Finally, some Darwin; or, What Would Terry Eagleton Do?

Hello all. Apologies for the two-month hiatus, but these last two months have been somewhat busy. Off to the US for much of June, various conference dates (as keen readers will already know) in July, and now a relocation. Yes, as of 8th August, the Doughnuts are moving from the terrorist's medium sized city of choice, Exeter, and up to Newcastle. In the meantime, however, I'm sad to report a muffin retraction. You'll remember a few months ago how I congratulated the Continental Airlines ground staff at Gatwick for their service in getting me good seats, with the cry of 'muffins all round'? Unfortunately, Continental's response on my return to the UK at the end of June was to act with such incompetence across two continents (starting with ineptitude and hungoverness at Oklahoma City, going on with massive inconvenience at Houston, and ending with startling rudeness at Gatwick) that I doubt there will ever be muffins for Continental again.

Right, to business. Finally, some Darwin, as on Monday I caught the first part of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin on Channel 4. I sometimes wonder what Dawkins' RAE contribution must actually be, because for the last few years he seems to be spending increasing amounts of time wandering away from science and into lacklustre cultural analysis and godawful episodes of Doctor Who (of the series finale, I'll say this - it was mostly fun to watch but utterly embarrassing to think about). This has been characterised by his shift from evolutionary biologist to professional atheist, from The Blind Watchmaker to The God Delusion, from being implicitly questioning to explicitly blunt. As an atheist myself (primary school RE was always on the back foot after the six year old me couldn't quite reconcile prayers to a loving god with the footage from Ethiopa; secondary school RE and I didn't get on when I kept taking what might best be called the Gregory House approach) there were parts of The God Delusion I liked; as a cultural historian, there were parts I found incredibly weak. The problem is that for Dawkins, evolution immediately refutes any religious narrative, as if the two were mutually exclusive. But for many people, they aren't. Are these people just plain wrong? Or are there more complex cultural and social reasons for this seeming contradiction and the persistence of religion? I'm guessing the latter, and this is where Dawkins falls down, as he simply doesn't have the philosophical background to deal with such questions. For instance, his treatment of Anselm's ontological argument in The God Delusion is astonishingly intemperate; dismissing it as a playground exchange as swiftly as he does leaves no room for the consideration that, although it seems silly now, it obviously had great rhetorical power for a different historical culture. That said, I'm more tempted to side with Dawkins than with Terry Eagleton, whose review of Delusion in the London Review of Books began with some good points before sliding into a diatribe that said more about his own sentimental attachment to Catholicism than anything else (God is not a man on a cloud, but rather a precondition for existence? Huh?).

Similarly, there are of course plenty of people for whom evolution and religion cannot co-exist and who reside on the frankly mental side of the coin. Three examples from my personal experience should suffice. Firstly, a friend of mine once showed me a leaflet from his local church on how to be a good Christian. There was a ten point plan for spreading the word, the final point of which was (and seriously, I'm not making this up) "If somebody wants to talk about the existence of dinosaurs or evolution, change the topic of conversation." Honestly. Secondly, an encounter with a man on the street who started talking about the wonder of the world and how there must be a intelligent designer. I let him speak for a bit before explaining why there wasn't an intelligent designer. He said that, actually, in like, later life, Darwin said his theory, was, like, totally wrong? I told him I lectured in Victorian culture at the local university; he told me that I should probably move on and let him have a crack at someone else. The final example, and the one in which I was completely unable to keep a straight face, was when I met another evangelical on the street, who started a lecture on how amazing the human eye was. How could so perfect an organic tool have come about with design? It was just too good to be true. The fact that she delivered this earnest speech wearing glasses about two inches thick somewhat undermined her claims to the divine perfection of eyes. God moves in mysterious ways, mostly around Specsavers.

