The Completist

“Hey, hey, hey, we’re moving in the right direction now.”

The Completist

As explored in a previous article (see Obsessions), I can get quite obsessed by certain things. As we saw, I love books, both collecting and reading them. As is expected of the obsessive reader, there are certain authors that I read time and again and others that published in such prolific profundity that the challenge is to hunt down and read their every last publication.

Isaac Asimov, for instance, published over four hundred books in his lifetime, fiction and non-fiction, covering everything from science and science fiction to commentaries on the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. I don’t quite have the time or the money to hunt down that many works from one author, but I do have a dozen or so Asimov books so who knows what may happen in the future. The Foundation Series and his short stories though are done. You’ll learn more about science reading his book, The Left Hand of the Electron, than from a dozen Horizon documentaries.

Back down the echelons of the more manageable, I’ve been obsessed with Emile Zola ever since I read Germinal fifteen years ago. Germinal is just one novel in Zola’s Rouqon-Macquart series, which runs to twenty books and one short story. The rule here is that they have to be found in second hand bookshops. So far I have found only half (less one short story), although two of those found are in the original French, waiting for when my French gets a little stronger (it’s getting there, though Zola apparently uses a style strange even to native speakers).

Even in English though, the Rouqon-Macquart series is an amazing group of novels, grander in scope even than Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, featuring over  three hundred main characters from the same family. Germinal alone is in my opinion amongst the greatest novels ever written, certainly in my top ten, even up against some pretty stiff competition. 

To the best of my knowledge I have read and own mostly everything by Ernest Hemingway except for a handful of his later short stories and his first book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon. Actually, I also own, The Dangerous Summer, his second book on bullfighting, which I still haven’t got around to reading, given that I don’t exactly approve of the sport. Then I’ve read plenty of his stories and articles on hunting despite not approving of that either. I’ll eventually read both of them. It’s the completist in me.

I agree with Michael Palin’s assessment of Hemingway: we wouldn’t have got along, but he always wrote passionately. His fiction is as much a travelogue, from Kilimanjaro to Cuba, Venice to Key West, and his journalism gives one as much a sense of the First World War as his novel, A Farwell to Arms. As with Zola though, I think I read his best book first. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a brilliant novel, although long, capturing much of the confusion of the Spanish Civil War. If you want to start with something lighter, there is always the much shorter The Old Man and the Sea, which only takes an hour or two.

My favourite American writer though is and probably always will be John Steinbeck. In the Maher Hierarchy of Great Writers, Steinbeck sits second only to James Joyce. Like Hemingway, I think I’ve read pretty much everything of Steinbeck’s, from the well-known masterpieces, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden (my personal favourite), to the lesses known greats like The Winter of Our Discontent and In Dubious Battle, to his non-fiction gems, Once There Was a War, Travels With Charlie and Journal of a Novel. There a couple of earlier novels that I’ve not found yet and I got a bit bored with The Log of The Sea of Cortez, written when sailing the Sea of Cortez with his scientist friend, Ed Ricketts (the model for Doc in the novels, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday). As with Hemingway’s bullfighting books, I circle back around to it eventually.

I can’t say enough in praise of John Steinbeck. He never wrote a bad novel (ok, The Wayward Bus wasn’t great), but he did write several masterpieces that no one can claim to be well-read without having read. Any writer who wants to know about narrative structure should study Steinbeck in detail. There isn’t a writer living or dead that tells a better story than John Steinbeck. Neither is there a writer who knows better how to end a novel. Steinbeck novels always end with a bang.

