Many blogs have open comment boxes. I don’t. Not for me. I prefer to have an email form on the website for anyone who really does want to get a message to me. A little like ‘Letters To The Editor’. It’s only a few clicks of the mouse away from the diary, by which time a reader would have worked out if they really do want to go ahead with their correspondence or are just bored and hey, it wasn’t really important anyway.

I would say about 80% of blog comments are entirely trivial and unnecessary. And that’s putting it nicely. It can be summed up in an equation. Internet + blog comment button + boredom = unnecessary comments, unflattering to reader, author and the human race. Many of such comments are by people who went to university, too. It does them no favours. It’s no good having a First in English from Oxford if the moment you go online, you turn into a dizzy 8-year-old girl.

If Virginia Woolf were about now, would she be posting photos of her pets and expecting the world to give a hoot? Oh wait, she published ‘Flush’, an entire book about a dog. Okay, bad example.

I went onto Myspace last night to find about a hundred messages waiting for me. Most of which were strangers plugging their bands or clubs. The others were, well, hardly the stuff of literary biography. No serious enquiries or proposals. The MySpace website itself was taking so long to respond that I just gave up. Life really is too short to spend hours at a computer pressing ‘delete’ and waiting for the page to refresh.

Too many areas of the Web have made it far too easy to generate pointless messages, and far too difficult to delete them. A decade’s blogging experience has taught me that asking people to write to you directly rather than post a public comment filters out all kinds of knee-jerk trifles, heckling for its own sake, and childish pettiness. There’s a place for that, sure. But I can only read so much of it per day. Once again, there just has to be a balance between Heat Magazine and the Times Literary Supplement.

There’s a feed of this diary on LiveJournal, and occasionally I take a peek to find a comment or two. I wish such commentators would email me directly instead, or I could miss something well-considered like this:

… but Dickon, DJing is creative, it has to be… There are people who’ve set up club nights which have had a far greater impact on people’s lives than most bands… Most good DJs also are musicians, they can match rhythmically, they know how to build a set, they are aware of the context of the music they are playing. See Erol Alkan or Larry Levan. And I’m not ashamed to say my residency has paid me a four figure sum over the past year, because I’m good at what I do, be it ‘just’ DJing… I could have just written, ‘it was good enough for John Peel’ here… But I do agree that ultimately first hand creation is the ultimate aspiration, because it takes more effort, not just some effort. Which is why I am going back to it.

You’re right, it is perfectly possible to be a creative DJ. Erol Alkan certainly is one, with far more ideas and creative worth than many derivative bands, who I don’t regard as creative in the slightest; more like joining in. I do like the odd Daft Punk, Death In Vegas, Basement Jaxx and Chemical Brothers record. They’ve all blurred the original artist / DJ distinction somewhat, and are very much in the ‘creative’ box.

Fatboy Slim is also a master of his art, though when I see footage of him performing to a massive festival crowd and doing his “arms in the air! make some noise!” gestures, part of me does think, “I miss the Housemartins.”

Regarding John Peel, I’d say he was more a broadcaster than an ordinary DJ, with his unique voice punctuating and branding his shows, which is far more creative than just playing records back to back. His voice was as important as his taste.

Still, that’s very true about DJs, club scenes and journalists influencing new bands. Though I would say they’re more catalysts and departure points, not destinations in their own right.

My point – and the Fosca song – is really addressed to artists that give up their songs entirely to become the more lazy, non-creative kind of DJs, slipping into a DJ career because it’s an easier ride and a regular wage. Less risk. More keeping your head down. Safer and more financially secure than marching up to the microphone and expressing oneself via an original lyric. But if you prefer it anyway, then fine. Personally I’d feel a bit itchy myself if I did it as my main activity. It wouldn’t feel entirely right.

God knows I’ve met many PRs, managers, TV producers and promoters who are far more original thinkers, smarter wordsmiths and indeed better dressers than the so-called talent they work for. They should be the ones on stage and on camera, not their clients. Essentially, I feel that if you do have a creative itch, it should always be scratched.