I've drifted from the point slightly. The Genius of Charles Darwin is a perfectly fine programme, but it's let down somewhat by Dawkins' own limitations as a cultural historian. The way Dawkins tells it, evolution was an insight that seemingly came out of nowhere but the mind of an intellectual superhero. Although attractive, such a narrative largely ignores the many other cultural influences around the appearance of the theory, in favour of a Romanticist notion of the lone genius turning the world upside down (ah, should have read the title). Alfred Russell Wallace, who was coming to the same conclusions at much the same time, is mentioned briefly but grudgingly; Herbert Spencer, who really coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest,' hasn't appeared at all yet, which is bemusing because at points Dawkins seems to drift into a more progressive Spencerian model of evolution than the more chance fuelled Darwinian mode. Admittedly, this is a three part series, so there's still time for more of this (next week, on eugenics, had better mention Francis Galton, otherwise I'm kicking my television to death), but I can't help but feel that it would benefit from more historical precision and fewer scenes of kids looking for fossils. Or perhaps more lines like "Hello, I'm Richard... so how long have you been a sex worker?"

Tour dates 2008

Something of a makeover this week, doughnutfans; since the day after I adorned the top of this e-journal with my strange double-exposure photo of scenes of Exeter (c. 2001) the city was caught up in the war on terr'r (to use George's pronunciation), I thought something more immediately Victorian might be appropriate, not least because the Victorian content suggested by the title hasn't been much in evidence so far this year. More to come in the forthcoming months, honest. I really can't wait to get hold of a scanner and share with you the late Victorian/Edwardian delights of The Doings of Vigorous Daunt, Millionaire, a kind of prototypic James Bond who first appeared in the Harmsworth Magazine at the turn of the century. The illustrations are great, marauding tigers and revolvers all over the place. In the meantime, you'll have to make do with Sidney Paget's image of John Watson from Conan Doyle's "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" in volume two of The Strand Magazine, 1891. Those of you wanting more gloss on this image should see what I said about it in Victorian Periodicals Review, 40.1 (2007). Ah, the distinctive aroma of self-promotion. While I'm about it, anyone in the academic business who wants to say hello (and to moan about the lack of Victorian stuff so far this year) can do so at any of the three forthcoming conferences I'll be speaking at in the next few months.

Firstly, there's Crime Cultures: Figuring Criminality in Literature, Media and Film at the University of Portsmouth, 14-16 July 2008, where I'll be presenting on urban myth and Edwardian crime fiction, in particular Marie Belloc-Lowndes' novel The Lodger. Although we tend to associate urban legends with twentieth century popular culture (and in particular fifties Americana onwards, I would guess), there's a persuasive case that such stories were all over nineteenth century popular culture, and certainly by the time Belloc Lowndes took a hearsay story about Jack the Ripper and turned it into fiction in 1912. It's probably a little on the late side, but you can book your front row seats here.

Secondly, and in the same week, a rare hometown gig; Artistry and Industry: Representations of Creative Labour in Literature and the Visual Arts, University of Exeter, 18-20 July 2008. This one is a development of the research area I unveiled at Birkbeck back in October, magic and conjuring in Victorian fiction. Like that paper, there'll be some Dickens in there, but this one is more generally about Victorian conjuring's internal struggle with its aesthetic status (is it an art? 'Yes,' says David Devant and other successful fin de siecle magicians; 'um maybe' says the public; 'Hell no' say the arbiters of high culture, but they obviously say it more politely). Expect side discussions of spiritualism and perhaps a bonus bad Derren Brown impersonation.

Thirdly, and finally for now, off to Leicester for Victorian Bodies: Touch, Bodies, and Emotions, 1-3 September 2008. Although last on the list at present, this one is part of my primary research project, being a cultural history of London Underground (those of you who have been paying attention to a psychotic degree will remember I mentioned this about fifteen months ago). Here, I'll be looking at how the establishment of the Underground in the 1860s gave popular culture a new space for fear, unease, and general terror, in particular in John Oxenham's 1897 crime serial A Mystery of the Underground, a story apparently so terrifying that readers refused to travel by underground. Or so Peter Haining argues, although I'm finding actual evidence for this rather scant (itself an interesting point; why are we so keen to accept narratives of terror about the underground?). Tour T-shirts to follow, featuring rockin' John Watson; yours for thirty pounds each.

