Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming

It is the 50th anniversary of the first Bond movie adaptation (Dr No), and what with the forthcoming new James Bond movie, Skyfall, it has become a rather inescapable Celebrating Bond Month, in the UK at least. Articles everywhere, covering the franchise, the books, Bond’s sex life… MGM and the Estate of Cubby Broccoli, for two, thank you for your continuing interest.
Much earlier this year, the exciting news of Skyfall prompted Julia at ten minutes hate blog to a review of the source material. Now nearing the 60th anniversary of the publication of the first one (Casino Royale), Ian Fleming’s original Bond novels have been a source of comfort and excitement since my first discovery of them at some tender age or other in the 1980s… I agreed enthusiastically to join in. For me, it’s a barely-needed excuse to revisit the books and cast over a critical-but-loving eye.
In the interests of labour division, we have split the novels roughly equally. Next up on my list is ‘Live and Let Die’. And sorry, JCG, for the delay!

We are examining Ian Fleming’s books, not the film adaptations, but any discussion of LALD requires perhaps rather inescapably a brief mention of Sir Paul McCartney’s live and let deathless theme tune.

It doesn’t seem to fit with the visuals particularly well, but it was recently voted ‘Best Bond Theme’ by people interested in such matters. As one of a number of memorable Macca moments, one would have to say at least Top 5 Bond themes. Foreshadowing: the cod-reggae stylings in the middle bit are important.

LALD was the second of the Bond novels, originally published 1954. It is the first book in which Bond goes to America, and provides opportunities for Fleming to toss about his quasi-urbane opinions on food, culture, people, in the USA. The plot concerns a treasure trail of looted gold coins, SMERSH’s money man in New York turning out to be a negro gangster called Mr Big, who rules his turf with a mix of brutality and voodoo for the extra fear factor. Bond blazes a messy trail from New York through to Florida and then out into the Caribbean, where the big showdown takes place.

On initial reading, Fleming’s view of the States is as shallow as this overview would indicate – a nervous skirting of the East coast and then off as quickly as he can. It seems quite one-dimensional, perhaps playing on notions of Americans being known to the general British public at the time largely as an admixture of ‘over-sexed, over-paid and over here’ memories of GI war billetteers and impossibly glamorous Hollywood stars providing escape in matinees and double features. The Yanks, for they are ALL Yankees to the Brits, have garish and extravagant tastes. They are not at all like the British in the way they speak, eat and dress. Also, in America, there are many, many black people.

The thematic involvement of “colored people” has dated in many ways, and in fact was probably dated in many ways when LALD was published. As with Macca’s clunky ranking roots referents, it’s a musical thing that sticks in the book. Principally, Felix Leiter’s down-wit-duh-negroes jazz conversations, which rely on Duke Ellington as a cultural signifier. This is fair enough to a point. Leiter, a straw-haired Texan in the books, is a Dixieland aficionado, and he leads Bond on a whistle-stop tour of Harlem for “local color” en route to a meeting with Mr Big. They take in nightspots such as the Savoy, Sugar Ray’s, Yeah Man… all of which were real, and historically/culturally significant, but as featured on maps of Harlem from 1932.

(Check out the excellent Strange Maps blog, where I found this helpful cartographical curiosity.)

Surely a jazz aficionado, or anyone familiar with clubs in 1950s New York, would have had at least a passing awareness of the hipper happenings at Minton’s? Fleming reveals something of the cultural snob with the what-to-say crib sheet, alluded to in my overview of Casino Royale. It could be argued that he’s not really talking (through Leiter) about jazz music so much as indulging in vague political theorising about “the blacks” in Harlem, and the impact on the middle classes that an exploitative character such as Mr Big might have…

Something about wolves and sheep, bastards and Our Bastards, anyway. And this is one example of the difficulty in distinguishing authorial and character voice that one finds with Bond and the Bond novels. Fleming-the-writer works in the chapter ‘Nigger Heaven’ (renamed ‘Seventh Avenue’ for the American version) in clear reference to Carl van Vechten’s 1920s novel, which offered a similarly controversial insight into cultures (black/white) firmly divided from each other, while bringing massive cultural tensions/influences to bear on each other. Fleming’s take jerks a knowing head backwards towards Harlemania while acknowledging the “advancement of colored peoples” to ultimate criminal achievement when let to develop “on their own”. His characters are disparaging, and glibly so, about this, while also offering a certain level of grudging respect that comes from “tough men” for their counterparts. Mr Big does at least have some gravity in his caricature role as “first of the great negro criminals,” with some decent descriptions and lines. Some…

