Apathy for the Devil Read Online Free PDF

made it her business to compel me to seek solace in books and enlarge my basic attention span in the process. I would have already started perusing the self-styled ‘new journalism’ tomes that had sprung up over the past ten years.
    Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was the first-a great book. Capote had a marked influence on me - particularly his celebrity profiles. He truly got Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe to open up in print and give voice to their personal vulnerabilities. In a way you could sense Capote was also betraying their confidence by revealing their intimate bar-talk to his readers in such a naked light, but it was a warranted invasion of privacy, made with a flawless insight into the human frailties that lurk behind the surreal world of celebritydom.

    I was certainly intrigued by Tom Wolfe’s dandified upper-echelon hipspeak prose style and provocative choice of then-contemporary cultural fetishes to unleash it on. But the tome that really fired me up that year was James Joyce’s Ulysses , the greatest book ever written. It was a tough nut to crack, involving at least six months of daily reading sessions and the added necessity of having to constantly consult two separate reference books that broke down into minute detail all the labyrinthine complexities lurking in each and every sentence of the text. Ulysses focused on just twenty-four hours in the lives of three Dublin residents at the turn of the last century, revealing their every hidden thought and impulse as they whimsically grapple with their destinies. Whilst writing it, Joyce found a way to penetrate the complex innermost workings of the human imagination and evoke them sublimely in the printed word. He ripped open the floodgates whence the whole ‘stream of consciousness’ aesthetic was sired. In a sense, it was a pioneering artefact of the psychedelic impulse because - if you only took the time to log into its many-layered meaningful-ness - it was guaranteed to blow your mind and stimulate new insights into the world of artistic expression. To borrow a line that the News of the World - Britain’s leading tabloid of the day - used to run at the head of every issue, ‘All human life is there.’
    My months spent doggedly digesting the full importance of Ulysses seemed to impress my English teacher, who then took it upon himself to persuade my parents that I should aim for a place at either Oxford or Cambridge University. This involved staying on at school for an extra term in order to sit a special entrance exam. It was probably just as well: my A-level results ended up being nothing to boast about.
    In late October I took the test, flaunting my newly acquired
Joycean insights throughout one essay and attempting to pinpoint the cause of Virginia Woolf’s obsession with depression and boredom in her various novels in the second. Both were pretentious screeds unworthy of serious consideration. I sensed as much in early December when I was interviewed by a lecturer at Queen’s College, Oxford, who wasted little time in further acquainting me with my shortcomings as a literary analyst. Those dreaming spires wouldn’t be housing my sorry hide, I quickly concluded. I wouldn’t be darkening the towers of higher learning in this exclusive neck of the woods. A formal letter of rejection was in the post heading towards my address before the year was out.
    Was I sad? Not that I can recall. I was finished with kowtowing to the high-minded dictates of academia anyway. My brain couldn’t take in another avalanche of useless information. The old ways meant nothing to me now. My mind was set on rambling, on striking out for parts unknown. My thoughts were all on how I could best project myself into the new wild frontier of London’s brimming youth counter-culture.
    What was I really like at this precise ‘crossroads’ moment in my life? A weird kid, certainly - moody, introspective, unsure of myself, girlish-looking, long-limbed, fresh-faced, a