 

Then there’s Graham Greene. There’s two early Greene novels that have never been republished, at the author’s own request, which I will track down someday, but otherwise I’ve read pretty much everything. Greene was certainly more of a mainstream writer than Steinbeck, perhaps even Hemingway, but there are still perhaps half a dozen of his novels that remain master pieces. Certainly, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, Brighton Rock and Travels With My Aunt are some of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

As with Hemingway and Steinbeck, Green wrote a number of non-fiction works that are just as entertaining and enlightening as his fiction. His volumes of autobiography, Ways of Escape and A Sort of Life are revelatory on his highly complex character. He converted to Roman Catholicism, but led anything but a virtuous life, having an affair with a married actress, as fictionalised in The End of the Affair. He was a former MI6 operative, but also a habitual drug user, including cannabis and opium, the latter of which he smoked during his time as journalist in Vietnam, where his experiences led him to write The Quiet American, concerning the CIA’s terrorist activities in the country during the 1950s. The main character of the British journalist, Thomas Fowler, is as autobiographical a character as Greene ever created.

In reading Greene’s non-fiction work, Getting to Know the General, I first heard of how the country of Panama came to be and it’s worth repeating. Panama was for a time part of Columbia. Then the Panama Canal started to be built, but when the private American companies in charge of the project ran into financial difficulty, the American government took over the project, unilaterally decided that Panama wanted to be its own country and declared Panamanian independence. The country was then further split into the Panama Canal zone, run by the Americans, and the non-Canal zone run by the Panamanian government. Greene became good friends with General Omar Torrijos, leader of Panama until Torrijos was killed in a car crash in 1981, even accompanying him at one point to speak at the UN in New York. Getting to Know the General is another hidden gem that most people know nothing about. See also, Journey Without Maps, Greene’s account of exploring the country of Liberia.

There are many other authors that I hope to one day complete reading. One Kurt Vonnegut novel, Player Piano, remains on my list, plus a number of his short story and non-fiction collections. I also have a great love for Alice Walker. I’ve read all of Walker’s major novels and some lesser known fiction and non-fiction. Like Zola, everything I have read by Alice Walker I have so far found in second hand bookshops, but there is enough left from her bibliography that I think I will have to hunt down through Abe Books and the like. Her most famous novel is The Colour Purple, for obvious reasons, but The Temple of My Familiar is even better, the narrative switching between a number of different characters, including Celie and Shug Avery from The Colour Purple.

I guess the common theme to emerge from this article is that I love reading writers who are also fascinating characters in their own right and Alice Walker has always fascinated me. She was taught at Spellman College in Atlanta by the heroic historian, Howard Zinn, married a Jewish man and moved to Mississippi, where it is said they were the first ‘interracial couple’ (I’ve never really understood that term, as simplistic and idiotic as all ‘racial’ language) in Mississippi and had a relationship with the singer, Tracey Chapman. Aside from one small collection essays, I read nothing of Walker’s non-fiction. The joy of reading is in the anticipation of books yet unread.

On a final note, I’m currently halfway through The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell. A more inaccurate title for a book can rarely have been conceived, with section titles including The Epistemologist, The Metaphysician and The Philosopher and Expositor of Science. Russell was also a prolific writer of books, mostly non-fiction, and I have for years hunted down titles such as Political Ideals, Sceptical Ideals, On Praise of Idleness and The ABC of Relativity in second hand bookshops, although it’s been a while since I found new one.

Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is a masterpiece and an excellent introduction to the subject. Philosophy and physics have been at odds for years with each rarely even pretending to understand the other, despite both disciplines being subordinate to mathematics. Bertrand Russell was that rarest of breeds, a man who bridged the gap between mathematics, physics, philosophy, logic and linguistics and time spent in Russell’s company is time never wasted. A proper, full review of The Basic Writings will follow in a week or so.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should also say that there are still a few minor Shakespeare plays I’ve not yet read. I’m savouring them.

Get it done. 

We Humbly Recommend... The Winter of Our Discontent

John Steinbeck knew how to tell a story. Moreover, he knew how to blend the mythical and the moral into those stories. His books are a searing commentary on American life in the first half of the twentieth century and on the human condition as a whole. ‘Of Mice and Men’, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and ‘East of Eden’ are rightly regarded as classics. Dig deeper into his lesser known novels and you’ll find plenty of other gems. ‘The Winter of Our Discontent’ is one of the best.

