(Did you know that Jacques Benveniste, one of the world’s leading homeopathic “scientists,” now claims that you can email homeopathic remedies? Yeah, see, what you do is you can take the “memory” of the diluted substance out of the water electromagnetically, put it on your computer, email it, and play it back on a sound card into new water. I mean, that could work, right?)
Richard Dawkins, Wheen recalls, once pointed out that if an alternative remedy proves to be efficacious—that is to say, if it is shown to have curative properties in rigorous medical trials—then “it ceases to be an alternative; it simply becomes medicine.” In other words, it’s only “alternative” so long as it’s been shown not to be any bloody good. I found it impossible not to apply this helpful observation to other areas of life. Maybe a literary novel is just a novel that doesn’t really work, and an art film merely a film that people don’t want to see… How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World is a clever-clogs companion to Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men; and as it’s about people of both sexes and every conceivable hue, it’s arguably even more ambitious.
I read Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’s book about bond-traders in the eighties, for two reasons, one of which was Wheen-inspired: he made me want to try and be more clever, especially about grown-up things like economics. Plus I’d read Lewis’s great Moneyball a couple of months previously [see “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” Dec. 2003/Jan. 2004], so I already knew that he was capable of leading me through the minefields of my own ignorance. It turns out, though, that the international money markets are more complicated than baseball. These guys buy and sell mortgages! They buy and sell risk! But I haven’t got a clue what any of that actually means! This isn’t Michael Lewis’s fault—he really did try his best, and in any case you kind of romp through the book anyway: the people are pretty compelling, if completely unlike anyone you might meet in real life. At one point, Lewis describes an older trader throwing a ten-dollar bill at a young colleague about to take a business flight. “Hey, take out some crash insurance for yourself in my name,” the older guy says. “I feel lucky.” As a metaphor for what happens on the trading floor, that’s pretty hard to beat.
Francis Wheen’s book and Paul Collins’s Not Even Wrong were advance reading copies that arrived through the post. I’m never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because quite clearly there’s nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one’s otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. I had no idea I wanted to read Wheen’s book until it arrived, and it was because of Wheen that I read Lewis, and then Not Even Wrong turned up and I wanted to read that too, and Buchan’s Greenmantle got put to one side, I suspect forever. Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g. books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.
Having said that I hardly ever read books about autism. I have now read two in the last few weeks. Paul Collins, occasionally of this parish, is another parent of an autistic kid, and Not Even Wrong, like Charlotte Moore’s George and Sam, is a memoir of sorts. The two books are complementary, though; while writing unsentimentally but movingly about his son Morgan’s diagnosis and the family’s response, Collins trawls around, as is his wont, for historical and contemporary illustration and resonance, and finds plenty. There’s Peter the Wild Boy, who became part of the royal household in the early eighteenth century, and who met Pope, Addison, Steele, Swift, and Defoe—he almost certainly played for our team. (Autistic United? Maybe Autistic Wanderers is better.) And Collins finds a lot of familiar traits among railway-timetable collectors, and Microsoft boffins, and outsider artists… I’m happy that we’re living through these times of exceptionally written and imaginative memoirs, despite the incessant whine you hear from the books pages; Collins’s engaging, discursive book isn’t as raw as some, but in place of rawness there is thoughtfulness, and thoughtfulness is never a bad thing. I even learned stuff, and you can’t often say that of a memoir.
New Year, New Me, another quick read of Gillian Riley’s How to Give Up Smoking and Stay Stopped for Good. I have now come to think of Riley as our leading cessation theorist; she’s brilliant, but now I need someone who deals with the practicalities.
BOOKS BOUGHT:
BOOKS READ:
Last month I was banging on about how books were better than anything—how just about any decent book you picked would beat up anything else, any film or painting or piece of music, you cared to match it up with. Anyway, like most theories advanced in this column, it turned out to be utter rubbish. I read four really good books this month, but even so, my cultural highlights of the last four weeks were not literary. I went to a couple of terrific exhibitions at the Royal Academy (and that’s a hole in my argument right there—one book might beat up one painting, but what chance has one book, or even four books, got against the collected works of Guston and Vuillard?); I saw Jose Antonio Reyes score his first goal for Arsenal against Chelsea, a thirty-yard screamer, right in the top corner; and someone sent me a superlative Springsteen bootleg, a ’75 show at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr with strings, and a cover of “I Want You,” and I don’t know what else. Like I said, I loved the books that I read this month, but when that Reyes shot hit the back of the net, I was four feet in the air. (The Polysyllabic Spree hates sport, especially soccer, because it requires people to expose their arms and legs, and the Spree believes that all body parts must be covered at all times. So even though I’m not allowed to talk about Reyes at any length, he does look to be some player.) Anyway, Patrick Hamilton didn’t even get me to move my feet. I just sat there—lay there, most of the time—throughout the whole thing. So there we are, then. Books: pretty good, but not as good as other stuff, like goals, or bootlegs.
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