Billie Piper at the Gates of Dawn

I've kept away from Doctor Who for long enough this year, but last week's episode was a goad too far; when they start poking about in detective fiction and table-rapping Agatha Christie, then I'm compelled to comment (the same would be true of the Dickens episode a few years ago, except that this site didn't exist then). "The Unicorn and the Wasp" was fairly characteristic of the series so far this year - nothing dreadful, but nothing you'd want to watch twice, either. The first half promised an interesting dialogue between the Christiean world (admittedly, a version of her novels collapsed into three dimensional Cluedo, which is at least two more dimensions than the 1990s televised version) and a huge murdering wasp; the second half, unfortunately, took a banality pill and revealed that the giant wasp was really a shape-shifting alien creature hiding in the guise of a vicar, and that all this craziness was the real reason for Christie disappearing for a while. Add some strange directorial decisions (how best to convey that Christie turned up again as an amnesiac at a hotel in Harrogate? Ah, we could have someone say it, and then cut to Christie looking confused beside a big sign saying THE HARROGATE HOTEL. Whaddya think? Too subtle?) and some rather rushed narrative twists, and the results safely veered away from the potentially fascinating collision of genres so interestingly threatened at the beginning.

I was reminded of two things watching this; firstly, Gerald Heard's 1941 crime novel A Taste for Honey, which I'd just been asked to endorse for a forthcoming reprint. Here the murderer breeds a particularly aggressive type of bees, who fatally attack anyone who comes into contact with a certain substance. On paper (well, on a website) it sounds silly, but the tone is such that the interaction between the almost science-fiction elements and the crime narrative work rather well (as I said, it's a cross between G. K. Chesterton and John Wyndham). This is where "The Unicorn and the Wasp" could have been heading, although the fact that the wasp in question was huge lends the potential of a Magritte-esque surrealism. Instead, the second thing I was reminded of while watching it was Timothy West's performance in Tales of the Unexpected back in the 1980s, where West gradually turns into a bee, complete with interspersed 'buzzes' in the dialogue. It wasn't a particularly effective narrative trick then; the fact that it was reproduced almost exactly in nu-Who doesn't make it any better, no matter how flashy your CGI is.

The Christie book titles crammed into the script didn't help, either. By the end, I wondered why they hadn't included someone called Evans, so he couldn't be asked something, or a classic Doctor Who countdown heading towards zero, or maybe a depressive called Cypress. While we're on the subject, why are Doctor Who's historical celebrities almost always literary figures (except for Queen Victoria in the second series)? I would like to see this as an underlying message of "Hey kids - reading is cool!", but I also suspect there's a hint of "Hey kids - reading is historical!", notwithstanding this episode's revelation that people will be reading Christie well into the year five million (and still with the freaky 1970s book covers, too). Perhaps next series, we could see Jimi Hendrix defeat Cybermen at Woodstock, or perhaps Syd Barrett and daleks. Actually, anything Doctor Who can come up with is probably fairly pedestrian compared to the kind of things that were running through Syd Barrett's head. But it would allow for an episode crammed full of Pink Floyd references: "You people are animals!" "We're on the dark side of the moon", "go at 'em, hearty mother!" It would be better than all the sinister corporations and gas creatures we're getting week after week, anyway.

"Hey George - High Five!": Laurie Anderson, Homeland

As promised earlier, a review of Laurie Anderson’s Homeland, which I saw at the Barbican Theatre last Friday. But before the main feature, a support act: a few words on the Barbican itself. My, it’s confusing, isn’t it? Not being completely familiar with the city end of London, a walk from Old Street soon turned into a confusing labyrinth of signs for the Barbican Centre, but all pointing in slightly different directions. This is obviously why they include a map with the tickets. Secondly, once you’ve found it, finding the appropriate entrance seems to be a matter of luck. And finally, once inside, you’re in a cultural centre of mezzanines and staircases designed by M. C. Escher. Finding the right auditorium was easy enough, but I’m sure I walked past the same ticket desk three times on the way to the toilets.

