consciously self-conscious and reflexive and self-deprecating and full of the apathy of the children of the last 25 years and oh so smart and oh it knows it's oh so smart and all the rest of these things. Describing it and why I hate it is like a rabbit hole. What upset me (and was supposed to) was that he was so glib about serious issues. I think that there are some topics that should only be played with under extreme circumstances and then sparingly. Cancer is one of those. Considering what a great writer he is, this could be overlooked, except he sews up all his writing with his smartness, and very little truth. Read and add snarky comments in the margins.
8. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. Oi, this one... I read this the year between advertising college and my first year of my BA. It almost put me right off studying literature (actually my intention was to study Applied English but then they moved the course to the education faculty and I hoped no one would notice the 'literature' bit). This novel is as long as the winter spent on that mountain. Which is very cold and is cold in other ways, because this is literature and literature uses metaphors. I did not have the energy to watch the movie but I hear it is shorter than the book. Watch the movie.
9. She's Come Undone or The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb. Contemporary American authors have the Suburb Disease. This disease is an ill-defined malais suffered by people who have enough of everything but have a nagging feeling that this is somehow not enough. The first book is about an obese women and the second about 9/11. That is all I remember. There is a third novel, which is excluded here because I enjoyed the ending (and no, not just because it ended!). Read only if you have lots of time to squander.
10. The People's Act of Love by James Meek. Because I did not and will never write this book. Read and read and read...

Disclaimer: These comments became far more sarcastic and perhaps nasty than originally intended, and all are meant to be taken with a pinch of salt (from the sandy seashore as you reach to pluck no. 10 from its unruly peers) and your own opinion, except Boyhood, because I mean that and could be nastier. I can think of at least one person who will disagree with my opinion of every book, except Atomised, because I do not fraternise with such people. And look, not once did I write: I hate this book with the voltage of the lights in Wanderers Stadium. I didn't write it, but I thought it.

I also thought: "I love Kafka on the Shore" and "I would love my car to transform into a laser canon-wielding Autobot and my best friend." 

Stranger and Stranger: Post 2 of 2

"Stranger and stranger," cried Camilla (she was so much surprised that for the moment she forgot to think up a better title).'

I didn't write this - I typed it. Har! Ok, it isn't original nor is it a decent appropriation of Alice's surprise in Wonderland. In the original (and funny) version, this prim little miss is so surprised she has forgotten 'her grammar', saying 'curiouser and curiouser' when the correct superlative is 'more curious'. (I have just unfunnied it. But wait, there is more funny to come.) She is surprised because her neck is growing longer - nothing else, just her neck - and all she can think about are her shoes and who will tie them. Granted, she is 10 years old or something and has probably just learnt to tie her shoes.

Now my title is not grammatically incorrect or funny. I am not surprised and my neck is still the same length as this morning, I think (I don't measure it regularly or at all so if I really wanted to be sure I'd have to compare photos, but I'm pretty sure it's still the same length). My title should tell you I am confuzzled. Again, this is not a word I am coining. It is a type of confusion, I suppose (I have never had to define it before), where you understand all the factors and reasoning, but that doesn't help you grasp it any better.

Like (sorry, folks), smoking. I don't understand it. I mean, I understand that it's addictive and that people often start out as teenagers due to peer pressure or because they think they look cool (update: not even James Dean in a leather biker jacket leaning on a fast car looks cool smoking) or because it reduces stress or because it smothers food cravings. But come on, we're a smart generation. We know better. You know better.

What confuzzles me is why someone would voluntarily imbibe tar, knowing they are imbibing tar (and bleach and rat poison), which a) is tested on animals (look that one up, you; I have nightmares about that rat) and b) destroys entire forests when factories are built (nevermind the oceans and lakes when the stuff spills). To look like James Dean on a bad day. Voluntarily. There is a link I am missing.

Anyway, that is confuzzlement. Perhaps this post is confuzzlement.

To recap, Stranger in a Strange Land is about Mike the Martian. He is physically human but a sociological 'stranger' and that 'strange land' is Earth. The Martians are a highly evolved civilisation who leave their young to survive or not before welcoming them back into the fold. (That way they weed out the weak ones.) They believe in ghosts. They also can 'discorporate' at will (die) (my favourite bit) and then their friends eat the body  (anyone catch that pun? Probably my best).