I appreciate the financial side of a proper DJ career is tempting, and it wasn’t easy to turn down offers of paid club work this month. But I’d made a promise to my heart that it was Latitude only for the time being, so I can think more about finally finishing the Fosca album. And because I don’t want to become a regular working DJ – it’s not really me. Just now and again is fine.

Which is a shame on a strict survival level, as I could really use the money. Still it’s better to be poor and happy than paid but itchy. And am I happy? Don’t answer that.

Anyway, at past gigs, I’ve introduced ‘Don’t Be A DJ’ (written years before I did any regular DJ-ing) with a kind of disclaimer:

“This next song… I don’t necessarily agree with in its entirety.”

It gets a laugh.

Last night – mixed the Fosca song ‘Don’t Be A DJ’. It’s not strictly anti-DJ-ing, more about people who fall into non-creative jobs around the creative works of others, where they can keep their head down, immune from any criticism. Fear of tall poppy syndrome. PRs who should be stars, working for dull stars who should be PRs (or anything else). Music journalists who are more attractive and have more to say then the dull bands they have to write about. How even the finest piece of music criticism only benefits the subject not the writer. A beautiful essay on Scott Walker only benefits Scott Walker. Whereas if Scott Walker recorded a beautiful song about the journalist… it would STILL only benefit Scott Walker. Thus with DJs. The need to rely on the works of others adds a level of compromise that irks me.

And this is one reason why I’ve turned down any hints of a career in either field myself. I feel the need to get on with writing an original song, story, or even just something in this diary. I’d feel a fraud if I did DJ-ing or reviewing seriously. It’d feel like an alibi. An excuse for not doing what I’m meant to be doing.

Had a discussion about this with producer Alex M, and we agreed that even the lowliest creative act, the record no one buys, the song no one hears, is still more noble than the finest book on pop music. Because creating is always greater than spectating. Then we thought about oh, Coldplay or someone we don’t care for. Are we really saying that Coldplay have more worth than great critics like Paul Morley or Simon Reynolds?

We solved this one by deciding that what Coldplay did wasn’t at all creative… Ah, a cheap jibe I know. I’m sure they feel the sting in their glittering mansions. Sorry, Coldplay.

It’s not like the art of literary biography, writers on writers: if a book on the Sex Pistols survived their music, it’d be worthless. The best thing a book on pop can do is make you go and listen to the records. They can never really stand alone, by their own nature. Writing about music will always be popular, because of the need to make sense of the abstract. But it still needs to come from, and go back to, the music. I leaf through a magazine and read some great pieces on bands I’ve never heard, and it’s all pointless unless I can get hold of the music too. It can’t stand alone in its own right. Just as DJ-ing can’t happen without records, but you can make records without being a DJ.

Dear Lord, let me not die a Fan.

Still, the occasional and unusual bout of DJ-ing here and there is fine, I decide. So I have turned down all offers of summer DJ work except one – the Latitude Festival in Suffolk.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to be booked or not, but today I find out for sure. Yes, it’s on. I’m booked. With Miss Red too, as The Beautiful & Damned. DJ-ing every evening in the Cabaret Arena, while silent movies and strange tableaux abound. And I will be shunning loitering within tent in favour of staying with my parents, in the cottage they rent every year by the Southwold lighthouse. Once again Latitude coincides neatly with their week’s holiday nearby. I like festivals which seem to be arranged entirely around my mother’s holiday plans.

I’ll bring a change of suit this time: last year, I had some unkind comments from passers-by when I walked around Southwold after three days, still in the same white ensemble. It wasn’t very white by that point.

Let’s see who else is there. CSS, Bat For Lashes, Arcade Fire, Jarvis Cocker, Patrick Wolf, Camera Obscura, Charlotte Hatherley, I’m From Barcelona, Final Fantasy, Stewart Lee, Bill Bailey, Dylan Moran, Josie Long, Mark Steel, Jeremy Hardy, Marcus Brigstocke, Roger McGough, The Puppini Sisters, Robin Ince and his Book Club (which I hope includes Martin White), Simon Munnery, Esther Freud. But I should also do the festival serendipity bit: wander into a tent and see if something I’ve not heard of delights the heart.