What Fleming-the-Brit-conservative is doing with Mr Big as a subtext in the Carribean sequences is presumably some sort of “don’t let the Windies go the same way as Cuba, or they’ll all be doing the Stalin One-step in Nassau by Christmas” domino theorising. Even so, Fleming’s metaphoric exploration of post-colonial politics could be developed more effectively, with less of a broad brush. I mean, “Mr Big”, for fuck’s sake. The climactic scenes, in a sub-aquatic grotto filled with gold, gramophone voodoo drums and oiled negroes pliantly doing the chieftain’s bidding… it is absurdly cartoonish, to put it kindly. There is an uneasy sense of facetiousness, of the ‘flippancy’ Elisabeth Sturch referred to in the TLS (thanks Wikipedia!). Still, in kindness: Fleming was developing as a writer, and developing an eye for his market… a scant six years after the Empire Windrush made port I’m sure there were many readers in Britain slurping down this part-informed pulp like conch chowder.

Later Bond excursions to the Caribbean, and the US, are more assured, though still cynical; supporting characters more developed, less one dimensional, though still flat. We’ll come back to those. Turning our attention to the surface appeal, the little details of sex and food and violence, as in Casino Royale, Fleming’s violence is casual, his dialogue dry as a waft of Kina Lillet. Bond’s little finger is broken as a punishment by Mr Big, Leiter is fed to sharks… Fleming’s own arched eyebrow at the typewriter is telegraphed with “He disagreed with something that ate him (we have plenty more jokes as good as this).”

The food porn is amusing, both in menu content and in its condescension:

‘Soft-shell crabs with tartare sauce, flat beef hamburgers, medium-rare, from the charcoal grill, french-fried potatoes, broccoli, mixed salad with thousand-island dressing, ice-cream with melted butterscotch and as good a Liebfraumilch as you can get in America. Okay?’
‘It sounds fine,’ said Bond with a mental reservation about the melted butterscotch.
They sat down and ate steadily through each delicious course of American cooking at its rare best.

“American cooking at its rare best”!

There’s actually a kind of double reverse snobbery here, with such a menu today coming across as pretty commonplace, although I am talking about Western cultural norms, of course. Yet the meal does actually sound pretty good as well… at a time of rationed meat and just re-introduced sweets, to a half-famished Brit-in-the-street such bounty would have been as exotically unattainable as a Caribbean treasure cave. Fleming knows this: it’s already an obvious part of the appeal, the sniffy dismissals of greasy spoon diner food in other chapters, extolled hearty breakfasts, and label Mabelry in the usual areas such as cigarettes and alcohol.

Fleming does also, on occasion, do an admirable job of absorbing some tougher moments from thriller fiction, while sustaining a depiction of enduring British importance in global affairs that is as exciting and endearing as it is wholly implausible. Revisiting LALD, I was struck by how uncomfortable a book it is to read in many ways, and not just with regard to race, music and menus. As a Brit, seeing one’s cultural past through the lens of pop novels, films, etc, can be instructive. It both preserves and diminishes. I look forward to reading the Andy McNab books in thirty years to see what they say about our just-post-millenial continued need for action tools.

Note, not “re-read”… this is part of that discomfort. Something that perhaps should be bourne in mind when talking about thrillers is that they are generally popular but critically unloved. If the films hadn’t turned Bond into Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, globally recognised and archetypal, it is entirely possible that the books would have fallen by the wayside a little, later ones perhaps even going unwritten in favour of more journalistic non-fiction exercises like The Diamond Smugglers. Hypothetical, of course, but it would be interesting to consider worlds – fictional and actual – where Bond dies at the end of… well, we’ll come back to that one too.

Bond is also an uncomfortable character to read in LALD. Something that many writers have picked up on in recent Bond retrospectives and analyses is the idea that Fleming was writing Bond as much as a critique as a celebration of the secret agent, man as blunt instrument, thug with a gun being pointed at the bad guys, whoever these are deemed to be. In LALD as a straight thriller, Bond is reassuringly tough. His laconic style can support this reading. “Don’t be seen… Wear a veil or something,” he suggests to Solitaire, Mr Big’s erstwhile pet psychic and Bond’s burgeoning love interest, as they escape New York.

