Stephen Phelan

A COUPLE of years ago I interviewed the novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer for this newspaper at his home in London. We talked mostly about his then-new book Zona, a typically chatty (and characteristically unclassifiable) treatise on the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker. Dyer also told me that he had just spent two weeks as a writer-in-residence aboard a US Navy aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. “And how was that?” I asked, perhaps hoping for some caustic drawing-room witticism. “Fantastic,” he said. “I love the American military.”

THERE is a place called the Zone, which looks more or less like the world we know, but the colours are fuller and brighter, and the natural laws are not quite so constant. Within the landscape of the Zone, there is a Room, where a person’s deepest desires are supposedly fulfilled. This is the premise of Stalker, a monumentally slow and meditative film made in 1979 by Andrei Tarkovsky. Relatively few people have seen it. “Not as many as have seen Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels,” admits Geoff Dyer. “But among those who have, you often hear that this film has been a big thing in their lives.”

BY his own count, Greg Dulli has played about 2000 live shows, give or take, in his long and ongoing career as a self-styled musical assassin. Sometimes travelling solo, but more often with a hand-picked gang of like-minded, hardened professionals, Dulli rolls into town, tunes up a little, and “executes”.

I moved to Buenos Aires the weekend before the 30th anniversary of the first day of the Falklands War. I knew enough not to call it that in Argentina, where those islands are known as Las Malvinas. To refer to them by their British name is a political statement if deliberate, and a dead giveaway if accidental.

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AN ex-banker named Guillermo Benitez swings a sawed-off hockey stick in each fist, bringing both of them down on an old computer keyboard like a furious gorilla locked inside a school supply cupboard. His girlfriend Lorena Dominguez is more methodical, lining up empty wine and beer bottles on a metal rack to smash them one by one with an axe handle. The Ramones are playing loud and dumb over the in-house PA system. Through the bunker-like slit of the observation window, it looks and sounds as if these two are having a wonderful time, and this is the entire point of The Break Club.

PAXMAN. The name comes from the Latin, meaning “man of peace”, which does not fit the pugilistic image of its best-known living bearer. Neither did it suit him to discover, as a recent subject of the BBC’s genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are? , that this moniker was contrived by a distant ancestor – a politician called Roger Packsman, who replaced two prosaic Anglo-Saxon letters with that magic “x” to enhance his appeal among the 14th century electorate.

ALMOST 100 years ago, a young apprentice from a Japanese sake company was sent to Scotland to study the art and science of whisky-making. Masataka Taketsuru travelled the highlands and islands and took menial work at various distilleries – learning by getting his hands dirty. He also took a local wife, marrying one Rita Cowan in Campbeltown before returning with her to Japan in 1921.

CHRISTMAS in Uruguay marks the start of the high season. Perhaps this sounds like a giddy little pun on the fact that marijuana is now legal here, but that would not be in the proper spirit. Arriving in Montevideo just as this landmark legislation is being rubber-stamped by the Senate, I quickly learn that foreigners tend to get much more excited about it than most Uruguayans, who kindly request that we please be cool.

IN 2007, the year before he was elected president, Barack Obama told a biographer that his favourite writer was E.L. Doctorow. To my mind, Obama’s political opponents did not make as much of this as they could have. Taken together, Doctorow’s body of work might easily be painted as a fictional analogue to Howard Zinn’s People’s History Of The United States – a liberal-secular rejection of America’s sustaining narrative, a chronicle of the betrayal or disfigurement of the nation’s original promise.