1. Stick it in the end pocket of a soft bag when you’re travelling and rest your feet on it.

2. Pick it up off the bookshelf late at night when you just want to re-read a chapter for old times’ sake.

3. Dog-ear a page (and then blog about it).

4. Get deliciously overwrought about bending the spine. Although attempting 1. might have a similar effect.

5. Waft across the pages and breathe in the dusty woodiness.

6. Use someone important’s business card as a bookmark in it.

7. Bend it ever-so slightly to fit in a jacket pocket.

8. Write your name in the front of it, so when someone else buys it in a second-hand book shop they can google you to get a bit of lovely insight into the book’s provenance.

Enhanced Editions found via James Hogwood

Intrigued by this. A multimedia iphone ebook app that lets you switch between text, audio and video without losing your place. It all looks beautifully seamless.

Despite the fact that I’ve never been one for audiobooks or ebooks, I’m seriously tempted to give this a go.

But although I completely appreciate the amount of work that must go into producing this,  it still feels a bit pricey at £15. I’d pay that much for a hardback. But whenever there’s ever a book that I want so much that I buy the hardback, then I want the actual physical hardback rather than a digital version (if that makes any sense?).

If it were £9.99 I’d be playing with it now rather than writing about it. But then, as I say, I’ve never been one for audiobooks or ebooks.

Saying that, Nick Cave is a brilliant one to launch with because…because it’s Nick Cave for chrissake. If there’s anyone I’m going to watch reading a novel, it’s him. Sod it, I’m going to do it.

Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road, he has taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, p24.

I’ve never anticipated a book’s launch like I did Infinite Jest‘s. I still have the courderoy jacket with one shoulder worn down to the cotton from lugging its hard-backed thousand plus pages to work everyday.

The first time I saw the internet in action was while visiting my friend Tom’s flat – the first search we did was for ‘David Foster Wallace’.

Read this by Robert Potts in the Guardian

I only have three chairs in the house: one for the wife, one for me, and one for a guest. No more. One guest at a time – that’s my philosophy. You don’t want your house turning into a hippy commune.

His “explosive new autobiography” is being extracted in the Guardian.

Popped into my local bookshop on Saturday and was intrigued to see the slim volume above. It’s a treasure. ‘What is Sport?‘ (google books preview here) was written by Roland Barthes as the commentary to a Canadian Broadcasting Company documentary, made by the little known Hubert Aquin. Essentially, Barthes was invited to write 5 pieces on sports specific to their national settings: bullfighting in Spain, motor-racing in the US, the Tour de France in, erm, France, ice hockey in Canada and football in England.

All of them contain moments of almost shiver-inducing clarity, though I think my favourite is on motor racing:

…on the turns…space is against time. Hence the driver must be able to cheat space, to decide whether he can spare it…or if he will brutally cut it down; and he must have the courage to drive this wager to the brink of the impossible.

drive this wager to the brink of the impossible – love it. And not unlike my rubbish poker technique. Its 65 pages (of commentary) are full of these little crackers. Have to say that the final chapter on football was a little disappointing, as it moves too quickly into generalised conclusion to the whole piece, but the others are all great.

Also nice are Aquin’s letters inviting Barthes (who had published ‘Mythologies‘ shortly before) to contribute to the project in the first place. I’m guessing copyright issues prevented them from including Barthes’ replies, which is a shame. There’s also a lovely note at the end from Richard Howard, Barthes’ long-time translator.

Now where can I track down the documentary itself?