Notebook

A few days ago I had the privilege of interviewing Benjamin Zephaniah. What's not in the interview is the conversation I had with him about his version of Tam Lin, Tam Lyn Retold, recorded with The Imagined Village. I told him how much Tam Lin meant to me -- that my novel Seizure was partly based on the story -- and he laughed, I like to think with delight. "I’m not just saying this," he said to me, "but I get this almost every day. One thing I find about people who are into Tam Lin, is that they’re really into it. And maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I didn’t know it at all. Maybe that helped me, because I could just look at it and think, how would I tell this in a modern setting? What wld be the modern day version of this? it’s interesting reading what people said about it – I dunno, it’s diff icult to say, you can’t go back to the past, you can’t imagine knowing something you didn’t know, but I think it would have been harder if I’d known it. I would have been asking myself, like, what would Erica think? And from all over the world I get people writing to me about it – some one just the other day from central Africa, from Malawi, wrote to me, saying something like, you’ve done us good."

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Walt Whitman said that the Brooklyn Bridge was "the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken". This remarkable photograph is by New York photographer Barbara Mensch. Find her work here.

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The other night I went to hear Simon Callow give a talk at the wonderful London Library. When asked by a member of the audience what his favourite book of all time was he replied that he would have to choose Dickens' The Pickwick Papers for its quality of beneficence -- a quality he said, rightly, was thin on the ground these days. He reminded me of the closing paragraph of the book, an exemplar of what he means:

“And there in the midst of all this, stood Mr. Pickwick. Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness, of which, if we seek them, there are ever some, to cheer our transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light; we, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at our imaginary companions, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.”

Three cheers for Mr. Pickwick and his friends. That's us, too.

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Eunoia is the shortest word in the English language that uses every vowel. Eunoia is a book by the shockingly clever Christian Bök. It's published by those equally clever people at Canongate.

Whenever Helen enters Hell’s deepest recesses, she sees
Hell’s meekest dwellers. She meets the repenters, never
redeemed. She greets her decedent elders. The elder
seers, when greeted, tell her: ‘repent, repent – never let
the tempters here tempteth thee’ – then these helpless
wretches tell her three spells best kept secret, lest the
tempted empress reverse these hexes, then set free demented
spectres, held here, bespelled. The three spells,
when reversed, sever these hexed fetters; hence, the
berserk efreets, when freed, screech ‘hell’s bells’, then
flee these endless deserts, where the embers swelter.

Hear Christian Bök read from Eunoia on YouTube --

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Anyone for ice cream?

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