However, even though Bond’s reward is food and sex, Fleming makes it clear that Bond is not invincible. He is damaged, and damageable. It is the thousand cuts of coral scrapings, pistol whippings, beatings and little finger breakings that whittle at the Bond of the books and make him such a compelling character as the series progresses. In LALD, the climactic scene where “the first tears since his childhood” well in Bond’s eyes is an odd, touching moment. It is one of a number of such episodes throughout the novels that show us glimpses of the more human Bond, rather than Bond the Cold War style template anachronism, suave cinematic superman.

Fleming stayed home for the next novel in the sequence, Moonraker, set entirely in Britain. Here is a link for Moonraker as discussed in the piece that kicked off this project at Ten Minutes Hate.

James Bond will return in JCG’s The Mortal Bath’s review of Diamonds are Forever!

 

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

Previously in The Mortal Bath… ‘Fasten your lap-strap’.

Casino Royale (CR), the first James Bond novel, was published in 1953. Here, from the lavish ianfleming.com website, is the original Jonathan Cape jacket blurb:

The dry riffle of the cards and the soft whirr of the roulette wheel, the sharp call of the croupiers and the feverish mutter of a crowded casino hide the thick voice at Bond’s ear which says, ‘I will count up to ten.’

Anyone who has ever gambled will find this tense and sometimes horrifying story of espionage and high gambling irresistible. So will readers who have never entered a casino. Connoisseurs of realistic fiction will particularly note the careful documentation of the Secret Service background, the chilling portrait of Le Chiffre, the authentic menace of SMERSH, and the sensual appeal of the girl in ‘soie sauvage’.

These bumphtious references to conoisseurs and raw silk barely begin to gently stroke the surface of the sensual appeal of the Bond books. Post-war gastronauts, label Mabels and petrolheads would also find much worthy of note within the pages of this landmark novel.* Bond’s reputation as a bon viveur is a significant aspect of the series as a whole, and it’s in CR that many of his predilections and prejudices first surface. He is, to put it bluntly, an aggressive snob in matters of what to eat, drink, drive, smoke, hump.

The cover of the Pan paperback captures the green baize excitement, the essential appeal of Bond, with the cashier’s cheque for an astronomical sum in francs panting continental exoticism, never mind the p’tite wink from the graphics department with the handwritten ‘soixante neuf’…

This consumption with relish of what must have been mostly unattainable pleasures for rationing book Britain appears throughout the Bond canon. Let us take the infamous Vesper cocktail, the ‘vodka martini, shaken, not stirred’ immortalised in the flicks. This bland order does no justice to the thing of alcoholic wonder, ordered with colonial vigour, in the book:

“Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”
“Certainly, monsieur.” The barman seemed pleased with the idea.

Booze pedants will point out that Gordon’s has diluted its recipe since, and so on, that shaking ruins the drink, but Fleming is creating a man who is the measure of all things, knows what he wants and dam’ well gets it. Bond is comfortable adding an absurd proviso regarding grain over potato vodka, lessening the poncery with a ribald crack in the local lingo. He later names the drink after a girl, showing his romantic, perhaps even a sentimental side.

We shall return to Bond’s prodigious consumption in Thunderball, although it is worth noting now that as well as this cirrhotic excess, the gambling and the gorging, Bond smokes around 60 cigarettes a day. However, while there is a lot of this airplane magazine catalogue of ‘cool’ GQ How-To-Guide stuff in the books, Bond’s absurd intake highlights what JCG at Ten Minutes Hate refers to as ‘a… sometimes out-of-control human being.’ Bond is, without doubt, a vehicle for communicating Fleming’s fashionable tastes in the name of excitement and escapism, but he is also a complex character, a haunted one in many ways.

This makes perfect sense given Fleming’s intriguing life story (soon to be filmed again by super Duncan Jones, it says here at ScreenJabber) and the historical context of the book, released a few years after World War II with its own well-rehearsed litany of horrors. Bond is a soldier who, in the absence of a Great Cause, is really just a blunt instrument, a man apparently with a death wish being used to visit it on others, something deliberately worked with by Fleming throughout the novels.

As the first entry in the series, CR establishes some reasons for why this might be. There is the Freudian field day (Field Day is a good name for a Bond girl) start of the infamous series of “Bond babes”, with the dark, quixotic French waft of mystery that is Vesper Lynd. The lemony twist to the tale (such as it is) is of course that Bond’s sentimental attachment to Vesper nearly emasculates him, actually and figuratively. Again, this fallible Bond is far more brutal, and brutalised, than any of the films prior to the Craig reboots, or arguably Pierce Brosnan with a beard in North Korea, managed. The chilling carpet beater scene is convincing and terse.