Now for the main event (and, incidentally, cheers to the Barbican/Anderson for a free programme, rather than the £10 gouge for jewellers adverts it usually is nowadays). Homeland, a song cycle on the themes of the ongoing war and national security, is stripped-down Anderson – the multimedia stuff has gone (hell, today Powerpoint makes everyone multimedia), and apart from the instruments, the stage is bare except for a couple of hundred small candles and lightbulbs hanging low from the ceiling, in much the same way as Yukio Ninagawa’s Hamlet in 2004. Typically, Anderson is not interested in rock artist ‘at last, here I am’ posturing; barely after the stage lights come up, she and the three other musicians stride on and get started. And Homeland starts brilliantly; violins competing with the rumbling bass of the groove electronics which, as promised, dominate the performance. And then there’s the voice. She sounds exactly as she does on disc (unsurprising, since apparently Bright Red was recorded with one of the most expensive microphones available), and pretty much looks the same too (no surprises in height here). The opening section, based on Aristophanes’ The Birds, moves between spoken-sung meditations on the birth of memory and a time before there was land, and a floating haunting chorus which she delivers effortlessly. Moving into ‘Bad Man’, here come the politics, the angry references to war and bombings. Anderson's status as an American - a New Yorker, no less - allows her to rip into US foreign policy with a vehemence that might seem like lazy prejudice coming from Europeans. Apparently a group of people walked out during Thursday’s performance – what did they expect? “Hey George – high five!” This is actually rather dark stuff (and as a whole, the work resembles the heavier stuff of Bright Red replayed in the style of Life on a String, in particular the pulsating electronics on “My Compensation” and “One Beautiful Evening”), and one wonders where the humour has gone. Oh, here it is, in “Only an Expert,” familiar now from numerous YouTube appearances and the closest Homeland gets to a lead-off single. But on the whole, this is serious stuff, performed passionately; Anderson really does seem disbelievingly upset at where her country has been and where it's going.

As a collection of Anderson’s new work, Homeland is compelling; as a coherent performance essay on the themes of security, information, and nation, however, it’s slightly less convincing. There are some brilliant lines (eyes "like dead stars, their light trapped in time”; similarly, the reflection that what makes the stars wonderful is that we cannot damage them, although we’re reaching for them nonetheless), and a few clunky ones (some sections of “Only an Expert”). Homeland and other stories might have been a better (if clumsier) title, because the promise of the opening section to offer an intriguing interplay between myth and the current state of the world doesn’t quite come off, although the Birds song’s thematic opposition of sky and land recurs a few times throughout the piece. ‘Heart of a Child,’ seemingly about the death of Anderson’s father (again, back to Bright Red and Life on a String here) is moving, but feels out of place. 'The Underwear Gods' (those huge people on billboards - 'always in their underwear') is funny (and the closest Anderson gets to Philip Larkin) but also seems like a sidestep. The best parts are when Anderson gets back to storytelling, and - yay! - the voice modulation comes out again when the mike gets dropped a few octaves for her to take on a male persona, acting as a kind of chorus. We're never quite sure whether this is another character in a sometimes wayward concept album (someone rueful about his own experiences in the intelligence industry, perhaps), or Anderson herself (there are brief references to working for NASA, an even briefer visual nod to the video for 'O Superman'). But these are some of the best bits, when the intellectual rock concert veneer splits open to reveal the performance art beneath, and lines such as 'Your silence will be considered consent' and 'there's trouble at the mine' gradually take on sinister undertones. There were only two of these interludes; frankly, I would have liked more, because of their potential to knit the whole piece together. But the performance ends almost as well as it begins, with "The Lost Art of Conversation," an analysis of modern alienated relationships (a bit like a pared down version of String's "Broken"), and the encore is wonderful; Anderson alone on stage playing a brief violin piece, weaving between the candles and constantly watching the audience.

Ultimately, Homeland is a superb collection of stories, but a ropey novel; the music is often fantastic, the performance compelling, but there's little sense of progression over the ninety minutes. This may, of course, be because in performance you only get to see it once, and Anderson's work is usually best appreciated after a few listenings. It's going to be released as an album next year (again, a measure of her difference from everybody else in HMV - who else would even consider touring a whole year before a release, taunting the bootleg gods?), and it'll be interesting to see if the whole thing survives as a double-disc bonanza, or if a more coherent, edited performance emerges. Either way, I'll be queuing up outside 'Music Solutions' for my copy in 2009.

