The diary of a disenfranchised bookseller

An alien in Prague

I will soon no longer be a bookseller. I am working on the future. I will post a link once it is up and running. Thank you all for visiting over the years.

Now that the suitably pretentious title is over with, I can get into the heart of what has occurred. I am selling off a great many of my books – delightful as they look on the shelves, I have reached a point at which the cold hard reality of capitalism has impinged upon my life, and after a number of years of boom in literary material gain, this particular form of fetishism has reached an unnatural end. I cannot claim to have books of any great interest to anyone else – on the whole they parallel my adult intellectual development – an excess of classic German and Russian philosophy and literature, tempered later by more general European theory, then a morass of Soviet/Russian/post-socialist cultural studies.

More interesting, however, have been the artefacts of my past I have found within the pages of some of these books: a scrap of paper from a form used in betting shops for checking large bets with a number of soul singers scrawled in my handwriting in blue biro, with the product code of an obscure 1970’s Sony amplifier in someone else’s hand in the reverse within a copy of “The First Man” by Camus – this I can date to within 3 months in 2000 prior to my first trip to West Cork. The second was a One-day Travelcard purchased at 9.33 on 13th December 2003 – when I was living in Finchley. Dating it is far easier (obviously), but its discovery has led me to question just exactly how much my life has changed (or not) in the intervening 5 and a bit years.

Stephen Fry’s letter to his sixteen-year-old self has been getting a lot of traffic and comments over at the Grauniad, somre touching, some silly. So the question is, what would you advise your teenage self with the benefit of 5, 10, 15, 20 or even more years of hindsight? Matters of the heart in all their myriad forms loom large in a great deal of the advice, along with fewer drugs (of both the legal and illegal varieties). I am not sure I would advise anything – on the one hand, life has to be lived in all its glory – pain and misery are tempered by moments of beauty or absolute calm, and on the other I am not really sure I have changed that much – maybe my abilities to build facades to hide behind and to bite my tongue have strengthened. The only other thing would be to not give up on maths – it brings me so much pleasure nowadays after re-immersing myself after a ten year gap.

That previous post was an aberration, sypmtomatic of the very ill that permeates my life, an inability to express anything. Not only vocally. I have never, and I become more conscious of it every day, found a means or medium of truly expressing myself, be it due to fear, lack of vocabulary, or simple lack of talent. These malformed ideas drop from my brain like shit-filled marbles.

Anyway, this latest psychological insight (or rather non-insight, to any of you reading this that actually know me), is a simple aside. I have recently been thinking about death, or rather more generally, loss. It is not something I have experienced in its pure unassailable unalterable form. When I have left, or something has drifted, or someone has passed, they have never been that close to me. And I mean that literally, not in some bizarre heartless unfeeling way.

My dreams recently however, have been permeated by those closest to me leaving me in one way or another. In simple psychological terms, it is no doubt related to the three constants (sorry to reduce you to that) in my life for the last 7 and a bit years leaving the country within the space of a week. As much as I never said a single thing, I hope they know I will miss them. But they are not the ones who have played in my dreams, it is those from whom I am once removed. And I really do not know what is going on. Yes, they (you) are constants within my life, at the end of a phone, or an e-mail or a Facebook message. And I will freely admit that I do find internet-based relationships slightly easier to deal with (strangely the thought of Shklovskii and estrangement (deep alliteration there!) has just crossed my mind) – but that is probably more to do with other issues than any early-20th-century literary movements. But I think it is the simple fact of my removal that has lent itself to these dreams. The lack of immediacy with many people I care for (despite mobile phones, t’internet, et al) has fuelled my paranoid delusions that whatever happens in other people’s lives, I will always be too late. In certain circumstances (births, generally), I think all parties would be grateful. But in others it would not, and it is the very feeling of powerlessness that has woken me in tears on more than one occasion in recent weeks.

I have no answer, I cannot even diagnose the symptoms. All I know is that this has helped.

I bought my first CD in nearly six months today. Harmonic 313, since you ask (or don’t). The only reason I bought it is that I have been unable to trace it anywhere else. It seemed odd to me to be in a record shop. Especially so, given that there was a period of four years in which I spent almost every lunchtime trawling the shops of Soho. The shops have now, on the whole gone – rising rents and ends of leases have done for most of them, and those that remain have cut back on their stocks or have mutated out of being specialist record stores into clearing houses for overstocks. I am as guilty as anyone in the destruction of these shops – I shop online for the best deal, or, dare I say it, download them from sites of questionable legality. This shift in business model has ensured that only those with rich backers or incredibly focussed vinyl obsessions survive with their coterie of equally obsessed shoppers.

Five other unfinished drafts that I will never look at again. Helping a family of Slovakian Roma find a free museum. Anti-avant garde-ism. Disrupted sleeping patterns. Alcohol. Apathy.

One of the most intriguing parts of my efforts at DJing has been not the discovery of obscurities, remixes, or recuts that accompany my trawls through record shops both real and virtual. It has been instead those moments in which a song creeps up on you, half suggests itself to you from a memory – and all the accompanying emotions this unexpected time travel entails.

I have been dropped back to being an 8-year old boy allowed to wander into the music department in the long-demolished Co-op in Portsmouth, marvelling at the posters of Dire Straits. I have been an 18-year old being driven back from a party with the Waterboys on the stereo. I have been taken back to student nights over ten years ago, when £20 was enough for a night out. And I have been back at karaoke nights in Kilburn pubs with beautiful ceilings and unusual colleagues. I am once again at a wedding reception in Ireland.

The Russian philosopher/literary critic/nutcase Rozanov always took great delight in catching people unawares. He would conciously avoid announcing his arrival at friends’ houses in order to see them as they truly were, to see which books they were reading before they had a chance to prepare for his arrival.

The unannounced guest often reveals more about us than we may care to admit, and this is how I am coming to treat these songs. Guilty pleasures, yes. But pleasures nonetheless, musically (in certain ways), more so in terms of the reminiscences they allow me. Enough nostalgia for one day, I think.

Two Xmas parties, little sleep and a vast number of empty calories thanks to Czech brewing have left me destroyed. Yesterday was a complete write off. Today was not. Shopping for food. Ealing packed with Xmas shoppers. I am shopping wholly (almost) online this year. I can avoid crowds and engage in capitalism when my insomnia is at its height. I was looking at 5.30 this morning. And it was sunny but icy today (here at least) – more late January than December. Christians tried to get me to go to their church. Do I look like I need faith? Maybe I just look gloomy. That’s all, really. My fingers are healing nicely following the whole burning oil/hand issue last week. Although the weeping wounds do feel the bite of the cold much more than any other part of my body. Czech film tonight and ironing. I hope. And then sleep. Only working odd days to use up my holiday by the end of the year – 2 days plus weekend, then 2 days, then 1, then back to work on 27th. Blissfully I have NYE off this year. Best get cracking with the music then, I suppose.