The Byrd Who Flew Alone: The Triumphs and Tragedy of Gene Clark (2013)

 

Buffet Froid (1979)

Last in! Haste ye back!

 

133/50

Tomorrow Is Another Day by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1995)

Elmo looked around his alley domain. Cars beeped and chugged on Main Street beyond the Farraday. Elmo seemed to listen and then touch his face.

“Just need another tomorrow,” he said. “And who’m I trying to impress, I ask you.”

“You’ve got a point,” I said. “But if you put the shave together with a bath, some clean clothes from Hy’s or Chi Chi’s Slightly Worn on Hoover, you might be able to line up a job.”

“Had one once,” Elmo said with a smile. “Makes me itch. Got no patience. Most guys out here …” He looked around, but there weren’t any guys. “Most guys have a story. What they were. What they walked away from. You know?”

“I know,” I said.

Elmo jangled the coins in his pocket. 

"I got no story. No ambition. What the hell. You’re born one day. Sixty, seventy years later you’re dead. You know?”

“I know,” I said.

Elmo shook his head.

“So,” he went on, “the way I figure it, why waste the sixty, seventy with work, trying to get something you can’t keep anyway. I’m not starvin’. I’m not cold or wet most days. I get plenty of time to read over at the library or wherever.”

“I get your point, Elmo.”

“You think I could really get a job?” he asked, looking away from me. “I mean if I cleaned up okay?”

“Lot of jobs, Elmo. The gravy’s in the navy.”

Les Fugitifs (1986)

This Gun for Hire (1942)

 

Slap Shot (1977)

A Window in London (1940)

New Board, Old Bull . . .

 

It's February 21st, a Sunday afternoon and I'm just posting this now whilst waiting for the football to start, and for Celtic to go through the motions against Ross County. I'm very hit and miss when it comes to the bull, so this is the closest I've ever come to the elusive triple bullseye throw. It's not something I religiously aim for but somewhere down the line, I'd like to knock it off my darting bucket list.

And the new board? Seven weeks on it's in the closet behind old trainers and surplus Christmas wrapping paper. The bounce outs were doing my nut in. Staples on dart boards are not your friend. See what happens when you try and do the right thing by buying local?    

We Are the Best! (2013)

 

Mr. Majestyk by Elmore Leonard (Harper Collins 1974)

 

"You know melons, uh?”

“Melons, onions, lettuce, anything you got.”

“You want to work today?”

The girl seemed to think about it and then shrugged and said, “Yeah, well, since we forgot our golf clubs we might as well, uh?”

“After you go to the bathroom.” Majestyk’s gaze, with the soft hint of a smile, held on her for another moment.

“First things first,” the girl said.

“Listen, I don’t say they can’t use them,” the attendant said now. “You think I own this place? I work here.”

“He says he works here,” Majestyk said.

The girl nodded. “We believe it.”

“And he says since the toilets are broken you can use something else.” Majestyk’s gaze moved away, past the attendant and the shelves of lube oil and the cash register and the coffee and candy machines, taking in the office.

“What’re you doing?” The attendant was frowning, staring at him. “Listen, they can’t use something else. They got to get out of here.”

Majestyk’s gaze stopped, held for a moment before coming back to the attendant. “He says use the  wastebasket if you want,” and motioned to the migrants with his hands. “Come on. All of you, come on in.”

As two of the migrants came in hesitantly behind the girl, grinning, enjoying it, and the other two moved in closer behind her, the attendant said, “Jesus Christ, you’re crazy! I’m going to call the police, that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Try and hold on to yourself,” Majestyk said to him quietly. “You don’t own this place. You don’t have to pay for broken windows or anything. What do you care?”

Paradise And Beyond: My Autobiography by Chris Sutton (Black and White Publishing 2011)

Vialli left me out of the FA Cup Final team to play Aston Villa at Wembley in the last competitive game of the season. I went to Ray Wilkins and he marked my card the night before the game that I wouldn’t be involved, not even on the bench. I hadn’t trained as well as I should have for a few weeks prior to that, wasn’t applying myself. This probably made Vialli’s mind up. I was looking forward to the season coming to an end and leaving the club, although nothing was certain at that stage. But I was always involved when I was fit. I really lost my cool at being left out for the final. I guess the previous nine months just came to a head and I exploded.