What's that? You want a star rating out of five? It's not the Radio Times, fercryin' out loud. Oh, OK: ****.

In English, Brainiac

At about this time last year, I wrote a mini-essay on the imminent death of Doctor Who. And, aberrations such as Steven Moffatt's "Blink" aside, the series seems content to wander in time and mediocrity. So far this year, we've had a plot about weight loss pills that was anorexic, a so-so Pompeiian runabout, a rather better but thematically hackneyed slaves in space affair (although some rather nice direction did a lot to raise it above the competent), and last week, Doctor Who and the Narrative Autopilot. Just thinking about it is tedious, so I won't.

Instead, let's consider television for grown-ups. Ah, a new series of House is here. I say new – I’ve actually already seen three episodes as part of the in-flight entertainment on the Continental flight I mentioned a few weeks ago. Without wishing to reinforce lazy gender stereotypes (although clearly here, I do), why do Continental’s film choices have to be so obviously, well, gendered? On the flight out, the choices were Bookclub Romantic Comedy Slush and Childcare Romantic Comedy Slush, while on the way back the options were Boom Boom Smashy Bang and Witless Sports Knockabout. Do they think the US is gradually filling up with the ladies (in Houston?), while antler-locking males are hotfootin’ it to Gatwick? At least someone had the sense to rack up a few episodes of what is one of the few dramas worth watching at the moment, and which also makes it truly laughable that Torchwood is supposed to be for adults. True, the plots are often silly (she had a koala mite in her ear all the time!), but the scripts should make Russell T. Davies weep with sheer inadequacy. After all, you need to be more than competent to make the cantankerous genius model of narrative work nowadays, but House does it.

Channel Five have their mitts on it at the moment, having shaken their sharks and Nazis phase (tonite – when shazis attack), and at the beginning of the year were promoting it with Numbers (sorry, Numb3rs. You know, like Se7en or all ‘Genuine Vi4gra’) as ‘clever television.’ The idea is that both centre around intellectual heroes (and remember, in the world of television the monarch of public intellectuals is Carol Vorderman), but that’s really as far as the similarities go. A telling distinction is that while House refuses to feature a regular character whose function is to scratch his (always his) head and say “In English, brainiac,” Numb3rs is crammed full of expositionary dialogue in which the Byronic genius outlines a vaguely relevant mathematical theory, before using it as an excuse to draw a circle right in the middle of the map the FBI types were all looking at. Of course, genuinely mathematics related-crimes are few and far between, leading the writers to rely on two annoying tropes. The first is the opening sequence's banal speech that "We use math every day..." Maybe, but only in the same sense that we use physics, linguistics, biochemistry, cultural studies - in fact, pretty much anything you like - every day, and they don't get their own glossy cop show. The second is the amazingly flexible definition of mathematics, primarily in the fact that one week our hero will be working with imaginary numbers, the next with turbulent flow, which makes as much sense as J. Hillis Miller, P. I being about Dickens one week and Piers Plowman the next.

There are also consequences for narrative. It seems that mathematics and detective fiction should naturally go together; there are tempting connections to be made between investigative paradigms, the solving of problems. In practice, however, the marriage is often a misjudgement of Liza Minelli proportions. The mathematician narrator of John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man never really shows us his analytic stuff; Guillermo Martinez's The Oxford Murders is fairly dire (and, christ on a pedalo, they've made it into a film), offering us a supposed mathematical genius who is stumped by a child's puzzle and, bizarrely, no real reason for why this mayhem should be happening in Oxford and not, say, Nuneaton. The good news is that the novel is full of ciphers; the bad news, they're the main characters. Ultimately, this all comes down to the fact that while maths and detection look good together, behind closed doors they have marital arguments of, well, Liza Minelli proportions. Modern crime fiction insists on focusing on the psychology of crime, its individuality. Critics of the genre are rapidly growing tired of all the Foucauldian disciplinary pessimism and returning to the genre's embrace of the romanticist troubled soul as the root of criminal mystery. This isn't to reinstate some tired argument that science doesn't capture the mysteries of human consciousness, just to say that crime fiction and determinism don't get along, because if criminals turn out to be so predictable, then pursuing them is simply dull. And this is where Numb3rs is behind the game; whenever Charlie suddenly realises that the criminal's movements can be determined and - the real kicker - predicted, as if the psycho were a variable rather than an actual person, then it's time to turn off. Who needs psychology or depth of character when you have graph paper?

