GENERATION XYZ

Just arrived in the post: a copy of Dr Frank's debut novel, King Dork, the story of a high school loser whose life is transformed by The Catcher In The Rye. One of my happiest memories of last year was sharing a beer with Frank Portman in a grungy San Francisco bar where, to my ears at least, all the music sounded like the Ramones. (I even started to enjoy it after a while. Who'd have thought that was possible?)

Looking forward to reading the book. The first thing that caught my eye was the glossary at the back. Very funny:

Hemisemidemiquaver: many guitar players believe the object of the game is to play as many of these as possible, leaving as few spaces as they can for the entire song.

The Ramones: if you can pull off the juvenile delinquent style when you are in your thirties and beyond, you are doing all right. The eighth-greatest rock and roll band of all time.

Stalin: Russian communist dictator who managed to thin out the Russian and Eastern European population considerably, earning him the admiration and gratitude of a small but irritatingly vocal segment of The Most Annoying Generation. A lot of them are a little embarrassed by this, now that he has fallen from favour, an embarrassment they will often celebrate by avoiding the subject, buying a sports car, smoking a joint or taking out the recycling.

There's an on-line discography too. How cool is that?

While we're on the subject of youthful rebelliousness, here's another first-time novelist, Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal:

Groovy white liberals can pose serious problems to ethnic minorities in this country. They contributed to some of the most enjoyable and least productive moments of my childhood. I went to an all-boys comprehensive school in Ealing... We’d often get a fresh-faced, idealistic teacher who had no doubt read Marx and Malcolm X and done an elective in post-colonial theory at polytechnic. We ate those suckers alive.

Comments

[Dr. Frank]

Hey, Clive - glad to see the book finally arrived. That was a fun time at the 500 Club. We should do it again sometime.

cheers/F