Digging a Hole

Reading is like digging a hole, and some books get you in deeper than others. The Philip Roth book I've just finished had me up to my neck, up to my fucking neck. The problem with the hole is you have to dig yourself out of it, and when I finished that book today, I just sat in silence for a while nursing a thick drink. Notwithstanding what I've said earlier, for there are many kinds of holes, even tracks, that mark your reading progress through this world, 'The Human Stain' has the sense of epic about it, or perhaps our disquieting lack of epic quality reflected back at us, and it is tremendous. It features a professor of classics caught in the morass of contemporary 'rules' which pretty much might be summed up as 'the classics are too difficult these days'.

It's so good I'm out of the house back in this bar listening to Cure records and watching the unceasing passage of mums, soon to be mums, buggies and babies once again for light relief. Apparently this place, this spot, has the highest percentage birthrate in Germany

Architectural Bookshops

What is it about architectural bookshops that is so stifling? Is it the lack of air conditioning? The anally retentive staff? Your fellow browsers, (who of course, in the circumstances, you take immediate sexual interest in out of sheer perversity). Is it the silence in which these people so dutifully browse? Is it the fact that all architects look the same? Is it the confrontation the so called great and the good (so often these days quickly manufactured before doing anything at all) The remarkable singularity and dogma of the architectural publishing world itself? Is it because you are so BORED, Is it the all pervading conservatism masked as radical thought? Yes thats it. I always go, I always hate it.

Books

Reading Philip Roth's 'The Human Stain'. It is obviously a very good book; it is positively an avalanche of words conjugated in very fine ways. My problem is I just finished a comparatively shlock thriller which I could hardly put down which was put together all the more simply, and well, I thought it was just better. That book was Robert Harris's The Ghost. In The Ghost, Harris also says just about everything I've picked up in all that heavy theoretical stuff that I've also been trying to read by people like Zizek and Badiou, but he's saying it in a very different way. This enigma is further complicated by the fact that Zizek in particular spends most of his time deconstructing popular narratives such as Kung Fu Panda and Enigma (Harris's first major success) and making statements like 'I feel it imperative to swear in public, but never in private'. In this sense Zizek is as much a media parody as the fictional ex- Prime Minister in the Harris book. I'm not sure Harris would admit to reading Zizek, but what if he did- what kind of circle would that make?

An added intrigue is that Ewan McGreggor plays me in the film version of The Ghost. It's my flat and my whisky glass he sips from, and when I read the book, he even uses the same pen as me.

Another is that sat across from me in this quite trendy bar at five in the afternoon in Berlin (for once there are no mothers with buggies) there are two cunts from Clapman or therabouts talking about wife-swapping in Russia in accents reminiscent of Martin Fucking Amis.

'She was from Moldavia (sic)- she had fucking enormous tits!'

One of them is called Rupert.

They sell crap to Russian supermarkets, they clearly enjoyed public school, they wouldn't even get Harris if they read him because it's not in their personal interests to do so, so it's back to THEIR human stain, and possibly me swearing in public if they fuck me off for much longer.

Special Occaisions

We approach the hour when nothing happens in Berlin; Sunday. Of course I relish such an opportunity. Precious little happens here most of the time as a consequence of historical trauma, leaving ample time for observation and whatever, however we have been caught up in a certain crisis called 'Julie's Birthday' which is why we are here in the first place rather than in St Albans going frantically mad with her four sisters and about a million kids which we know, as opposed to those we simply 'observe', here in the 'Motherland'.

There are lessons to be learnt in dealing with 'special occasions', occasions I dread of course.

The first is to try and NOT to do anything special. We got caught in the most fabulous rain storm yesterday, and that was special enough for me, water pouring over the canopy of the bar, bouncing off the roofs of cars, all that sort of thing. It was incredibly romantic, and bathed away Julie's birthday anxieties perfectly, but it came from 'trusting to luck' and 'not doing anything in particular' as a mode of operation. The thing is, when there are five sisters, the normative communication on birthdays is 'What are you going to do? (that's special!)' under that rubric (that of the spectacular- the commodification of feeling) and in that zone it's almost impossible for anything special to actually happen (unless you are in Las Vegas, where you embrace that experience as curiously authentic) you just chase around getting unhappy. Instead we get drenched in the rain and found a fabulous restaurant and much more on what would be no more than a ramble around three blocks enjoying various curiosities by accident or trust to luck. This could be a lesson from the surrealists but it remains a hard one to learn.

If I remember rightly, read 'Mad Love' by Andre Breton to cultivate such sentiments.

Some kind of utopia..

