The most depressing thing about the Sarrazin affair? The amazon.de reviews — almost all positive. What a hideous collection of knuckle-draggers.

And even in Berlin, there’s are apparently still venues willing to give Sarrazin a platform. Among them Urania, to its shame.

I stumbled onto Sheila O’Malley’s blog this afternoon, and instantly knew I need to read everything she’s ever written. Especially the book reviews — e.g. on Harriet the Spy, Brideshead Revisited, Notes from Underground, and above all this essay on love and AS Byatt.

Talking of Byatt, The Guardian have a wonderful video interview with her; I assume they’ll eventually turn in into an article, but they’re taking their time about it. What’s particularly delightful is how it works as a conversation rather than a potted Q&A. She covers several topics — social realist novels, facebook, religion, big brother — but keeps returning to a central theme of the limitations of culture concerned entirely with reality and people, where

interest in life as it is has supplanted religion

. Also, as one of the comments points out, it’s somewhat intriguing that she has a roll of tape balanced on her knee throughout.

More superficially:

• The Spectator on Michael Moorcock: “
  
  He is generally sound on religion and politics
  
  “. Yes, really.
• A plea for intergenerational peace from Rhian
• Remember the park benches in
  
  Transmetropolitan
  
  ? A park in China tries doing it with spikes [NB:
  
  Quirky news from China, hence probably exaggerated or downright false
  
  ]

Random googling has just confronted me with Sheila O’Malley, and she’s won herself an instant position as my second-favourite source of book reviews. On a slight tangent, here’s something that should be ingested by any blogger:

My ideal reader is someone who shares my sense of humor, who “gets it”, someone who doesn’t roll their eyes at excitement or enthusiasm, someone who loves to get fired up about this or that, who isn’t put off by a grown woman blithering like a 13 year old. My ideal reader is someone who likes to go deep. Who isn’t afraid to go deep. My ideal reader is not the kind of person who needs to make a joke, nervously, when the mood gets serious.

The Guardian has a wonderful interview with AS Byatt, in which she takes a decent shot at a combined critique of social realism in novels, the narcissism of facebook and big brother, and the death of God. There doesn’t seem yet to be any transcript or article published, alas. Some (possibly inaccurate) quotes:

• on realism: “My life as it really is consists of reading Shakespeare in bed at one in the morning” (i.e. this and other shared, commonplace activities are at least as real as the grittier horrors)
• 
  “I don’t believe in God. I believe in Wallace Stevens”
  
  — partly for the thoughtful way she comes out with it, partly because (when she explains what she means) it’s not just a throwaway line
• 
  /”interest in life as it is has supplanted religion”
  

And all this with a roll of sellotape balanced on her knee. I can’t figure out if this is a carefully-placed detail, in either the style of Old Masters portraiture or ARGs, or just One Of Those Things that happens when you’re focussed on sharing ideas.

Ah, nostalgia. The internet currently seems to function as an enormous engine for encouraging and amplifying nostalgia, providing endless information with which to peer into every crevice of our upbringing.

Music, today. Grooveshark and some light googling helped me recover Buck Rogers, which was ubiquitous around my school in 2001*. The kind of thing that was once ubiquitous and I now hardly ever hear. G has said that trance is her Volksmusic, having been all over Israel as she grew up (and still, I suppose). Certain kinds of rock are in a similar position for me: not actually very

good

, but psychologically imprinted at a particular moment.

Now, looking back at it, I get to puzzle over the details you don’t notice until you stop and look from afar. Why is it called ‘Buck Rogers’? What is with the lyrics? Even songmeanings can’t make much out of it.

* actually, I’d imagined it being a few years earlier than that, but I trust wikipedia more than i trust my memory.

Chroniques de la rentrée littéraire are again trying to crowdsource reviews of all* the French novels published this autumn.

* ‘all’ being understandably somewhat limited. No space here, for instance, for Dmitri Bortnikov’s novel of the Territory.

BooksWeLike seems now to be entirely dead. Pity. I guess

Library Thing

is now occupying much the same space, and better. Still, I have a bunch of reviews in there, and it’s always sad to see sites vanish when you turn your back for a couple of years. Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess.

“Heute abend findet am Berliner Hauptbahnhof so etwas wie ein Flash Mop statt.”

[maybe it’s how you clean up after a flash flood?

Anybody remember the benches in

Transmetropolitan

, that heated themselves overnight to stop people sleeping on them? Somewhere in China has gone one step further:

Park officials in China have found a way to stop people from hogging their benches for too long – by fitting steel spikes on a coin-operated timer.

If visitors at the Yantai Park in Shangdong province, eastern China, linger too long without feeding the meter, dozens of sharp spikes shoot through the seat.

[Caution about the limited reliability of ‘funny old world’ type stories about China, of course]

Just been to a RHPS showing. Remain somewhat astonished by how unknown it is in Berlin; it’s the kind of import you would expect to be overdeveloped here compared to its condition in country of origin. Not so.

Still, even here it has the makings of a secular ritual. The music, the comforting ritual, the morality almost as screwy as the Old Testament. Or maybe that’s just me