Schizopathic psychophrenia.... of the mind
Returning to work on Monday, I found that Amazon had finally made good on their nebulous threat to deliver Le Tigre. Yay! I heard Hot Topic on the radio what must be two or three months ago, and was reminded how much I needed this album, as I think I have been pretty regularly since it was released. I saw Le Tigre in Brighton... um... perhaps three years ago - when they were touring Feminist Sweepstakes, in any case - and remember bouncing enthusiastically to Deceptacon. That was a good evening: steaming venue, and a walk home through cool night air. I do miss Brighton, and the sea.

The sea. Thoughts:

1)Lost in the Irish Sea on a sailing boat. Dodging cruise ships, rolling in storms.
2)Looking out from a dying seaside town on the south coast in the dark, the sea as an absence, the coast as noise. On top of an observation tower, and cold.
3)Brighton, sitting on the wall above the beach at 3 in the morning, breath visible, wishing the world still.
4)The Blackwater and the sea. Between the water and the land is a vast, flat level of grassy mud. It looks like another planet. It feels like nothing could grow or live there, but life, as is its tradition, finds a way. The earth is rich and dead, and offers treacherous footing.

So anyway. Today, over coffee before work, I finally brought down the curtain on a very low period in my life. I finished Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown. My life is once again my own.

I don't entirely blame the fuck. After all, it is not his fault that a whole lot of people bought The da Vinci Code, and thus that his publishers rush-released his terrible sophomore novels, which until then had been gloriously unread. As such, how was he to know that it would become painfully clear that he had strip-mined the latter to provide ideas for the former?

Each begins with a killing. We then cut to Robert Langdon, Harvard symbologist. He is awoken in the night. The ensuing conversaton, in essence, goes like this.

Hello. You are Robert Langdon, esteemed Harvard symbologist. You have devoted your life to the study of religious symbols.

I have. Who are you, and why are you telling me my own autobiographical information?

Although mysterious, we need your help. We will send a vehicle, which will pick you up shortly.

I am confused. This will happen quite a lot, necessitating further exposition, because I juggle my duties as a Harvard symbologist with my hobby of being a fucking cretin.

There has been a symbologically intriguing death. Please to look at the funny picture.

My God! A gruesome image of a murdered man ... with some symbols.

Langdon is then rushed to the scene of the crime, where he has the opportunity to look at the corpse and repeat the symbological hook over and over again. He will also meet the fiery daughter/granddaughter of the victim, who will be understandably miffed about the whole matter, or antimatter. The parameters of the quest will be broadly defined, and Langdon will be packed off. It will be depressingly clear that, despite an age difference of around fifteen years and a relationship based primarily around moving rapidly from one point to another, she will at some point shortly after the conclusion of the novel sex him up.

Oh, cut to the sinister assassin, by the way. The sinister assassin is surprisingly picturesque for a killer. The Da Vinci Code excels at this point. A word of advice: if you are a giant albino, do not become an assassin. You are exceptionally easy to spot. The sinister assassin has some issues.

Langdon and femme then find themselves tasked with solving some very simple puzzles. The fiendish puzzles of the Da Vinci code include two anagrams, a pair of riddles and some mirror writing. Yes, mirror writing, which defeats a Harvard professor and an Oxford-educated historian. Angels and Demons revolves around solving a four-line riddle, and then moving in the direction that some statues are pointing until one encounters another statue. At some point we will hear the same disquisition on the iambic pentameter in both books. We will also be told that English is la lingua pura, both books being based around secret societies opposed by the Vatican. The writer will not notice that he is repeating himself almost word for word. He may be distracted by his hero's uncanny ability to dredge up lengthy memories of lectures he had delivered which helped to fill in exposition on the action currently taking place. Later, we will learn that the halos worn by saints in devotional art are based on the depiction of the divine in Egyptian art. Twice. As Langdon does battle with these surprisingly easy puzzles, we witness a battle of wits not matched since Richard Whitely met Chris Maslanka in a low-oxygen environment.

