The Drifters by James A Michener (Books 2018, 29)
I think I’ve read this more times than any other book except Illuminatus!, and maybe The Lord of the Rings. Which may be only three or four times. A friend got into Michener when we were teenagers. None of his books much interested me, until I looked at this.
It’s a tale of hippies and others in 1969. Six young people from various countries meet each other in Torremolinos, and drift around the Iberian Peninsula and parts of Africa. The narrator, seemingly detached third-person at first, turns out to be an older man who knows some of the young people, and arranges business trips so that he can hang out with them from time to time.
It’s about what was going on in the world — Vietnam, the Arab/Israeli conflict, drugs, music — and about the characters. They aren’t that well developed — indeed, he largely abandons character development after the first six chapters where he introduces each one — but those introductions are enough to see us through.
Actually, thinking about it now, I wish he had written more about some of them. A sequel would have been in order.
It’s partly, I suspect, Michener’s own struggle to come to terms with the way society is changing — he was born in 1907, so he’d have been 62 at the time this is set. It was published in 71, so maybe a tad older when he wrote it. The narrator, George Fairbanks, is younger than that, I think — probably in his fifties, maybe even forties, but people seemed to become old at a younger age back then.
Well worth a read.
I’m In A Book About The Clash
Joe Strummer died 16 years ago today. The Joe Strummer Foundation has a good memorial piece.
But for me it’s amusing or ironic or something, that it should be today of all days that, out shopping, I see (and buy) this book:
I’ve been waiting for this for around five years. You’ll recall, I don’t doubt for a second, that back in 2013 I posted a link to a Kickstarter that the authors were running to help them fund the writing of the book.
What I don’t seem to have posted about is that a year or so later, in June 2014, one of the authors visited the UK and interviewed me for the book. He didn’t come over just to interview me, I should stress. It was a research trip, and he visited various places and interviewed lots of people, some of my friends included.
We’ve exchanged emails a couple of times since then, when he had followup questions, so I kind of expected to hear when the book came out. Coincidentally I was recently thinking about emailing him, to talk about something on the Joe Strummer 001 collection of obscurities that came out a month or two back. Had I done so, I would of course have said, “So when’s the book coming out?”
But here it is. I am extensively quoted (well, quoted a couple of times) in the section on the busking tour’s visit to Edinburgh, which was mainly what he wanted me to talk about.
Here’s the publisher’s page on it. Here’s its GoodReads page, and its Amazon UK and US links. Probably too late to get it for Christmas. Try a bookshop.
Here’s a page with me:
I knew going In to the West End on the Saturday before Christmas was crazy. But first I couldn’t get on to the Piccadilly Line platform. And then, they’re queueing outside the Lego shop!
(Actually things aren’t too crowded so far.)
Today I learned that Nick Cave has a newsletter. I insta-subscribed, obviously, as you can do, and read the archive.
EU Figures Rule Out Concessions as May Postpones Brexit Vote
Honestly, she has no idea what she’s doing. Plus, she seems to be acting alone. We don’t have a presidential system here. The Prime Minister is not the entire executive.
EU figures rule out concessions as May postpones Brexit vote
This is more contempt of parliament.
It’s bullshit. Delaying the vote is just a ploy to leave less time to organise a second referendum. May is finished anyway, and her reputation as worst PM ever is assured. She should just finish it.
Na? No
I expect you’re all wondering what happened with my NaNoWriMo attempt this year. Sadly, after last year’s success, this year I failed.
As you’ll have seen if you clicked through to look at my stats, I averaged 595 words per day, for a total of 17,800. It’s not nothing, and it’s still a decent start on the new novel, but it’s nothing like last year.
Why did I fail? A better question is, why was I successful last year? This year’s result is comparable to other years when I’ve tried it. Last year’s success looks like the aberration.
The big difference between last year and any other was my commute. I’ve tended always to have a commute of about an hour — except when I worked at the bank in the City, when it was shorter. Last year I was working in Croydon, which took me an hour and a half or more to get to. The one good point was that, picking up the Overground from Dalston Junction, I nearly always got a seat within a few stops. And on the way back had one from the start (coming from West Croydon, which is the start of the line).
So I was able to get forty or fifty minutes of concentrated writing time in each direction. Add to that the fact that the office I was in was really horrible, so I didn’t want to spend my lunch hours in it. I mostly went out and wrote in cafes or at Boxpark Croydon. The one thing I miss about that job is the the places to eat, especially a little pizza place in Boxpark.