In my bone fide creative life, Fosca have been asked to play London on Weds August 1st. The Windmill in Brixton. Headlining, for the first time in… well, it must be years. So we said yes. Please come. Bring everyone else. Because, oh, because we’re worth it.

Some of Fosca are single. Well, all right, just me.

When choosing which bands to go and see, at any time, you should be told which band members are in relationships and which one’s aren’t. It should be in the listings. Never mind “Rock” and “Jazz” and “Blues”. There should only be two categories:

“Bands With Single Members Who Are Looking, Actually.

“Everyone Else.”

The video for that song about chocolate biscuits by The New Royal Family is online:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N1qFjZc7_g

It’s like a kind of jolly dream – the ones you really have as opposed to the ones Dr Freud wants you to have. I have a cameo role as a butler, and filmed my bits a month or so ago. For the record, I prefer Fig Rolls.

I have sheepishly joined Facebook, the latest online networking playground. I don’t really understand it. It just seems to be the latest faddy thing to do, following on from Friends Reunited, Friendster and MySpace. Heigh ho, another ‘log in’, another password to forget, another web Inbox to check when I already have a perfectly good email address. But it’s clearly the latest thing to do if you want to be contactable by those who understand the real world more than I. So, as I have a mobile phone in order to pass through the realm of those who live and die by their mobiles, so I must join Facebook.

On Have I Got News For You this week, the guest host is the veteran newsreader Moira Stuart. In the early 80s, she was seen as radical: the first black woman to read the news for the BBC. Recently she was taken off the news, and I think it’s partly because of her very rigid accent – once labelled as BBC Received Pronunciation – sounding out of place on 2007 TV.

In fact, on HIGNFY she was asked what her accent was. “I don’t have one,” she replied. Well, she didn’t have one when she started out. In the 80s, all BBC TV announcers spoke in the same way. But the world has changed around her: they now either have articulate regional accents (Welsh and Northern Irish are particularly popular: “Noy on BBC2…”), or they have a kind of false-modesty, non-specific Southern English voice, like BBC RP but with the edges filed off. Like Mr Blair. In order to haughtily address the nation, you must no longer sound like you’re haughtily addressing the nation.

Ms Stuart has gained an old-fashioned accent simply by not changing the one she thinks she doesn’t have. She could probably move to Radios 3 or 4, though, where such voices are still monarchs. Albeit more honest monarchs.

The HIGNFY writers made her read out various jokey appeals for work, purely so they could hear her anachronistic tones grappling with the latest networking jargon:

“If you’re watching this and you’re a TV producer, why not ‘Poke’ me -”

(She pulls a shocked expression, and the audience laughs.)

“I never thought it would come to this… (she tries reading it again) Why not ‘Poke’ me on… Facebook?”

***

Tuesday. For no reason, I’m in a stressed-out, upset mood. So I find things to upset me rather than be upset because of things. A sticky day, pushed against other people on a packed 43 bus that stops everywhere, then pushed against other people on a packed Silverlink train that seems to take longer than usual. Add to which spending four hours solid in a hot underground studio, finding that I have to phone up Tom and get him to email me a drum track for use then and there, finding that my email isn’t working just when I need the track, wondering if Rachel is getting my messages about singing tomorrow, and so on. None of this matters in the greater scheme of things, obviously, but when you’re in just the wrong frame of mind, everything matters too much.

The garish new London Olympics 2012 logo is the city’s current talking point. It gives me a headache, and the animated version reportedly produces epileptic fits. Still, I’m proud that this is a city where the aesthetic qualities of a mere logo can be the subject of intense feeling. Other countries get upset about content; we get upset over style. Or rather, the money behind the style. Once people could put a price to the logo (400,000 pounds), it was back to the price of everything, and the value of nothing. No story about a painting in the news comes without a mention of its fiscal worth.

Without the price tag, the furore over the logo would have no index. It’s ugly – that should be enough. But no, the consensus must be: it’s ugly AND it costs a lot of money. It’s like the old joke: “The food’s terrible here. AND it’s in such small portions.”

Many people use price tags in order to understand the world, which I think is their failing. I don’t, which is mine.