‘The Winter of Our Discontent’ centers on Ethan Hawley, a grocery clerk who has fallen on hard times and now works in the store he once owned. He is slated for his lack of ambition, but battles to maintain his integrity against the corrupting influence of small town American life. But the dam cannot hold. Ethan reports his Italian boss to the Immigration Service, getting him deported in the process, and is sucked into the same mire as those around him.

It’s a return to fall-of-man motif explored in ‘East of Eden’, but ‘The Winter of Our Discontent’ is far more a comment on the degradation of contemporary society that Steinbeck had witnessed during the previous decades. Indeed, the novel is set in Long Island, where the novelist lived for a number of years. It’s one of his least harrowing, but most accessible books, and the last one he ever completed. The social commentary is there for all to see, but it reads more like a novel than the documentary feel of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ or ‘In Dubious Battle’. And as with all his greatest novels, there’s the trademark ending. John Steinbeck knew better than most how to end a novel.

The surrealist painter Magritte said he always gave his paintings abstract titles in order to lend an extra layer of mystery to the composition. With Steinbeck too, his titles add dimension and were almost always chosen from the classics. By choosing the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Steinbeck could have been using the phrase in same inaccurate way that it is used in politics (the winter of discontent is the end of discontent, the death of discontent, not the depths of it). However, I prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt. With those words is begun a play about unravelling morality, political conspiracy and spiralling violence. ‘The Winter of Our Discontent’ is hardly ‘The Godfather’, but it does remind us that whether it be shopping your boss to Immigration or shopping your brother to the king, it only takes one petty act to begin the downward spiral. It is a novel that in recent years has become relevant all over again.

4th Epistle to the Foxnewsians

Dear Foxnewsians,

¡Hola! How the hell are you? You know, I was watching your network the other day (from behind bullet proof glass, inside a radiation suit, it really is the only way to avoid being burnt by the contents of Bill O’Reilly’s bile duct) and it occurred to me, we haven’t spoken in ages. Did you have a good Christmas? I did. My cousins gave me a great book called, ‘Lies, Damned Lies and History’ by Graeme Donald and I spent most of Christmas Day reading it obsessively. I learned a lot.

For example, did you know that the Pilgrim Fathers were communists? It’s true. The first thing that the Plymouth Brethren did when they arrived in Cape Cod (not Plymouth Rock, that element of your creation myth was added later) was to sign a communist compact. Everyone worked the land, throwing their contribution into a common pool to be divided equally between all. However, the single men objected that those with families in the colony were receiving a greater share for working the same amount, and so the compact was dissolved. With that one act of selfishness, the ‘United States’ were truly born (humour).

But then most of history, as Henry Ford never said, is bunk. The commencement of the American Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, the war had been raging for eighteen months before Lincoln even mentioned it. Christopher Columbus never went to North America, let alone discover the continent. And aside from the book of Exodus, there is nothing to suggest that a large group of Israelites were ever even in Egypt, never mind slaves. Egyptian records from the time make no mention of them and despite half of the country being subject to archaeological digs in the last century and a half, no evidence of their presence has ever been found. This despite Exodus stating that Moses freed 600,000 slaves from a country whose entire population at the time was only between three and four million.

Oh, and the first Thanksgiving Feast that was ever celebrated on what is now American soil took place in Florida, by the Spanish, fifty years before the Pilgrims arrived. A feast of this kind was traditional in those days after a long sea journey, though the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving didn’t take place until after the second year of their reaching land. Even then, there were twice as many Native Americans present as Pilgrims, half the colony having perished during the previous winter. It seems curious to me that the major holiday in your calendar is to celebrate the Pilgrims as the progenitors of your country. The Pilgrim colony survived barely a decade, its entire population either dying, returning to England or being absorbed by other colonies, like Jamestown. Jamestown, a violent, lawless colony of slave traders, that is where America truly begins. To commemorate the Pilgrims as your forefathers is as ridiculous as celebrating Neanderthals as the ancestors of man. But like I said, history is bunk, and most holidays that celebrate historical events the world over are based on myth and exaggeration.