Whereas now, working at Imperial, I’m back to a one-hour commute, with much less guarantee of a seat. And I really like both job and office, so I’m quite happy to go back there after I’ve got my lunch.
One other point is that last year I had worked out how I was going to end the novel I had been working on for years, so I was running downhill towards that end. This year, starting a brand-new one — even though I’ve got a plan, it feels much more uphill.
Still, we press on, writers against procrastination, borne forward ceaselessly into the future.
All the congratulations to NASA for another successful landing on Mars. Good to know humanity can still do great things.
Did I hear right on https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive? The principal scientist for Mars Insight is Bruce Banner? Hope he stays clear of gamma rays. And doesn’t get angry.
Rude and Rough
I watched Rude Boy for the first time in many years. It is, in case you don’t know, a film from 1980 about and featuring The Clash. It’s kind of a fictionalised documentary, in that the titular character, Ray Gange, is both someone who was a sometime roadie for/hanger-on of The Clash, and playing the part of “Ray Gange.”1
The worst part of it is, as I recalled, his “acting.” Well, that’s not quite true. Viewing it as a film, that’s the case. But viewing it as a document of the end of the seventies, the worst part of it is the casual racism. And indeed the organised racism of the National Front rally shown at the start.
Also bad are the violence from police and bouncers, and the general horribleness of Britain in the seventies. Nothing looks clean, everything looks run-down or broken. It looks, in fact, far worse than I remember it being.
Don’t worry, by the way, if you don’t remember what it was like, are too young to have experienced it, and/or don’t want to watch the film. It’ll be like that again in a couple of years if things go as we fear.
The best parts are, of course, the scenes of The Clash live and in the studio. And we won’t get them back after Brexit.
Also, in looking up the IMDB article, I discover that a) Ray Gange has actually been in a couple of other movies, and b) far more importantly, there is a 2016 movie called London Town, which is a drama about those times. With people acting as The Clash. Whaaaat? Why did no-one tell me about this?
- Or not quite. That’s how I remembered it, but Wikipedia suggests the story is slightly different. ↩
I just read the phrase “staying under the rule of Brussels” in a foolish article. Instead it should read, “Continuing to contribute to the rule of Europe,” if you want it in terms of ruling. “Continuing to share in Europe’s future development,” to be more about cooperation.
My resignation from Labour has had a bigger impact than I expected:
In an email to Labour Party members this evening, Jeremy Corbyn confirmed that Labour will support the campaign for another public vote on Brexit if a general election is not possible
Our Prime Minister is either lying or deranged. From The Guardian’s live updates:
Labour’s Phil Wilson asks May if she can say, “hand on heart”, that this deal is better than what the UK has now.
May says she firmly believes the UK’s best days are ahead.
Or avoiding the issue: “best days ahead” could be looking ten, twenty years ahead. You know, when we rejoin the EU.
Stan Lee: Marvel Comics co-creator dies aged 95 – BBC News
He had a good run, I guess, and created some amazing things. I hope they’ve filmed his cameo for the next Avengers film.
Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is
I realised after yesterday’s post about Corbyn and Brexit that I’ve said similar things before. So today I’ve put talk into action. I’ve cancelled my direct debit for my party membership, and written to my constituency party secretary tendering my resignation.
I also did this:
Perhaps most significantly, at least symbolically: look up there. ⬆️ This blog has been called “A Labourer At the Bitface” more or less since it started, partly as a reference to my political stance, as I explained in this post.1 It’s now called “Tales From The Bitface,” which was the name of my Livejournal version. That’s still there, but it, along with the whole site, pretty much, is moribund.
I still support the principles of the Labour party, and I’m sure I’ll vote for them again. But not until they sort themselves out about Brexit.
- Even then, I note, I was “consider[ing] my future in said party.” ↩
Some Labour MPs are thinking along similar lines to me.
Wes Streeting:
“Labour cannot sit by and allow the choice to be between the economic ruin of a hard Brexit or the loss of sovereignty under Theresa May’s deal, with Britain subjected to EU rules but with no say over them,” he said. “As with any fork in the road, there is always the option of turning back home.
“We know this is a mess made by the Tories, but the Labour party can’t just sit back and watch. It’s time for all of us in the Labour party to make the full-throated case for a people’s vote with the option of remaining in the European Union.
“That leadership must now come from the top, or our party may never be forgiven for the consequences that follow.”
Chris Leslie:
“With even Tory ministers recognising Brexit threatens the poorest in society, our public services and Britain’s place in the world, to have a Labour leader just shrug about it, then go awol, is nothing short of a dereliction of duty.”
OK, they’re maybe not planning to leave the party, but still.