Salaam

Here we go again.  Whatever the rights and wrongs and realpolitik of it, and I struggle to make my mind up, I wonder if any bookies are taking punts on whether we will get any thanks for stepping into the Libyan imbroglio.   Long odds I suspect. 

By pure coincidence I’ve been rereading John Latimer’s Alamein and, while the technology has moved on a bit from Panzer IVs and 25-pdrs, the North African geography remains as much of a constraint as it ever was.  For either side to carry out a ‘home run’ into Tripoli or Benghazi means extending themselves out over 650 miles of coastal road and still having the wherewithal to be able to sustain themselves for long enough to finish the job when they get there.  Think of it as two boxers attached to bungee ropes.    It’s as true now for Gadhafi and the mysterious ‘Opposition’ as it was for the Afrika Korps and the Eighth Army.  And that inescapable logistical limitation is the main reason why the desert war see-sawed back and forth across Cyrenaica and the Western Desert for over two years.  Incidentally, I haven’t seen any news reports at all that have actually referred to eastern Libya as Cyrenaica, a name which became all too familiar through 1940-42.

Latimer excels as an author of popular military history, balancing the grand strategy with the human.

 

While Axis forces usually relied on centralised cooking, the British often devolved the responsibility down to vehicle crews, allowing more scope for inventiveness.  Crews soon perfected the technique of ‘brewing up’ and moving on in 20 minutes, and 20 ways of cooking bully.  Whenever the British were close to Alexandria an enterprising unit would arrange for delicacies to be brought up by anyone with an excuse to make a visit there, however brief.  ‘Up the blue’ – in the open desert – very occasionally there would be gazelles to hunt for fresh meat, and sometimes a Bedouin would appear seemingly from nowhere, enabling a trade – the British swapped tea or cigarettes for eggs.  According to Harold Fitzjohn, these exchanges were not always straightforward, as the nomad would always ask for a written chit or pass to prove his loyalty to the Allied cause.  ‘He’d ask the Germans for the same.  I suppose he had a pocket full of them.  We used to make one out and it used to say “Whatever happens, do not trust the bastard.”  After much thanking and “salaaming” he would go on his way clutching his pass.’ (p.21)

Bookshop Memories

Surely a university town of some 200,000 people warrants a decent bookshop.  As the downturn continues to play itself out, the latest local example of corporate retrenchment was the abrupt closure of the branch of Waterstones.  There were several small bookshops in the town throughout my childhood and my teens.  All gone now.

In one of the side streets, off what once was the town’s major thoroughfare before the construction of a huge blight of a shopping centre, there was a cramped and dusty bookshop run, if memory serves, by two old ladies.  I remember going there when I was immersed in a school project on the history of aircraft, or the Second World War, or some such, and spending ages in deliberation before settling upon The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe . 

I don’t think it can have been of all that much use for the project as it lacked all the sort of cutaway diagrams necessary for that sort of thing in favour of a dense textual soft apologia for the life and unpleasant works of Field Marshal Erhard Milch, one of AH’s technocratic true believers.  In my defence, I’ll say that at the age of 10 or 11 I had no idea whatsoever of who David Irving was and I can only assume that I chose it because I was with my mother, who I had cajoled into the promise of buying me a book and so a book – any book – had to be bought.  Scanning over the online PDF just now reminded me enough to be grateful once again for the systematic inefficiencies of the Third Reich.

Eight or ten years later.  The old ladies and their dusty old shop had gone and I was working, rather unhappily, as a wages clerk by day and leading what I took to be an alternative lifestyle by night.  This involved a lot of music.  It was that time of life when you enter into no-holds-barred competition with friends to discover and lay claim to albums and artists for yourself before they do.  The Rolling Stones were quite unfashionable then but I had developed an interest in them as ur-Punks and was proselytising with the fervour of the convert and, predictably enough, I was especially enamoured with Sympathy for the Devil.  I’d picked up a copy of Anthony Scaduto’s biography of Jagger in the market and come across a reference to how the song was based upon the book by Bulgakov.

It felt like a big deal then, going into a shop and going through the whole officious process of filling out forms and leaving a deposit.  At that time there was a small independent though hardly, I think, cutting-edge bookshop on the fringe of the town centre and I went there during one of my lunch breaks and ordered The Master and Margarita.  I don’t know what I expected the book to be like, coming at it, as I did, courtesy of the Glimmer Twins.  I’m sure that it was the first translation that I’d ever read and I could see that it was an allegory of the same Soviet Union that I’d come across in Animal Farm at school.  I knew next to nothing about Faust but I found both the major story and the book within the book, about the ‘fifth procurator of Judea, the knight Pontius Pilate’, amusing and moving.

That shop is long gone too and probably unmissed by anyone.   For a number of years there was a book stall in the indoor market.  I passed by and had a browse on a fairly regular basis but there never seemed to be that much of a turnover of stock.  The only purchase that comes to mind now is Volumes 1-3 of the, then long out of print, Collected Essays Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, which prompted me into my first foray onto eBay to pick up Volume 4.  There are many Orwell collections, from one volume affairs through to the massive 20 volume Complete Works, but CEJL remains the connoisseurs choice for its mixture of the many Orwells.  The market stall closed a few years ago and now, with Waterstones gone, only WH Smith and the various charity shops remain. 

Out in the pub the other night I carried out a straw poll on the theme of A Town Without A Bookshop and the result was as near indifference as makes no difference with responses ranging from shrugs to mutters about doing all book buying online.  I think it’s a shame.  Not because I’m a fan of Waterstones but because, like libraries, bookshops are a Good Thing, providing the space for serendipity that online shopping, even with its Recommendations, somehow lacks.