There is also a curious piece of historical misapprehension and arrogance that you see repeated in internet forums and youtube comment boxes wherever Americans get into heated debate with Brits. We’ve all heard the conjecture: If it wasn’t for us, you’d all be speaking German. My response to this statement follows in six parts:

1. English is a modern form of Anglish or Anglo Saxon, a language spoken by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, economic migrants who settled in this land from the 5th century AD and gave birth to the country of England. I already speak German. Moreover, large sections of the American population count themselves as of White Anglo Saxon Protestant descent, people who not only speak German but who are directly descended from Germans and follow a faith which has its origins with a German priest nailing a piece of paper to the door of a German church. You already speak German and more besides.
2. Have you ever been to Britain? While most of the rest of Europe is bilingual, trilingual, even, in the case of the Dutch, quadrilingual, the British speak one language, barely. Which is weird, don’t you think? English has absorbed loanwords from most other languages, swelling its vocabulary to over a million words, you would think French, German etc. would be a piece of piss for us to learn and yet we wander the towns and cities of the continent shouting, “SAUSAGE, EGG AND CHIPS” at baffled Europeans, as if talking slowly and loudly will make them understand. Even when we do remember some key phrase like, “Ou est la supermarche?” it is usually said in an accent so broad and guttural that even native English speakers struggle to comprehend it (I once went travelling in Europe with a Lancashire lass whose accent was so broad that I had to translate everything she said into English for the benefit of the Americans and Canadians we met along the way). Trust me, if the Nazis ever had succeeded in invading Britain, sarcasm, parochialism and an obstinate refusal to learn anything new would soon have sent them scurrying back across the English Channel in sheer frustration. I am not patriotic in the slightest (it’s the last refuge of the scoundrel don’t you know!), but belligerence and an instinctive gift for irony are two inherently British traits of which I am immensely gratified to be armed with. It’s the reason why five minutes of the best British sitcoms are funnier than entire seasons of American comedy. While fascism and totalitarianism are undesirable in every day society, in art they are absolutely essential. Comedy is not something that can be decided by committee.
3. Despite being under German occupation for a number of years, I am not aware of the general population of France ever being required to speak German. Actually, as an aside, the portrayal of the French as, “Cheese eating surrender monkeys.” always makes me seethe with rage, especially when I hear it said by people whom I otherwise respect. Again, maybe it’s a flaw in my autodidactic education that I have read an inordinate amount of fiction and non-fiction from that period and so find this attitude incongruous with reality. From the outset of the war, large sections of the French population, men and women alike, did take up arms to bravely fight the invading German army, even after the French government had negotiated its surrender (see Jean Paul-Satre’s ‘Roads to Freedom’ trilogy for a fictionalised account of this period). The notion that we judge and ascribe entire nations with the characteristics of their governments is a baffling concept. By this measure, all Americans are international terrorists and all Britains are their obedient lapdogs. And by this measure it is we who are the cheese eating surrender monkeys, while you, as one British comedian brilliantly framed it, are burger eating invasion monkeys. Do we really think for an instant that the British government would have behaved any differently when faced with a German invasion? Most of the ruling classes at the time were pro Nazi anyway, seeing communism as a disease of Jewish origin. The king’s consort at the time, mother to our present queen, sent the then British Foreign Secretary a copy of ‘Mein Kampf’, urging him to read it and take note of Hitler’s obvious sincerity. No, if it had have happened, events would have progressed in much the same way that they did in France. While the majority of the French population neither resisted nor collaborated with the Nazis, the French Resistance (ever hear of it?) was so extensive that over a million of its members took part in the VE Day celebrations in Paris in 1945.