Last night: in the Hackney studio again, this time for ‘Come Down From The Cross’. I add new vocals and revise the lyrics to fit producer Alex’s new edit. Originally the song did bang on for a bit, and he’s now brought it in under four minutes. The trouble with having unlimited time when recording – at least, for me – is that I think of more and more riffs and melodies around the same chord structure. The result is seven catchy riffs all fighting to be heard at once, where one would do. The ear can only really pick out one melody at time – the rest is all background warmth. All notes should form part of one melody, or nothing. With Alex on board, we’ve cut it down and let the songs breathe a little.

On the overground train to Hackney, a fifty-ish man with greying sideburns and baseball cap gets on, reaches to the ceiling for a handrail, then stops himself in time when he realises it is actually a fluorescent lighting tube. Unfamiliar with the Silverlink line, I’ve made the same mistake myself. He suddenly speaks to me, with a heavy accent:

Man: London is horrible.
Me: I’m sorry?
Man: London. London is horrible.
Me: Aha.
Man: Milano is much better.

I want to say something in my city’s defence, about how he’s probably not seen all of it in order to make such a judgement. The free parks, the free galleries and museums, the architecture, the history, the secrets, the adventures. But I keep quiet.

To be fair, the Silverlink train line is not one of the capital’s highlights. Florescent lighting tubes where there should be handrails don’t help, and neither does the system’s current incompatibility with the Oyster Card. It seems ridiculous to have to buy an overland rail ticket to get from Camden Road to Hackney Central, and not be able to do so via the Oyster Card, which integrates all the city’s buses and underground trains. Still, this is such a common gripe that it’s only a matter of time before the inevitable. (I check – Oyster will be compatible with Silverlink from November this year).

I wonder if my Milan friend is aware of the Oyster card system. If not, I can appreciate that London’s travel prices are indeed horrible for the outsider. All visitors to London for more than a day must educate themselves about Oyster Cards, or end up spending a fortune unnecessarily.

I review some music for Plan B:

Candie Payne “I Wish I Could Have Loved You More” (Deltasonic)
Rose Melberg “Cast Away The Clouds” (Vinyl version: Where It’s At Is Where You Are)
Suburban Kids With Biblical Names “#3” (Yesboyicecream Records)
North Sea Radio Orchestra “The End Of Chimes EP” (oof! Records)
Andres Segovia “The Fabulous Andres Segovia” (El Records)
Steven Brown “Brown Plays Tenco” (LTM)
Sebastian Cabot, Actor “Bob Dylan, Poet: A Dramatic Reading With Music” (Rev-Ola)

Some notes on each one.

Candie Payne: Young Liverpool singer, unabashed ersatz retro in the John Barry / Phil Spector mode. ‘One More Chance’ is far and away the best song, well-written and well-sung, and deserves to be heard by everyone.

Rose Melberg: US twee-pop veteran (from such bands as Tiger Trap) going all Virginia Astley and pastoral. Best track is the vinyl-only one, which is just as well. I have to get a wet cloth out and clean the caked dust off my turntable for the first time in centuries to review the album. Bonus track in question is a gorgeous cover of a 1971 song by English folk artist Anne Briggs. The LP insert sports a poster-sized photo of the singer against a snowy landscape, immaculate in red coat, white socks and black wellingtons.

Suburban Kids With Biblical Names – the Swedish Pastels, or one of them. Quirksome but never irksome, flaunting their jauntiness.

North Sea Radio Orchestra – chamber-folk ensemble who use dead poets (eg Longfellow) as their lyricists, and thus are right up my street. Have played libraries and churches and have been featured on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction programme, to no one’s surprise whatsoever. Coming from the classical side of the spectrum but with an indie bent (how many other classical ensembles put out 7″ vinyl EPs in 2007?). I am an instant fan.

“The Fabulous Andres Segovia”, a typically stylish El Records compilation of classical guitar recordings from the pioneer and virtuoso Segovia, who’s credited with rescuing the humble acoustic guitar and rebuilding it for the classical world. Includes enlightening sleeve notes on his historical importance, plus a dark beauty in period Spanish garb on the cover.

