The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (42 page)

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If
FANTASTIC FOUR #50
PASSED YOU BY, you'll have to take MY
WORD
this is what happened! THE TALE IS TOO
TWISTY
TO RE-TELL HERE! NUFF SAID! – anFRACTUOUS andy.

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Co-creator Jack Kirby's original vision was of the Surfer as the Fallen Angel and Galactus as an Old Testament Jehovah. Under writer Stan Lee's direction, the character more closely resembles another religious archetype, the Wandering Jew. The pioneers of the comics industry, many of whom were Jewish, are the subject of Michael Chabon's novel
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
and Chabon has said that the character of Joe Kavalier was partly inspired by Jack Kirby. I must read that book, it sounds every bit as fascinating as I keep telling people it is.

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For the uninitiated, ‘Krautrock' is a xenophobiasm (see below) coined by British music journalists in the 1970s to define this wave of German progressive music. Some prefer the term ‘Kosmische Musik', denoting the genre's deep-space/inner-space connotations. To complicate matters, several German groups subsequently adopted the K-word themselves, e.g. ‘Krautrock', the
sehr kosmische
opening track of Faust's fourth album,
Faust IV
. However one labels it, this music has remained a touchstone for experimental and alternative musicians for over forty years. No two groups sounded exactly alike but one could expect to hear some or all of the following on their records: long, experimental pieces filling the entire side of an LP; wailing, distorted electric guitar; unfathomable and often improvised vocals and chanting; a metronomic drumbeat referred to as ‘motorik' or ‘apache'; slow, glacial drones played on the only Moog synthesiser in West Germany. The author of
Krautrocksampler
, in the introduction alone, defines it as, variously, ‘
the German pre-punk self-awareness trip of all time . . . a substantial artform with considerable stamina . . . a whole Youth-nation working out their blues . . . some of the most astonishing, evocative, heroic glimpses of Man at his Peak of Artistic Magic
'. Julian H. Cope: never knowingly underwhelmed.

‘Xenophobiasm' is a neologism coined by me to define a xenophobic neologism, rather than an orgasm of racist origin, e.g. one brought on by reading the
Daily Mail
.

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My original copy of
Krautrocksampler
has never turned up and, as the owner of the blog noted, this PDF looks like it was scanned by someone in a hurry. Pages 98 and 99 are missing, which means I may never know how Cope feels about the two Amon Düül II albums,
Carnival in Babylon
and
Yeti
, ‘
the Ur-Kraut album of All
', though I can hazard a guess. Do you have these stray pages? Do you know someone who does? Get in touch, please. OCD's kickin' in pretty bad, man!

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Of his preference for the Travelodge experience, in 2000 Cope told a BBC film crew: ‘After about six or seven years of travelling I started realising that I was staying more and more in Travelodges and people were asking me why. “Why are you staying in Travelodges all the time? They're totally characterless, they're totally anonymous, they're always the same.” I said, Precisely. I said, I'm just getting fed up with travelling for seven hours, being exhausted after a full day's fieldwork, and then having to listen to, you know, some sweet biddy who says, “Ooh, you know, this is the porch that we built two years ago.” And I just feel like, Gimme me the keys, Bitch! . . . Is “Gimme me the keys, Bitch!” too compassionless? I think it's probably more rock, isn't it?' Inspired by Cope, I stayed exclusively in Travelodges while conducting fieldwork on Britain's crazy golf courses for my first book
Tilting at Windmills
; likewise, every word of
The Year of Reading Dangerously
has been written while wearing shades and a misinterpretable hat. I regret nothing,
Mein Führer
.

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Plenty more where that came from at: www.headheritage.co.uk/julian_cope/qa2000ce/krautrock.

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Compare with Jung's essay, ‘The Stages of Life': ‘
Whoever protects himself against what is new and strange and thereby regresses to the past, falls into the same neurotic condition as the man who identifies himself with the new and runs away from the past. The only difference is that the one has estranged himself from the past, and the other from the future . . . Just as a childish person shrinks back from the unknown in the world and in human existence, so the grown man shrinks back from the second half of life. It is as if unknown and dangerous tasks were expected of him; or as if he were threatened with sacrifices and losses which he does not wish to accept; or as if his life up to now seemed so fair and so precious that he could not do without it
.'
Modern Man in Search of a Soul
(1933), pp104–108. ‘I paraphrase his [Jung's] stuff all the time,' Cope told Simon Reynolds in 1991. ‘He's incredible.'

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Oh, bad luck! Turner painted many remarkable canvases along this particular stretch of the Kent coast; but the majority of
La Mer
was composed in a sea-facing room at the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, which is, of course, on the south coast, not the east. So you only get half a point. Yes, the footnotes are back. Did you miss them? I left them out of the previous chapter because it took the form of a letter or email and not even I annotate my own emails.

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Metaphor! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!

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This is not a euphemism for some bedroom indelicacy. When Tina and I moved in together in the early 1990s, we rented the attic flat above the headquarters of the Victorian Society in Bedford Park, the garden suburb area of Chiswick in West London. The Victorian Society is a charity dedicated to the study and preservation of Victorian and Edwardian architecture and other arts. Amongst its guiding lights were John Betjeman, Hugh Casson and the German architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, founding editor of the classic
Buildings of England
series. As detailed by Susie Harries in
Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life
, Pevsner did not compile these books alone. At his side was his wife Lola. When undertaking research for one of his guides, Pevsner insisted Lola ferry him around in their Morris Traveller, wait in the car while he jotted down his observations of a church or guildhall, drive him on to the guest house she had booked, eat the sandwiches she had made for them both before setting out, and stay awake until he had finished typing out his notes. The following day, the same routine, for year after year, until her husband had filled the pages of more than thirty volumes and been justifiably acclaimed as one of the pioneering figures of post-war British cultural life. In fact, Nikolaus Pevsner knew how to drive all along but preferred not to; and Lola Pevsner predeceased her husband by twenty years. It is this arrangement to which Tina is referring here.