4. America’s entry into the European field of conflict was largely irrelevant. All you really did was drag the Japanese in with you (and there is extensive evidence to suggest that this is exactly what you did!), complicating the situation no end. Much conjecture and speculation is posited as to why the island of Britain avoided invasion by the German army, but it mostly comes down to the same quality that decides all wars: Luck. You see, The Battle of Britain, the fight for air supremacy that was fought over Britain in 1940, was a disaster. It is estimated that if the battle had continued for two more weeks, the Royal Air Force would have been totally wiped out and Operation Sealion, the codename for the invasion of Britain, would have begun. In the meantime however, British planes had started bombing German cities and their civilian populations, and this irked the Germans so much that they broke off from the Battle of Britain and retaliated by bombing our cities. It turned the war for the first time in our favour and while some may argue that this was a brilliant strategic move, it mostly comes back to luck. Given that America didn’t turn up until the following year, the claim that you are responsible for saving us from invasion and defeat is ludicrous. Besides, the country most directly responsible for the defeat of Hitler is Russia. Three quarters of all German infantry divisions were defeated by the Russian Army at a personal cost to them of twenty million dead. I don’t think that this historical statistic is repeated often enough, even if Russian tactics (i.e. the rape and murder of East German civilians) were largely indistinguishable from that of the Nazis.
5. After the Holocaust, which is obviously a unique event in history, the single most despicable act committed during the Second World War was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war with Japan had been over for a long time by this point. The war was a disaster for the Japanese and they had in fact been considering surrender from as early as 1943. Terms had already been offered to your government before the bombs were dropped. The majority of your generals were in agreement on this point and they saw no point in making use of this new, terrifying weapon. It was an act conceived and perpetrated by civilians and the administration of Harry S. Truman. They were dropped partly out of revenge for Pearl Harbour, partly out of bloodlust and partly to scare the Russians. There is an argument that while hundreds of thousands died in those two nuclear blasts, they saved the lives of millions by stopping the Russians in their tracks and preventing post-war Europe from descending into a free-for-all. Personally, I don’t believe that, but whatever the reasoning, the act of bombing one enemy to impress another, by any definition you chose to employ, that is an act of terrorism, a fact I remind people of whenever they cite 9/11 as the largest terrorist act ever perpetrated. The largest terrorist act ever perpetrated against America, yes, but while the events of that day are obviously despicable (as are all such events), compared to your country’s own atrocious acts since 1945, it is like spitting into the Hudson. And yes, I understand the argument that goes, the Nazis and Japanese were evil, which justifies anything the allies did, but since when was judging yourself by other people’s standards a justifiable way to behave? He who fights dragons too long becomes a dragon himself.
6. If you saved us from the Nazis, who will save us from you? More specifically, who will save us as America’s sphere of influence slowly declines and it adopts its new role as Sparta to China’s Rome?

