Calling all ye bookworms

BOOKERED OUT: BE A BOOKER PUNDIT

Could you read 20 books in 28 days? Would you like to take part in a new BBC Four programme?

We’re looking for six enthusiastic, energetic and dedicated people to take part in this book marathon for a programme called Bookered Out. You don’t have to be a book worm or a literature buff to take part. Novice readers are more than welcome!

You'll need to read every book on this year's Booker Prize longlist and decide which six you would shortlist. In addition to reading the books, you must also keep a video diary of your month (cameras and training provided).

You have until Thursday 4 August to tell us why you think you're the perfect candidate. The Booker Prize longlist is published on Wednesday 10 August, and we will announce who has been selected shortly afterwards.

Go here to apply:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/books/features/booker-recruit.shtml

Feeding on his damask leg, like a worm i' the bud

Another little bauble from David Sedaris, the master of self-deprecatory humour.

He was eight years old and living in the Congo, when he noticed a red spot on his leg; nothing huge—a mosquito bite, he figured. The following day, the spot became more painful, and the day after that he looked down and saw a worm poking out.

A few weeks later, the same thing happened to Maw Hamrick, which is what I call Hugh’s mother, Joan, and though her worm was a bit shorter, I think it’s much worse in terms of trauma or whatnot. If I was a child and saw something creeping out of a hole in my mother’s leg, I would march to the nearest orphanage and put myself up for adoption. I would burn all pictures of her, destroy anything she had ever given me, and start all over because that is just disgusting. A dad can be crawling with parasites and somehow it’s O.K., but on a mom, or any woman, really, it’s unforgivable.

As a fellow survivor of the worm-nesting-in-flesh syndrome, I can sympathize with this. It really is more creepy than it is painful. And it is more commonplace than you would think.

The setting: A semi-tropical country in sub-Saharan Africa

The scene: The lord of the manor (although it's more of a smallish townhouse than a manor, really) casually tosses his shirt into his laudry basket, confident in the knowledge that the resident maid will wash it and iron it and return it to store, duly sanitized. Ah, little does he know!

The maid does indeed wash and dry the shirt and then, while ironing it, thinking of this and that, no doubt, she omits to iron a little corner by the collar.

Three days later the master wakes to find an impressive, swollen-looking red bump growing under his collarbone. Alarmed and despondent, he rushes to the nearest medicine-man who surveys the bump grimly and informs the lord-of-the-manor that he is now host to a putsy-fly worm. Thr l.o.t.m's options are twofold:

1) He can ignore the bump and allow the resident worm to grow and mature till it becomes a fully formed fly that will, unbidden, burst forth into the world (I kid you not!) . Or,

2) He can cover the bump with Vaseline petroleum jelly (a product with multiple uses, if you are a denizen of sub-Saharan Africa) and an adhesive plaster and wait till the larva, starved of oxygen, worms its way to the surface of his skin and attaches itself to the adhesive plaster.

Chances are that he will select option # 2. While in the middle of a tense business meeting or a languid lunch with friends, it is always difficult to explain away the fly that just flew out from under your skin.

I too, in my youth, played host to just such a putsy fly. And while the bump itself didn't ache that much, the thought of putsy fly eggs under my skin was indescribably gruesome. The seven day wait to be divested of them was possibly the longest week of my life. I carry the scar to this day - just your everyday battle scar from life in sub-Saharn Africa.

For the rest of the Sedaris article, go here: http://www.newyorker.com/shouts/content/articles/050801sh_shouts

Pati

I've been musing about last weekend and why it was such an emotional maelstrom. The call came at 6 something in the am, a mere 3 hours after I had gone to bed after glutting myself on 6 back-to-back episodes of Rumpole of the Bailey. It was my father, calling to inform me that pati had passed away.

If all of us are truly honest with ourselves, it must be admitted that we have all been sort of waiting for this to happen for a while now. There have been increasing rifts in the lute of our little family circle arising from the strain of taking care of pati. Noone was willing to move back to Madras to look over a problematic old lady for whom they felt only a tepid affection. Emails and phone calls of an increasingly nasty tone flew back and forth across the globe as everyone accused everyone else of either negligence or interference.

