oh no, it's moby derek

A couple of further items related to Moby-Dick - firstly the 1956 Gregory Peck film, while the most famous adaptation of the book, certainly isn't the last word on the subject, far from it. There were film adaptations as early as 1926's silent The Sea Beast (featuring the immortal dialogue intertitles pictured here), later talkified as 1930's Moby Dick. Both films starred John Barrymore, but of course as admirable as Barrymore is, all anyone wants to know about these (and indeed any) adaptations is: how rubbish where the whale effects? From the brief clip I've seen I would say: not great, but not as rubbish as you might think. As with any effects achieved using a combination of scale models, carefully-shot articulated body parts and stock footage of real creatures there are some jarring scale transitions, from mildly irascible trout to something the size of a house, but this is hardly a problem exclusive to 1930s films; Jaws suffered from it too.

Subsequent to the 1956 adaptation there were several more, including a TV movie in 1998 (starring Patrick Stewart as Ahab and featuring a cameo from Peck), a film adaptation in 2010 starring, bizarrely, Barry Bostwick aka Brad from The Rocky Horror Picture Show as Ahab, and a TV series in 2011 starring William Hurt as Ahab. Anyway, here's the lowdown on the various whales in each of those adaptations:

• 1930 - not bad, considering, though not particularly white
• 1956 - appropriately gnarled and wrinkly and scarred and harpoon-laden and overall pretty good, considering, though a bit rubbery
• 1998 - surprisingly rubbish - presumably some early CGI but far too clean and smooth and just generally fake-looking
• 2010 - utterly ludicrous, no doubt intentionally since this was a film by The Asylum, the company that brought you the Sharknado series, not to mention Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus
• 2011 - again, a bit CGI, but much better

That's restricting ourselves to films specifically named Moby Dick, but there are other works which owe it a debt, notably the 2015 film In The Heart Of The Sea, which is actually a rendering of the true story of the demise of the whaling ship Essex in 1820. So not a direct adaptation of Moby-Dick, but since the novel borrowed heavily from the Essex's story, and the film seems to focus on the battle with the whale rather than the subsequent murder and cannibalism activities, it's an adaptation in all but name.

Other non-filmic works have taken inspiration, or maybe just a name, from Moby-Dick, notably Led Zeppelin's instrumental song of the same name, which was mainly a vehicle for John Bonham to indulge in that most reviled of rock traditions, the drum solo. A just-about-tolerable four-and-a-half minutes in its original studio incarnation (about three minutes of which is drum solo), it was expanded to interminable length in concert, presumably to allow Plant and Jones to wander off and have a cup of tea and Page to bang a couple of under-age groupies. The version on the definitive Zeppelin live album How The West Was Won is 19 minutes long, which is a larger amount of time than I'm prepared to sacrifice to listening to a drum solo, as thunderously legendary a rock drummer as Bonham was. The other obvious song to mention here is Mountain's Nantucket Sleighride, inspired by the story of the Essex and which I see I've already mentioned here, as well as cashing in a couple of cheap gags, which I now feel that I can't do again here. Oh well, no use "blubbering" about it, hahaha.

Lastly, Moby-Dick is another in the intermittent sequence of books featured here which contain a map, a list which includes The End Of Vandalism back in mid-2019 and this list of books from around five years earlier which includes a few books I own which haven't appeared on this blog as well as A Small Death In Lisbon, The Name Of The Rose, Faceless Killers and Sunset Song of those that do. The map just shows the Pequod's voyage from Nantucket to the site of its eventual demise in the mid-Pacific. Here it is:

the last book I read

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.

Hasten ye back with me now, if you will, to the wild and woolly days of the mid-19th century, where men were men, women knew their place and if you wanted a light to see by during the hours of darkness you were obliged to fire up some dangerous contraption powered not by a couple of hundred volts of nice convenient alternating current out of a hole in the wall but by the literal rendered life-essence of a colossal sea creature, who didn't just hand it out willingly to passers-by but had to be relieved of it somewhat invasively by being protractedly speared to death, peeled, boiled and wrung out into barrels by hordes of malodorous rum-crazed sailors.

It's tough work, roving the seven seas searching for giant aquatic mammals to violently murder and butcher, and carries some risks: scurvy, starvation, drowning, falling off a mast, being speared with your own harpoon or being smashed into mince by the thrashing fluke of an enraged whale. Nevertheless young men are queueing up to be taken on by a whaling vessel, including our narrator, who introduces himself in the book's famous opening sentence. He has travelled from New York to New Bedford, Massachusetts to enlist on a whaling ship. Stopping off at a crowded inn for the night, he is obliged to share a room and a bed with exotic South Sea Islander Queequeg, who it turns out is also seeking similar work as a harpooner. 

Striking up a friendship, Ishmael and Queequeg travel to Nantucket together to enlist as crew members on the Pequod, soon to set sail around the world a-slaughtering and a-rendering, aiming to return three years hence stuffed to the gunwales with enough whale oil to make everyone's fortune. They meet with the ship's owners to discuss the terms of their employment but don't get to meet the captain before the ship sails. They do learn something of his reputation, though: Captain Ahab, a harpooner in his youth but now a fierce and a grizzled fiftysomething sea captain, recently inconvenienced by having one of his legs chomped off at the knee by a sperm whale. 

The ship trundles off and the crew go about some standard sea-going business, giving the reader the chance to meet some of the crew: mates (in descending order of seniority) Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, each of whom commands a whaling boat with a harpooner, all of whom are of exotic race: Starbuck has Queequeg, Stubb has a Native American called Tashtego and Flask has an African called Daggoo. It later transpires that Ahab has brought along his own secret team of crack oarsmen and his own harpooner, a Parsee called Fedallah, who seems to be a bit of an amateur soothsayer and issues some slightly Macbeth-esque prophecies about events that will have to come to pass before Ahab can die.