I appear to have landed in some kind of spooky futuristic feminist utopia. You look out along the street and all you see is happy women and happy babies and every second shop is a kindergarten. You sit in a trendy bar (they are all trendy bars) and in flock ladies with articulated buggies to allow their babies to gawp at projections of fish floating across the big screen. There are NO teenagers, it appears they have been banished (there shall be no awkward interruption of maternity!) and what remains of dissolute manhood sits around in huddles in the park nursing their bottles of beer and wondering, no doubt, 'where did it all go wrong?' and 'shall we have another game of (municipally provided) ping pong?'. This place is called something like Prince-lawuer-berg but I'm not sure, just call it 'motherworld', and it is very strange indeed. Also, the ladies all seem to scowl at me.

In the apartment analysis appears to confirm the situation. Our host, for instance, seems to have taken a dedicated stance against Thomas Edison. It appears she has a phobia with electricity. We could start with the lights, but we must quickly move on to electrical equipment in general, in that it appears to exist but certainly doesn't work in any conventional way. The CD player spat out the Foo Fighters after one verse and presumably only responds to Suzanne Vega, the tv is dedicated to the Wombles, the dishwasher is suddenly 'me'. Meanwhile, the decor, elegantly drawn as it is, is elegantly drawn tits, arse and cunt in multiplicity without the least hint of pornographic interest. I feel I have been finally committed to 're-education'.

By nature I'm not much one for theories of the 'sexualization of space' but I'm sure in one now. Luckily I'm reading an excellent book, 'The Spiv and the Architect' (Hornsey) a reading of 'queer roles in the spacial practice of London's post war years' (for balance) which is fabulously homosexual, and therefore, I may be undertaking some kind of life changing therapy.

Meanwhile materialist analysis tells me, 'when the wall came down the students came to live here because it was cheap, the locals evacuated somewhere else because for them it wasn't anymore, and now all the students are breeding, and tomorrow it really is Notting Hill'. But students tend to be pretty crap at materialist analysis just at the time they should be bathing in it.

Cats and Dogs

So times like these, to fully enjoy them, require considerable inactivity. There's a lot to think about if you give yourself hours of inactivity and so I sat on the sofa staring at a wall of drawings, some by the kids of the apartment at the bottom of the wall, others by the mum rising to the top of it.

Firstly, in strictly critical terms, the drawings by the kids were better than those of mum. Mum's looked better, very stylish fluid line drawings, but the kid's had something else going on; they were discovering things and it was good to think about what and how they were discovering things.

There was a fabulous kid's drawing of a cat, it started as a 'cat', but the barbaric nature of the child's imagination soon took it into 'tiger' with the ferocious scribbling of orange and black 'stripes'. I thought this drawing was utterly fantastic, it had everything of cat and tiger AT THE SAME TIME (same set!) and probably the kid didn't even care!

Weirdly, as far as I have seen anyway, there are NO CATS in Berlin. Berlin is a DOG CITY. Dogs (hounds) trot around like they own the bloody place with their curly tails in the air, they even go along to shop in the supermarkets. Our friend has a big white wolf of a thing, very stylish indeed, and as soon as it saw us in it's customary second home, it threw up on the parquet as if in disgust. Hence, the kid was really using his or her imagination.

But the only time I've ever seen a cat here is in my favorite bar in Savignyplatz, and so as far as I'm concerned, that's the only cat here (my friend agrees). That made me think, maybe because I like cats and especially pub cats, that this may contribute to me loving that bar so much. I also wonder whether the sound of the german language is better associated with dogs than cats, and a cat language would have to be...Italian. There is indeed much to ponder on.

Then I read Zizek deconstructing 'Kung Fu Panda' and thought, well I'm not as good as him, and then, then, the problem with Zizek is, he just does too much.

Back in the DDR

Escape to Berlin, that's us, where the girls waft by on their bicycles with their bones and their breasts and their blond hair and their babies (some carried in strange carts sleeping in safety belts) as if on a kind existential autopilot. Our hosts said of this particular bit of Berlin 'You'll love it, It's just like Notting Hill' Well as you no doubt well understand I hate fucking Notting Hill, but thats long distant friends for you, they are unlikely to get your preferences quite right. But, hell, here we are in a land necessarily historically tranquilized for our own beneficial period of tranquilization, and I'm in some bar where they play that anonymous dreaming tranquilizer music and the beer is good and there's virtually nobody here which makes it a lot better than Notting Hill. If my friends had said,'It's like Notting Hill but with nobody in it', I'd have been fine.

But when we arrived last night we were of course a little befuddled. There was no tv in the living room for instance. German ways may be hard to absorb, and we are clearly in a flat vacated by a mum and her young twins (tv sits on the floor elsewhere). Therefore, in search of televisual entertainments, I was faced by the complete set of The Wombles to be viewed from the bed (on video!- and no ice making facilities!- door falls off ice making bit of fridge). Still, we are now happily settling in (and truly grateful if mum is reading this!) and should be right as rain in a month.

I once visited Womble creator Mike Batt's country pile. Never let it be said that creating the Wombles couldn't have a huge effect on the material aspects of life. I was there at a wedding, and there was much Womble memorabilia in evidence. My friend said 'I'm not leaving without a Womble stuffed up my arse'. Those were the days.