I’m starting my week with a hangover, which is making me feel all disconnected and spatially disoriented, like I’m walking around with one eye closed. I didn’t drink a lot last night, but apparently four beers and a cider are enough to keep me tossing and turning all night and leave a sour metallic taste in my mouth. Work is the curse of the drinking classes. I need a Diet Coke, a grilled cheese sandwich and a nap.
SiC and I spent the weekend in Wales again – SiC’s dad is in France, so we had his house all to ourselves. I’d meant to lounge around and get some solid reading done, but these days that’s more punishment than relaxation, as I’m reading one of the most irritating books I’ve ever come across. I mean, it’s not up there with DeLillo or anything, but it’s pretty fucking annoying. So why am I still reading it, you ask? Because I started it. Yeah. I’m fairly obsessive about finishing books once I’ve started them: if I so much as skim the first paragraph of a book I MUST FINISH THE ENTIRE THING or the sky will fall and my children will be born blind. I live in fear that someone will leave Finnegan’s Wake lying around and I’ll accidentally glance at the first page and will consequently be doomed to lug the cursed thing around for all eternity, clawing at my eyes and howling in torment. “Yaaugh! You can’t just make up words, you stupid drunk-ass mick!”
Ahem. The book I’m reluctantly slogging through at the moment is an unauthorised biography of Nick Drake, written by one Patrick Humphries. Now, if you were writing a biography of a troubled English singer/songwriter who released three promising albums before committing suicide in 1974, how would you start the first chapter? With a detailed description of the sinking of the Titanic, obviously! This went on for a good five pages (with me repeatedly looking at the cover to assure myself I’d picked up the right book) before Humphries finally made the tenuous connection that his own great-uncle, who had attended the launch of the Titanic as a child, eventually became a doctor and delivered Nick Drake. If you cut all the similarly irrelevant material out of this book, what you’d have left wouldn’t fill a pamphlet. Other mystifying tangents include a history of British imperialism in Burma and a chronology of the career of Robert Johnson. (Whoops! Wrong musician!)
When Humphries does trouble himself to actually write about Nick Drake (remember him, mate? His picture’s on the cover!), it gets even worse. His prose puts the ‘urg!’ in ‘turgid’. He describes Bryter Layter track by track, combining the sort of overwrought description and ham-fisted metaphors you’d expect from a high-school short story competition with the musical insight of a packet of salted nuts. For example:
A wash of strings, a crash of cymbals, like waves breaking on a distant shore, and Nick’s deftly picked descending guitar figures usher in ‘Hazey Jane I’. But this is no love song; it is a baffled attempt to grasp the unattainable. And in the end, as the strings seep away like the setting sun, the bass rises and dies – and all the while the guitar is plucked like a heart string.
JESUS CHRIST. And still I read on. I hate myself. But not as much as I hate Patrick Humphries. I want to kick him in the shin.
Excerpt from an actual conversation recently held after smoking a spliff:
“Shut up or I’ll throw you in the stingers.”
“What?”
“I’ll throw you in the stingers! In the stinging nettles.”
“Ohhh. I thought you said ‘Fred and the Stingers’ for some reason.”
“No. That would be a 1950s dance band.”
“Yeah – Fred and the Swinging Stingers.”
“Or maybe Fred and the Stinging Swingers!”
“Like they all fuck each other’s wives with pointy strap-ons?”
“Or with a bag of bees!”
“A bag of bees?”
“Uh-huh! You put the bees in a bag and then you tie it to the end of your cock, and the bees make it hover up, and the bag goes BZZZZZZZ and the woman’s like, ‘What’s that?’ and you’re like, ‘It’s a new sex toy that only pleasures you!’ and she’s selfish so she’s like, ‘OK’, and then you fuck her. With the bag of bees.”
[Helpless, paralytic laughter]
“I can’t tell if you’re laughing with me or at me.”