Ahab eventually puts in an appearance and explains the unusual nature of the Pequod's mission: find Moby Dick, the white sperm whale who took his leg, fuck his shit up and ultimately pop a cap in his ass. All other considerations are secondary, including the usual bagging of as many whales as possible on the way. Since the acquisition of as much whale oil as possible is the direct means by which the crew get paid, this causes some consternation, but Ahab's crazed enthusiasm carries the crew along with him.

And so the Pequod and her crew set off on a journey round the Cape Of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean and into the Pacific, where Ahab expects to find Moby Dick. On the way they do manage to bag a few whales, just to keep their eye in, which gives the narrator an opportunity to explain in some detail certain aspects of harpoon and lance technique, processing of whale carcasses, extraction of oil, and also to examine the distinctions between different whale species (the Pequod is a ship specifically designed for hunting sperm whales and Ishmael is somewhat scornful of the mainly European crews who hunt other varieties, mainly right whales) some aspects of the whale's anatomy, including an entire chapter (chapter 95, "The Cassock") devoted to describing how to make a trench coat out of a whale's foreskin. 

The Pequod also meets a few other ships on the way, and Ahab is keen to quiz their respective captains about sightings of Moby Dick. Eventually as they head south-east from Japan towards the equator, they start to hear news of recent sightings, and eventually a spout is sighted attached to an unmistakable white humped back, and Ahab smells the sweet sweet scent of revenge. There then follows a three-day chase with several excursions in the whaleboats and much furious thrashing of those boats into matchwood by Moby Dick while the crews manage to stick a few more bits of iron into him to slow him down. Eventually the climactic battle sees Moby Dick turn on the Pequod and stave its side in, sinking it, while also dragging Ahab down to Davy Jones' locker by getting him entangled in a harpoon rope. While everyone else either goes down with Moby Dick, drowns, or is eaten by the circling sharks, Ishmael manages to climb upon a piece of buoyant wreckage and floats for a couple of days before being rescued.

Moby-Dick is the sort of book where it's almost futile to express an opinion, its critical status being so unquestionable, partly because of its age (published in 1851, the only entries on this list which pre-date it are Pride And Prejudice (1813) and Fanny Hill (1749)). For what it's worth, though, I found it to be a rollicking adventure story, though not without some thick and chewy language in parts which demands your full attention and a series of digressions into tangentially-related topics which some might find baffling or irritating but which I found, in the main, fascinating. Obviously it's not just about slaughtering whales and making luxurious outer garments out of their genitals, it's also about obsession in a more general way, and its corrosive and destructive effects on those who harbour it and on those around them.

I found that I was already familiar with quite a bit of the terminology through having read Willard Price's Whale Adventure many times as a child. What was vaguely apparent to me then and blatantly so now is how totally implausible the central plot conceit was, i.e, that there existed in the world of the 1950s whaling boats which conducted themselves, for no obvious reason, according to the technology-free conventions of a century earlier, keel-hauling, manual harpooning and all. In hindsight this contrivance was shoehorned in solely to enable Price to swipe large chunks of plot and whale-related exposition from Moby-Dick and only introduce modern-day stuff like helicopters at the end when the Hunt brothers needed their asses conveniently rescuing.

I also recall watching the 1956 film a couple of times on TV during my youth; the only bit I (or anyone else) remember is the ending where Gregory Peck shouts at the whale for a bit before lashing himself to its back and being dragged to a watery grave. Chunks of Ahab's final rantings (the "from hell's heart I stab at thee" speech) also crop up at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. 

I've had the old Penguin Classics edition of Moby-Dick on my shelves for probably upwards of 25 years; what prompted me to read it was partly the feeling that it was about time for another Project, but also a rather odd article in the Guardian featuring quotes from a whole host of people who took some pride in never having read it (an article which I slightly annoyingly now can't find) which just tweaked my contrarian instincts enough for me to promote it to the top of the to-read pile. Like a few other books on this list with a daunting reputation for difficulty and general indigestibleness (House Of Leaves and Lanark being two fairly recent examples) I was pleasantly surprised at its readableness; it's probably only fair to observe that the current lockdown conditions are pretty much ideal for concentrated reading of attention-demanding books, while being a massive pain in the arse in many other ways. 

sudoku? yunohu tugotu

Nia has been getting into some more adult puzzle-wrangling lately, including sudoku, which reminded me of a couple of things that intrigued me about it back when it was suddenly A Thing a few years ago (mid-2000s seems to have been the start of sudoku-mania in the Western world). Firstly, I'm still slightly vexed at how many people mispronounce it, but I have come to accept that some people just seem to have a general sort of word-blindness and once they've fucked something up once will never be able to (or, more judgmentally, care enough or be capable of exercising enough intellectual curiosity to) avoid continuing to fuck it up in perpetuity. I also experience slight annoyance every time someone describes them as "mathematical puzzles", generally as an excuse to avoid engaging with them, since they are clearly nothing of the sort. The usual set of nine things arranged in the grid is a set of numbers, admittedly, but it could just as easily be any other set of nine distinct things; there's no mathematics involved.

I dabbled with quite a bit of sudoku back in the day, and I might still have a go if I happen across one in a magazine during an idle moment, but the thing that always intrigued me about them, more than the actual solving of them, was how the partly empty grids were constructed. Clearly the starting point is a fully-filled in 9x9 grid containing the "solved" puzzle, and the challenge (essentially the reverse of the "actual" puzzle) is to remove a number of the values from the grid until you arrive at a grid (the starting grid for the solver) which is acceptably "hard" depending on what sort of a challenge you're aiming to provide, retains enough information for the solver to be able to reconstruct the grid you started with, and, moreover, for that grid to be the only valid one reconstructible from the set of starting values. 

