A few connected literary thoughts
1. A pretty woman in her early twenties sat opposite me on the train today, and pulled out a copy of "A Confederacy of Dunces", one of my favourite novels of all time. "God," I immediately thought, "If I were single and fifteen years younger, this is the sort of woman I'd develop a crush on". Then she failed to laugh at the book once during the entire forty minute journey, and I realised that she therefore couldn't have been less my type.
2. People do still judge you by what you read on the trains (though I doubt many people besides me actually judge others on their responses to fiction). I once took a second-hand copy of the sixties poetry revival inspired "Children of Albion" anthology on a few commutes with me, and actually got laughed at on two separate occasions. "Ha ha, he's reading hippy poetry! Look at the silly hippy painting on the front!" they clearly thought, probably not realising that the anthology actually contains some of the most biting political works of the time (which still stand up well and seem relevant now, worryingly enough). Take a Pink Floyd biography on the tube, however - as I did one week, and never again - and you'll actually get interrupted by muso bores wanting to talk to you about Pink Floyd and their tedious lame-arsed later work, as also happened to me twice. Why one book makes you new friends and the other attracts derision isn't immediately clear to me, since both things originate from the same scene.
3. I was browsing through the Syd Barrett biography "A Very Irregular Head" in Waterstones a couple of days ago, and noticed that it seems to go into his influences in much more depth than previous tomes about him managed. Syd Barrett was my idol as a teenage boy, and it utterly staggered me to find out that most of his literary influences (most especially Bob Cobbing) were people who had a serious hold on me while I was first developing performance poetry work. I was utterly unaware of any connection at the time, but was clearly sub-consciously zooming in on all kinds of figures whose work had some similarities. Even when you try to escape the hold of your teenage heroes and move on, it seems you'll often be unconsciously rooting around within their spheres of reference (similarly, I know many Manics fans and Smiths fans who, try though they do, will often end up kicking around in the same ballpark as Mozza or Richey, and I even know Fall fans who have never quite got over M E Smith's scattergun writing technique).
2. People do still judge you by what you read on the trains (though I doubt many people besides me actually judge others on their responses to fiction). I once took a second-hand copy of the sixties poetry revival inspired "Children of Albion" anthology on a few commutes with me, and actually got laughed at on two separate occasions. "Ha ha, he's reading hippy poetry! Look at the silly hippy painting on the front!" they clearly thought, probably not realising that the anthology actually contains some of the most biting political works of the time (which still stand up well and seem relevant now, worryingly enough). Take a Pink Floyd biography on the tube, however - as I did one week, and never again - and you'll actually get interrupted by muso bores wanting to talk to you about Pink Floyd and their tedious lame-arsed later work, as also happened to me twice. Why one book makes you new friends and the other attracts derision isn't immediately clear to me, since both things originate from the same scene.
3. I was browsing through the Syd Barrett biography "A Very Irregular Head" in Waterstones a couple of days ago, and noticed that it seems to go into his influences in much more depth than previous tomes about him managed. Syd Barrett was my idol as a teenage boy, and it utterly staggered me to find out that most of his literary influences (most especially Bob Cobbing) were people who had a serious hold on me while I was first developing performance poetry work. I was utterly unaware of any connection at the time, but was clearly sub-consciously zooming in on all kinds of figures whose work had some similarities. Even when you try to escape the hold of your teenage heroes and move on, it seems you'll often be unconsciously rooting around within their spheres of reference (similarly, I know many Manics fans and Smiths fans who, try though they do, will often end up kicking around in the same ballpark as Mozza or Richey, and I even know Fall fans who have never quite got over M E Smith's scattergun writing technique).