It also introduces a first ‘new enemy’ for Bond, early Cold War political uncertainty represented in the wonky Cyrillic letter Щ carved into the back of his hand by a heavily-accented Soviet agent. (Check out the excellent Commander Bond website for some far more detailed research and exegesis.) This scene makes explicit Bond’s helplessness in the wider game of history, and the long coda to the novel, with Bond and Lynd’s doomed relationship playing out through convalescence, elaborate meals, empty sex and finally betrayal, is doubtless a metaphor for British involvement in wartime and post-war Europe in some way. The book begins and ends nihilistically; it is a damaged world, full of damaged people, including the protagonist. As Fleming perhaps saw it, life is about the way the cards fall, and how you play them… and the house usually wins.

It is a satisfyingly dark book. Bond has only some of the insouciance and confidence one associates with him, the Secret Agent Man, the suave and apparently indestructible force of justice. His uncertainties and flaws in CR are what make him such a compelling character for the rest of the series. That and the exciting drinks, card games and violence. As a scene setter, and as a standalone work, CR is indeed in many ways irresistible.

*Yes, it is a landmark novel.

 

‘Fasten your lap-strap’

Appropriately, for May Day, the stirrings (not shakings) of a James Bond-related project.

J.C. Greenway, currently bank holidaying writer of the excellent Ten Minutes Hate blog, wrote about Moonraker recently, a piece I heartily endorse. Somehow, a discussion of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels – see the comments section here – was suggested.

Something for everyone to look forward to there. So, some considerations on Bond. The notion set me musing on the continuing appeal of the James Bond books. I’ve been a devotee since a while back, probably since I was about 11 or 12. It was a family holiday, a memorable trip for cultural firsts, as part described in the Simon and Garfunkel section here in this music bit of the Mortal Bath. I also became a fan of Fleming, working my way through the series as quickly as I could find the books in various second-hand shops around town back home. Readers who have been to Harrogate may understand the urbane appeal.

I ended up with a full set, as well as two Kingsley Amis additions, Colonel Sun, which faithfully referred to the Casino Royale template of violence, girl and food but was a bit boring, and The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007, which was hilarious. Crucially, it also provided context, a surrounding cosmos for the Bond solar system. Parodying a Playboy/How-To style, Amis used the simple device of quoting the original novels extensively, with dry observations skewering the contradictions, recurring tropes and brand snobbery. Also, Amis being a friend and fan of Fleming, it was clearly revelling in the pot boiler deluxe stylings of the best efforts in the series. This was probably the first time I realised that to parody something effectively you have to love it.

That’s where Bond ended for me, really, with the full set of Fleming and the Amis reductio. The first few John Gardner books I tried were interesting, but it seemed a dilution, somehow, not as compelling. I couldn’t get past the first chapter of Devil May Care more recently for the same reason. And, back in the day, prompted by the lurchings of the film franchise, I had begun to develop Bondsickness. The Book of Bond, at least, amplified self-reflexive, humorous subtexts already present in the books. Importantly, it managed this in a way that did not cheapen them, as Danjaq’s increasingly desperate efforts with the films sometimes did.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll watch an old Bond movie if it’s on, but some of them are pretty ropey.

Anyway, the books, the books. In a moment of teen fundamentalism, manifesting a disastrous decision to “move on”, thinking myself beyond Bond, I divested myself of all the books. I know, I know. If it’s any mitigation, the same period saw me ditching the Clive Cussler and Alistair Maclean collections as well, only one of which decisions is now vindicated. The folly of youth, etc. While having since found what I am convinced was my actual collection in an Oxfam in York, I still no longer have the Book of Bond. I had bought it for £1.00 out of Bell’s Bookshop (sadly defunct). I can’t find the paperback online for less than £15 now.

This reflects, I think it can be convincingly suggested, if not argued in any great detail, the cultural rehabilitation of the original series. The novels-as-objects are hot commodities, the pricing for even bog-standard paperbacks suggesting their desirability. Long since featuring introductions from, like, “proper” writers such as Anthony Burgess, they are also recognised for their contextual importance and lasting cultural impact. And of course, film tie-in, the novels are due for a re-re-release this year. This will no doubt further dent any hopes of ever recapturing my mis-streamlined youth without breaking the bank at Royale-les-Eaux.

It has always been ‘Bond-as-adapted-book’ for me. The films just aren’t as hard, funny, tasty, stupid and horrible as the books. The details and tone of the novels are unique. Still, as JCG notes, the return-to-canon approach of the last few outings has refreshed the movies, while providing new lights with which to re-examine the original texts. The Secret Service trope has been interrogated at length since the 1960s. Bond himself was always part of the deconstruction, at least in the books. One of the main points of appeal is his ambiguity, simultaneously the aspirational model man of tastes and the ‘blunt instrument’, post-war relic adrift intended by Fleming.