This Wikipedia page has what appears to be a good and comprehensive summary of most of the relevant mathematics (unlike the puzzle-solving itself this undoubtedly is a mathematical puzzle); on the other hand it might be utter horseshit, I'm not really qualified to judge. The bit that is of interest to the layperson, though, is this section wherein it is revealed that the minimum number of clues you need to provide for a uniquely-solvable puzzle is 17, and that this number varies depending on the specific characteristics of the grid layout you've chosen.

Similar thoughts occurred to me during a game of The Genius Square, a game I was given for Christmas last year and which Nia has taken to with frightening speed, with Alys not far behind, as the picture below shows. 

Basically this is a sort of horizontal Tetris where you have to fit a set of 2-D pieces into a grid, the twist being that the grid is a slightly different shape every time owing to the presence of seven "blockers", whose placement is dictated by a set of dice.

The parallel to what you might call the sudoku meta-problem here is: given the set of pieces you're provided with, you can clearly construct a theoretical blocker placement which would make filling in the grid impossible (see below). 

So there must be some constraint which ensures that this can never happen, and the clue is in the claim made on the box that there are 62,208 distinct puzzle layouts. Now there are seven blockers and therefore seven dice and therefore in theory 6⁷=279,936 possible permutations; a moment's thought should reveal that this is impossible, though, as there are 42 dice faces and only 36 squares, so some square addresses must appear in more than one place. And sure enough while 5 of the 7 dice have six distinct square addresses on them, the sixth has four (two appearing twice) and the seventh has just two (appearing three times each). Sure enough if you do the maths 6x6x6x6x6x4x2 turns out to be 62,208.

So what the three diagrams above show is as follows: the first one just shows what values appear on each face of the seven dice. The second shows, for each square in the grid, how many distinct dice faces it appears on (and therefore indicates how likely it is to come up during a random throw of all seven dice). The third, which is probably the most interesting (though clearly this is all relative), divides the grid up into seven "zones", each corresponding to the set of values contained on a single die. The important point here is that for each of the seven coloured zones, you will only ever have a single blocker in that zone during a game. Note also the rotational symmetry between, in particular, zones 2 and 5, and 3 and 6. You can see how the corners are the "awkward" spots and how it'd be desirable to increase the likelihood of having a blocker in a corner (and that the dice configuration ensures that you'll always have at least one corner blocked), but how you get from there to a mathematical demonstration that the dice layout provided guarantees a solution in every case I have no idea. 

shite entertainment

Generally I like the Headline Of The Day candidates to be freshly-minted and just plucked at the moment of perfect ripeness from whichever website has bunged them up without proof-reading them properly first. This one is a little different as it's from around eighteen months ago, but has some present-day resonance for me in ways which I'll explain shortly. Here it is:

There's quite a bit to unpack here, so let's start with the simple stuff: Blippi is a supremely irritating American children's TV creation who has become a gazillionaire by the seemingly simple method of bouncing around seemingly abandoned trampoline parks, softplay centres, playgrounds and skateboard parks making lots of high-pitched squeaking noises and gurning at the camera in a way that young children (my 3-year-old son among them) find as irresistible as some people find injecting heroin into their own eyeballs on a skanky old mattress under a highway overpass. 

When I first encountered Blippi back in the early days of the coronavirus lockdown (I think it was Alys who happened across him first) I jokingly tweeted that he was a bit like Pee-wee Herman (true) but at least he wasn't a sex criminal (also true, but, well, wait and see). 

he's a little bit Pee Wee Herman only without quite so many convictions for public wanking

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) April 26, 2020

Blippi does, it turns out, have some back-story of his own, though - in his case (in contrast to Pee-wee Herman) from before his kiddy-centric fame happened rather than after. He is the creation of someone who these days goes by the real-life name of Stevin John, but seems to have been originally called Steven Grossman. The reason for the name change seems to have been his real name's uncomfortably close proximity to Steezy Grossman, the name of his youthful comedy alter ego as whom he made several videos whose content is definitely not for kids, including one notorious one where he takes a gargantuan splattery (and, as far as I can gather, real) shit over a friend in a toilet cubicle. 

Needless to say now that he's a MASSIVE HIT with the under-fives he's not very keen for his MASSIVE SHIT with the number twos to keep popping up in internet searches, so there has been a fair bit of legal effort expended on suppressing the video wherever it pops up. Just to be clear, I haven't seen it, nor am I especially keen on seeking it out, but I expect you could if you really wanted to. I'm not judging you, any more than I'm judging Blippi or suggesting that he is not a fit and proper person to be entertaining small children, as long has he keeps his anus out of it. I think this is a not unreasonable expectation of any children's entertainer, to be honest.

follow the gourd

One of the things that's kept me at a reasonable level of fitness during lockdown is Nia's love for running, which has acted as an incentive for me to get out and get some exercise periodically. I mean, I do have indoor options which I make use of as well, but it's nice to get out and get some fresh air while pounding the streets occasionally. Ordinarily we'd have the weekly parkrun (of which we have a choice of two in Newport) to go to, Nia having graduated around the start of 2020 from the leisurely kiddy-friendly junior one (2 kilometres) to the proper adult one (5 kilometres), but of course that's all been shelved during the pandemic as, even outdoors, lots of sweaty people in close proximity breathing heavily and coughing all over each other isn't a good thing.

This is a pity, as Nia clearly has a genuine aptitude for this stuff, and as the lean willowy type is perfectly built for endurance running (and indeed endurance activities in general). But we've made the best of it by finding some routes we can do from the house, including the nearly-parkrun-distance one we did at the weekend.