I spoke to Vialli after breakfast on the Saturday morning. We stood in a corridor. I told him he was a coward for not telling me to my face that I wouldn’t be involved in the final. Then I repeated that insult to him. He tried to explain to me why I was left out. I called him a coward for the third time and he wouldn’t accept it anymore. He told me if I said it one more time, he would knock me out. I didn’t say it for a fourth time. I shouldn’t have said that to him at all, as, over the piece, he was more than fair to me. I regret calling him a coward. It’s not something I’m proud of. I was totally unprofessional. I regret it and it was the last conversation we had. I acted like a spoilt brat. It was my fault. My strength of character let me down, nothing else. I paid the ultimate price that day for taking my foot off the pedal in training in the build-up to the final. It was the correct decision to leave me off the bench. To compound it, I behaved selfishly towards Vialli and he certainly didn’t deserve it on the day of such a big game. I’m still totally ashamed of my actions that day and Vialli deserved much better.

Cops and Robbers by Donald E. Westlake (Mysterious Press 1972)

 

Joe

The subway had fucked up again. Paul and I were positioned at a manhole on Broadway, where the people were coming up. They’d been down there for over an hour, and there’d been some smoke, and now they’d had to walk single file in the tunnel for a ways, and come up a metal ladder, and at last out onto the street. It was nine-thirty at night, traffic was being detoured around us, and we had our patrol car between the manhole and the street, flasher going.

Most of the people coming up were just stunned, all they wanted was to get the hell away from there. A few were grateful and said thank you to Paul or me for helping them up the last few steps. And a few were pissed off and wanted to take it out on a representative of the municipal government, which at the moment was Paul and me. These last few we ignored; they’d make an angry remark or two, and then they’d stomp off, and that would be the end of it.

Except this one guy. He stood around on the other side of us, away from the manhole, and yammered at us. He was about fifty, dressed in a suit, carrying an attaché case. He was like a manager or supervisor type, and all he wanted to do was stand there and yell, while Paul and I helped the rest of the people up out of the manhole.

He went on like this: “This city is a disgrace! It’s a disgrace! You aren’t safe here! And who cares? Does anybody care? Everything breaks down, and nobody gives a God damn! Everybody’s in the union! Teachers on strike, subways on strike, cops on strike, sanitation on strike. Money money money, and when they work do they do anything? Do they teach? Don’t make me laugh! The subways are a menace, they’re a menace! Sanitation? Look at the streets! Big raises, big pay, and look at the streets! And you cops! Gimmie gimme gimme, and where are you? Your apartment gets robbed, and where are you? Some dope addict attacks your wife in the street, and where’s the cops?”

Up till then we ignored him, the both of us; like he was a regular part of the city noise. Which in a way he was. But then he made a mistake, he overstepped himself. He reached out and tugged at my elbow, and he yelled, “Are you listening to me?”

They’re not going to start grabbing me. I turned around and looked at him, and he was so amazed he went back a step. The city had finally noticed him. I said to him, “I’m coming to the conclusion you fell coming up those stairs and broke your nose.”

It took him a second to work it out, and then he back-pedaled some more, and yelled, “You mustn’t care much about keeping that badge of yours.”

I was about to tell him what he could do with the badge, pin first, but he was still backing away, and the hell with him. I turned back and helped Paul with a fat old lady who was having trouble climbing because of bad ankles. But I kept thinking about what the guy had said.

My Life Closed Twice by Nigel Williams (Faber & Faber 1977)

 

6.30 a.m. Monday

On most of them, you see, I want revenge. I want to make them suffer. Revenge first of all, on that guy at the publishers. I recall his letter as faithfully as I can. I can’t bear to get it out from the pile.

Dear Martin Steel,

   I'm afraid I’m returning The Good The Bad and the Indifferent to you. Some of us here liked it a lot, but none of us (alas!) enough to publish.

    Do let me see anything else of yours.

