Finding out about podcasts, how to use them, what equipment (I would say “kit” but somehow that makes me smile and squirm a bit) do I need and do I just want a player ? So far have managed to download 3 programmes, including one about the architecture of the New York Subway System, another called Americana with Matt Frei from the BBC talking to Americans in his Washington studio about a wide range of subjects. I look forward to having access to such stuff when and where I like which doesn’t mean being near the computer, as well as sometimes using the computer to “Listen Again” on the BBC  to their matchless output. BBCi is already a favourite source of entertainment.

Spent 2 hours on Thursday with F Scott Fitzgerald in our course – Into the Jazz Age: American Art and Literature 1900 – 1930 – run by Keele University at Silverdale Library. Introduced by our great tutor John Toft, the man was depicted, dissected, discussed, delighted in, debated and distributed in the form of extracts from Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby. Clive James includes eloquent praise for Fitzgerald in his Cultural Amnesia, putting into words whatever it was I thought or felt about him without knowing it and then some. Someone mentioned the shirts scene in Gatsby and away we went for a humorous minute led by John on the subject of his own shirt collection! Then I missed most of the next 20 minutes as he asked if anyone knew the name of the actor who played Tom Buchanan in the 1974 movie and I knew but couldn’t get the name off the tip of my brain. By the break, we had gathered the phrase “American Dream” to find out the origin of, too. Get Bruce Dern from memory, but this one’s going to be a search engine job.

I am really enjoying this collection. The stories transport me in a few lines to whichever part of America they are set in and I’m usually there without a break ’til the end of the story. This isn’t the same as the ‘sense of place’ so often commented on by writers on Faulkner and others, as Wolff moves easily from desert to suburb to city as he tells us of his characters’ troubles, delights and then often more troubles, usually of the spirit. His endings for me form a major part of the experience as they ripple out beyond the last sentence into the silence in which I gaze up the garden or out into the night while the story’s effect endures.

So Borders the bookshop chain is closing down. The branch in Brighton was heaving this weekend with bargain-hunters like me looking for the best stuff on which to apply their 40% sale discount. Settled on The Family Mashber by Der Nister, a collection of Tobias Wolff‘s stories called Our Story Begins and a Lonely Planet City Guide to Chicago. Hoping to go there sometime before the end of the decade. Only ever flown into and out of the airport. Been to New York, Syracuse, Memphis, San Francisco, Portland Oregon, Seattle, Vancouver, Lancaster County and State College Pennsylvania, Cape Cod, Oxford Mississippi, Asheville NC, Appomattox, Montreal, Toronto and many other interesting parts of  North America – nothing against Chicago, just ain’t got round to it yet.   Been interested in ‘Border Studies’ since doing a Diploma in HE in American Studies at Staffordshire University back in the 1990s. Wrote an essay then on the clash of cultures around the Mexico – USA highly porous border. Wonder if I still have it somewhere? I thought it was quite good at the time.  (American Studies was closed down at Staffordshire Uni several years ago).  Posted a comment on Jeff Newberry’s Muse of Fire blog mentioning The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He lives in Georgia, USA. A bit of border crossing going on there, indeed. What’s a border on the internet? And then there’s Cormac McCarthy’s western novels, from Blood Meridian to No Country for Old Men.

After rather miserably finishing off our look at The Waste Land this Thursday, it was good to move swiftly on to My Antonia by Willa Cather. What a great book, we are already with Jim Burden arriving after a few lines  at the remote railway station of Black Hawk and off into the lives of the immigrants to Nebraska. Antonia is an unforgettable woman; the writing is unforgettable and passes my test of taking your breath away every so often. After a reading of any of this book I always want to, and often do, go to the DVD of Michael Cimino‘s Heaven’s Gate and watch again all the scenes of the Bohemian immigrants, their struggles, their fun times and their magnificent battle with the landowner’s hired army.  The film has had a poor reputation which is still only partly improved with time, but I love it for its many aspects of good film making and, of course, it takes me, like My Antonia, to a part of America I have yet to see for real. It’s set in Wyoming not Nebraska, but that doesn’t matter. What’s not to like about Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Walken  and Jeff Bridges; and it even has T-Bone Burnett running the band at the roller-skate dance. And it’s a very ‘brown’ film which is what my son calls all the movies I like. His book has been reviewed from one Marxist perspective.

The Wednesday morning Keele ‘Continuing and Professional Education’ class today featured The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).  Hard going to read this for me, but rewarding on looking back at and through it with the group. I decided Howells – or at least as evidenced in this book – was a bit of a leftie, if not even an armchair Marxist. This last paragraph from the book seems to convey the conditions/consciousness dialectic of Marxism, as Silas reflects on whether he has any regrets: “About what I done? Well, it don’t always seem as if I done it…Seems sometimes as if it was a hole opened for me, and I crept out of it. I don’t know… as I should always say it paid; but if I done it, and the thing was to do over again, right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it.” An excellent study of social class, with observations through his characters’ actions and thoughts that are as recognisable in today’s society as they evidently were in the Boston of the 1880s.

Too long, many thought, but this may be a function of such works being first published in serialised form.