Nia and I upgraded to the longer not-quite-5k route. still cranking out 6min kms relentlessly. can't shake her off yet #running pic.twitter.com/pGZfOdRmXZ

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 10, 2020

She'd be even quicker if she didn't gab the whole way round. Worst bit is she expects me to do it too. First couple of kilometres I was getting quizzed relentlessly about what watermelon plants look like. I mean, fuck knows. Large, presumably.

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 10, 2020

The second tweet here is actually what this blog post was meant to be about, though I seem to have digressed onto the running topic more than I intended to. No matter. The watermelon conversation started when we ran past a piece of squashed discarded watermelon on the pavement and I humorously speculated that it must have fallen off a watermelon tree, only to be scoffingly informed that watermelons weren't native to the UK, and was there actually such a thing as a watermelon tree? At which point I had to confess that I'd no idea what sort of plant a watermelon grew on. The Twitter thread went on to list some other fruity items whose parent plant and general appearance in their natural milieu aren't quite what you (or in any case I) might expect. 

Anyway, it turns out there is no such thing as a watermelon tree, and indeed a moment's consideration of the size and weight of a fully-grown watermelon will tell you that they must grow in contact with the ground in the style of, say, pumpkins - indeed it turns out that they belong to the same family of gourd-like plants, the Cucurbitaceae. As it happens we have a member of that family taking over a significant portion of our herb and vegetable patch at the moment; it's a pumpkin plant which we bought as a bit of a joke in the spring but seems to have thrived, and in the process spread itself out laterally, as these things do, right across the front of the vegetable patch, through the herb patch, through the decking railings and onto the decking. I'm going to need to be scrupulously careful about keeping the shed door locked or it'll be in there too. 

Obviously, it now being mid-October, what would be ideal, and give some purpose to the whole plant-growing exercise, would be for the plant to now burst gloriously forth with a select but shapely crop of pumpkins which we could use for Hallowe'en entertainment purposes (and, if supplies permit, perhaps some hearty soup afterwards). It is only in the last few days. however, that any sign of meaningful fruit production has been apparent, right at the tip of the plant up on the decking. As you can see it's all fairly minimal at the moment, but my experiences with growing courgettes tells me that these sneaky bastards can double in size overnight, so I'm not giving up hope yet. I just need to make sure I harvest them before this happens.

Going back to unexpected fruit/plant appearance for a moment, the two I mentioned in the Twitter conversation are probably worth noting here: firstly, the pineapple. Hard to say in hindsight what I was expecting, but a single upright fruit presented on a low-slung shrubby throne of frondy leaves almost certainly wasn't it. Even this is outdone by the humble cashew, though - neither the honest-to-goodness down-to-earth (literally) utilitarian rusticness of its apparent near-relative, the peanut, which just minds its own business under the ground, nor the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin matter-of-factness of a true nut like the hazelnut, just growing straight out of its parent tree like it was the most natural thing in the world. No, the cashew emerges into the world via a freaky space alien arrangement involving being extruded out of the arse of some lumpy apple-like fruit and just hanging there like a tenacious turd until harvested. 

The basic rule for both fruit and nuts is: whatever you might think you know is wrong, and, furthermore, knowing that whatever you might think you know is wrong won't help you, because you'll still be wrong anyway. Is a peanut a nut? No, you fool, it's a legume. Is a banana a fruit? No, you fool, it's a berry. Is the big clearly-a-fruit apple-like structure in the picture above a fruit? Is the smaller clearly-a-nut hard-cased thing under it a nut? No, and no, obviously. The apple thing is an accessory fruit and the cashew "nut" is the true fruit (of which the bit we habitually eat is a seed). Honestly, you can see why people just give up and eat crisps instead; at least you know where you are.

they practically own south america

My mother, who evidently keeps an eye and ear out for these things, alerts me to a couple of appearances of our mutual relative and science fiction author Olaf Stapledon in popular culture. Firstly, she was watching the 1978 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (the one featuring Leonard Nimoy, a very young Jeff Goldblum and Donald Sutherland's memorable screechy alien finale) and noticed a brief piece of dialogue featuring Veronica Cartwright's character and one of her mud bath customers, wherein the customer extols the virtues of Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds In Collision and she recommends that he also read Stapledon's Star Maker. 

There is an important distinction between the two works, though: Star Maker is explicitly a work of fiction, whereas Worlds In Collision purports to be a work of non-fiction, though in reality it is as much of one as, say, Chariots Of The Gods. 

I have never read Star Maker, as it happens, although I do have a copy in the to-be-read pile. You may recall that I have read Last And First Men, though - those two books are Stapledon's most celebrated works, although he did write a lot of other stuff.

Last And First Men has its own, more recent, popular culture intersection, it turns out: this film with a voice-over by Tilda Swinton, which premiered in Berlin earlier this year. Rather than being a formal adaptation of the book (Swinton's voice-over is taken exclusively from the last two chapters) it is mainly a vehicle for the music of Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (more famous among mainstream film buffs for his score for the 2014 Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory Of Everything), and features lingering shots of various immense pieces of abstract architecture. The film was largely made in 2017, but was only completed after Jóhannsson's death the following year.

The immense monuments featured in the film are mainly located in the former Yugoslavia and are a fascinating subject in their own right. Known as spomeniks, there are mainly Tito-era memorials to World War II, placed in some bizarrely remote and inhospitable locations which just accentuate their otherworldliness. Many of them still exist, in varying states of disrepair.

Back to Worlds In Collision for a moment: I used to own a work of that name, but it was a copy of the 1991 Pere Ubu album rather than Velikovsky's book. By far its most well-known tune (sung by one of my many namesakes) is I Hear They Smoke The Barbecue, a quirkily catchy pop nugget which references another branch of pseudoscience, the various hollow earth "theories". Coincidence? Or IS IT??!?!?!? I expect you know the answer by now.

