Stephen Phelan

A GIANT red robot soldier stands over 20 feet tall in the long, wild grass of a roof garden, atop a pastel-coloured building surrounded by trees and hedges. It’s a strange sight, even for Tokyo, but also dimly familiar, like something you once daydreamed or doodled in primary school.

IT has taken Michael Ondaatje seven years to write his new novel Divisadero. It took him eight to write his last one, Anil’s Ghost, having been made famous by the one before that, The English Patient, which won the Booker prize and then several Oscars when Anthony Minghella adapted it into an auspicious motion picture. The long delays between novels may partly be caused by Ondaatje finding other things to write and do in the meantime.

THERE are books about Seamus Heaney and “the crisis of identity”, Heaney and “the impress of Dante”, Heaney and “imagination and the sacred”, but there are no straight biographies available for the casual reader, even though Heaney has more of such readers than any other living poet – his titles now make up two-thirds of sales in that depressed market. Famous Seamus himself has said he likes it this way, and would prefer his life story to go unwritten “until after”, when he’s under the very dirt which has inspired so much of his work. As for his own memoirs, there may be no need for Heaney to put down in prose what’s already there in the poetry.

IT IS the second and final day of the Body & Soul fair at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall, and the main event is sold out. Three hundred people, the vast majority of them women, have paid £15 each for a seat in the exhibition hall, where therapist, healer and author Diana Cooper will conduct a workshop under the same title as her latest book: Angel Answers. If Cooper and her readers are correct in their view of the universe, then the auditorium must be twice as full as it appears to be. They will gently insist that belief is not a such a simple matter of right or wrong, but everyone here is agreed that all human beings have their own guardian angels. So we must be, this afternoon and always, in the midst of an invisible multitude.

NO Logo was published in January 2000, and addressed the new century directly. The argument advanced by Naomi Klein seemed to promise a new world to go with it. From the perspective of those holding high office in tall buildings, this seemed more like a threat.

FOR all the tricks and habits that humans teach them, there may be something we can learn from dogs. We consider ourselves their owners and masters, but there is no way to know what they think, and we are only guessing when we say they dream of rabbits. On occasion, between frequent, inscrutable relapses into primaeval wolfishness, tongue-lolling lunacy, and dung-eating degeneracy, they act as if they might possess the secret of happiness. Harry Horse’s dog Roo was no different, except that she could actually tell him about these things.

WE only came for the pandas. Thirty-six straight hours on a train from Shanghai, across the interior of China, almost to the border of Tibet, on “hard sleeper” beds in smoky and crowded compartments. But there is no question of the trip being worth it, because there are pandas at the end of it. Hundreds of them. Or at least 108 of them, according to the last count at the Chengdu Panda Breeding and Research Centre in Sichuan Province, including 12 new cubs that were born there over this past summer.

TOKYO is plagued by crows. They are thieves and murderers, stealing the eggs of meeker birds and biting through high-speed internet cables. Walking through Ueno Park to meet David Peace this morning, I watch one of them drag a plastic bag of food away from a sleeping homeless man. There is another screaming on a bare branch outside Peace’s office in Nezu, and it continues for the duration of our interview. “I actually quite like them,” says Peace.

WAKE UP. Spike Lee keeps repeating this. Watch any of his movies, or ‘joints’, as he calls them, and at some point you’ll start to feel that you’re missing the point, or that there isn’t one, or that there are too many to grip. He admits that he doesn’t make films that are about “just one thing” – he’ll throw five or six basketballs on the court, and you’re free to play with as many of them as you can. But essentially, he is telling you to wake up.

PRIVATE Bill Stone requested combat duty. Serving with the United States Army in Vietnam between April 1967 and November 1968, he killed enemy soldiers with grenades and was badly wounded twice. He also formulated certain doubts about America, which he repeats today: “How can you send only the poor to fight? If you’re going to war, go with everybody.” Stone himself was never poor, and had enlisted under his middle name because he thought “Oliver” sounded too soft and monied. Later, he became a world-famous, Oscar-winning film director with a Vietnam war movie called Platoon (1986), which drew on his most lucid memories of physical pain and animal fear, but also of some other, less material dimension he detected in the jungle. Oliver Stone leans forward to show me the white scar in the back of his head.