Ronald Jones

Like your wife or your mother or your father. Just so long as it isn't a novel, short story, play or poem I’d love to see it. I mean—who does Ronald Jones think he is? What does he do on his free evenings? I can see him now—in a fetching leather bum-freezer—sitting with a few chosen friends in Charco’s wine bar in Chelsea.

And who, while we’re at it, are “some of us”? A sandpit full of trendies, up there in Bedford Square or wherever they hang out, lounging around like the last days of the Roman Empire and sneering at Manuscripts Received? Or is it just a stupid way of saying “Me”? Ronald Fucking Jones. Probably never even tried to write a novel. The ultimate one-upmanship.

Like the other week when I was with a Minor Poet, we met Davies, a zealous Talks Producer from Radio. It was about half past nine at night and the Minor Poet and 1 were having a steak in the canteen, prior to recording some of his verse. There, at a table in the corner, was Davies, moustache drooping, stooped over a plate of soup.

“What goes on?" I asked.

“Oh,“ says Davies, “just doing some typing."

Suspicious. So I said, lightly and airily to the Minor Poet, as we made our way down to the studios,

“I bet he’s writing a novel."

“Oh they’re all writing novels at the BBC," says the Minor Poet, “only none of them are any good, are they?" And he looked at me keenly.

I knew then that he’d rumbled me. How in God’s name does one conceal the fact that one writes novels? I really have tried to look as if I do something else with my leisure hours. I really have tried to do something else with my leisure hours actually but that’s not the point. The fact or point is that I have written about fifteen novels in the last five years. About a million and a half words. And, all around my room, stuck to the walls, the ceiling, the floor even, are short, pithy letters on thick paper, all beginning “Dear Martin Steel" why do they always use both names as if you were a kid at school?), and all of them saying, in one way or another “Piss off with your bloody awful books." Here's another:

Dear Martin Steel,

Yes I’ve read the two novels. I found Down The Corridor too long, and although I loved some of the dialogue and many of the set pieces from The Jellabies Move To 22a Camden Hill Gardens, I felt the joke didn't quite hold for two hundred pages!!!

Yours,

Elizabeth Jones

Elizabeth Jones. Probably a relation of Ronald’s. Probably his sister. And what makes the thing so bad is that Elizabeth Jones is, or was, my agent. A woman greatly loved by other rattlesnakes in the Literary World because (quote) of her “in-built shit-detector". Sure she’s got an in-built shit-detector—she detects shit and sells it to various publishers at enormous gain to herself. Only the other rattlesnakes in the Literary World call this “being in touch with things’’.

Just a couple more letters before I get on with the business proper. One of the mealier variety from a creature who works (believe it or not) at the BBC. Last year, as a desperate resort, I took to writing for television. It seemed such an easy option. One simply writes “Interior. Day. Brighton.” and there one is. I wrote a long (and quite funny) piece about a man who grows a pair of symbolic breasts and sent it to an acquaintance of mine from the Drama Department. Here is his reply:

Dear Martin,

  Now you’re really going to hate me for this! You see, I think Serenade on a Rainy Day is a good idea and a well written idea, but I think you haven’t really come to terms with what television wants from a play (if you see what 1 mean). One has to do things that one feels it right to do now and I think that is the situation one is in here (really).

 

   If we want to be particular I think that when David meets Julie on the station, from that moment on we really are unsure as to whether he is only doing this for Karen or whether his antics in the Department are a factor. And once that is exploded the whole David/Karen thing is no go.

Agree?

Paul

P.S. Let’s meet and talk.

Let’s not, Paul. Let’s avoid each other for ten years, and, at the end of that period I will supervise a small but tasteful ceremony at which slices will be cut off your behind and served (with garlic bread) at a hootenanny for Script Editors. And, while we’re at it Paul, when my sixteenth novel hits the bookstalls and you’re catching up with my (unlisted) phone number—you will not get so much as an Italian meal out of me. When you ask for the Television Rights, I shall refer you to my new agent, a Greek half-wit from Camden Town, whose only other authors are world-famous playwrights and celebrities. I will make you crawl, Paul. Agree?

A Place to Go (1963)

 

Call for the Dead by John le Carré (Penguin 1961)

 

Why did she do it?’ Mendel asked suddenly.