[FOOTNOTE] A couple of things I meant to add: firstly that the static black-and-whiteness of the images, the voice-over and the general gloomy elegiac tone of the Last And First Men clips put me strongly in mind of Chris Marker's short film La Jetée, now available in full on YouTube and well worth half an hour of anyone's time. Secondly, the 1978 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is a pretty good remake, as remakes go, of the original 1956 film (which in turn was an adaptation of Jack Finney's 1955 novel); further remakes from 1993 and 2007 are also available, but since I've never seen them I have no opinion to offer.

did he say that? he shaw did

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

the last book I read

All Shook Up by William Bedford. 

It's the late 1950s (which year is never specified exactly but the Elvis song which gives the novel its title was released in 1957) and Stephen Godard is living on the east coast (presumably Lincolnshire) with his mother and father when his father, a policeman, gets a new posting in charge of an American Air Force base, in the same general area but inland. This entails the whole family upping sticks and moving to a new house in the vicinity of the base, which is being used (the base, not the house) to store the new Nemesis nuclear missile, this being the height of the Cold War and all.

Stephen isn't terribly impressed about the move, but soon makes the best of it and makes some new friends: brittle, cynical Matthew, robust, sporty Barbara and enigmatic, scholarly Caroline, all of whose parents have some connection with the base.

Stephen and his friends are all in their mid-to-late teens and therefore at that age when firstly those feelings, you know, down there, start to make themselves known, and furthermore an age where they are expected to move seamlessly from being provided for at home and school to providing for themselves at college and in employment, the nature of which they are meant to have some clear ideas about. Like many teenagers, though, Stephen doesn't really know what he wants to do with his life. Stephen's father, on the other hand, has some pretty firmly-held views on the subject: Stephen should join the police force like his father, instead of poncing around with book-reading and other suspect activities like some sort of namby-pamby lah-di-dah poofter.

Stephen finds himself unable to resist his father's will and joins the police as a cadet, although he chafes at having to submit to the rigid hierarchical regime, and finds himself traumatised by some of the police reports (complete with gruesome photos) that he is required to read through. Meanwhile he hangs out with his friends quaffing cider down at the local pub and conducting a fledgling romance with pretty, enigmatic Caroline, happy to adhere to a Stakhanovite schedule of furtive handjobs but unwilling for the moment to go any further.

All the stuff that's parked on Stephen's doorstep has an impact on his life as well, though: the local police (with Stephen in tow) conduct a raid on a local house which is being used as a brothel (with many of the American military personnel from the base as clients), and the world finds itself facing the prospect of imminent fiery armageddon as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolds, and the base mobilises to prepare for the unthinkable possibility of having to deploy the Nemesis missile.

After it becomes clear that life in general is, in fact, going to go on, it also becomes clear that life as Stephen and his friends have known it is going to end - not only is everyone heading off to college, but Nemesis is being decommissioned and the base shut down, which means Stephen's father will be posted somewhere else. Caroline's father is being posted to the United States and Caroline will be going with him and attending university over there, so Stephen and Caroline enjoy a last few glorious weeks of valedictory fucking before she departs and Stephen finally screws up his courage and resigns from the police force to take up a college place to study to be a journalist.

There is a sense in which all coming-of-age novels, including the ones which have appeared on this blog (a list which includes Pig, The Levels, Demian, Bluesman, The Leaves On Grey and My Summer Of Love among others) cover much the same ground, i.e. the transition from childhood to adulthood, complete with some awkward fumbly furtive sticky couplings (though Stephen and Caroline seem to get the hang of it pretty quickly) and then a sense of things coming to an end as the principal character and his or her contemporaries head out into the world to seek their fortunes. In particular there are some echoes of The Levels here as Caroline, slightly posher and richer than Stephen, does her effortless social mobility thing and flits off leaving Stephen a bit more tied to his original location (college course notwithstanding). 

So you're never going to be able to avoid cliché completely, but within its self-imposed constraints I think All Shook Up does a pretty good job. There is an odd sense in which we get to know Stephen less well than, say, Matthew and Barbara, but maybe this just reflects that at that age (and perhaps any age) nothing is more mysterious to us than our own motivations for doing any of the things we choose to do. The specific details of the novel's location resonated with me, not because I'm at all familiar with Lincolnshire but because some of my formative years (during the Cold War) were spent living within a small nuclear warhead's throw of a fully tooled-up American Air Force base at Greenham Common. If the base in All Shook Up was meant to resemble a real one then it was probably Hemswell. 

transports of delight

Nia and I fulfilled a long-held ambition last weekend when we went down to the Transporter Bridge and did the high-level traverse of the bridge via the walkway at the top, rather than via the gondola at the bottom. Obviously this is only an option for foot passengers, as you'd struggle to get a motor vehicle up the steps, and you will have to pay a couple of quid extra for the privilege of climbing the 200-odd steps to the top and walking across.

Anyone thinking of doing it should be armed with the knowledge that it's pretty airy and exposed up there and the walkway is not some solid structure made out of stout timber planks (although old photos show it used to have some) or sheet steel but instead some flimsy looking mesh that you can see straight through down to the river below, and which flexes slightly worryingly under your feet as you walk on it. The top of the gondola mechanism which basically just clanks back and forth on rails passes disconcertingly close below your feet as well. I would say if you're in any doubt whether you'll like it or not, chances are you probably won't. Nia was fine, and I'm pretty much OK with heights (though the significant traces of rust and corrosion around some of the bolts in the superstructure gave me pause for thought); my main worry was that while I wanted to get some photographs I was acutely aware of the catastrophic consequences of dropping my mobile phone.

