Researchers – DaneCobain.com

Stevyn Colgan – Joined-Up Thinking | Review

Title: Joined-Up Thinking

Author: Stevyn Colgan

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 254

Rating: 8/10

Stevyn Colgan – Joined-Up Thinking

I first heard about Stevyn Colgan after a friend suggested that I should invite him to be a speaker at the writers’ group that I’m organising. He’s a local writer who’s attained a certain level of success, winning praise from Stephen Fry and Q.I. creators John Lloyd and John Mitchinson – in fact, Colgan went on to become an Elf on the show, a term that’s used to describe their researchers.

Because of this, I already knew quite a lot of the facts that Colgan includes in the book – many of them were recycled and used within the show, and I’ve watched every episode multiple times. That said, it didn’t really matter, because Colgan’s point here is that everything’s connected – he’s effectively using the six degrees of separation with facts.

For example, he may begin by explaining how to hypnotise a chicken, then relate that to chicken nuggets, then relate that to the gold rush, then relate that to the song Gold by Spandau Ballet, and then it might transpire that the lead singer for Spandau Ballet (Tony Hadley) keeps pet chickens.

Now, that’s a hypothetical example, and Colgan is much better at making links than I am, but it does illustrate how the book is laid out. In fact, every single chapter, including the final chapter which houses the acknowledgements and dedications, is written in a loop. Must’ve been challenging to plan, but it’s well-executed.

Stevyn Colgan

Click here to buy Joined-Up Thinking.

Allen Ginsberg – The Letters of Allen Ginsberg | Review

July 30, 2014 danecobain

Authors F-J (By Surname)Non-Fiction

Title: The Letters of Allen Ginsberg

Author: Allen Ginsberg

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 468

Rating: 6/10

Allen Ginsberg – The Letters of Allen Ginsberg

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Allen Ginsberg and beat writers in general, but this book was a little heavy even for me – as with most collections of letters, it’s better suited to scholars and researchers, who can dip in and out to source references for their essays. Reading it from cover to cover took a lot of time, and I’ll confess that I had to do it over the course of a year, reading only one or two letters at a time.

Ginsberg and his pals often wrote in a sort of code, a bizarre dialect which was populated with obscure references and in-jokes that only the recipients of the letters could really understand – even with hefty annotations, it’s often a struggle to understand what’s being talked about, which was probably precisely what the great poet intended. You really feel like an interloper, as if you’ve dug the letters out of someone’s drawer when they weren’t looking – you feel like you don’t belong, and it’s a weird feeling to have when you’re trying to read a book.

That said, there are some fascinating insights here that you won’t find anywhere else, and Ginsberg writes to such notable beat figures as William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Lucien Carr, as well as his long-term lover Peter Orlovsky. In a way, it’s sad to think that his generation was one of the last to use letters to their fullest – will the equivalent become a book of e-mails in the future, or even worse, instant messaging logs?

Allen Ginsberg

I wouldn’t bother picking this up if you’re only a casual reader of Ginsberg – it’s far too much, and you won’t enjoy it. If you’ve read literally all of his other books, though, then I guess you have no choice – you’ve read enough to have graduated to his letters, and you’ll understand them much more when they’re placed in the context of his wider body of work.

Credit is due, however, to Bill Morgan, the book’s editor – he’s done all of the research so you don’t have to, and without his footnotes and observations, you’d really struggle to understand what’s happening. Morgan was Ginsberg’s literary archivist for many years and has even written a biography called I Celebrate Myself, so he knows what he’s doing – this isn’t his first work on a collection of letters, either. He also worked on the Selected Letters of Gregory Corso, and so editing together the thoughts of crazy writers isn’t new to him.

There’s not much left to say, but I’d be interested to know what you think if you read it – tweet me and let me know.