Do you see? It is a bullshit statement, as are 99% of all such statements expounded on the internet.

To finish, I present to you my reworking of the classic Monty Python sketch, ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’. I call it, ‘I Just Love My Country So Much (or Variations on a Theme of Python)’:

SCENE: Inside the Fox Newsroom, Glen Beck is over emotional (yet again).

Glen (teary eyed from the onion juice liberally sprinkled in his palm): I’m sorry, it just upsets me that we’re losing our identity, losing the country that we grew up in. I can’t help it, I just love my country so much.

Rosa Parks: Even Obama?

Glen: Well of course not Obama.

Seymour Hersh: What about Noam Chomsky?

Sean Hannity: Oh God, yes, Glen, Chomsky’s an un-American traitor.

Glen: All right, I’ll grant you Obama and Chomsky are two Americans I don’t like.

Howard Zinn: And the Democrats.

Glen: Well obviously the Democrats, the Democrats go without saying. But apart from Obama, Chomsky and the Democrats...

John Steinbeck: The poor.

Michael Moore: People without health insurance.

Malcolm X: Muslims.

Bill Hicks: Drug users.

Pancho Villa: Illegal immigrants.

Glen: Yes, alright, fair enough.

Harry Hay: Gays

All: Oh yes.

O’Reilly: Yeah, they certainly need to be thrown in jail.

Leonard Peltier: What about Convicts?

Hannity: Yeah, don’t forget the convicts Glen. We’ve got the largest convict population in the world. Largest convict population in history thanks to the three strikes system (much laughter).

Glen: All right, all right, but apart from Obama, Chomsky, the Democrats, the poor, people without health insurance, Muslims, drug users, illegal immigrants, gays and convicts, I love my country.

Amused, Manchester: What about Karl Rove?

Glen (angrily): How dare you! Don’t you dare criticize a hair on his pretty fat head, you are talking about the man I love!

(uncomfortable silence)

Glen: We’ll be right back after these messages.

SCENE

You shall hear from me anon.

Amused, Manchester.

This Epistle is dedicated to the memory of Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

http://howardzinn.org/

2nd Epistle to the Foxnewsians

Dear Foxnewsians,

It is important to say something positive about the world in which we live so that we become more rounded individuals. To that end, I thought I would write a little this time about what I enjoy about America. I write two semi regular series of articles. The one, ‘And Another Thing...’ is usually me on auto-rant. The other, ‘Best Things Ever’, sees me picking something I have a particular passion for (tea, Shakespeare, ‘In the Loop’), and eulogising it. If my 1st epistle belongs to the former series, think of the 2nd as very much of the later.

Of course, a country is an arbitrary boundary and a nation but a random collection of individuals. I am sure that America is a beautiful land, it looks it, but I confess that I only been once so far and that was to New York, which people tell me isn’t like the rest of America (I’m sure no part of America is). Yet I am and always have been heavily influenced by American culture and it to this that I turn my attention this time.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love the blues, that pure American sound. I love John Lee Hooker, Leadbelly and Muddy Waters. On first hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (following a recommendation by Van Morrison) I wanted to jump up and down in the street. ‘Down by the Riverside’ blew me away. And then there is Chuck Berry: ‘Too Much Monkey Business’, ‘Never Can Tell’, ‘Nadine’, they’re like totems along the highway of my life. They say if Chuck Berry had been white, he’d have been bigger than Elvis.

I love listening to the Eagles’ song, ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’, at the end of drunken night, because it reminds me of my late father. I love the Raconteurs ‘Carolina Dream’, because it reminds me of an obscure Dylan song on unfashionable album. I love Ani DiFranco when she sings ‘Self-Evident’ and ‘Serpentine’ and Rage Against the Machine when they perform Alan Ginsberg’s ‘Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox’. Their version of Springsteen’s ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ is also shit hot.

Anyone who knows me knows of my obsession with Bill Hicks and Bob Dylan, I quote them more than anyone except possibly Shakespeare, so I will skip over them briefly. The late Bill Hicks was to my mind the greatest comedian ever to walk to earth. Comedy was an art form in his hands, his timing honed to within the millisecond. Dylan is the everyman, through his lyrics he shows you what man is. Not what man should be, what he aspires to be, but what he actually is. A flawed genius to be sure, but what other kind of genius is there?

Of all the sounds in all the universe, it is Nina Simone’s voice that sounds the most exquisite to my ears. When she sings ‘For All We Know’, ‘Mr Bojangles’, ‘Just Like a Woman’, it’s like retuning to the womb. And when she plays those first strains of ‘Good Bait’, the first chords of ‘Mood Indigo’, OMG, a well played piano is the most powerful narcotic you can subject my brain to. Must be why I love Tori Amos (other than her being a redheaded goddess and all). In the right mood, that woman can induce a state of almost transdimesional relaxation, an overwhelming feeling of being at one with the multiverse.

