Random Stuff

1. I think this is fantastic. There was a link to it off of the Guardian's music pages the other day. Good things happen about three and a half minutes in, and the last minute is great. I love 2 Many DJs but I tried some Soulwax once and thought it was a bit too rocky, so I've bought the remix album this track comes from off of ebay in the hopes it will be good, and will arrive in time to form the soundtrack of my move to Italy.


2. Every year at the time of my summer exams I used to get this terrible need to write a novel, and this is called a displacement activity. Maybe my life would be different if one time I had just gone with the flow and not struggled through finals etc. Recently I have been getting very appropriate displacement activity urges: when I was meant to be painting I felt the need to crochet an ipod sock; and when I was supposed to be packing and getting rid of books I felt an overpowering urge to start collecting Everyman Classics.
There is a reason for the latter, a good reason. Hardbacks are rubbish. They cost lots; they are difficult to read because unwieldy; they are large making them a hassle to carry or store; they are printed on bad paper with big fonts and lots of space on the page to stretch the text out to a larger book; and they have dustjackets, which are a nuisance to keep on while reading, but even worse if you take them off because then you have to put them somewhere safe and find them again later. Except for academic reference books, hardbacks are not good. The message conveyed by a book in hardback is "Look at me! I am a... (pause for effect) hardback!". You pay extra for that self-importance. But, in the words of Shania Twain, that don't impress me much. I am lucky enough to work with some of the most beautiful books in the world, the more beautiful for being meaningful in many different ways, and they mostly look like nothing special with their covers closed.
There is one exception to the wrongness of hardbacks, which is the old style Everyman Classics -- not the current series, which is even worse than most hardbacks because it tries too hard by having cream covers. The original Everyman hardbacks are the size of a small paperback (thriller/detective novel size rather than literary novel size), and therefore easy to carry. They wear their sturdy format lightly. They may have had dustjackets at one point, but many have now lost them. They also have lovely endpapers and title pages (see below). So I am thinking of starting a collection of battered valueless Everymans. The more stained and imperfect the covers the better, as long as the books can be read without discomfort, and have the insides all intact. Hopefully at some point I will be able to get some more rats to help the shabbiness along; rats are good at customising books to make them less physically pretentious.



3. I'm reading Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted. I'm no distance in and already I've read something so gross I'm going to have to work really hard to forget it, almost in the My Idea of Fun league. It's going to have to be good to make it worthwhile.