The Book Tower

Anyone of a certain age will remember the very strange television programme called Monkey. This Chinese TV series was dubbed into English and aired by the BBC in the late 70s/early 80s. Each week three characters called Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy had mad adventures and jumped about. That was about as far as it went, and if you were a fan of Monkey you probably also liked The Water Margin.

My ears pricked up recently when I heard that Damon Albarn had written a stage musical based on the 16th Century Chinese novel by Wu Cheng’en. Monkey: Journey to the West continues the Monkey legend and features artwork by Jamie Hewlett, who was responsible for the Gorillaz look and feel.

I’ve been a fan of Albarn for ages. His music, through Blur, Gorillaz and The Good, the Bad and the Queen has always been excellent and inventive. He’s also never shy to push the boat out, and this latest project sees him leaving the shore completely. The album Journey to the West was released this week and I admit my first impressions were ones of bafflement. I guess I was expecting an extension to Gorillaz, but that’s not the case. Whilst the two albums Albarn made with that band were pretty experimental at times, Monkey makes them look like Bucks Fizz records. It’s challenging to say the least, Albarn doesn’t sing on it and it largely comes across as Brian Eno after too much rice wine. I kind of gave up on it all last night. I even emailed a friend saying the album was rubbish.

But gingerly I put the album back on again tonight (or, in the modern way, fired it up in iTunes). The headache that’s been bugging me all week and making me grumpy has almost cleared and I’m finding fresh and original things in this weird music. What’s a barrier is the lack of the visual feast I would imagine that the original stage show was, but this is still a worthy addition to the Albarn canon. It’s not one for the dinner party, even if you’re cooking for die-hard Damon Albarn fans – they’re likely to have the same first impressions as me. But it goes in the grower category, and I’ve already identified two really stand out tracks, Heavenly Peach Banquet and Monkey Bee. This is a record I might be listening to for a long time to make sense of. At least until his next project comes along.

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From Booking Through Thursday:

What is your earliest memory of a library? Who took you? Do you have you any funny/odd memories of the library?

My mother used to take me to the library. I remember it being a very long walk, across the iron bridges that crossed the railway, down an endless leafy street, through a park and past the milk depot. A really, really long walk for a child but one that planted a desire for books within me (like a thirsty man crawling across a desert towards an oasis, I knew that there was something worthwhile at the end of my trek).

I was always deposited in the children’s library as my mother disappeared into the main section. Left to my own devices, I would usually drift towards the work of Spike Milligan and Dr Seuss. I went for humour in those days and these were my favourites. My mother would, on returning to collect me, urge me to borrow the Just William books that she’s enjoyed in her childhood. I sometimes did, and enjoyed them too. My only other earliest memories are factual books, the inevitable dinosaurs and astronomy. I remember being particularly fond of one giant textbook entitled What Makes it Go.

Taught exemplary library manners, I would present my borrowing selection to the librarian (four at any one time I recall) all neatly opened at the correct page and ready for stamping. Other library etiquette, such as keeping quiet at all times, appears to have come to me instinctively. This seemed to put me in good stead as, ten years or so later, I applied for and was accepted as a Saturday assistant in the same library. I didn’t work in the children’s library, and was instead left to deal with the pensioners and their hardback mysteries, and the Dads of schoolmates who would sometimes recognise me. It was a pretty laid back job, although I always fell down on one thing. People returning their books late were subject to fines but I always felt awkward making them pay. People penalised to savouring their books just a little bit too long? It didn’t seem fair.

These days I’m a slave to Amazon. I visit a library only rarely and I sometimes feel a pang of guilt; I should browse and I should borrow. Although I suspect I would over-borrow, take too long to read and end up being fined. I did introduce my daughter to the library in her early years and admit being put off by the shelves of DVDs that have the habit of enticing children away from books. And because of this we now tend to treat our local Waterstones as library-ish. You can’t borrow, but you sure can spend a long time hiding in a corner and reading.

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I’ve become so accustomed to not reading that I don’t even read what appears before my eyes. It’s not easy; they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.

You are on a few days holiday break in Italy. You have taken along a copy of If on a Winer’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You think it will be fitting to read a classic of modern Italian literature. Furthermore, you decide to write a post in the style of Calvino once you get home. You like the conceit of the book, reading it as you queue to enter tourist attractions, and when your family spend time looking in the shops selling carnival masks. You like the way the text plays with the reader, reminding them that they are reading a novel and constantly tantalising you with new and unfinished stories…

But when I got home I decided not to write a post in the style of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. Eventually the book gnawed at my patience for too long. Written in 1979, Calvino’s novel is composed of a collection of openings to novels. The reader (you) stumbles from one unfinished text to another, witnessing (and reading) a detective story, a murder and several meditations on the relationship between text and reader. This is a book that fans of literary theory will get very excited about, and it’s a book that David Mitchell also got very excited about (proving the inspiration and the structure for Cloud Atlas). The problem may be me; I have a short fuse with this sort of thing. Films-within-films, plays that remind you that you are the audience, books that remind you that you are reading them. So forgive me for endulging in a post that reminds you that you are reading it (that is, of course, if you’ve bothered to get this far).

You are getting to the end of your post. You realise that you don’t have much to say about If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You are thinking more about the other book you read on your few days holiday in Italy. You begin to shape some thoughts on your next post…

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