PL33 - But days

A week about literary London

An issue for those of you – professional literateurs and not – who ‘skip the book bits’. There’s an essay in the chamber but my week was so intellectual and stimulating I thought I’d try a diary.

Monday

Watched Call My By Your Name. For his next film the director, Luca Guadagnino, is adapting an Italian book Separate Rooms. That’s getting reissued with a foreword by CMBYN’s author before the film comes out. Seemed like a fun chance for a high-traffic piece. Thought I could watch all his films and read the books. Being unestablished I try to stand out for energy, ie. reading the full Booker and International Booker shortlists, watching every Curtis.

CMBYN unremittingly gorgeous of course but left me anxious for them to change into trackies, lie on a sofa and look at their phones. Don’t actually want, even if I’m meant to, to sit on a stone bench in ironed shorts staring at air.

Tuesday

Love radio and very conscious that any literary star must now be as easy on camera and mic as page. Hitchens still among most influential NS journalists, despite fifteen years of death, because he’s on YouTube. Bet on YouTube. Best thinking still happens in ink, but you must find a popular audiovisual translation. One of this year’s goals.

Asked a colleague to take me with her to her weekly Times Radio slot. Fourteenth floor of News Building. All Murdoch’s properties in there, right next to the Shard, breathtaking night view of city and river and London Bridge trainlines. Astonishing impression of reach, and amazing to see in the lighted booth John Pienaar, perched in majestic deliberation, speaking from the sky to the nation.

Watched from gallery with amazing young technicians. One said juggling all the tasks becomes like driving a car. Not convinced. Impossible concentration to live-read the news, change scrips, fiddle audios, launch ads, stitch in clips, brief the panel in snatched convo during ad breaks, greet guests before channelling them in. Gallery-booth totally soundproofed and when the door opens the speakers cut. TVs everywhere. Large numerical clocks. Must be numerical because you can’t “trail” an “item” in fifteen minutes, you have to do it “at forty-six thirty” and so on. Gets intense near end as hour must be met exactly. Everyone so chatty throughout, my heart rate at four-hundred.

Outside at bus stop in cold night put the channel on in my headphones and looked up at the building white in the black sky and liked knowing the words in my ear were being uttered somewhere in there.

Wednesday

More A/V research, to Royal Geographic Society in Kensington for book launch The Rest is History’s Tom Holland. He had far more stage rizz than one might have expected.

His host George Osborne defied expectations of nerdiness too, by dropping a suavely insinuant “so let’s turn to the sex”. Sadly the cool impression evaporated when he repeated the well-received line in exactly the same words and tone ten minutes later, then asked twice if Suetonius was porn, then asked “so what about the prostitutes?!”, then about sexual “pridelictions” [sic.]. He then joked that numerically-hapless Holland could work in the treasury now because the only analysis you have to be able to do on a graph is ‘Oh look they’re all going down.’ Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016.

Thursday

Bar crawl through pubs owned by a world tour of companies registered in tax havens. Also the Two Chairmen, the one pub on the Westminster street where lots of mags and think tanks — Spectator, UnHerd, Prospect, Policy Exchange — have their offices. Worth going on a Thursday to sense the politics-culture scene. Members of Parliament trying not to laugh at how easy my gotcha questions are to pass. You’re not meant to be awed by them by I still am a bit.

Friday

Months ago from my desk buddy:

“Clear your calendar I’ve got us tickets to Perry Anderson’s LRB lecture!!!”
“K wat day”
“Feb 14”

So my Valentines was spent in Bloomsbury watching the pope of Marxism address his people. Anderson an Olympian, patrician, now 86. Edited New Left Review from 1962. Then campus politics had two dividing axes: Korea and Stalin. ‘New Left’ the quadrant that opposed both American and Russian governments. Roughly. Speech a history from WW2 to now, ecstatic idea selection, gorgeous word choice, such a pleasure. Transcript in next LRB.

London’s entire intelligentsia present. So many faces and bylines, including Stefan “take ‘em to the Colliners” Collini. In subsequent bars and bohemian salons (parties where people are smoking inside the flat) managed to speak to lots of critics I have admired from afar.

Bus home

Some melancholy always follows meeting things you’d wondered at. Money buys the knowledge that money doesn’t buy happiness, seeing the top gives lets you see what’s not there. Even at its best reality is singular and earthly. That vision of every quality and inexhaustible strangeness was a dream, baseless fabric. In covid my friend and I roamed the heath designing perfect days to the minute. Forcing yourself to supply detail turns the day more and more familiar. Wake up at the sort of time people wake up, eat in one of the ways that people eat, do the sorts of things people do, sleep eventually. Lives pass by years pass by days. “Where can we live but days?” asked Larkin. Nowhere I know of.

So as I say a tad gloomy on the bus home but it matures into cheer after a good night’s sleep. All too often it takes an entire lifetime to get up high and go back down again. Sharp thoughts like the above are a welcome and lucky prod to go and enjoy the things and people in your life. They can be low and undreamy and limited (sorry), but if you were designing your perfect life, you’d still have to choose them.

Please reinsert the joke that got cut from my bit in the Saturday Read this week for being too stupid: end of paragraph 2: “That’s not forever, Shirley Bassey!”

And there is a book bit really — I reviewed Montana outdoorsman Callan Wink’s Beartooth in this week’s Reviewed in Short.

Hope you had a happy week, very best wishes,
GM