Blog readers with long memories may recall that I'd been across the bridge before back in late 2010 with Hazel, Doug and Anna as part of a general mooch around Newport involving several pubs, back in the pre-kids, pre-pandemic days when you could just do that sort of thing. Photos from last weekend's walk can be found here. 

Like I say, we'd been planning to do it for a while, as Nia shares my predilection for climbing on top of stuff - what finally prompted us to do it was the news that the bridge is due (as of this coming weekend, in fact) to shut down for a 2-year programme of repairs and maintenance, and that this would therefore be our last chance to do the walk before early 2023. I was half-expecting that we'd be thwarted at the eleventh hour by some draconian pandemic lockdown measures being imposed, but luckily we managed to dodge those by a few days. 

Blog readers who follow me on Twitter may be aware that the bridge has its own Twitter profile; one of the great joys of this is seeing the exchange of tweets between it and various other historic bridges, including the nearby Clifton Suspension Bridge but also an entertainingly banterous rivalry with the only other working transporter bridge in the UK (and one of only six worldwide), the Tees Transporter Bridge in Middlesbrough. It sounds terribly disloyal to say it, but I think the Middlesbrough bridge (also currently closed for maintenance, as it happens) is prettier, as it's slightly chunkier owing to its self-supported construction (the Newport one is cable-supported, a bit like a suspension bridge, complete with chunky cable anchorages on either side) and moreover is currently painted a rather fetching shade of blue. There is, as it happens, a bridge just upriver of the transporter bridge called the Tees-Newport Bridge, and much of the steel for the construction of the Newport transporter bridge (it opened in 1906, five years before the Middlesbrough bridge) came from the Dorman Long steelworks in, you've guessed it, Middlesbrough. Coincidence? or IS IT??!!!? As always, yes: yes it is.

There is a third, smaller, non-operational transporter bridge in Warrington which a band of stalwart enthusiasts are conducting a surely doomed attempt to secure some funding to renovate, and, as you'll recall from this earlier post from our trip to Liverpool for the Open Championship in 2014, there used to be another one, larger than either of the two surviving ones, crossing the Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal between Widnes and Runcorn. There is actually some footage of this on YouTube - this longer clip from the 1930s and this one dating from just before the completion of the replacement fixed bridge in 1961, which was quickly followed by the old bridge's demolition. Newer transporter bridges, and there aren't many, are generally somewhat smaller, including this rather charming miniature hand-operated one in Germany. 

let there be slightly less light

In a poignant echo of the current pandemic sweeping the nation, I'm afraid I have to report the tragic demise of another kitchen light bulb, latest victim of the current highly-infectious outbreak of bulb demises that started in November 2019 after a gap of around four-and-a-half years and has now accounted for five of the twelve bulbs in the kitchen layout (we replaced one, so you only see four in the photograph below). The latest one was number 3 (layout diagram here), one of the first two to expire as part of the original experiment back in May 2014 and be replaced with IKEA LED bulbs. It therefore replaces its predecessor as the longest-serving bulb in existence (well, not any more) with a lifespan of 2329 days.

end of a century, oh, it's nothing special

Well, I promised you stats, and stats you shall have, specifically some comparisons of the components of my book-reading triple-century. The brief analysis of the first hundred books appears at the end of the review for the hundredth, Light On Snow, and the analysis of the second hundred has its own post here. I'll rehash some of the numbers from those here for comparison purposes so you don't feel obliged to flick back and forth comparing.

• The third hundred took 2053 days to complete, compared to 1474 for the first and 1601 for the second - note that these are slightly different numbers from the original posts; I'm not sure what formula I was using there to do the calculations but I suspect it was wrong, albeit only slightly. In real money that's 5.6 years, compared with 4 and 4.4 for the first two.
• On the other hand, the third hundred books were, on aggregate, the longest at 31,782 pages, compared with 28,361 and 30,761 for the first two. That still means the pages-per-day numbers were lower than for the first two at 15.5 - numbers for the first two were almost identical at 19.2 for both. That's largely a legacy of 2016 and 2017 both being very light in terms of book consumption, compared with other years anyway. For 2017 that can be partly explained by having a tiny baby who was either in hospital or at home being extremely difficult and time-consuming to feed, which certainly would have curtailed some of my reading opportunities. Since Huw only turned up at the tail-end of 2016 I'm not sure I can plausibly account for the figures for that year being so low, though.
• Longest book for each hundred in chronological order: The Corrections at 653 pages, Infinite Jest at 1079 pages, A Man In Full at 742 pages.
• Number of distinct authors for each hundred in chronological order: 93, 88, 92.
• Number of authors who were new to me (generally, not just among books reviewed here) for each hundred in chronological order: 40, 36, 42.
• Male/female split for each hundred in chronological order: 75:25, 72:28, 80:20. None of the selection is consciously by sex but it's interesting nonetheless that this is the most male hundred of the three (I noted a ten-month gap in this tweet - note that the book I was reading at the time was Imaginary Friends). Within the bounds of plausible random variation, though, I suppose, and it partly reflects my book-buying habits (from, in most cases, a few years back) as well as my current selecting-the-next-book-to-read habits, since I can only select from what's on the shelves.

Finally, an update to the multiple-blog-featurees table last displayed here. Note that the late Iain Banks (in his two incarnations) has now taken the lead on his own, with a few new authors slipping into the 3-book category.

Number of books	Author(s)
8	Iain (M) Banks
6	Ian McEwan Russell Hoban
5	TC Boyle William Boyd
4	Lawrence Durrell
3	Cormac McCarthy Stieg Larsson Patricia Highsmith William Gibson Beryl Bainbridge Jim Crace Robertson Davies Alison Lurie Anita Shreve Paul Theroux Anne Tyler

the last book I read

Sea Glass by Anita Shreve.

