The NY Times’ Dwight Garner on Paul Bowles and The Sheltering Sky:

Rereading “The Sheltering Sky” today is to be reminded of its dark, largely sublimated power; from its first pages the novel is like a pile of kindling to which a match is about to be applied. Bowles’s sun-baked prose, while never showy, is consistently and ruthlessly evocative. North African vegetation is described as “a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred.”

I’ve reread The Sheltering Sky more times than I can remember—more times, I imagine, than any other novel—and despite its darkness (or perhaps because of it) Bowles’s post-war novel of yanquis adrift in North Africa remains one of my favourites, top ten. For many writers, “darkness” is merely gratuitous, a vanity; for Bowles, darkness was the only way he could honestly examine lives:

If I stress the various facets of unhappiness, it is because I believe unhappiness should be studied very carefully . . . You must watch your universe as it cracks above your head.

With a worldview like that, you’ll never be let down.

Jeremy Clarkson explains in his own inimitable way the seduction of the automobile and the need to dream of owning (and the need for) supercars in a world increasingly being taken over by shite Priuses in his review of the Lamborghini LP560-4 Spyder:

We just went up that smooth, brilliant road with the roof down and me looking at the stars flying by as though we were on the Starship Enterprise’s observation deck. It was, I think, the most enjoyable drive of my life: to be in a car that good, with its V10 bark echoing off the limestone and a bit of Steely Dan on the stereo, doing about a million with a man who truly knows what he’s doing at the wheel. This is what those of a Guardian disposition don’t understand: that a car can be a tool but it can also be so much more. It can be a heart-starter, it can be a drug, it can be a piece of art, it can stir your soul and it can get you from Marbella to Ronda before the bar closes. . . .

Running a supercar as your day-to-day transport is like hacking out on Desert Orchid or moving to one of those all-glass modern houses or being married to Jordan or living entirely on haute cuisine. They aren’t really designed for real life. They’re designed for dreaming, and that’s why I wrote that Aston Martin piece for Top Gear. It’s why I selected Brian Eno’s track An Ending as the score. It’s why the director, Nigel Simpkiss, spent so much time and effort on the pictures. We wanted to highlight the dangers of what the anti-speed lobby and the pressure groups and the government’s eco fools are doing. It’s one thing removing our freedom to live the life we want to live. But now they are waging war on our freedom to dream.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again here. I don’t really want a Lamborghini Gallardo. But I don’t want to live in a world where it doesn’t exist.

Amen.

Independent publisher Mark Batty isn’t worried:

What you read on the Kindle is all gray—a few shades of relatively low-resolution gray. It’s always set in Caecilia, not a bad font in its own right, but what you get on the screen is words, not design. Whether your reading matter is racy, mind-numbingly violent, ingeniously obtuse or an auto parts list, it all looks the same. A purpose of type is to help evoke appropriate feeling though a pleasing but unobtrusive design. The fact that the Kindle can’t do this today indicates that it is not yet a book at all.

The Kindle and its e-ilk certainly have their purposes; this b-reader, however, has yet to discover them.

Just the other day, as we drove through ultra-pretentious Newport Beach, I noted to The Wife that the name ‘Flemings’ for a restaurant was pretty awful. ‘After all,’ I said with a puerile glint in my eye, ‘would you go to a restaurant named “Diary”?’ (Is there a restaurant called ‘Diary’? I certainly hope not.)

Seems Jay Rayner has similar problems with poorly named restaurants:

Personally I think that [the worst restaurant name in history] accolade should go to Ken Hom’s Yellow River group, a name that brings to mind nothing more than a trail of piss. . . .

I’ve always loved the name Chez Bruce, because nobody can take that too seriously. Yes, the restaurant is a very accomplished, classical joint doing really good things with good ingredients. But it really isn’t up itself, and the hinged frenchiness of ‘chez’ with the blokey Bruce tells you all you need to know.

It doesn’t take much for me to reject a restaurant. I typically give a restaurant one chance to impress. Which is unfair. So what? That chance also includes the name.

At least get me through the front door and seated before you disappoint me.

Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill whinges through his Chamberlain moment:

Assurances had been given by the Libyan Government that [Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi’s] return would be dealt with in a low-key and sensitive fashion. Advance notice of my decisions was given to the UK and US Governments so that they could seek similar assurances.

Naïvete knows no bounds.

Trust is an awfully important thing to be given (away) so stupidly.

Less than two weeks away from Provence and pétanque and pastis:

It is the quintessential French pastime uniting millions around dusty courts and bottles of aniseed liqueur. Now la pétanque—boules—has been elevated to a higher plane by a Buddhist master, who has been hailed across France for his theory that the activity is a helpful tool for meditation.

I think a little meditation’s just what the doctor would order for our frazzled nerves—especially if it came in a pill form and he could charge an arm and a leg for it.

Isn’t it nice that the best medicine only costs an aeroplane ticket—or a train ticket, a bus ticket, a full tank of petrol in your own car—and comes with none of the usual side effects?

Nota bene:

You look at a dozen men, each of them not by any means detestable and not uninteresting, for each of them would have technical details of their affairs to impart; you formed them into a Government or a club and at once, with oppressions, inaccuracies, gossip, backbiting, lying, corruptions and vileness, you had the combination of wolf, tiger, weasel and louse-covered ape that was human society.

And people wonder why I choose solitude.