“Steven Brown Plays Tenco” – a curiously arty mini-album from the late 80s. San Francisco avant garde artist Brown interprets the works of Luigi Tenco, a Brel-esque Italian songwriter who shot himself dead in the late 60s, because a mainstream pop festival rejected his work. I’ve had some unkind reviews too, but I think that’s a rather overly dramatic response. Even for me.

Sebastian Cabot was a rotund actor popular on US 60s sitcoms for playing posh English gentlemen, and provided the voice of Bagheera in Disney’s Jungle Book. In 1967, for no discernibly good reason he released a spoken word album reciting Bob Dylan lyrics to a freestyle musical backdrop. Suffice it to say, the album begs to be filed alongside similar works by William Shatner (Like A Rolling Stone is particularly Shatner-ish), but despite that, the charming, twinkling backing arrangements render it frequently engrossing, even touching. Certainly unusual.

Two fascinating articles on waste and recycling: I would print them out and send to family and friends, but that would be an unnecessary waste of paper and thus invoke the gods of irony. If you can stand to read long articles on a computer screen (and chances are you probably do spend hours as it is staring at one), please do so in this case.

One is a full investigation by Andrew O’Hagan for the London Review Of Books. He hangs out with those who collect the bins, the managers of landfills and furnaces, and a curious pair of gentlemen who shun money, live together in a van and exist purely on the food thrown out by supermarkets (though as one letter the following issue asks, what about their fuel, insurance, road tax? What happens if they crash into someone?).

Mr O’Hagan points out how it’s easy to forget that recycling is older than modern consumerism. Many have memories of used bottles taken back to the shop and exchanged for pennies, and the term ‘dustcart’ in the first place refers to the dust recycled in Victorian brick manufacture:

The 19th century was the age of salvage, and Victorian Britain was a recycling nation by necessity: wood was redeployed and bone was ground down; ash was spread on the land, and the only things buried were bodies and vegetable matter.

He also touches on the more poetical and philosophical side of current waste concerns: waste as a record of life, and thus death. The landfill as monument:

At the near edge it seemed there were Tesco bags as far as the horizon; I looked down and saw a bottle of children’s bubble mixture, a squashed box of Typhoo tea, a tin of Dulux paint, a Capri Sun fruit drink carton: the recent detritus of an average life, and in the distance there were more plastic bags trapped in the branches of a copse of trees and blowing in and out like struggling lungs.

Mr O’Hagan’s wonderful essay is here in full:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n10/print/ohag01_.html

By way of contrast, his fellow LRB contributor Mary Beard emails me the link to her “all very well, but…” piece in the Times, addressing the selfishness of liberals who use recycling purely as a way of salving their 4×4 conciences. Recycling as a kind of liberal confession booth:

The problem is that the amount of high-minded effort that goes into recycling at home (all that careful sorting of the plastic bottles from the glass ones, the removal of the plastic cover from the newspaper supplement you never read, and so on) tends to make you feel that you have already done your bit for the planet. ‘I recycle so I’m OK.’

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2007/06/does_recycling_.html

***

Last week I announced I’m retiring from DJ-ing for a bit (with the exception of the Latitude Festival – though they seem to be dithering). And since then, I’ve had more offers of paid DJ work than ever before. Typical. It’s a career move based on The Cutty Sark via Joni Mitchell. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

***

A reader emails on the ‘the world behind every mirror’ theme in the last Doctor Who and the Sandman story I was reading at the time:

The concept is also there in a Borges story (which inspired China Mieville’s novella ‘The Tain’, where the very peed off people from behind the mirror gain their freedom and revenge).

Sounds great; must read that. For a Get Out Of Genre Free card, it’s always best to mention Borges. And I understand Mr Miéville is one of the few sci-fi authors allowed to be on BBC Radio 3 arts programmes without the world coming to an end.

On genre:

The odd thing is how certain authors get rescued – Ballard, for instance, is now regarded as a literary writer, ever since his books became set in a recognisable present (whether his writing has changed, or reality has become more Ballardian, is another case entirely). More accurately, ever since his publishers started marketing him that way.

I would say the same about Ian McEwan, whose earlier books like The Cement Garden were dark and strange and ‘cultish’. Today, he’s part of the UK arts mainstream.