Terminal disease

Calm down, doughnutfans - I mean dis-ease, but I thought the cute use of punctuation in the title to undermine conventional meaning might be just too nauseatingly deconstructionist for the more delicate of you. I refer, of course, to the current Spencerian (Frank, not Herbert) management at Heathrow Terminal 5, and British Airways more generally. Whether it's losing the luggage of an entire small town, getting tangled up with caterers who sack their staff by megaphone, fixing prices or having their pilots go on strike, British Airways are rapidly becoming the Norman Wisdom of the skies. The world's favourite airline - if you like to point and laugh.

One of the effects of the embarrassment over Terminal 5 has been to entrench even more deeply a widespread scorn of Heathrow in general, one which I've always found rather unfair. In fact, I rather like airports. The first sentence of Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul suggests that "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport,'" which is witty enough, but also misses the point. Airports are never going to be architectural white knuckle rides, for two reasons (conveniently enough, arrivals and departures). Arrivals: no tourist economy is going to survive a situation whereby the airport is more fantastically exciting than the country outside (hence, no log flume at LAX or Quasar at Gatwick, notwithstanding the immediate appeal of thirty people lumbering around a smoky room with their hand luggage). Departures: let's not forget that the anodyne aesthetics of the airport are really a prelude to what remains the spectacular experience of actually taking off (hardened travellers with their nerves cauterised by enough air miles to take them to the moon might consider times when the plane has lurched unexpectedly when 'scaping the surly bonds of earth to punch god on the nose) and being a stupid height above the ground. In fact, it's at the airport ends when flight becomes most interesting, when the pedestrian view of the landscape suddenly unfolds into panoptic mode, when it turns from a postcard into a map.

The other accusations are that airports are boring and uniform. But, with the exception of seven hours in Chicago O'Hare (a reflection on the sheer mass of time waiting, not on O'Hare itself, although they generally need better bookshops), I can't remember ever being bored in an airport. This may be down to the fact that I've usually got something to read, but I prefer to think that it's the influence of a steady and ambient tension. How boring can a place be when there are people walking around with guns? And, furthermore, walking around with guns because there may be other people with guns, or something more devastating? In his recent (and rather controversial) collection The Second Plane, Martin Amis makes the observation that global terrorism really led to a rise in its opposite - global tedium, as we all spend longer waiting in the same lines to be asked the same questions, those thirty or so seconds replicated around the world thousands of times and adding up to whole years of boredom. The irony is funny, but at the same time there's an undertone that security should really just be for the tanned and turbanned. It's the annoyance of guys who look a bit like Peter Ackroyd at having to take their shoes off at Heathrow for less than a minute - what now? I don't believe this - and their luggage innumerate wives (I love the social precision of the announcements that make it quite explicit that "a lady's handbag" constitutes one item). They see the strict division of airport space (before and after security) as an encroachment of the police state, without realising that all public spaces (and a good few private ones) are already pretty much parcelled out for various types of social utility. That's the good thing about the use of space in airports; the honesty is refreshing. Incidentally, on the pre- and post-security divide, why is it always a strikingly nicer environment after security? They've got you by then - at this point, you're either ending your visit in a plane, a van, or a bag. You wouldn't have thought they'd have bothered by then, but seemingly without fail it's lighter, more open, and generally less of a scrum.