Buried Bucks

My first computer was an Atari 400, with a touchpad keyboard, an awesome 16k of memory, and a cassette-player peripheral used for loading such mind expanding and state of the art games as Buried Bucks.  Techno-envy at the time amounted to lascivious slavering over a friend’s Atari 800 with an unimaginable 48k of RAM and a floppy disk drive for disks that were truly floppy.

High jinks were there to be had from wandering innocently into a branch of Currys or Dixons and finding an unattended display machine, a ZX81 or a Spectrum, and getting busy with a little simple and direct BASIC coding before swiftly exiting said shop:

10 PRINT “FUCK YOU! “

20 GOTO 10

The best humour never ever dates.

Other computers followed in due course.  An Amiga 500+, which provided hours of entertainment (for the player, not the watcher) at Gunship 2000 and Civilisation 1; a pre-iMac Mackintosh, from which non-right-clicking time all my antipathy to the brand dates; a Dell laptop that was, briefly, state of the art, with a price-tag to prove it, and now feels incongruously house-brick heavy.

For a year or so in the 90s I had a Swatch Mobile Phone in lovely lurid lime-green that was only pocket-size if you happened to be wearing a bib n braces overall and was acquired under a contract such as Mephistopheles used to entrap Faust, which predisposed me to pay-as-you-go for years to come  until last year’s acquisition of a Nexus One.

Making a choice between Google, Microsoft and Apple is like picking your favourite member of the WW2 Axis.  If you’ve ever been to EUR outside of Rome you’ll know that the Italians had the best architecture so I guess that might make Apple the Fascists. 

My father was an early adopter of VCR technology in the early 80s.  It just was an unfortunate source of playground social embarrassment that he had lighted upon the technologically superior, but even then clearly doomed, Betamax when all my friends had VHS so that I could never borrow a copy of the critically lauded Kentucky Fried Movie.  Anyhow, I swiftly made myself the house expert on Making The Video Recorder Work Properly. 

As far as school went, I exited the whole system a year or two before the wholesale purchase of BBC Micros and the emergence of ‘technology’ classes – incorporating computers as well as the previous woodwork, metalwork and technical drawing – so my formal training on computers was patchy, to say the least. 

However, a succession of data entry jobs at financial institutions that ought to, for their sake and mine, remain anonymous seriously upped my keyboard skills.  Then the sort of career planning that amounts to making a great leap across a stagnant pond to an uncertain stepping stone and only then wondering where to go to next <repeat to fade > has seen me progress through a series of increasingly technical roles: Systems Librarian, Data Modeller, Excel-whizz and go-to-man for on-the-fly databases.   When I set this alongside my writing activities all I can say is that it’s a Left Brain-Right Brain thing.

I offer this lengthy preamble by way of demonstrating that I am emphatically not a Luddite.  And yet I feel a good deal of ambivalence about e-Book readers.

There is an increasing amount of literature and debate about the extent to which the internet is rewiring our brains, often with particular reference to the hippocampuses (hippocampi?) of London taxi drivers.  A sub-strand of this dispute turns upon e-Book Readers versus traditional books and, for now, I have to say I remain a Dead-Tree-Man.

In large part this is because I have no desire to be rewired any more than I already am.  It’s easy enough to fitter a whole afternoon or evening away with browsing the web, easier and more absorbing than it’s ever been, or foraging around on Twitter, and I suspect that an e-Reader, of whatever brand, might prove to be such an intoxicatingly luscious piece of kit that it overwhelms the actual content.  And what if, having given in to temptation, you find that your concentration span is irrevocably changed, and you can’t ever properly go back?  You could kiss goodbye to most of nineteenth century literature for a start.  I don’t have any truly empirical evidence to hand to suggest that this might be the case, only the observation that the people I do know who possess e-book readers tend to go on and on about the devices themselves without ever mentioning the things that they’re bloody well supposed to be reading. 

I can see the practical advantages of the Kindle et al in terms of the portability of things, though some of the comparisons are a rather specious, of the Kindle v Complete Works of Dickens variety.  But I can only physically read one book at a time and, as such, the average paperback is hardly a burden to carry about.

It’s only the possibility of a very long journey or a protracted stay in some book benighted desert that would be likely to make me give in.  I sustained myself through a 2 x (13 + 8 hour) return trip to Australia, via some furious concentrated smoking on the roof of the transit lounge in Singapore, with A Dance To the Music of Time which, even in its four volume form, proved to be touch and go as to whether I’d be reduced to red-eyed hallucinatory drooling over episodes of Friends.  Then there was a week spent on a Greek Island – Lesbos – where there was nothing to do apart from get tanned and drink Amstel and I ran out of books on day 4 and was reduced to USA Today, though I got my own back by relieving myself on a statue of Sappho.

At root, though, my aversion is simple.  I don’t trust them.  Quite apart from the ironists of Amazon deleting all the Orwell books off peoples’ Kindles, I can’t believe that, even though at root e-books are just text files, they won’t find a way, a la music and video, to keep on making people buy the same things that they've already bought over and over again as each new ‘enhanced’ format emerges.  Then there’s the devices themselves.  I’ve just had to replace and box up an old but perfectly functional printer because it isn’t supported by Windows 7.  And there’s the phone and the TV and the cable box and the DVD recorder and all the rest of the stuff that only adds marginal improvements that you managed without anyway with each successive iteration but which, somehow, the great perpetual China fuelled capitalist revolution obliges you to get involved with anyway.  Do I need something else of that ilk?  No.

Book-books, the ones made from dead trees, are to all intents and purposes indestructible.  I’ve managed never to set mine on fire, although a few have suffered bath time immersions.  And they’re mine and I don’t have to buy them again.  So why, apart from the dead hand of fashion, bother with an e-book reader?  Answers on a postcard please.