There doesn't seem to be a hint of irony in the judgement that human behaviour is largely an arbitrary set of rules designed to prevent human beings from achieving... I have no idea what noun to ascribe to the Martian ideal. Nirvana?

I'm being sarcastic here because I'm all riled up over the animal testing, so find some salt and throw it over your preferred shoulder.

Literature that was revolutionary at the time seems dated a few decades later. I have said this before, in defence of EM Foster (back off, you, that's sacred ground you're about to trample on, literally). Free love was revolutionary in the 60s (a bit like Google will seem in 50 years, after the second Silicon Valley crash). It was Mike's solution to human problems, not the Martians', because by all accounts they are as ugly as salmon and have the mating patterns of.

Mike doesn't have any of the cynicism that I and probably you (else you're in the wrong place, bud) have (I scoffed and rolled my eyes more the further I read). He can set up a telepathic and empathic link between his followers (yes, what happens next is exactly what you think happens next) so that they can access his superhero powers (lifting things and making policemen disappear and, well...) and his Martian bond between his body and let's-just-go-with mind. Ta da, emotions like jealousy discorporate.

I dunno. I can't imagine feeling less jealous because I'm in my partner's brain, and I really, really don't want him in mine.

Maybe my resistance to Mike's spirituality is only proof of how constrained I am by human mores. Well, of course! I yell. Followed by, no, I don't think so. Both. Because human beings need a framework, whether political, familial, social or religious. It's the details of the framework that can be awful and constraining, not the framework (unless your framework is cannibalism. Like Mike's).

Look, no one's stopping me from setting up a hovel... in a hovel, but then I must accept that no one's going to come to my aid when it falls down. I'm sure Mike could have constructed a lovely hovel in no time and without twitching a finger joint, and then rebuilt it, and filled it with followers. But he would just be replacing one framework with another (are you really asking me to choose between democracy and free love? The former has health care and builders to rebuild my hovel, and the latter has the power of the mind, and my mind is a scary place without entrusting my life to it).

Let us sidewind back onto the path. A path. I wrote in the last post that Stranger in a Strange Land can be divided into two distinct books, but that perhaps I was being unfair in judging the second when I hadn't finished. I have finished it, I have let a few days pass, and I stand by my judgement. (Always trust your instinct.) You may be out of salt by now, so you guessed this, I'm sure. No review can end well when it begins with smoking.

Now I think the second book is even worse than I first suspected, especially when compared with the first. Which had a plot. And character consistency. I am confuzzled about how one author can write both books - and in one book! - how it won a Hugo Award and how this book finds itself squished up with 1984, We and A Brave New World on 'best of' lists. I am confuzzled about the editor and publisher who let the book end like that (I won't spoil it - but I will warn you). I am confuzzled about why I read past that 46% (don't).

A common excuse for sci-fi writers is that they were tripping or psychotic at the time, maybe both. According to his Wikipaedia bio, he embraced that stereotype and wandered into Wonderland every once in a while. That might explain the monologues about how awful the modern world is. But Philip K Dick used to write a novel in two days while high on LSD and he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Perhaps I am judging Heinlein harshly, based on one bad experience. But I don't think so because that's how I got into this post.

Now I am irritated and need a good book to read.

Orbiting The Swan Thieves

There should be space in the title The Swan Thieves for a joke about how the book stole hours of my life. See, it's too far out of orbit. Also, I feel a bit mean saying that - it's a bit harsh and I could have chosen to steal my time back. Am I a sop? I am overthinking again, wasting more precious time, but this is why you love me. Well, you would if you met me. What does my foible have to do with a joke that spins in a wide orbit?

Scientifically, the joke couldn't sweep too far an orbit from the book (which we're assuming is the centre of the system), because once it moved out of the centre's 'range', it would careen into space like an asteroid. So either: the joke is skimming the very edge of the book's sphere of influence or it is floating around, unconnected with anything.

More time, floating away.

Luckily this ramble careens us back into orbit: The Swan Thieves is, like its predecessor The Historian, an unconventional mystery. In Elizabeth Kostova's first novel, we chased the legend of Dracula - at arm's length because the sources of this legend are prone to mutilating people and I am squeamish. In her second release, I think the mystery is a painter's obsession with a woman who lived more than 100 years ago. He has a psychotic meltdown, tries to destroy a painting and then refuses to speak.