As for airports being uniform... I've seen enough American ones to pick out the differences. Sacramento's two terminals seem to be embodying some kind of historical tension, one of them a typical NorCal hippy child of the sixties, the other all chrome and glass. The McNamara terminal at Detroit Fort Wayne offers the rare experience of standing at one end of a room and not being able to see the other; it's about 1.3 miles long, a gigantic parody of a baronial banquet hall (it's disappointing to get to the other side and find there isn't a huge pig on a spit, revolving in front of the plate glass, although the salt could easily be passed by the internal monorail). Passport control at San Francisco is weirdly quiet; Las Vegas, inevitably, has slot machines at departures and the huge windows on the desert just seem like cinema. As for the UK, this is where I stick up for Heathrow again, as opposed to its less well-to-do sibling Gatwick. My experiences of Heathrow (admittedly, mostly limited to Terminal 3) have all been pretty fair. Gatwick, if you want to get psychogeographical about it, seems to be at some confluence of bad juju and worse weather (flying into there in January, we descended right into the middle of a storm so bad that planes on the ground were refusing to take off , leaving us to make numerous futile, bumpy and vomitous approaches for half an hour). Heathrow, by both M4 and underground, acts as the gateway to London; Gatwick seems to be simultaneously in the middle of nowhere and handy for Croydon. The shuttle buses are a spectacular rip off, even for airport transport; my wife and I once paid £5 to be taken around a corner before disembarking at a hotel from which we could quite clearly see our original bus stop. We walked back the next day, one area in which Gatwick scores over the siege mentality of Heathrow - they'd still let the trojan horse in, though, because it was on wheels. What Gatwick need to do now (as if there were any real competition between the two) is capitalise on the terminal 5 debacle, which they've already started with their South Terminal redevelopment. If enough of us ask, they'll put in Quasar.

The Californian Bookselling Massacre

Bad news this week, bibliophiles (at least, those of you in Northern California). A paltry week or so after adding the link for Woodland's Next Chapter bookshop over there to your left, comes the news that the shop is to close. Read all (or rather, in internet friendly newschunk format) about it here, thanks to the Sacramento Bee:

http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/775661.html

All right - but we'll still be able to go to Bogey's Books in nearby Davis for second hand literary goodies, yes? Well, no:

http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/487057.html

Thanks again Sacramento Bee, bringer of depressing news, although it's also nice to see that this counts as news, rather than the minutiae of football that constitutes important information over here. I suppose the BBC might have covered this, but only if they had a programme about it to publicise. And I thought the licence fee was there for a reason, i.e. to avoid incessant corporate advertising and rip-offs of ITV talent shows. Ah well.

But this is beside the immediate point. Naturally (since I wouldn't be writing about it otherwise), these closures are saddening, since these two shops in particular formed a large part of my time in Yolo county (also: apricot pie from Raley's, though not their fried chicken, which is of British standards; cobbler from the Memorial Union at UC Davis; and In-n-Out. Honestly, I'm only overweight by the smallest medically defined amount). The Next Chapter in particular will be missed, since my wife and I lived a few blocks away from it, and it contributed a good many of my memories of Northern California. For instance, finally finding a copy of Georges Perec's A Void (all right Oulipo purists, La Disparition) there. Or just English amazement at being able to go second hand book shopping at eight in the evening (once you get back here, opening hours seem somehow prudish, and late night opening once a week before Christmas is no longer the glimpse of stocking it once might have been). And the smell of the place, a combination of books, coffee and, just to stop that being a hackneyed combination, American wood. It did, after all, use to be a hardware store. And yes, American wood smells different, as does the slightly differently sized paper. Hell, the whole country has a hint of cinnamon about it, especially the airports. As for the bookshop, I always intended to pop back once I'd got a proper academic job and pick up that set of E. W. Hornung they had ($15 a volume is pretty good, but not quite on a graduate student salary). For now I'll just have to get round to reading the copy of Roy Vickers' The Department of Dead Ends I got for $2.50.

Bogey's wasn't quite so central to my Californian life, but still pretty important (and useful for picking up some John Dickson Carr as well).For some reason, the memory of walking there one evening after a day spent in the library at UC Davis in December 2005 has particularly stuck in my mind, like a Wordsworthian 'spot of time' but with slightly better weather. I even sold them a few books as well, but not very good ones (I suspect my copy of Mick Jackson's Five Boys was still there at the end), so maybe I should feel a little complicit in the closure. Or we could just blame Borders around the corner. Yeah, let's.