Boring Like A Drill.

I don’t plan on touching a computer until Wednesday. The subject and name indices will be updated for February next week sometime, along with further momentary diversions.

Ben Watson, a middle-aged adolescent in an op-shop jacket complete with a few stray badges on the lapels, his uncut hair swaying gently from his receding hariline, lightly crept from table to table, reciting glossolalic poetry written earlier in the day. In pauses between verses, his 18 month old daughter stood in her mother’s lap and applauded theatrically. Beside the bar, someone else’s kid wandered up to the piano in the back corner, and gently draped himself across the keyboard in affectations of ennui, accompanying the poetry with dense, plangent chords at irregular intervals.

The literary world (pretty much like the real world only with worse dress sense) is rocked by the shocking findings of a survey of everybody in the whole wide world, even that really old bloke down the road who never leaves his house and you thought was dead: people feel good about books that make them feel good.

“That does it!” vowed one author who asked to remain anonymous. “From now on I’m only going to write books people like.”

The other survey findings include: everyone’s favourite book was that one they saw on TV last month. Other favourites include books that shed unsightly flab from you thighs and abdomen while you read, and books that shower you with a delicious assortment of chocolates whenever you open them (soft centres only).

Men liked books about guns, while women preferred novels with bright pastel covers.

More importantly, the survey confirmed that you should never, ever trust a librarian’s taste in books. It looks like they’ve given up on last year’s attempt to pretend they’re sexy and relevant and have gone back to telling everyone to read To Kill a Mockingbird. Well, at least someone in authority finally had the guts to step up, put their reputation on the line and dare to make approving comments about this book. You VILL enjoy this book! It is Helen Darville’s favourite!

The second most librarian-suggested book is the Bible. I wonder how many of these librarians said that the Bible is the only book they recommend, ever; whether it’s for a punter looking for the rack of Star Trek novels or a kid researching a school project about ants. Where was this survey conducted? Please say Iran.

In unrelated news, TMFTML offers free advice to James Frey on how to revive his career:

May we suggest the concept for your next book? In A Million Supposedly Fun Things I Never Did Before, you go back and actually do all the stuff you said you did in Pieces (i.e., get root canal without novocaine, board a plane covered in puke, drive some girl to suicide, etc.) and then write about it. Trust us, A.J. Jacobs and other purveyors of gimmick lit will have nothing on you. Oprah will once again be eating out of your hand. Assuming you don’t get it cut off in a bar fight.

Also, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, and J.R.R. Tolkein. I’m not sure if they have anything to do with the above but apparently you can’t write a book article these days without mentioning them. Hopefully by xmas everyone – well, people with healthy social lives, anyway – will have forgotten about Tolkein again, which will make all our lives just that little bit easier.

Like every other visitor to the Tate Modern over the past few months, I took some photographs of Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment in the Turbine Hall. You can see plenty of shots on Flickr, just search for “Whiteread”. So here are my contributions: some photos of people looking at people looking at Embankment.

Whiteread is known for making casts of spaces, making otherwise invisible interiors (literally) concrete. Her most famous work, House, cast the interior of an entire terrace house, a few minutes down the road from the Bunker. Her recent, avowedly Public Artworks, such as her inverted plinth in Trafalgar Square, have taken on more of the characteristics of objects in themselves, rather than denoting the significance of the space the object now fills.

Embankment is made of thousands of casts of several old, cardboard boxes. Because the casts are obviously box-like, hollow, translucent, the boxes themselves were evidently empty. Unlike Whiteread’s previous works, these objects refute the idea of an interior life once contained by the cast’s host.

At first it’s nice that you can walk amongst it, but then you realise it’s killing the mystery. It feels like a timid sop to populism, like the way that tourists visiting the Big Pineapple (or Uluru for that matter) are granted the opportunity to climb to the top. Part of House‘s impact was that it was impossible to enter: her earlier works were spaces with no insides.