I look forward to an exploration of some of these ideas, as well as revisiting my favourite sections. Bondish events here in The Mortal Bath shall start at the very beginning, shortly, with Casino Royale. Fasten your lap-strap…

 

Planning and further reading

I know I keep saying ‘I’m gonna…’ There’s a running gag in Our House about our friend Anita (‘Anita Writemore…Anita Stopsmoking… Anita Haveabreak-Fromthebooze’) Well, yeah. I’m busy getting on top of lesson planning. It’s a bane of the trainee teacher’s life… This term has been v. tough for me, and I know from talking to m’fellow trainees that they’re all knackered as well. Very challenging work, teaching and thinking about teaching. It don’t come easy. Especially when, as ver Pistols also once observed, you’re a lazy sod.

Yet! Upping my work rate in all areas (Sun in Aries, digits extracted, etc) will see a marvellous cultural flowering here in relatively short order, of course it will. Anyway, short version, I’ve got a couple of blog bits and pieces in progress, should you be interested, so stay tuned.

While that’s germinating, here are my current five favourite RSS Live Links feeds, the material distracting me from adding my own two penn’orth and, indeed, from getting on with planning lessons for Year 9, but also providing inspirations.

In no particular order…

Back Towards the Locus, always interesting and neatly-phrased perspectives on items, from Ben Six. Recently discussing Libya and wrestling.

From Julia Smith in Tokyo, Ten Minutes Hate. Doubleplus good writing on politics, living and working abroad.

The does-what-it-says-on-the-tin celebration of female wordsmiths fuck yeah lady writers!

And a two-way tie between ‘one-stop intellectual surfing experience’ 3 Quarks Daily and Unicorn Chasers Boing Boing.

I’m sure there’s nothing there you didn’t already know about, and it is perhaps equally superfluous to note that there’re lots of other equally inspiring people writing about all sorts, but I’ve been digging these ones in particular. Happy distractions, and I’ll be back after these words from Vygotsky.

 

Lies, evasions, etc.

Salutations to Julia at ten minutes hate, keeping calm and carrying on in Japan. Scanning the telescreens this morning, I read with dismay that we (The UN), principally the US, UK and France, are once again lobbing cruise missiles into Libya. The precise reasoning for ‘our’ involvement here and not in Bahrain or Yemen, for example, remains unclear.

What might George Orwell have thunk, I wondered?

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.

(From Politics and the English Language, George Orwell, 1946)

M. le Président

 

Whistle and it’ll come back

Woke up early, before five and daylight, and the sound of first one then two birds twitting loudly right outside the window stopped me from dropping off again. Shortly I found a more familiar bite in the guts. This could have been due to different dietary effects wrought by seasonal feasting, or perhaps the scary movie we watched late last night (recent adaptation of M.R. James story Whistle and I’ll come back to you) and all the attendant restless dreaming I knew would be induced by considering the ghosts of living people and the alien landscapes of our minds, thoughts half-bidden foregrounding.

By this I mean I had some perhaps hilariously elaborate dreams, the last
of which I recall ended with me and twenty or so of the rebels (Ivorians, Palestinians, Yugoslavs and Free French) running through fences and scrub to flee the tanks and CGI wicker basilisks, escaping in a descent down endless stairs along which thick nets of cobwebs had been left as a simple natural first line of defence. I realised this halfway down and ducked while running, but the guys behind me kept forgetting and were showering me with insects and arachnids as they tore through the webs. I knew as I kept pounding down the stairs a particularly hairy spider would later emerge one leg at a time from the neck of my olive fatigues as we sat round the campfire. Maybe it just meant I needed a good crap, but anyway, there was that bite. I eventually acknowledged it actually meant I would have to get up and write.

[This is now being typed up from handwritten notes, from a green hardback with lined pages. My spidery scrawl continues:]
In an earlier notebook, maybe it’s this one, I likened the feeling I get when I’m writing, really *getting those words down*, to being underwater. What I probably meant was trying to convey the feeling of suspension of breath, and of time, a slowing of the pulse, noise filtered away, the weird refractive light, and the sudden sound and colour, the splashing, when returning to the surface. Funnily, when writing *this* down, bits of paper and card I’ve tucked into my notebook fell out on to the sofa where I’m sat, curled up, resting on the left arm with a cushion across my knees and my nose about four inches from the page.