It's 1929. So, already, no prizes for guessing a couple of key upcoming plot points. but let's not get ahead of ourselves. We're in New Hampshire, and Honora Willard has just become Honora Beecher after a fairly whirlwind romance with travelling typewriter salesman Sexton Beecher. They've been offered the chance to house-sit a delapidated ocean-front property, and, subsequently, to purchase it at a relatively bargain price, something Sexton arranges via some slightly shady financial shenanigans. No need for the little lady to worry her pretty little head by knowing about any of that stuff, though, of course. 

Meanwhile, Vivian Burton, slightly older and moving in slightly more elevated social circles, finds herself set up in a house at the opposite end of the beach after an ill-advised fling with Dickie Peets, a man with fingers in many pies, most of which turn out to be worthless when the bottom falls out of the stock market late in 1929. 

Meanwhile the plebs must do actual manual work to earn a crust and produce the fabulous consumer goods that the flapping classes like to consume. In the nearby town of Ely Falls, for instance, many men are employed by the local cotton mill, but times are getting tougher for everyone and the mill owners are looking to maximise profitability by cutting wages. What can the beleaguered workers do? Unionise their ass off and go out on strike, that's what. This being the United States such actions have the whiff of GODDAMN COMMUNISM about them, though (and to be fair there are a few actual Communist agitators about) and can legitimately be met with some violent retribution.

Having lost his typewriter-wrangling job following the economic downturn and some awkward revelations about his property-acquiring arrangements, Sexton Beecher finds himself having to take a job at the mill to keep some money coming in. When the strike is mooted, though, he lets slip that he has some typing and printing apparatus at home in his loft just ready and waiting to be used to print off inflammatory leaflets. So the entire strike committee relocates to Honora and Sexton's place for some serious revolutionary organising and some epic food and booze consumption (mostly courtesy of Vivian), not to mention some charged looks between McDermott, one of the strikers, and Honora.

This is all tremendous fun of course, but there comes a time when the partying and the printing of inflammatory leaflets has to stop and the serious striking and picketing has to start. And once it does there is a strong likelihood that the authorities (including the owners of the mill) will take a dim view of commie agitators in their midst. And so it proves - as soon as the strike begins, SHIT GETS REAL, violence erupts (not helped by Sexton's pulling a concealed weapon and blazing away) and some hired goons arrive to put an end to the strike, and indeed some of the strikers. This includes McDermott, but not Sexton, who, having been shot, escapes from hospital and goes on the lam, no doubt in a jalopy with frantic banjo music playing. In the aftermath of the violence and the continuing fallout from the Wall Street Crash, Honora occupies herself house-sitting for Vivian (her and Sexton's house having been repossessed by the bank) and acting as surrogate parent for young Alphonse, the barely-teenage mill worker that McDermott had previously taken under his wing.

Wikipedia's page on Sea Glass refers to it rather sniffily as a "romance novel". I'm not sure I recognise that description, as there's plenty of grit here (and not much romance, unless you count McDermott and Honora's unrequited moonings). One thing that I was mildly concerned about when I chose to read it next (more on this in a minute) was that it might be too similar for comfort in style and tone to its immediate predecessor, Breathing Lessons, written by a female American author of roughly similar age. Actually the two books are quite different - Sea Glass has a historical setting, an undertone of righteous anger about working conditions in late-1920s/early-1930s America, and some actual killing at the end which makes Breathing Lessons' concerns seem quaintly parochial. One interesting bit of background detail here is that Honora lost several family members when she was a child in the Halifax explosion of 1917, a disaster whose ferocity and scale is almost incomprehensible even now - for instance the half-ton main section of the anchor of the ship that exploded fell to earth two miles away.

Anyway, I enjoyed Sea Glass very much, as I did the two previous Anita Shreve books that featured on this blog. You may recall that they were, respectively, the first and one hundredth books to feature here. Well, I can tell you that Sea Glass is the three-hundredth book I have rambled inconsequentially about here since late 2006. The missing milestone (i.e. the two-hundredth review, when I can only assume I didn't have a handy unread Anita Shreve book to fill the gap with, or didn't realise the milestone was imminent until too late) was Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. I will concoct a stats summary in a separate post.

rigor portis has set in

It's been a busy few months what with being in the midst of a global pandemic and all, but life goes on. Well, for most of us, anyway, but not for those who feel the icy hand of The Curse Of Electric Halibut upon their shoulders, for their time has come and what must be done must be done. And, having been done, it must be documented here to serve as an everlasting monument to, I dunno, something or other. So mote it be.

Anyway, be all that as it may, it turns out that Charles Portis died back in February, less than two years after True Grit (by far his most famous work) featured on this blog. That's not in the same ballpark as the brutal treatment meted out to Michael Dibdin and Philip Roth, who were brutally dispatched a mere 59 days and 150 days after a book they wrote first featured on this blog, but it's fairly quick. Apart from Dibdin and Roth only Russell Hoban, Richard Matheson and James Salter were rubbed out more quickly. Portis was 86, which puts him pretty much smack in the middle of the median range for curse victims. Iain Banks and Doris Lessing, who died within six months of each other back in 2013, are the statistical outliers at 59 and 94 respectively.

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d

incidental music spot of the day

A breathily-re-imagined version of Pink Floyd's Eclipse (the last song on their perennially humongo-selling 1973 album The Dark Side Of The Moon) on the trailer for Denis Villeneuve's forthcoming re-imagining of Frank Herbert's Dune. 

I have, to the best of my knowledge, never seen a Denis Villeneuve film, although I remember thinking that Arrival looked quite intriguing when it came out in 2016. I have read the source novel for his 2013 film Enemy, though, since it's José Saramago's The Double, as featured on this blog back in 2009. The film evidently took some liberties with the book, though, since the book does not end with an encounter with a giant spider.

