Books for 2011

So this year I'm going to write about 100 books I'm going to read during the year. I know, I'm already behind schedule if I'm only starting now but I did decide a bit late. I will also, of course, cheat. The nature of the cheating will expose itself soon.

Last week I read "Touching the void" by Joe Simpson. We have taken to reading and watching mountain climbing films recently. We both read "Into thin air" by John Krakauer (having enjoyed his Into the wild and Under the banner of heaven) and decided to get our hands on the IMAX movie shot during that season. The climbing sequences in that really hammered home the craziness of the whole endeavour. This led us to watch Scream of stone by Werner Herzog - we're huge Herzog fans - partially due to Reinhold Messner being the climbing consultant. This may not be the greatest narrative film ever. Werner (my pal on facebook) disowned and didn't write the script and the acting is not actually great. But the mountain Cerro Torre, a 2KM needle of ice covered rock with a mushroom shaped summit made of windblown snow, is simply one of the most insane things I have ever seen that anyone would want to try and do a Batclimb all the way up. Back to the void. I read it over a decade ago. A few years ago this would have been a problem but I found myself with no clear memory of details from the book, as distinct from the film, which I watched maybe seven years ago. I have now rectified that by going back to the book and I realise to some extent how this happened.


Even now I read a book like this without fully understanding the climbing. I didn't draw little diagrams to work out the traverses and rappels and how the ropes were anchored during the descent in particular. I certainly wasn't entirely sure what a piton looked like and I think some of the knots and rope climbing techniques I don't really understand. I find that when a book doesn't form a coherent whole in your mind it is easy to forget. This was always the reason I didn't finish books if I really didn't like them: to allow me to forget something best forgotten. Of course in my youth I suffered from too much memory, which is not really a great problem these days. As I've got older I have discovered that if a book on a subject is interesting, it's even more interesting to read 10 or 20. And watch films. Because of that we've ended up reading a few books and watching a few more, and my intray has a few of both piling up. People ask, "what you sit at home reading and watching but don't climb?" to which I invariably reply "what is it about books and films with people losing body parts and lives to cold, ice, wind, hypoxia and falls that would make you want to get up a mountain? Oh, and we do it with the fire on on a COMFY sofa."

Back to the book: this is exactly the kind of extraordinary survival adventure that would make any sane person feel glad of their warm fire. It asks you one really important question over and over again: would you just lie back and die? Now would you? Stand on your dislocated broken knee and walk on broken scree, now would you? Thirsty passing out from pain hallucinating from hunger, now would you? How about now?

Little Miss Sunshine

We're making a habit of going to see films on their last day of release. Last week it was Volver, Almadovar's best since 'all about my mother'. Loved it. Last night we went to see Little Miss Sunshine which was mighty fun. I often worry about US "indie" (it's on Fox) films. They often have the same tendency to be Joseph Campbelled and Syd Fielded to death with heroic story arc and all that wank. You start noticing all the plot holes, mcguffins, clumsy expositions, and shitty dialogue. But only if they don't hold your attention. This film built our interest in the characters rather than assumed it and gradually brought us to the point where the entire cinema was hooting with laughter. I think it helped that the small screen in the IFI was jammed with people: the documentary festival was just starting so anyone who walked in off the street ended up in the small screen. I was worried also that the film would feature lots of cute hollywood kids that would make me want to throw up. Fortunately it was about a bunch of freaks. But the kids reminded me of this book . And that made me think that I wanted to make a list of my favourite photography books of the past few years.

This one, Ricas y famosas features the trophy wives of Mexican rich socialites and daytime soap stars and their incredibly tacky, yet incredible houses and outfits. It' s fairly camp to be sure. But stunning darling. The gold! The heels! The makeup! The pools! I think Pierre et Gilles may have had a bad influence on me many years ago.


If that was camp, well, this is simply the gayest book ever to cross my threshold. Wow. Who would have known the Taliban are queer, but they sure are. Here the army of lovers pose for their identity photographs (photography having being banned but security being important a contradiction arose in the state) kohl rimmed eyes stare out from whitened faces with rouged cheeks, touched up pouts and jet black hair. Conspicuous consumption in the form of flaunted watches and mobile phones, guns taped up with bright coloured tapes. Guys mock killing each other in front of Swiss chalet backdrops that look like they long to set up home sweet homestead, put on the blonde pigtail wig 'who shall wear the apron today habibi?'

This book 'Ghetto' (or gee-tow as Timmy Hillnigger would put it) is compiled by the editors of Color magazine. Or ex editors, I think they called it a day to make this book. The cover image is from a portrait project in a Cuban mental hospital and much of the book is even grimmer than that.

Vive la revolution... or at least we'll have a strike

Just came back from over a week in France, in Toulouse and Carcassonne. Had a great time, bought a load of records, went to a match with my da for his seventieth birthday and it was great, came home later than expected. I love France, and in general, I love the French people. Though the civil service there seem to get their only thrill in their stunted, joyless, impotent lives by being arseholes. Off work they're probably fine.

I was sitting in Carcassone castle enjoying the sun and reading 'House of Leaves' by Mark Danielewski (extraordinary book - David Foster Wallace's 'infinite jest' is the major reference that comes to mind. But without the smug annoying self satisfied onanistic backslapping on its own cleverness and with terrifying voids of horror and emotional damage)and I met some nice Americans while I was having a glass of wine. They insisted on buying me a glass - no other nationality would have in that circumstance, Americans are actually, genuinely much nicer than Europeans. One thing that struck me as odd was that they were genuinely annoyed by French people going on strike. I was kind of 'why do you care? I mean it doesn't hurt your economy...' Which is kind of my attitude to incomprehensible things that you can't change and don't really effect you. I often find it funny when people in Europe get heated about US domestic issues. It's not like you can vote. Anyway I was saying that they had a revolution so that they could do this and if they were the same as everyone else why would people come to France? We were sitting, as I said, in a beautiful huge castellated medieval city. If it was in Ireland every tourist image of the country would have it. But the more I thought about that issue the more the revolution came into my head. Revolution often fills my head. When I was in school I remember writing a parody of Hopkins called 'that nature is a Hegelian dialectic and of the comfort of the revolution'... Anyway. I think the reporting of the current French strikes and protests against the law to 'liberalise' the youth employment market misses the point. The protestors are the children of petit bourgeois, functionnaires. The French revolution was a petit bourgeois revolution. It was unnecessary in England as merchants ran the country rather than aristocrats. The US revolution, by contrast, was a revolution of aristocrats and oligarchs avoiding paying tax to the English. As a result France is run by and for the petit bourgeois: the US is run by and for the ultra-rich who don't pay tax. Where does that leave us? I've said before that we took the Canadian option when we were run by our local version of the US revolutionaries: rich landgrabbing Anglos that didn't want to pay tax to England. And then we had a revolution. Or did we?