I love Wilson Pickett and Otis Reading and Jackie Wilson singing ‘(You’re Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher’. Statues should be erected to Louis Armstrong, if only for ‘What a Wonderful World’ and ‘We Have All the Time in the World’. I have a predilection for Joe Satriani albums and Alice in Chains got me through some difficult times. I understand from my brother that with their new singer, William DuVall, they are the best band he has ever seen live.

And then there is the music of George Gershwin, which shows multiculturalism at its most creative, throwing up new forms like tectonic plates colliding. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and ‘An American in Paris’ are joyous compositions, as are ‘Summertime’ and ‘I Loves You Porgy’. Again, if you want your heart breaking, listen to Nina’s version of the latter.

I love NASA, despite my socialism and ambivalent feelings on how their budget could be better put to use. Yet astronomy has always fascinated me, I watched the first Space Shuttle missions with wonder as a child and still have the Space Shuttle manual bought to celebrate the maiden launch of Columbia. Edwin Hubble is a hero and the telescope which bears his name is one of the wonders of the engineering world. The first time I saw that image of the pillars of life in the Eagle Nebula, it brought tears to my eyes. I feel sorry for people who deny that the Moon landings took place because faced with a historical event which I can ultimately neither prove nor disprove, I prefer the optimistic course. Neil and Buzz deserve their place in history.

I am a huge Science Fiction fan and in this regard America has obviously had an enormous effect. I was 5 in 1978, the year ‘Star Wars’ came to Britain. I can remember walking home from the cinema, looking up to the sky and thinking, I wonder if there is anyone out there. It’s always seemed a pretty profound thing for a 5 year old to think and was certainly the first step on a journey which led me to become an Astrophysics undergraduate, as did the popular science authors I read. In George Greenstein’s now out of print, ‘Frozen Star’, I learnt about neutron stars and pulsars and black holes and quasars. Michio Kaku opened my eyes to higher dimensional space, as well as to an appreciation of Picasso. And Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan taught me about DNA and natural history in ‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’.

Of course, Star Trek had an enormous effect. ‘Deep Space Nine’ is second in my list of best ever TV shows, with Ronald D. Moore’s reimagining of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ not far behind, both shows daring to display the shades of grey which overshadow war. With Battlestar it’s like they took the DS9 episode ‘By the Pale Moonlight’ and built a whole franchise ‘round it.

Philip K Dick is another influence, ‘The Man in the High Castle’ and ‘A Scanner Darkly’ are rightly regarded as classics. While Dick has been the victim of too many dubious film adaptations, I regard ‘Blade Runner’, loosely based on ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’, as my favourite film, combining as it does the three classic ingredients, sci-fi, hard-boiled detective drama and film noir.

On the absurdist side of sci-fi there is Kurt Vonnegut. To describe him as the American Douglas Adams is the finest tribute I can pay the man. ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ is a revelation and remains one of the few contemporary accounts of the horror of Dresden, where the allies firebombed a German city of little, if any, military significance for three days during World War II, killing an estimated 25,000 civilians. Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in the city at the time. Talking of war, the absurdity and horror thereof, check out Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch 22’ and Dalton Trombo’s ‘Johnny Got His Gun’ as the finest examples of each subgenre.

Dashiell Hammett’s ‘The Maltese Falcon’ is second only to the monolithic ‘Ulysses’ in terms of my favourite novel. The Bogart adaptation is third after ‘Blade Runner’ and the Godfather trilogy as my favourite film: All are emblematic tales in the emerging American mythology. Philip Marlowe is a greater detective even than Holmes and Chandler the only author who can match Joseph Heller for wordplay. Marlowe’s prose rolls off the page like a wave, like honey drizzling from a spoon. I love to while away an afternoon in the company of Marlowe.

