Authors Electric

  I have a habit of seeing stages of my life in terms of books or films that seemed to reflect everything I was experiencing or feeling at the time. Is this, I wonder, how we make sense of our lives, attempting to give the chaos and serendipities of reality a narrative arc where none really exists? My early years were pure Christopher Robin, an only child in the countryside, whose best friends were pets and toys, entirely unaware that I had arrived at the end of a long line of privilege; white, male, middle class and British. The idylls of “Hundred Acre Wood”, (and “Never-Never Land” for that matter), were then replaced with a mixture of “Jennings Goes to School” and “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” – culminating in the cathartic anarchy of Lindsay Anderson’s film, “If”, which was released just as I was reaching the end of my patience with educational institutions. “Down and Out in Paris and London”, “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” and “Of Human Bondage” reflected the struggle to surviv...

The other night I found myself in a crush of shoppers at a big-top market. Its cavernous space cheerfully illuminated: Murmurs blended into the ambient up-music amid a kaleidoscope of kiosks, redolent with e xotic victuals. I was bringing an order of barbecued prawns to my inamorata and a couple of friends who sat at a food court table chatting merrily. As I approached, someone informed me that I had dropped something. Shrimp were falling from the soggy bottom of my bag, one-by-one, leaving a trail behind me. Then the bag gave way and the rest plopped to the tiled floor in a slippery mess at my feet. There was a hush. People tried not to stare. No use attempting to salvage anything. I could just hear, “Clean-up on aisle 4,” over the loudspeakers. “ Tooozi again! Get that Toozi off the court!” I remembered my red-faced high school basketball coach blowing his whistle and yanking me out of practice games for passing the ball to opposing players. I grinned fe...

Don't you flash your close-ups at me, matey       I wasn't sure what to blog about this month.       After a quick and slightly upsetting look at my sales, I thought I might talk about the unpredictable nature of bookselling. After all, hits always, always come out of the blue. Aside from exhaustive efforts to boost word-of-mouth, and/or saturation media coverage, there's nothing anyone can do, for certain, to sell a title. If there was, the nation's publishers would never have printed an unsuccessful word... [insert raised eyebrow here]...       No, that's a total downer.       I thought maybe I should talk about the way the new Kindle, the little 'un, seems to be taking the mickey with its screensavers. All those close-ups of pens and typewriter keys and printing blocks. It's as if the cheeky whatsit is sitting there saying "ha ha, look at all this old tech, you don't need them...