Tory leader David Cameron has done a Doctor Who and turned himself from a lofty superhuman (from Planet Eton, an eternal plane of the powerful and godlike looking down on the real world) into an ersatz normal human of sorts – a living zeitgeist index of what he regards normal people do. To this end, he has had his photo taken reading the latest McEwan novel. On the train.

I think I may have to finally stop reading the blogs and online diaries of people I know personally when I’m feeling a bit down. The trouble is, if they’re writing about being sad and miserable, it’s depressing. And if they’re writing about their successes, name-dropping anecdotes and their careers soaring, it’s… even more depressing.

Well, no, of course, one really thinks, good for them; I’m happy for them, and I wish them well. But during one’s darker nights, I regret to confess the presence of an inner imp of Envy, pouting childishly and whining “how come THEY’VE got a huge house / perfect lover / perfect career / their own private elephant, and I haven’t?”

And that’s just one’s friends. Enemies get a far easier ride, because at least you know where you are with them. I really must get that imp painlessly put down.

Envy is not only a perniciously pointless and unflattering sin, it doesn’t even make sense. Not only could I be getting on with pursuing said objects of desire for myself, what’s crucial to the mix is I’m not anyone else and they’re not me. People say “I wish I could spend a day in David Beckham’s shoes”, but if they really did switch bodies, they’d lose everything Mr Beckham had in seconds. They’d mess it up. The change would be so pronounced, it would lead to the footballer being thrown into an asylum for good.

Besides, I’m as happy as can be expected at the moment. I’ll admit I have a fridge that still holds unopened bottles of expensive booze, gifts from others, which I have promised to only drink with a lover. I’ve had them for nearly a year, now. But I don’t mind. I’ll just have to find another reason to drink the champagne – the release of the Fosca album, perhaps.

(and as I type this, someone I don’t know in a country I’ve never visited sends me several times the minimum donation for the Diary Angels fund. I really can’t complain.)

What does matter is that I’m not in any physical pain. Even those various aches and bouts of mysterious localised soreness have gone away. The ointments have run out, but so have the ailments. Just as well.

***

Thing is, although I don’t have a cold of any sort, at this time of year I am likely to occasionally find myself suddenly sneezing. Just once or twice a day – not even worth buying the anti-hay fever treatments. What I would really like to know is: why am I cursed with such a loud, outrageous bellowing comedy sneeze (like something off a 1950s radio comedy), while daintier sorts get to make a noise akin to a sniffly kitten? Can I train myself to sneeze in a quieter fashion?

***

Thought when buying razors. I bridle at the Gillette latest Men’s brand – FIVE blades on one head plus a sixth tucked away, presumably for special occasions. It’s such a male kind of marketing – more of anything is meant to be better, regardless. I will never fill manly enough to buy anything from Mr Gillette, so I plump for the Boots’ own brand – a comparatively sissy three blades. When buying razors, I go by Ockham’s.

***

Innocent, the aggravatingly pretentious drinks firm, has renamed its ‘Juicy Water’ range, which is more water than juice.

The drink is now called ‘This Water’.

Still on Genre, I pull myself away from reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman saga, at the point where one powerful character in female form – Despair, Sister of the Endless family – is shown to be living in an eternal realm that lurks on the other side of every mirror.

From this, I watch Doctor Who, which ends with a powerful character in female form – The Family Of Blood’s Sister Of Mine – imprisoned in an eternal realm that lurks on the other side of every mirror.

Sandman homage or not, this latest Doctor Who story is bold enough to move the programme from its nominal sci-fi genre into something more mythological, classical, dream-like. The ‘Sister Of Mine’ character is left in the form of a sinister little girl, still clutching her balloon. It’s the keeping of the balloon, even behind the mirror, that I like. Very reminiscent of Ovid’s poetical, creative punishments metered out by the ancient gods on their enemies. The Doctor is said to visit the little girl behind the mirror once a year – why? And why not put all the aliens in the same void, rather than dole out individually-tailored fates? Because it makes classical sense. One of the aliens is even transformed into a statue based on his own creations, which is VERY Zeus.

Genre can sometimes stand in the way between a story and a reader who might otherwise enjoy it. The Time Traveler’s Wife is a good example of a science fiction novel successfully marketed to people who don’t like science fiction.