In terms of classic authors, I am a great fan of Mark Twain, holding similar views on golf, and I unconditionally love everything of his I have read so far. Thanks go to the American historian Howard Zinn for introducing me to Jack London’s seminal work, ‘The Iron Heel’, a futuristic retelling of how fascism came to conquer the Earth. ‘The People of the Abyss’, London’s frank description of the condition of the working poor in the city which bears his name, inspired George Orwell to write ‘Down and Out in Paris and London' and ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, classic texts of the British left. Yet American literature for me is defined by the early 20th century. F. Scot Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Arthur Miller, these are the voices which spoke to me when I was first venturing into reading more challenging fiction. ‘The Great Gatsby’, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, ‘Death of a Salesman’, these are the foundations on which American literature is built. I have recently come to realise that ‘Moby Dick’ is a masterpiece and special dispensation should be given to Tom Paine and ‘Common Sense’, for though he was born in Norfolk, he perhaps more than any other author shaped the independence movement in the colonial United States.

Yet of all American authors, it is John Steinbeck that I admire most of all. Before even the mighty Russians (Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsym), Steinbeck is the high priest of narrative storytelling. ‘In Dubious Battle’ is so good I sat up from 10.30 to 5am finishing it. He does this every time, draws me in, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, ‘East of Eden’, ‘The Winter of Our Discontent’, even ‘Once There Was a War’, with Steinbeck’s prose I find myself compelled to keep reading, I want to know how it ends, because I know it’s going to be dynamite. John Steinbeck should be compulsory reading in American schools, for he offers some much needed perspective on the realities of the American Dream. Steinbeck should have his own national holiday.

The latest addition to this American Classic Collection is ‘The Wire’, a TV series which could hardly be more Russian if it were set in St Petersburg rather than West Baltimore. The British intelligentsia worship ‘The Wire’ as the greatest TV show ever made, but it is hard not to eulogise it, it is simply is that good, a show that starts small, grows, evolves, shows the drugs war from both sides, the police and the dealers, taking in increasingly large sweeps of the city, before, finally, embracing all. I know many people that have watched it, but few that have a bad word to say about it.

What else do I love about American culture? I love Heather Graham and Julianne Moore and Henry Miller and Alice Walker and Maya Anjou and Walt Whitman and Noam Chomsky and Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley and Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson and Scott Joplin and The Blues Brothers and Jaws and Indiana Jones and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Dr Strangelove and Family Guy and Scrubs and The Big Lebowski and My Name is Earl and Batman and Talking Heads and The Onion and James Joyce Quarterly and Fight Club and Pulp Fiction and The Sopranos and the Galileo probe and Dilbert and Dita Von Tesse and Looking for Richard and Robot Chicken and Ren and Stimpy and Jimi Hendrix and Serena Williams and Gillian Anderson and Angelina and, grudgingly, Brangelina and The Black Crowes and Chinatown and A Confederacy of Dunces.

I love America for its delusional self image, because it’s optimistic attitude looks to be the biggest, the best, the boldest. The problem is that in order to achieve those lofty goals one needs more than to merely brag about your greatness. It takes determination, hard work and unity to truly be the best, yet you are one of the most disunited countries on the face of the planet. American culture is rich enough to guide the way. I have not even begun to exhaust my list of cultural icons, but I think you will agree, oh Foxnewsians, that the previous couple of thousand words are a testament to the extent that your country folk have inspired me. And don’t go saying, look viewers, he’s admits it, America is greatest country on Earth. How’s that work? How do the 280 million best people in the world in a population of 6 billion ordinary people, how do they all come to conglomerate, randomly, within the same arbitrary boundary? Now don’t go making me write a ten part mini-series on everything great that isn’t American, ‘cause you know I’ll do it!

You shall here from me anon.

Amused, Manchester.

PS: How did you get on with the homework from last time? The answer was: Fascism. On a dichotomous, two dimensional political scale, the opposite of socialism is fascism. Half a point if you said Dick Cheney.

The Pillars of Life