The Play Ethic

Big Babies, Rejuveniles and the limitations of 'growing up'

The Independent just published a version of my review of Micheal Bywater's Big Babies: why don't we just grow up (Granta). I had so many problems  with it, as a thesis, in its stylistics (never mind the barely suppressed patriarchalism-blending-into-misogyny). The newspaper version is a little cut-down, so I'm putting the original review in extended post below.

As an alternative to this 'Grumbulist Manifesto' - apart from The Play Ethic - let me point you to Christopher Noxon's growing empire around Rejuveniles. And for a youthful, creative, playful sensibility given its proper infrastructural due - rather than slagged off as consumer narcissism - I'd strongly recommend Charles Leadbeater's coming book, We-Think. I read his article in the FT this morning, and I half-thought I'd written it myself...

My books of the year

My books of the year for the Sunday Herald (not online, so reproduced here):

A strange year of non-trendy reading, squeezed around musical projects. Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976 (Fourth Estate) does exactly what it says on the tin, and reminded me (like I needed reminding) of just how impure the sources of the purest pop can be. From Edinburgh University, Claire Colbrook's Gilles Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum) also realizes its promise about the most difficult of modern French philosophers. And some fiction (though not enough): Jonathan Raban's Surveillance (Picador) is like Dickens revived to witness the Age of Terror; and Micheal Gardiner's Escalator (Polygon) is an elegant collection of short stories about life in Tokyo, from one of the most original minds in Scotland.