So when the news of pati's death finally came, why was it so painful? I felt like such a hypocrite for feeling any kind of grief. I can't deny that it was only a sense of filial duty and TamBrahm guilt that pushed me to go see her for a couple of hours once every fortnight or so. Yet I can't quite assimilate the thought that I will never see her again, this person who has been such a constant in my life. Despite all the wonderful Sify memories, my strongest associations of India and Madras will always be 258 Lloyds Road, and pati sitting on a bench in the hall ( surely that room with its 1.5 chairs and dusty, dusty cabinets cannot be described as a living room?)

When I think of pati, I think my primary emption is guilt. That I wasn't a better granddaughter, that I didn't love her more, that I didn't go and spend more time with her during the year that I lived in Madras. What must it have been like, living the life that she did? Living out the last few years of her life confined to three rooms because she wasn't able to walk out beyond them, outliving her daughter and the son she loved best, unable to eat the foods she loved because her body was failing her, getting to see the occasional family member only once every few months, and nothing but a few shrill Tamil programmes on TV to keep her sane.

And then I wonder whether my life now isn't in some way a reflection of hers?

I associate her with all the most personal, most painful facets of me that I need to keep hidden from the world. My closest family has always compared me with her. And even though I have always denied these similarities, I know that of all her children and grandchildren, I am the one who resembles her the most, in physique and temperament. And I can't help but wonder whether, in my old age, I will grow into the same sort of person she was.

Which is why as I now grieve for her, I wish I had taken the time to understand her better. I wish I had spent more time with her, to ease her loneliness. I wish I had been less impatient of the times when we sat togther for an hour with nothing but banalities to say to each other. I wish she could have known how much I identified with her. And I hope and hope that after these last few agonizing years, her soul has finally found peace.

You know that you have a caffeine problem when you find yourself sipping simultaneously on a hot and richly caffeinated latte and an icy-cold Diet Coke. So much for any hopes of sleep tonight. *Sigh*

Wooster on Wodehouse

Hugh Laurie Wodehouse Saved my Life
The Daily Telegraph 27.5.99


With today's reissue of PG Wodehouse's books, Hugh Laurie tells how the comic genius made him clean up his 'squalid' existence To be able to write about PG Wodehouse is the sort of honour that comes rarely in any man's life, let alone mine. This is rarity of a rare order. Halley's comet seems like a blasted nuisance in comparison. If you'd knocked on my head 20 years ago and told me that a time would come when I, Hugh Laurie - scraper-through of O-levels, mover of lips (own) while reading, loafer, scrounger, pettifogger and general berk of this parish - would be able to carve my initials in the broad bark of the Master's oak, I'm pretty certain that I would have said "garn", or something like it.

I was, in truth, a horrible child. Not much given to things of a bookey nature, I spent a large part of my youth smoking Number Six and cheating in French vocabulary tests. I wore platform boots with a brass skull and crossbones over the ankle, my hair was disgraceful, and I somehow contrived to pull off the gruesome trick of being both fat and thin at the same time. If you had passed me in the street during those pimply years, I am confident that you would, at the very least, have quickened your pace.

You think I exaggerate? I do not. Glancing over my school reports from the year 1972, I observe that the words "ghastly" and "desperate" feature strongly, while "no", "not", "never" and "again" also crop up more often than one would expect in a random sample. My history teacher's report actually took the form of a postcard from Vancouver.

But this, you will be nauseated to learn, is a tale of redemption. In about my 13th year, it so happened that a copy of Galahad at Blandings by PG Wodehouse entered my squalid universe, and things quickly began to change. From the very first sentence of my very first Wodehouse story, life appeared to grow somehow larger. There had always been height, depth, width and time, and in these prosaic dimensions I had hitherto snarled, cursed, and not washed my hair. But now, suddenly, there was Wodehouse, and the discovery seemed to make me gentler every day. By the middle of the fifth chapter I was able to use a knife and fork, and I like to think that I have made reasonable strides since.