In a shocking reverse, it will transpire that one of the good guys introduced to aid Langdon is in fact the pseudonymous villain of the piece, and both Langdon and the sinister assassin have been mere dupes, played against each other. The vast plot holes created by this revelation are to a very great extent ignored.

Fortunately, it all turns out all right in the end.

The da Vinci Code is certainly more ambitious than Angels and Demons, but only in the sense that allowing your dog to crap in somebody's driveway is less ambitious than entering their house in the guise of a meter reader and defecating into their DVD player.

With a bit of luck, I may never have to read another Dan Brown book. For those who have yet to do so, I would recommend playing Deus Ex instead. It has all the same nouns, and the dialogue and plotting are actually better. It seems that Dan Brown includes among his top ten books of all time Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer, Robert Ludlum's Bourne series, and Strunk and White's Elements of Style - "Because who can possibly remember all the rules of grammar and punctuation?". I am unsure whether one can actually end another human being's life through papercuts inflicted by the target being secured to a chair in front of a snowblower into which an entire paperback run of The da Vinci Code is being poured, but I'm ready to try.

Bad week. Last week, three days of training left me thinking of everything in terms of a project to be solved, and horribly starved of human socialisation, leading to what can only be described as a minor episode of personal incoherence before an audience including but not limited to blahflowers, zenith and plumsbitch. On the plus side, I expect to deliver far worse. By Friday, under the combined influence of Dan Brown and Harminder, my ebullient geezer of a tutor, I just wanted it to end, "it" encompassing the exam, the course, the Central London area and indeed time. Afterwards, struck by an unexpected burst of leisure, I realised I had forgotten how to move around London : I was shambling like a zombie through the backstreets around Eastcastle Street, singing quietly to myself. Stopped for a beer. Watched the video to True Faith from beginning to end on the pub's video jukebox. Shopped randomly for fountain pens (fridgemagnet, I recommend both the pens from Muji and the Rotring Skynn as low-cost alternatives to Parker). Resolved to write more proper letters. Met E., C and D for a drink, and again ranted incomprehensibly on a number of partially connected topics, but felt the keys starting to click gently back into their places. The fever was abating. By the time I reached Tokyo Diner for birthday wakame and movie with A. and P., I was almost human again.

Sideways, by the end of which I was damn near comatose, with exhaustion, alas, was a human and humanising experience. Based around a "last week of freedom" blow-out in California wine country for a man about to marry and his divorced friend, an unpromising setup unfolds into a meditation on drinking, fidelity and depression. Which is not a promising basis for a comedy, but when you're that low almost everything seems funny. Many of my darkest moments were spent laughing my finely-tuned arse off about the next thing I was obviously going to make a horrible mess of. Paul Giamata conveys this very well, his barrage of tics suggesting that he is frantically trying to work out an acceptable response to every situation outside wine-tasting that he encounters from whole cloth. Thomas Haden Church's turn as the unflappably Californian buddy, an unsuccessful actor about to marry money but channeling the crisis about his failure at his vocation into frenetic horndogging and constant evaluation of the logistics of getting to auditions in L.A is also superb, and Stephanie Oh (a new one on me) and Virginia Madsen are, if rather too good to be true, also well realised.

Saturday, of course, was xxxlibris' leaving party, preceded by a chance meeting with L. on the way to meet huskyteer to experience iCrack, which led to a long coffee break in the middle of which a charming if confused Japanese student handed us questionnaires on iPods. An omen, which the huskyteer took up and ran with, suggesting that the fates wanted me to buy not just a new laptop but also an iPod Shuffle and, hey, possibly an iPod to boot. Winner. Dinner at Café Lido, the Stockpot of Regents' Street, and par-tay. All very pleasant. All a touch exhausting. Sunday quiet and a little short-tempered.

Right, that seems to catch us up a bit. More later.