The Black Spot posted by Richard Seymour

I've been handed the black spot , and am obliged to comply for fear of my mother being stolen by gypsies.

Here goes:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest :

Algernon. Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?

Lane. I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.

I shall be Algernon, and eat cucumber sandwiches, and dispense witty repartee, and seduce dear Cecily...

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
The Snow Queen. When I was seven, right, I used to fantasise about being her slave and... look, bugger off will you?

The last book you bought is:
I bought two books on Friday at the second hand shop. One was Thomas Carlyle's Latter Day Pamphlets, which is a series of hilarious, vitriolic and deeply reactionary rants against Democracy and the swinish multitude. The volume is from 1898 and a load of the pages were bound together, so I had to cut them open. The second book I bought, which I have yet to read is Thomas Hylland Eriksen's Small Places, Large Issues: And Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology. Sounds snazzy. Has phrases in it, like "the multivocality of symbols".

A note on Jamie's choice (see link above). Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic is a largely discredited thesis if you ask me. Magic did not 'decline' in 16th and 17th Century England - rather, it was de-hegemonised, becoming a subterranean culture for the peasants and proles. It usually co-existed with religious conviction and scientific inquest.

The last book you read:
I rarely read books fully, but the last one I cam close to finishing was Ian Kershaw's The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. It is an extremely useful intro to the various arguments about fascism. Hmmm. Actually, I did finish Richard J Evans' Lying About Hitler, a very entertaining account of the Irving trial.

What are you currently reading?
I rarely read books to the end, preferring to dip in and out, but the ones I am dipping the nacho chip of my curiosity into now are Seumas Milne's The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners, said Carlyle tract, Moshe Lewin's The Soviet Century, John Berger's The Shape of a Pocket , Dilip Hiro's Secrets & Lies: The Truth Behind the War on Iraq, Justin Rosenberg's The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations, and Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Mood music.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:
Fuck. Only five? I suppose I'd bring Das Kapital and see if I could finally read the bastard in its entirety. Although, quite frankly, I suppose I could dispense with an analysis of capitalism on a deserted island. Naturally, the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Also, my tattered cheapo volume of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare - have to burn up a lot of time. Then, I suppose Myra Breckinridge/Myron by Gore Vidal, being a most incensed comedy of the sexes and their appendages. And something by Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint, or The Human Stain, or even The Dying Animal. I'll pick closer to the time. Leave me alone.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
Doug Ireland , a Mick prole autodidact; Meaders , an urbane economist who doth meddle with things of which we know little; and Chris Tharp , an American socialist comedian presently taking refuge in South Korea where he teaches children how to find psilocybin mushrooms.