Among the addenda bombing the shallow end are two pieces of paper torn out of a notebook, folded roughly. It is pages from a dream diary I was keeping. I remember I removed them because I had higher designs for that particular notebook. The date on the front sheet is 02.01.10. The note describes a hilariously elaborate dream, one of those detailed-yet-pretty-hazy-on-waking ones you may be familiar with. It starts with a comment that ‘my dreams were telescopic’, which as I’m writing this now seems a nice image, my inner eye at the other end of whatever tube it is I’m looking down [and as I'm typing a short while later I am thinking of moon maps and naval eye-patches]. The dream had me watching Bruce Springsteen somewhere, from afar, and as I made my way nearer, through lines of crowd and police, into the seven or eight-sided chapel that was the venue – not the Union Chapel, though that would be an awesome gig… this one was a bit more of a dilapidated castle, with battlements crumbling to create steps to allow people through… I’ll let me-in-January 2010 take up the recount:

‘…the direct route in seemed too obvious, the exit crammed with hipsters + early adopters – inside Bruce played to a collegiate crowd, The Gaslight Anthem (steampunk) playing but kind of modified to this bearded combo of Fleet Foxes, Women, Olivia Tremor Control. The singer making announcements that sounded like stage chat but then could have been recorded songs, weird psychedelic exhortations to learn about everything, using the internet to access [playing as backdrops] videos of massive underwater polyps, Qabalah diagrams, compleat histories of esoteric tradition, films about witches, documentaries on puritan rebellion, popular revolt… then talking with the singer and enthusiastically explaining how I could really relate to all this – see, when I went to University first in 1992 this was all a pipe dream, but this is what was in the dream, information, the chance and the knowledge that we will all just have this stuff in our heads and that’s how the great leap forward next will happen… I did tell him that I had been doing a bit of acid, [thinking about stuff with friends like] total thought communism, this idea we played with one night spangled, and here it all is. The creeping thought stole upon me that he wasn’t listening – concerned with grooming his beard – his American bandmates crowded round, talking of the ramifications of immigration, the custom people coming to disapprove. He was like what would Jesus do? And I said he’d probably say let your freak flag hang, man. All those pacifist reveries and the platonic reasoning and other dreams of expansion through technology masked, by apps, public relations, property recycling, money, money, money. Waking up I was thinking, where did our sense of wonder, fun + excitement go? Email – why don’t we call it spacemail or something? We’re wheeling round in circles and there’s a universe to explore – keep the wheels turning, onwards, avanti avanti avanti!’

That’s how I tend to get round the new year, all enthused about getting into a fresh groove, mixed with the usual post-god/alcohol goldfish bowl cocktail pescimism. This new year, looking back round the spiral, I have to acknowledge that my dreams of global enlightenment through music and talking cock about the daft shit we think up remain tantalisingly 5,000 miles adrift. But look, this internet tool, it’s amazing! ‘The information age’, constantly effervescing and elephantine, 2010 bringing up actual sci-fi-like cyber warfare, as the Grauniad panted excitedly… clearly the experiment will continue to have a lot of explosions and sooty faces as we mix substances to see what goes green and what goes bang, but like an actual brain, mainly, the more exciting and energising stuff goes in, the more excitement and energy comes out. My output on this blog has been scanty, as a direct consequence of action in the offline part of the world. This old year I left my job in London to come home to Yorkshire, where I’m studying to be a teacher. Good friends of mine have gone abroad, to teach as well. People I haven’t seen for years tag turn out to be inspiring writers. Information has again realised the capacity to slip its handlers and make its way to receptive people. 2011, for me, will be aimed at nurturing all that.

There’s my dream interpretation/farewell to some of that message, if that’s not just a pointlessly 20th century, Viennese finger up the nose bit of a sucrose sentimental self-examination concept to tolerate, O reader. Hauntings and hall of mirror comedy dream reflections refracting and conspiring to bring me about full circle, thrice widdershins to see my own boss-eyed self gurning out from the porch, going flibbalubbalub across my lips with the other forefinger, knuckle deep in one nostril in the Alfred E. Neuman style as new year fireworks pop and fizz about.

Dreams, hauntings, visions, ghost stories, I love them and acknowledge them for what they are, most likely minds trying to make sense of masses of data, dancing silly spooky dances round ourselves. For 2011 I resolve to get more of my waking life into enjoying writing, and reading, then getting those enthusiastic spider scratchings on these spacepages.