Juming Museum, Taiwan

The Juming Museum is an enormous outdoor garden, filled with sculpture. There are dozens of monumental bronze statues of tai chi practicioners, soldiers and people in flight.

Apparently.

Sleep, interrupted

I was taking a siesta this lunchtime. Or a nap. Or a snooze. I was feeling exhausted: I'd been drinking hard last night and the hangover was hitting me hard. I tried to read The Finkler Question to cheer myself up. That was a sign of how bad I must have been: nobody reads Booker prizewinners to lift their spirits.

Milkweed

I stayed up too late last night reading Bitter Seeds, and then this morning I downloaded the sequel, The Coldest War, and finished reading that about six this evening. That didn't make for a very productive day.

Reading matter

Several parcels arrived in the mail today; a big box of herbal tea from the US, the DVDs of the second series of Fist Of Fun, and a very aged book, Resume With Monsters, written by William Browning Spencer. It was rescued from a charity shop by way of Amazon's secondhand marketplace, and although printed in 1995 looks slightly older than the Necronomicon.

Born to run, live to play Xbox

Last night we stayed up late watching GI Joe: Rise Of Cobra, which is something any right minded person should never do. I'd seen it before, so that makes me wrong minded to the power of two. Shame on me. I woke at six to the sound of rain, put the alarm on snooze for ten minutes ... and then went back to sleep until 9.

Hook, Line & Sinker

I've just finished reading Len Deighton's Hook, Line & Sinker trilogy, which I picked up for a steal in a secondhand bookshop in Shelburne, Nova Scotia this summer.

Inventions

Today I was going to build a script to write comedy reviews. It would be quite simple; a random number generator that would spit out "Needs more rape jokes" and "Could do with less rape jokes" at the end of each spurt of text. However, coming back from lunch, I had to do some work instead, so my auto-reviewer had to remain a wisp of inspiration and offence. Perhaps I'll build it this weekend. Just in time for Edinburgh. 2013.

Some sense of endings

Warning, spoilers ahead:

Here are the last lines of eleven of my favourite books. (Mostly the final sentence, unless I felt that really, really would be too difficult, in which case you get a couple of extra sentences for free.)

The Apocalypse Codex

Yesterday I started reading the latest Charles Stross, and only stopped at midnight, when I was so exhausted that my chin felt inexplicably wrong, before falling into a dreamless sleep that went an hour and change past my alarm.

Befuddled and bedraggled, I ran for four miles, got home and as soon as I had stopped sweating, picked up the book and carried on reading until I was done.

Chocolate, dark

I've been reading more of The Chocolate Wars, and continue to be struck by the strangeness of the Kit-Kat being invented. It's a chocolate-coated proof of the claim that technology is anything invented after your twentieth birthday; those chocolate-coated wafer biscuits are so much part of the fabric of the world that it seems impossible that there was a time before the Kit-Kat. It seems even more strange, somehow, that the Kit-Kat was invented, had a date on which it came into being, rather than being discovered.

Unlike Maltesers, which have been grown in the Falkland Islands for over a thousand years after they were first domesticated.

Cleaning up

Today we planned to visit the zoo and feed the giraffes, but after an eight mile run this morning I conked out completely, incapable of doing anything apart from hanging the laundry out.

Danger Lunch

Today I stayed at the office for lunch and ate pasta, to minimise the chances of choking to death on my own. However, the pasta I had was full of stringy green shoots that kept getting stuck in my craw, so I almost choked to death (or boked all over my workmates) instead. Seems like there's nothing so threatening as food.

Sale! Sale! Sale!

This weekend Kinokuniya is having a 20% off sale, so this afternoon we went to their bookshop on Orchard Road, along with half the population of Singapore. The shop is tardis-like in dimension and labyrinthine in layout: I must have spent half an hour looking for books about running, and when I did find them I realised I didn't want any anyway. And I'd walked past them five times without realising.

Sale! Sale! Sale!

This weekend Kinokuniya is having a 20% off sale, so this afternoon we went to their bookshop on Orchard Road, along with half the population of Singapore. The shop is tardis-like in dimension and labyrinthine in layout: I must have spent half an hour looking for books about running, and when I did find them I realised I didn't want any anyway. And I'd walked past them five times without realising.

Empire

I just finished reading Jeremy Paxman's Empire, which rather than a tale of the presenter of Newsnight's imperial command, is an account of the British Empire's rise and fall.

Brain Training for Runners

I bought Brain Training for Runners at Kinokuniya last night, shortly before my eyes starting pointing in different directions and I needed to be sat down and fed cake until I felt better. I think that was to do with the big pile of pills I've been taking, rather than the shock on realising that the Big K would mark up a book from 17 US$ to 33 Singaporean, but who knows? (Curiously, UK books get a bit of a bump in price here, but never that much. Maybe it's harder to float books across the Pacific than drive them through Asia, or something.)

The Perfect Fool

Today I read Stewart Lee's The Perfect Fool, about a decade after it was published. I think I picked up a copy in an Oxford bookshop, at least six years ago, and put it down again, finding it unreadable. But perhaps that's just a false memory, me wanting to make the claim that I found Stewart Lee impenetrable ages before anyone else did.

The Fall

I wouldn't want you to think I detested New York, but I have realised I'd be quite happy if almost everyone who lived there got mauled to death by flesh eating zombies. Not just any flesh eating zombies though, ones with literary merit. I hope that gives some succour to any Brooklynite, to know they're being torn limb from limb by a ravening beast that's been described with a minimum of cliche. Thus while there are lots of books about the zombiepocalypse I doubt I'll ever read, I keep returning to Colson Whitehead's Zone One.

Vampires, on the other hand, I hold no truck with. If I were to attempt amateur psychoanalysis, it would be obvious that I'm fascinated by death and scared of sex, hence my choice of monster. But I'm not, because that would be utter piffle. Vampires are lame because they're the Robert Pattison crowd, revenant Hugh Grants moodily haunting schoolgirls (or stalking reanimated transexual hookers on Rodeo Drive - have I stretched this metaphor to breaking point yet?)And so they just look too nice, too damn sparkly to be meaningful horrors.

The Sense Of An Ending

There's a film, Angel Heart, that only really makes sense when it doesn't make sense, which is to say the optimal mode of experiencing it is on late night television, and only if you stumble into it a minute after it has begun, but because you're in a drunken stupor, you believe you've missed the first half hour that would have explained all the portentiousness. Sober, it's a pile of rubbish; drunk, it's a masterwork.

Angel Heart is based on a novel of the same name, which is much worse than the movie (who says Hollywood ruins everything? The same people who think Michael Bay ruined Transformers by overcommercialising them?), and at the centre of that book's plot is a concern about the failure of memory. Which gets us, eventually, to The Sense of an Ending.

Night Terrors

As I walked down the hallway to the lifts this evening, I heard a ghastly screech. I looked up, to see the old man who lives in the flat closest to the bank of lifts, sat against the gate of his flat, his torso bare, holding a violin and sawing at it in time to music spilling from a radio somewhere behind him. I nodded at him and fled.

Downstairs, a very old man, shrunken and covered in inept, prison tattoos, was fighting with a newspaper in one of the alcoves. It flapped across the floor and reared up at him as he spun around it, stamping away. This was a very strange evening.