Just Say Gnome!

In 1990, during his Sound + Vision tour, David Bowie invited fans to vote for what he should play. Inevitably, someone ran a campaign to get one of his 'embarrassing' early works, The Laughing Gnome, on the list. Voting was then scrapped in what I think was a regrettable lack of a sense of humour (an unusual one, look at this) and of proportion.

A similar lack of proportion, though in reverse, seems to have attended the publicity-explosion of the last few 

weeks about the surprise release of where are we now. I mean, it's fine, isn't it? I just don't think it merits the reception it's gotten. And nor is this the first time this has happened: in fact everything that Bowie has put out since at least 1999, when everyone said Hours sounded like Hunky Dory, which it doesn't, has had the same treatment. Perhaps everyone's just so relieved it's not Tin Machine again. That's a shame, because it diminishes the original achievements in his golden period running from 1970 to 1983 (you can dispute both ends). It's not that the recent albums aren't bad, many tracks are good, they just lack the sense of risk, innovation and plain madness that characterised him at his pomp (and indeed afterwards, I'm no fan of Earthlings, but it shows the same restlessness). It's certainly true that since 1999 he's eliminated the tendency to put out something awful, but it comes at a price - he's lost that sense of adventure. Not surprising for a man in his sixties. 

But in his pomp, he was extraordinary. He released more than an album a year in the 1970s (useful list here). And all of them (Pin Ups aside) are great, and different. To have followed it at the time must have been amazing, even in retrospect, it's jarring, but exciting. Above I noted that Hours doesn't sound like Hunky Dory, that's because nothing sounds like Hunky Dory - it's a odd, affected record, but it's brilliant, packed full of gems as well as the classics. I remember getting it, it was one of my CDs and it unlocked Pop for me. I then bought most of the rest. You can take your pick, but I'd single out Ziggy Stardust, Station to Station and Diamond Dogs as the best. At one point over 40% of my CD collection was Bowie. 

Anyway, there's a nice retrospective here (hat tip to Elliot), though it misses out The Laughing Gnome.

An elegy for lost data

Notoriously, I have a database of my friends. Specifically, I have a small spreadsheet on which I record my core friends - about 50 of them - and various facts, including how often I see them. I also have spreadsheets that record in detail a variety of other things, including my books and reading. No-one really remembers them though. Now, they are all gone - or at least 2012 is - as I put them memory stick on which they reside in the washing machine. The data for 2012 is lost. I was, and am, very upset about this. A doesn't really understand why.

Now I've had these for about ten years, maybe a bit more. I started them for quite prosaic reasons. I built a list of books because at the time most of my books were still at my parents' house and I didn't want to buy duplicates. I started recording presents when I bought the same thing for the same person two years in a row. I built the Friends database to win an argument over how many of my friends were Tories - less than half as it happens. But I've kept them because they're useful, and interesting. They've expanded in function of course. It was the Books DB that told me I'd not read about 15% of the books in the house, and so I read them. It's the Friends DB that means I don't forget to catch up with people who aren't front of mind. A record of what I cook, and where, from means I could throw out half my cookbooks last year, and forced me to discover more in those I kept. There's more, minor (I also recorded when people first met JR on the Friends DB) and major (the Books DB also records reading levels, allowing me to note the catastrophic baby-induced collapse in volume). I'll now never have that information for 2012.

But the loss I feel is bigger than that - I feel like I have lost part of my past. Without the data, I'm forced to rely on my perception of what happened, and perception is irredeemably faulty, unsystematic and unreliable, and just plain wrong. We know this - that's why we write things down, it's why we take photographs. For me, the information in those spreadsheets was part of my narrative of my past. The information contained allowed me, quickly, to access accurately the past. I'm not making any great claim for the information they held as a record of my life, but they captured part of it, and with ten years of data, they were compelling. And now they are gone. I can replicate some of the information, but not much, and though I've only lost one year, the sequence is broken and the data will always be incomplete. So will the narrative they supported.

I mourn.

Bibliography, 2012

End of the year time. Here were my books of the month:

January - A. Burgess, Earthly Powers* 
February - J. Le Carre, The honourable schoolboy
March - D.L. Sayers, Gaudy night 
April - M. Lewis, Moneyball 
May - Duflo & Bannerjee, Poor economics 
June - T.Penn, Winter King 
July - P.G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime
August - P. Krugman, End this depression Now
September - C. McCullers, The Heart is a lonely hunter
October - L. Strachey, Eminent Victorians 
November - P.G. Wodehouse, Service with a smile
December - A. Spiegelman, Maus

It almost doesn't need saying that this has been a terrible year for reading. In the previous seven years, I've chalked up an average of 127 books; this year it was 85, and while I don't have a lightweight percentage to hand, it would be higher than ever before. There's certainly more fiction - 64/85 or 75% - though this hasn't really shown up in the BOTMs, which fell 50:50. One minor upside, it did make Books of the Year easier to pick. Too many months had only good rather than great books as their best.

In fact, if you'd shown me the list in advance I could probably have guessed fiction this time last year. I loved Earthy Powers eight years ago, and I loved it again this time. Like other monumental works, it repays rereading as while the shape remains constant, one's engagement with the characters and the issues changes over time - Carlo seems much more fragile, and more flawed than he did in 2004. Regardless, it's a magnificent book, and I'm already looking forward to rereading it in about 2020.

Non-fiction was a surprise, though it shouldn't have been. Non-fiction was better as a whole than fiction despite its low numbers. But, excellent though Penn was, nothing could touch Eminent Victorians. I suspect if I'd read it at 18, I'd have taken more modern papers at university. And, by implication, fewer Byzantine ones. I can think of no greater praise than that.

Bibliography, December 2012

BOTM: A. Spiegelman, Maus

A. Christie, Crooked House*
A. Christie, Hallowe'en Party
A. Christie, Sad Cypress
P. O'Donnell, Modesty Blaize
S. Maconie, Pies and prejudice
S. Richardson, Clarissa (vol 1)

Some years ago, someone told me that Clarissa revolutionised their view of English Literature (they either went on to do or were doing a English Literature degree at the time, which may have been a warning sign). Given it's free on the Kindle I thought I'd try it. I have failed - it is turgid in the extreme and I only got to end of volume one (of four) and that took serious effort. Perhaps as a result, everything else has been a bit lightweight. I almost gave BOTM to Modesty Blaize, which I read on the strength of listening to it serialised on Woman's Hour when I was ill the week before Christmas. but it was flimsy, if great fun. Maus however was a cut above. In some ways it's a bit flimsy too. There are certainly better Holocaust books (and there the obvious ones), but there's an immediacy that the comic form brings that works well.