Smiley shook his head slowly: ‘I think I know, but we can only guess. I think she dreamt of a world without conflict, ordered and preserved by the new doctrine. I once angered her, you see, and she shouted at me: “I’m the wandering Jewess,” she said; “the no-man’s land, the battlefield for your toy soldiers.” As she saw the new Germany rebuilt in the image of the old, saw the plump pride return, as she put it, I think it was just too much for her; I think she looked at the futility of her suffering and the prosperity of her persecutors and rebelled. Five years ago, she told me, they met Dieter on a skiing holiday in Germany. By that time the re-establishment of Germany as a prominent western power was well under way.’

‘Was she a communist?’

‘I don’t think she liked labels. I think she wanted to help build one society which could live without conflict. Peace is a dirty word now, isn’t it? I think she wanted peace.

'And Dieter?’ asked Guillam.

‘God knows what Dieter wanted. Honour, I think, and a socialist world.’ Smiley shrugged. ‘They dreamt  of peace and freedom. Now they’re murderers and spies.’

‘Christ Almighty,’ said Mendel.

Saturday, 3pm: 50 Eternal Delights of Modern Football by Daniel Gray (Bloomsbury 2016)

 

When I was a teenager, I startled a geography teacher. This had nothing to do with arable farming, and everything to do with European cities. During a test, it turned out that I knew the capitals of Serbia and Albania, Finland and Croatia. This was something of a surprise for me too. Behind my back, the European Cup and editions of World Soccer had sewn this knowledge into my brain.

Living and Dying on the Factory Floor: From the Outside In and the Inside Out by David Ranney (PM Press 2019)

 

I am suddenly interrupted from this reverie by an annoying ding from my cellphone. It is a CNN news alert about yet another presidential tweet. In this one the president claims that his proposed tax reform will bring “middle-class jobs” back to the U.S. For some reason this really sets me off. Feeling angry and agitated, my mind goes back forty years to a time when I was working in a number of factories in Southeast Chicago. It was another time in my life, one when I was both an outsider looking into the world of the factory workers and an insider looking out at the outside world.

I realized that the perspective I gained then is still with me today and accounts for my anger at the simplistic notion of “bringing back middle-class jobs.” So I began to write about that time in my life, not as a memoir but as an account of life and even death on the factory floor, the raw class and race relations, the exploitation of backbreaking and dangerous labor, and the often unhealthy and unsafe working conditions. Sharing that perspective with others today seems timely and important.

In 1973, I was comfortably employed as a tenured professor at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. It was a time of great optimism and hope that we could replace a society based on greed, sexism, racism, and wars aimed at global domination with something new. I strongly believed, and still do, that we can achieve a totally new society in which “the full and free development of every human being is its ruling principle.” It would be a society where the measure of wealth would be, in Marx’s words, “the needs, capacities, enjoyments, and creative abilities” of each individual.

As these ideas were forming in Iowa City in the early 1970s, I was highly involved in local political and social activities, including opposition to the Vietnam War, supporting the demands of various civil rights groups, critiquing the political outlook of textbooks used in major survey courses at the University of Iowa, and experimenting with new social forms by organizing cooperative daycare, food co-ops, and housing co-ops. I helped to develop community education events about both the Vietnam War and the Southern African wars for national liberation from colonial powers. The political work and political education were intense and productive, but I increasingly began to feel that we were operating in a bubble that didn’t really extend beyond Iowa City. I longed to engage the growing social justice and revolutionary movements all over the world and couldn’t really do so from my comfortable perch.

So I took a one-year leave of absence and moved to Chicago, following my Iowa City friend Kingsley, who had opened up a unique pro bono legal clinic he called the Workers’ Rights Center in a storefront office in Southeast Chicago. Initially I joined a socialist group called New American Movement (NAM) and worked in its national office but later joined the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) and began working with Kingsley in the Workers’ Rights Center.