Because, obviously, all artists are, to put it nicely, crazy. (You'd hate to know what other words come to mind.) Obviously. The painter is a nicely rounded set of stereotypes, which is actually a relief from the painful touchy-feely-ness of the other characters and the unethical absurdities of a teacher hooking up with a student (I suspect because he needed food and shelter), and a psychiatrist marrying his patient's ex-girlfriend. Oh and so much more that I can't reveal without spoiling the plot.

I said, "I think" because halfway through the mystery shifts, although honestly I don't know where it went, nor do I really care. The mystery petered out, without a single vampire swishing around in the shadows. Imagine, an Impressionistic painting chasing you through a psychiatric hospital. Not a Cuckoo's Nest hospital but a clean and accommodating one. When you turn around, there is nothing behind you except for a hint of a frame and the flash of a brushstroke in the moonlight.

Maybe I'm biased by The Historian, and this novel isn't meant to be creepy. (Although, as I mentioned, it is creepy in other ways.) Maybe it is meant appeal to to readers of a more sensitive disposition, who are moved to tears by flowers blooming and children bullying each other on a playground. Maybe they fancy they are the epitome of another artist stereotype: the delicate waif writing dedications to urns and then dying. Poetically. Tragically.

Again, I feel I am being glib. At about 90% of the way through the book were a few pages in which I felt the author extended the promise of her first novel: her descriptions were more focused and so more was left to the reader's imagination. My glibness is a product of my disappointment in a novel of the same breeding of The Historian and with this potential. (This novel was more a book-club read than serious literary fiction, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, because the writing catches you in its orbit and doesn't spend time describing your fellow jokes' eyebrows in epic poems first.)

The novel also reminded me of how much I used to enjoy painting and drawing. I even went out and bought a set of pencils. (Which has been opened and the pencils touched, you. Once. But once more than in 13 years.) So, despite my whinging about the amount of adjectives and adverbs and nonsense, some of it had an effect on this reader.

Recitation complete. No questions. We have all wasted enough time. I have appointments to keep: being chased down the corridors of a hospital and waning over a desk piteously. Eventually I'll have to choose one stereotype, I suppose.

Also, I'm distracted, dear reader. First, I have just started The Solitude of Prime Numbers, which I have been eyeing for years and found two days ago in a secondhand bookshop I often go to. On the one hand, the novel was originally written in Italian by a professor in particle physics; on the other hand, the first few chapters are underwhelming - not one paradox or brain-popping theorem or just the number 15 (my favourite). Let's bet on my final ruling. Because I am completely objective, I will be the bookie.

Second, I want to post about Ayn Rand's Anthem, but this is a heady topic, and my head is still annoyed. I used to look down on people who take her philosophies so seriously. I understand. Oh, I understand. Maybe you want to read it before my next post and you can share my annoyance. (If you empathise though, stay away. Only kidding. Let's discuss this and then someone will hold you down and I will smack you (I may need a few tries - my arms are my weak spot).)

I think we left orbit a while back.

I blame it on the bad coffee

'Print is dead!' said Nietzsche. 'YouTube killed the radio star,' said some band no one remembers. 'It's the end of the world as we know it,' said a social worker with a condition that makes him chronically sensitive to light.

Yes, I meant to bend those sayings to my will. To my will and my keyboard. To my will, my keyboard and the weight of the inter-space. We (not the royal we) are making a statement. Not an Occupy-esque statement (I really don't like to smell and I really really don't like smelling other people, and sometimes (tiny white lie), I really really really don't like people (definition: more than three within a hundred metres of me)) (also, since, I've already dropped a few brackets and one more set won't hurt, your time might be better spent helping families who have lost everything than getting smoke-bombed and rubber-bulleted in a park like a game of paintball).

So, not that kind. (I also don't play paintball.) Just a small one, the size of 'Terms and conditions' text, which you need glasses to read even if you have 20:20 vision. Not even a statement really, an observation. Hey, come back! I didn't mean it! (stage whisper I did, but in for a penny, in for a pound. And penny wise, pound foolish. Finder's keepers, too.)

