{"id":961,"date":"2010-06-03T15:34:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-03T22:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/06\/the-twisted-mind-of-geoff-nicholson.html"},"modified":"2010-06-03T15:34:00","modified_gmt":"2010-06-03T22:34:00","slug":"the-twisted-mind-of-geoff-nicholson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/06\/the-twisted-mind-of-geoff-nicholson.html","title":{"rendered":"The Twisted Mind of Geoff Nicholson"},"content":{"rendered":"
THE Los Angeles-based novelist and recovering Englishman <\/span>Geoff Nicholson<\/span><\/a> had a smart, counter-intuitive and <\/span>oddly funny essay<\/a>\u00a0in Sunday\u2019s New York Times Book Review about his passion for old Guinness Books of Records and “the joys of outdated information.”<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Geoff, whose book <\/span>The Lost Art of Walking<\/span><\/i> I like very much, was part of a small posse I ran with at Guadalajara\u2019s International Festival of Books a few months ago. The piece brought back the Sheffield native\u2019s slightly skewed and generous way of looking at things. Here\u2019s my Q+A with the man himself.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/a>1. <\/span>Sunday’s piece was quite charming. What fascinates you about outdated or discredited information?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The piece is partly about the joys of old encyclopedias.\u00a0 I find the whole idea of the encyclopedia, a book or set of books containing everything worth knowing, a fascinating and in many ways a very attractive one.\u00a0 It suggests stability, eternal truths, the power of facts, etc.\u00a0 But of course our ideas of what\u2019s worth knowing and what\u2019s worth including in an encyclopedia, even of what\u2019s a \u201cfact,\u201d are changing all the time \u2013 in the case of Wikipedia, on a minute by minute basis.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And it seems to me that by being so thoroughly inclusive, Wikipedia is heading towards some Borgesian notion of an encyclopedia that contains everything in the world, and is in some sense the same as the world, like a map on a one to one scale.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I also find it quite instructive, for example, to read in my 1969 World Book Encyclopedia that \u201cMost Angelenos are American\u2014born whites.\u201d\u00a0 I don\u2019t think we\u2019d put it quite that way now, would we?\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a02. <\/span>I was pleased to see a reference to my <\/span>school-librarian wife<\/span><\/a> and her struggles to get kids to sort out facts from conspiracy theory. What drew you to include this?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Well partly because, my English grammar school didn\u2019t have a full-time school librarian.\u00a0 Certain teachers volunteered or got forced into it, and I don\u2019t recall they did much more than tell you to sit down, shut up and get on with your reading – which is perhaps not the worst advice to library users.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0English grammar schools of that period, or at least mine, were a nightmare.\u00a0 All male, both teachers and pupils.\u00a0 Joyless, cold, Philistine, and very strict though not to any obvious end, least of all educational. The idea that somebody might teach us \u201cresearch skills\u201d would have been a fantasy beyond comprehension.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Even so, our school library was a place I spent a lot of time, a place of refuge in a way.\u00a0 I still dream about it once in a while, and within the dream I always wonder why I haven\u2019t been back in so long.\u00a0\u2028\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

3. <\/span>You run an intriguing blog about food and culture — <\/span><\/i>Psycho-Gourmet<\/span><\/i><\/a>. Tell us a little about it.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

The subtitle is \u201cruminations on food, and its relationship with sex, decadence, obsession and the madness of the mouth,\u201d which remains my best stab at describing it.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0After I\u2019d written The Lost Art of Walking (which has been, I suppose, my \u201cgreatest hit\u201d) I was looking round for another non-fiction subject and food seemed a good one, given my interests and the world\u2019s. So it started as a kind of public notebook to work with some material that might turn into a book.\u00a0 And it might yet.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t want it to be restaurant reviews, and I didn\u2019t want to give my mom\u2019s rhubarb pie recipe, so I let it go where it would, and after a while it took on a life of its own and it turned into the quirky, occasionally dark and overripe smorgasbord you see today.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

4. <\/span>So you do and don’t have a new book out?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Well, my latest novel <\/span>Gravity\u2019s Volkswagen<\/span><\/i> was published in England in the second half of last year, by a small interesting publisher, Harbour Books.\u00a0\u00a0 As an Englishman, it\u2019s nice to be published in England. As an American resident, it\u2019s slightly galling that it\u2019s not published here.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/a>\u00a0It got some great reviews, but didn\u2019t cause as much of a stir as I\u2019d have liked it to.\u00a0\u00a0 It isn\u2019t a mighty tome, but you know, there are no small novels, only small advances.\u00a0 It struck me as fun and commercial and culty, and potentially cinematic, but I guess the author is never the best judge of these things.\u00a0\u2028\u00a0\u2028\u00a0\u2028\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

5. <\/span>You close your essay with a reference to Douglas Adams of <\/span><\/i>The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy<\/span>. You knew him a bit, didn’t you?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Yes.\u00a0 I knew Douglas fairly well for a very short time, then I\u2019d see him once every 5 years or so and he\u2019d bring me up to date on what he\u2019d been doing, which of course got ever more glamorous.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0We were both at Cambridge.\u00a0 He was only one year older than me (as I now see by checking Wikipedia) but he was a few years ahead in terms of college.\u00a0 So by the time I was graduating he’d been away to do great things – including write with Graham Chapman of Monty Python – but it had all gone a bit flat – and he’d come back to direct the end of term Footlights show.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 I know Footlights has quite a reputation (Peter Cook, John Cleese, Hugh Laurie et al), but at that time \u2013 mid 70s – it seemed to me to be just incredibly unhip and old fashioned, but I did do some writing for that show (I believe the words \u201cgood career move\u201d may have been invoked), and I saw a lot of Douglas at that time.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 After that we largely lost touch, but every once in a while I’d see him walking down the street in London – and I’d ask what he was up to, and first it was writing for Dr Who, and then he had this idea for a SF comedy radio show, which seemed like a real shot in the dark.\u00a0 And the rest of course is history.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Photo credit: Naomi Harris<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
—<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE Los Angeles-based novelist and recovering Englishman Geoff Nicholson had a smart, counter-intuitive and oddly funny essay\u00a0in Sunday\u2019s New York Times Book Review about his passion for old Guinness Books of Records and “the joys of outdated information.” Geoff, whose book The Lost Art of Walking I like very much, was part of a small […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[88,240,34,30],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-961","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-brit-culture","7":"category-libraries","8":"category-literary","9":"category-los-angeles","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}