Sometimes, it’s because people are put off by a perceived notion of what the audience is like:

“I do not like or am not like the audience, therefore I cannot or will not enjoy this material.”

The reverse theory can be just as damaging:

“I do not like this material, but I will pretend I do because I am like the audience. Or because I want to BE in the audience.”

Ideally, there should be no such thing as genre at all: no stories for boys, or stories for girls, no ‘gay interest’. no fantasy fiction or crime fiction or romantic comedy. Just well-written stories and badly-written stories. But I realise this is a naive way of thinking: people will always like their filters and signposts, award nominations, plaudits from names they like or admire. Everyone has their own way in.

With the new, go-ahead 21st Century Doctor Who, a traditionally boyish sci-fi programme has finally become more girl-friendly and ‘Time-Traveler’s Wife’ compatible. David Tennant’s Doctor, mysterious as he is, is clearly into human ladies, who in turn are better written than the archetypal damsels in distress of old. The price paid is that despite all the flirting he can never be allowed to truly get off with them. Or can he? This is what keeps people watching, of course.

What’s particularly interesting is that the latest Doctor Who tale is also an adaptation of a book in the 90s ‘New Adventures’ spin-off novels. The original novel (“Human Nature”), regardless of its merit, would only have been read by the most devoted of old-style Doctor Who fans, as opposed to normal people. So its new life on TV this week represents a kind of triumph for those fighting in the genre wars. It’s one thing to moan about how awful such-and-such a popular band or film or author is, while much better artists and works reach tiny genre-based or ‘cult’ audiences. It’s another to actually do something about it.

Thoughts on genre. Am currently working my way through the works of Neil Gaiman for the first time, including his short story collections and graphic novels. Reading them in public – on the Tube or in libraries – I feel, despite myself, the shadow of the literary prejudice afforded genre fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, crime, thriller, mystery) and serious comics. I was shocked to read an arts journalist recommending one graphic novel in their column with the disclaimer that “as we all know, all graphic novels are embarrassing rubbish, but this one is an exception.” A statement of such ignorance, it really should do have done him no favours. But in this country at least (I understand France has a more enlightened attitude), the sentiment is almost default. Which is the real embarrassment.

Funny how graphic novels are even considered a genre as opposed to a medium, whether it’s The Beano, the DC / Marvel superheroes titles, or the likes of ‘Ghost World’. I feel that even mentioning them turns some people off, which is a terrible shame. From the mainstream looking in, any discussion becomes defensive against the perceived snobbery.

Jackets of popular fiction boast a ‘master storyteller’, which is never the sort of phrase that appears on the cover of Booker Prize fare. Dick Francis is a ‘champion storyteller’. Within the genre audience, there’s another kind of snobbery – not knowing enough. You have to be a fan, and have read the whole oeuvre, or nothing.

I love that scene at the beginning of ‘Educating Rita’, where Rita’s essay on Harold Robbins is dismissed by her lecturer. As far as Rita is concerned, she was asked to write an essay on a favourite novel, and did so. But however much thought and work she puts into it, her tutor gently explains, the essay can only be rubbish, because the book itself is rubbish. His task is to show her why this is, why airport fiction isn’t literature. Why there are such things as standards. Why she should read more widely in order to experience the joy of a well-honed sentence.

And though these days there are more university courses that enable students to write serious essays on trashy fiction – such as, say, a dissertation on the craft of popular storytelling which takes in The Da Vinci Code, it’s no good without reference to a wider knowledge of the classics.

All reading in any area must be a point of departure rather than a final destination. It’s one of the reasons I call this more of a diary than a blog, because I want readers to turn off the computer and do something else – books, magazines, DVDs, gardening, snogging – not direct them elsewhere on the Web. I equate that with in-breeding.

Actually, that’s recalling another Educating Rita scene, right at the beginning. The lecturer (played by Michael Caine in the film) stops his own English class with his normal students, out of his own personal despair:

“Look out the window. It’s a lovely day. You’re all young. Why don’t you go outside or something? Why don’t you all go off and make love (his voice cracks) … or something?”