I have also, as I've mentioned before, seen David Lynch's 1984 adaptation of Dune, and, seemingly unusually among those who saw it, quite enjoyed it. I maintain that this is at least partly because I've never read any of the books (and can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that I never will). I thought the Guild navigators - basically giant freaky-ass rubbery space tadpoles transported around inside giant blacked-out railway carriages - were pretty cool in particular.

the last book I read

Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler.

Maggie Moran is approaching fifty, with long-standing attachments to her husband Ira and their family house in Baltimore. She and Ira have two grown-up kids, Jesse and Daisy, both a bit on the feckless side, who drift in and out between the house and other more self-sufficient accommodation.

As we join Maggie she is gearing up for a road trip to Pennsylvania for the funeral of the husband of her old college friend Serena. During the build-up to setting off for the trip we learn a few things about Maggie and Ira: he is an undemonstrative, methodical man who runs a local picture-framing business which he inherited from his father. His father isn't dead, though - no, he just decided that once Ira was of an age to take over the business, he (Dad) would declare himself too much of an invalid to continue running it, hand it over and retire upstairs to his armchair for the next several decades. This was done without much consultation with Ira, who nonetheless felt obliged to abandon thoughts of a medical career and assume full responsibility for his father and two sisters, both of whom suffer from varying mental afflictions which make them unable to live independent lives. Maggie, meanwhile, is somewhat more scatty, inclined to well-intentioned meddling in other people's lives, in particular those of her son Jesse, his estranged wife Fiona and their daughter Leroy. She is also an utter liability behind the wheel of a car, as we discover when she picks up the family car from a garage and promptly has an altercation with a truck which results in a section of bumper getting torn off.

Ira, evidently well-used to his wife's driving habits, takes the wheel for the trip to the funeral. When they arrive it transpires that Serena has had the somewhat eccentric idea of, instead of something more dirge-y and mournful, having the musical accompaniment to the funeral ceremony be a re-run of the songs from her wedding, and, moreover, sung by the original singers, mostly the funeral attendees, including Maggie and Ira. Ira refuses point-blank to be involved, but Maggie gives it her best shot. Back at the house for the wake Serena digs out some old movie footage of the wedding, and, possibly inspired by a sighting of her younger self, Maggie persuades Ira that a quickie in one of the bedrooms might be the thing to do. Disturbed by Serena in the fumbly early stages of this, they decide that this might be a good time to make their excuses, leave, and start the drive back to Baltimore. 

Ira is hoping for a speedy return home and a chance to put his feet up, but it turns out that Maggie has had an idea: why not make the shortish detour to where Fiona now lives (at her mother's house) and visit her and Leroy? Once they arrive and find Fiona and Leroy in but her mother out, Maggie decides to push her luck a bit further: why don't Fiona and Leroy come and stay for a couple of nights? She can get Jesse to come over and they can have a nice little reunion and - hey, who knows? - maybe rekindle their old relationship. To her mild surprise, Fiona agrees, even when her mother returns and takes a dimmer view of the idea.

So they return to Baltimore, Maggie gets on with preparing dinner, and eventually Jesse turns up to join them. While he seems genuinely pleased to see Fiona and Leroy, it soon becomes clear that the picture Maggie has painted for Fiona (and perhaps even convinced herself is true) of Jesse still pining for her and obsessively keeping mementoes of her under his pillow, isn't really true. Jesse has been playing with his metal band, setting himself up in his new apartment and getting through a series of girlfriends perfectly happily, thanks very much.

So after Jesse and Fiona have both done their storming-out-of-the-house scenes, Maggie and Ira are left alone together. No time to reflect too closely on what's just happened, though, still less the advisability of trying to interfere in other people's lives - Maggie and Ira have another road trip to contemplate the next day, delivering daughter Daisy to college. Perhaps she will be more receptive to some motherly guidance?

Breathing Lessons is the third Anne Tyler novel to appear on this blog, after A Patchwork Planet and Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant, and deviates very little from the general structure of the previous two (and indeed most of Tyler's oeuvre): Baltimore setting, family drama with occasional moments of quirky and/or bittersweet comedy, very little in the way of rude thrusting assertiveness, guns, or liberal use of the c-word. I think the secret of which book or books you find you really like depends less on the plot details (since the level of variation is pretty low) and more on whether you find that you click with the central characters or not. As it happens I found Maggie generally slightly irritating rather than endearingly well-intentioned, and moreover (the slightly incongruous interlude in Serena's bedroom aside) somewhat prematurely aged in outlook for someone who is meant to be younger than me. You may recall I had the same issue with the central protagonist of Hotel Du Lac. 

So while this isn't my favourite Tyler novel (that'd probably be A Patchwork Planet) it's still impeccably well-written and has craftily well-hidden depths. What the hell do I know, though, because Breathing Lessons is the Tyler novel that the Pulitzer committee felt moved to bestow the Pulitzer Prize for fiction on, in 1989. Previous Pulitzer winners in this list include, in no particular order, Foreign Affairs, The Road, Independence Day, Gilead, A Thousand Acres, Beloved, The Grapes Of Wrath and The Bridge Of San Luis Rey. Breathing Lessons also appears in this Guardian best-novels-EVER list from 2015, at number 96, though it should be understood that the list is in ascending chronological order of publication rather than order of perceived merit. Other novels on that list which have featured on this blog include The Great Gatsby, Tropic Of Cancer, At Swim-Two-Birds, The Grapes Of Wrath (again), Under The Volcano, The Catcher In The Rye, Lolita, On The Road, Midnight's Children and Amongst Women.