By this time my one-year leave of absence at the University of Iowa had run out and so had my money. I made the difficult decision to leave academia. Many left-wing organizations, STO included, had members working in factories for a variety of reasons. STO believed, for reasons I will discuss at the end of this book, that a new society could be built from the initiatives of “mass organizations at the workplace.” So it made sense that my financial needs could best be met by working in Southeast Chicago factories. The work was consistent with STO priorities and also engaged the sort of people who were coming to the Workers’ Rights Center for legal help. This is how I came to work at a number of different factories from 1976 to 1982.

. . .

One night when I am leaving the plant, I have a flat tire. I open the trunk to get the jack and spare. Ken stops to help. I realize that the trunk is full of leaflets advocating Puerto Rican independence and freedom for Puerto Rican nationalist political prisoners. Ken picks a leaflet up and reads it. He says nothing about it as he lifts the spare tire out while I jack up the car and remove the flat tire. He puts the flat tire back in the trunk and helps me lift the spare onto the car. Then he goes back and shuts the trunk, and we finish bolting the tire on. When we are finished:

“Thanks Ken.”

“I’m with Workers World. Who are you with?”

“Sojourner Truth Organization. Fifteen guys working here and two are commies. Who would have guessed? Any more?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well thanks and let’s Free the Five Puerto Rican Prisoners of War! Why not try to recruit the prick? Workers World can have him.”

Ken laughs, and we go our separate ways. Politics never comes up again.”

How to Rob an Armored Car by Iain Levison (Soho Press 2009)

 

Wilton, while never beautiful, could be at least photogenic after a snowfall. The three gray brick smokestacks of the metal-refinishing plant with the snow-covered mountains as a backdrop made a decent photograph for a freshman arts major trying to capture man’s inhumanity to nature. Over time, this had become Wilton’s purpose. Flocks of Penn State students would come down every spring to catch a black-and-white image of a strip-mined valley or a withered ex–coal miner dying of black lung disease on his disintegrating porch. From the gutted earth of the quarries just outside the town to the abandoned coal mines, some of which were permanently on fire, Wilton was a picturesque icon of poverty and environmental rape.

Riff-Raff (1991)

 

Pardon Us (1931)

 

The Festival (2018)

 

Doors Open (2012)

 

Northline by Willy Vlautin (P.S. 2008)

 

Well, the lady fired me after the second time so I didn’t get another job or anything for the rest of the summer. I just laid around with the A/C on in the dark and rented movies. I saw Paul Newman first in Slap Shot, and I thought he was the funniest guy I’d ever seen. Plus he was so handsome. Then I started renting all his movies. When he’s young, like in Cool Hand Luke, he’s amazing. He’s really really handsome in that. Or in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But if you’ve ever seen Fort Apache, the Bronx, then you’d understand him. You ever seen that one?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘He’s older in it and he falls in love with a nurse. She’s really beautiful, but she’s a junkie and lives in a horrible part of New York City. But she’s a good person, she’s just had a hard life. Paul Newman is a cop and he’s tough and strong, but he’s also really nice. He’s just tired and worn out ’cause being a policeman in New York City is an awful job. Anyway, there’s this scene where the nurse and him are together, and she’s really exhausted so he makes her a bath. He puts bubbles in it and shakes the water so the bubbles get extra bubbly and he sits with her while she lays in the water. It’s hard to explain, but it just kills me. As sad as it is to admit, he’s probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me.’

‘Paul Newman?’

‘Any time I get worried or my anxieties start in, I just think about Paul Newman. Sometimes it’s hard to get him here, but most of the time he shows up. Ever since that summer, it’s been like that.

El Diego by Diego Armando Maradona (Yellow Jersey Press 2005)

Brazil have sold the world this idea that they’re the only ones capable of the jogo bonito, of playing beautifully ... bollocks! We can also do the jogo bonito, we just don’t know how to sell it. Brazilians always think everything is tudo hem, tudo legal and they’re all mellow, whereas for us when it’s not tudo bem it’s not cool and fuck the lot of them. We stop people short and knock them out one by one. That’s how we are and I don’t have a problem with that. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Brazilian way of life, I like them, but in football, I want to beat them to the death. They’re My Rivals, with capital letters.

Lexulouz-Voulez

 It's habit-forming  . . . 

Games played: 438

Games won: 227

Games lost: 209

Games drawn: 2

Bingos: 171