He’s really talking about himself, of course, but I like the sentiment. It’s fine to have an anorak; as long as you take it off from time to time. Or you won’t feel the benefit. Get off Facebook for a bit and go frolic in the park. Read the genre fiction AND the Booker Prize winners. Don’t dismiss an entire genre or medium unless you really have read a good portion of the better examples. It’s all about balance.

Vastly enjoying the latest Doctor Who story, “Human Nature”. The normally manic, modern-London-accented Doctor becomes a gentle human schoolteacher with period-drama BBC Received Pronunciation, falling in love and being normal and being quite happy about it. Except, of course, there’s the small matter of having to save the world every Saturday tea-time.

There’s references to If…., The Shining, Goodbye Mr Chips and most of all, the film Superman II (early 1980s, like most of the greater things in life), where Superman also turns himself into a human.

Obviously, it’s hardly a spoiler to say that Superman gets back to normal by the closing credits, just as we all know The Doctor is going to be himself again in time for ‘Any Dream Will Do’ or whatever programme is on afterwards. But when the story is told well, you believe it as it happens, and you believe that it IS happening.

These days, Superman II is often regarded as the most memorable of the Christopher Reeve films, and I’ve seen it referred to in the likes of The Family Guy cartoon and Russell Brand’s stage routines. Everyone remembers the one with General Zod. And though I have difficulty remembering what I did last week, I can still remember a couple of memorably droll quotes from that film, decades on:

Clark Kent: (on finding out about some terrorists’ plot to blow up the Eiffel Tower) But jeepers, Mr. White, that-that’s terrible!

Perry White: (with heavy irony) Yes. That’s why they call them terrorists.

And when the US President has to kneel before Terence Stamp’s conquering supervillain, General Zod:

President: (despairing for the world) Oh God…

General Zod: Zod.

It’s funnier if you imagine Terence Stamp pronouncing the word ‘Zod’ as only Terence Stamp can do, with his kind of half-camp, half-Shakespearean relish.

But whereas the Doctor opts to become human in order to escape some nasty Time Lord-sniffing aliens, falling in mortal love only by accident; the Man of Steel’s motivations in the 80s film are rather more selfish. He becomes human purely in order to properly love a mortal woman in the first place: Lois Lane.

It seems rather amusing to set this down today, but all of the instances I’ve cried my eyes out at the cinema, one of the biggest was when Superman gave up his powers to snog a girl. The film was new, I was nine or ten years old. As our hero emerged from the Humanizing Chamber and jumped into bed with Ms Lane, it seemed a move worse than suicide – it was a betrayal. When faced with a strict choice between asexual immortality with super-powers and sleeping with a pretty girl for a lifetime, few boys would opt for the latter.

Well, all right, few pre-pubescent boys.

Well, all right, the pre-pubescent me, anyway.

One does wonder about the moral message of such a storyline. It could be interpreted as saying: if you go with girls the world will be dominated by three supervillain overlords in black lycra; comprising Terence Stamp, Servalan from Blake’s Seven‘s stunt double, and a big bearded gay bear.

(Actually, the idea of being dominated by one or preferably all of the above is just the sort of thing certain friends of mine would actually prefer, as opposed to the more conventional likes of marrying Ms Lane, but you get my drift.)

Could Superman II be a message of comfort – that it’s okay for fans of fantasy to never go steady with girls? The unkind joke writes itself.

What I think it does do, along with the current Doctor Who, is build on the theme of the powerful hero doomed to solitude and never getting what they want, which is as old as the Greek and Roman myths. Coupling between the unlike usually leads to trouble – and a great story. From Zeus and his chums, to Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Consummation turned Ms Buffy’s boyfriend from a kindly ex-vampire into the murderously evil villain he once was. It’s a twist that carries mythical resonance and Angela Carter-esque sexual allegory. You can write a thesis on it, sure, but the main appeal is that it’s a tried and tested tool of good storytelling. Thesis, schmesis, the viewers will be back, the page will be turned. What worked for Ovid in 7 BC works for the writers of Doctor Who in 2007 AD.

Gods in metamorphosis, coupling with mortals, romance and battles – it’s classic stuff, because it’s the stuff of the Classics.