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They have been renovating that place for months now, the inconsiderate bastards. Their intrusion into the text would be the perfect illustration of what I am describing here, if only it weren't so bloody loud. ‘
Knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about has made the whole of my life a daily torment . . . I do not see why one fellow who is removing a load of sand or manure should obtain the privilege of killing in the bud the thoughts that are springing up in the heads of about ten thousand people successively
.' Schopenhauer, ‘On Noise'.

Other contradictatorial books, or books with a strong contradictatorial streak:
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers,
The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald,
U & I: A True Story
by Nicholson Baker,
How Proust Can Change Your Life
by Alain de Botton,
Leadville
by Edward Platt, as well as works by Cervantes, Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, Julian Cope, Michel Houellebecq, Lemony Snicket and even Charlotte Brontë (‘
Reader, I married him
') discussed elsewhere in this book. To this list, one might add the films of Jean-Luc Godard, or those of Patrick Keiller, or the stand-up comedy of Stewart Lee. Books about books, films about films, jokes about jokes. Again, this may be the influence of Douglas Adams, whose
Hitchhiker's
novels are constantly punctuated or interrupted by extracts from the fictional
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
(the one with
DON'T PANIC
inscribed in large, friendly letters on the cover), either commenting on or disagreeing with whatever the reader has just been told. For this reason, the acid test of a book's
contradictatoriality
is whether one can imagine it being read aloud by the late Peter Jones, the voice of the Book in the original
Hitchhiker's
radio series.

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As a parent, it has been instructive to discover that the deep, instinctive love I feel for my own child is counterbalanced by the antipathy I feel towards other people's children.
Pace
Tolstoy, it is for this reason that great nations go to war.

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Have you ever wondered how writers backed up their work in an age before computers, Mimeographs and even typewriters? They got their spouses to do it for them. Tolstoy made the Countess Tolstoy copy out the three-thousand-page manuscript of
War and Peace
in longhand, not once but seven times; small wonder she was testy. In the same period, she also ran the estate at Yasnaya Polyana, oversaw her husband's business affairs, managed his literary career and bore him four children. All of which puts me asking for a lift to the shops into perspective, surely. Of course, a lot has changed since Tolstoy's day. Tina was asked to write out the manuscript of this book only twice, a duty she discharged with a tremendous sense of post-Feminist empowerment, like I told her to.

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Julian Cope recently announced that he was planning to sell off his record collection. ‘
It's 2012, brothers'n'sisters,
' he wrote, ‘
and I have every intention of disposing of as much of our archives as I can – even personal effects and instruments – so that my family and I can travel more extensively and live unencumbered in these coming years. Forty years of vinyl? I gotta divest myself of some of these classics . . . Love on y'all, JULIAN (Lord Yatesbury).
' This is what I like about Cope; he can make something as mundane as having a bit of a clear-out sound like the affirmative action of a Forward-thinking MoFo. Encroaching clutter crisis?
Er . . . Look out!

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Tina's order of translational preference: Louise and Aylmer Maude, then Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, then Rosemary Edmonds. She has the Constance Garnett on her Sony Reader but finds it to be ‘prissy'.

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One reader of an early draft of this chapter raised an objection to this story. It's so blissfully connubial, he told me, it just makes me want to puke. I wouldn't have minded but he was Best Man at our wedding. Anyway, the conversation about
War and Peace
did actually happen in exactly the way I have laid it out here. If it makes you feel queasy, consider this an annotative indigestion tablet.

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The CEO concerned really said this. On the bright side, perhaps in the future I shall be able to sell the extracts from Chapter IV concerning Charles Arrowby's disgusting menus to whoever produces an app for
The Sea, The Sea
. It's all content, isn't it?

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I don't know why anyone was surprised by the phenomenal sales of
Fifty Shades of Grey
. When presented with some new technological breakthrough, it is only ever a matter of time before the human animal figures out how best to pornify it. The same thing occurred with previous innovations such as the gramophone record, the Internet and the Space Hopper.

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The Top Five in full. 1) Drinking, eating. 2) Holding on to books, regardless of size. 3) Making models out of Play-Doh™ and sniffing fingers afterwards. 4) Giving Paul McCartney the double thumbs-up in the street and having him reciprocate with same. 5) Self-abuse.

FWIW, I believe Harold Bloom and I are in accord about at least two of the above, if not more.

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Despite Amazon's best efforts, other brands of ereader are available for purchase and my customer comments are applicable to any and all of them.

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‘The rejection of technology is only sound when it's done through understanding. Rejection through ignorance or belief in the natural superiority of the old ways seems to me to be as bad as drably accepting all modernism.' Julian Cope,
Repossessed
.

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‘This is perhaps the best rough test of what is literature and what is not. If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at all.' Oscar Wilde,
The Decay of Lying: An Observation
.

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Under the Volcano: A Hypertextual Companion
, www.otago.ac.nz/english/lowry.

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I am able to tell you with absolute certainty that the question took me two minutes and twenty-three seconds to ask – but felt much longer – because I recently discovered to my absolute horror that the whole of Adams' interview at the ICA is now available to listen to online, as is my excruciating contribution from the audience. Twenty-five years on, it is even more mortifying than I remember it. If anyone reading this has a time machine and is thinking of going back to kill Hitler at birth, would you mind stopping off in The Mall in 1987 to kill me first? Thanks. Worst of all, this unwelcome entrance to the past has been propped open courtesy of the British Library.
You people were meant to be my friends!