Progress is inevitable, here and now - not necessary, but that's another discussion. Nietzsche has been foretelling the death of print for years (did you know that we use more paper now that we have computers? Think about it) and now we're told that print will survive in niche markets, but isn't creating communities one of the characteristics of the Internet, and why oh why are people sending this junk to me in daily newsletters?

Go do something, people. Go start a print business or an internet business or feed starving children. (Not you, them; although the latter would of course be very constructive.) I mean, really, things die every day. And sometimes they just change.

Why have you (and I) had to sit through this rampage (say the word with the French accent, just 'cos)? Because I feel guilty. I own a Kindle. My excuses are (because people question me often): a) I only download books I wouldn't buy in hardcopy, to stand on my shelves until I 'pass' and my grandchildren throw them at a second-hand book dealer, b) it is ideal to travel with (and I do travel), c) see above regarding progress and the annoying columnists my inbox harbours.

But really (and even though I still read and buy hardcopy books - I swear my books are staring at me), I like my Kindle. It's a bookshop I can carry around with me. Granted, sometimes the formatting is off and so is the editing, the bookmark function is not what you'd think, and I miss page numbers. But this bookshop is huge and it contains editions you can't find elsewhere and it's more affordable than hardcopy books. (Collusion of the ethical people who cut down trees at the pace of 50 football fields a day.)

There's just one leetle thing. I was sitting at an airport in a town (that I still have never found, meaning where are the buildings?!), on a work trip (remember I'm in publishing, so I read a lot of stuff), three hours early for my flight because Customs closes at 15.00. (I expected sniffer dogs and all they did was try to trick me so they could tell that my passport is real. So what do they do until 17.00? Do they have to refill the stamps? Recite the passport details from memory? Feed the dogs? Study how to be as miserable as possible?!)

Oh, and my laptop battery was dead. The last thing I wanted to do was read anything serious. As you can imagine, my Kindle library is very serious. Snort. No. The serious stuff is mostly the stuff I should read and mean to read but cringe from because I do not possess that kind of vocabulary and I'm embarrassed to tell Kindle that I need to look up a word. I have some very frivolous material in my library, but I wanted something short and about 3 steps on the trashy scale (the Kardashians being a 10).

Kindle Singles are the other wonderful thing about a Kindle. They are novellas, longer than a short story but short enough to read in one sitting. Perfect for my one sitting. My favourites are the serials: Positron and Wool. Not trashy enough. Some stuff on Obama, obesity, blah. Then 3rd-rung trashy, possibly 5th. I'm too embarrassed to tell you.

But to not tell you would really annoy you and then you'd leave and then I couldn't stage an Occupy with you smelly people, if I wanted to.

Ok... It's a single about a guy's experiences with dating, specifically online dating. I want to salvage my pride by saying I have never tried online dating, but honestly I think it takes guts. And perhaps some trusty friends on automatic dial who are very good at faking situations like a python in the lounge wrestling a cushion or a plague of chicken pox or burst water pipes or geysers or sewers.

He talks about some of the dates he's been on, which is amusing and which was all I was really there for. Trashy is code for wanting to laugh at or disdain or just judge other people. I just wanted to hear about his worst dates. He describes about five. He also talks you through creating an online profile. Aaaaaand I think that was it.

Remember when I said there was 'a leetle thing' (you should remember because I spelt it funny)? Normally I would not have read, nevermind paid for, a book or magazine or pamphlet like this. I was looking for something to soothe my tired eyes and brain. This single was amusing for roughly half an hour. But it wasn't soothing and then it was just annoying and I drank some coffee and worked using pen and paper and boarded the plane and slept and looked out of the window and wished I were home already.

(FYI people around this continent drink very bad coffee, including this town that I can't find, though I found the airport... 3 hours early. Very bad.)

Anyway, take me as a case in point. Here I sit, happily typing away, anything just anything that comes to mind, and then I post it and tweet the URL and people read it. Hopefully. (Can spambots read? Like AI-style?) No gatekeepers except the volatility of my laptop and internet connection. As an editor, I appreciate the need for mediators. As writer, I do not see why mediation is necessary. As a reader, I think I want buying trash to be a little bit more difficult, so that I come to my senses (however ragged) before I press 'Buy'.

PS. Here's the link. I judge myself more than you ever can.