I spent the following couple of years meandering happily back and forth through Blandings Castle and its environs - learning how often the trains ran, at what times the post was collected, how one could tell if the Empress was off-colour, why the Emsworth Arms was preferable to the Blue Boar - until the time came for me to roll up the map of adolescence and set forth into my first Jeeves novel. It was The Code of the Woosters, and things, as they used to say, would never be the same again.

The facts in this case, ladies and gentlemen, are simple. The first thing you should know, and probably the last, too, is that PG Wodehouse is still the funniest writer ever to have put words on paper. Fact number two: with the Jeeves stories, Wodehouse created the best of the best. I speak as one whose first love was Blandings, and who later took immense pleasure from Psmith, but Jeeves is the jewel, and anyone who tries to tell you different can be shown the door, the mini-cab, the train station, and Terminal 4 at Heathrow with a clear conscience. The world of Jeeves is complete and integral, every bit as structured, layered, ordered, complex and self-contained as King Lear, and considerably funnier.

Now let the pages of the calendar tumble as autumn leaves, until 10 years are understood to have passed. A man came to us - to me and to my comedy partner, Stephen Fry - with a proposition. He asked me if I would like to play Bertram W. Wooster in 23 hours of televised drama, opposite the internationally tall Fry in the role of Jeeves.

"Fiddle," one of us said. I forget which. "Sticks," said the other. "Wodehouse on television? It's lunacy. A disaster in kit form. Get a grip, man." The man, a television producer, pressed home his argument with skill and determination. "All right," he said, shrugging on his coat. "I'll ask someone else." "Whoa, hold up," said one of us, shooting a startled look at the other. "Steady," said the other, returning the S. L. with top-spin. There was a pause. "You'll never get a cab in this weather," we said, in unison.

And so it was that, a few months later, I found myself slipping into a double-breasted suit in a Prince of Wales check while my colleague made himself at home inside an enormous bowler hat, and the two of us embarked on our separate disciplines. Him for the noiseless opening of decanters, me for the twirling of the whangee.

So the great PG was making his presence felt in my life once more. And I soon learnt that I still had much to learn. How to smoke plain cigarettes, how to drive a 1927 Aston Martin, how to mix a Martini with five parts water and one part water (for filming purposes only), how to attach a pair of spats in less than a day and a half, and so on.

But the thing that really worried us, that had us saying "crikey" for weeks on end, was this business of The Words. Let me give you an example. Bertie is leaving in a huff: " 'Tinkerty tonk,' I said, and I meant it to sting." I ask you: how is one to do justice of even the roughest sort to a line like that? How can any human actor, with his clumsily attached ears, and his irritating voice, and his completely misguided hair, hope to deliver a line as pure as that? It cannot be done. You begin with a diamond on the page, and you end up with a blob of Pritt, The Non-Sticky Sticky Stuff, on the screen.

Wodehouse on the page can be taken in the reader's own time; on the screen, the beautiful sentence often seems to whip by, like an attractive member of the opposite sex glimpsed from the back of a cab. You, as the viewer, try desperately to fix the image in your mind - but it is too late, because suddenly you're into a commercial break and someone is telling you how your home may be at risk if you eat the wrong breakast cereal.

Naturally, one hopes there were compensations in watching Wodehouse on the screen - pleasant scenery, amusing clothes, a particular actor's eyebrows - but it can never replicate the experience of reading him. If I may go slightly culinary for a moment: a dish of foie gras nestling on a bed of truffles, with a side-order of lobster and caviar may provide you with a wonderful sensation; but no matter how wonderful, you simply don't want to be spoon-fed the stuff by a perfect stranger. You need to hold the spoon, and decide for yourself when to wolf and when to nibble.

And so I am back to reading, rather than playing Jeeves. And my Wodehousian redemption is, I hope, complete. Indeed, there is nothing left for me to say, except to wish, as I fold away my penknife and gaze up at the huge oak towering overhead, that my history teacher could see me now. Text © Hugh Laurie/Daily Telegraph Layout © R.D. Collins 2004