About Bob
Hello and welcome.
I’ll start my introduction as if this was an AA meeting. Picture, if you will, a tiredly shabby local church hall. Within, amongst the cluttered stuff of years of disparate use, a circleof moderately uncomfortable folding chairs. The occupants of those chairs’ demeanour range from irritatingly over-confident smugness to twitchy paranoid nervousness.I stand up. I do this with the rash suddenness of someone who has taken an awful long time in internal debate about whether to do just that.
And I state, “My name is Bob and I am an autodidact”
I’m not an author. Other than an art review published rather casually many years ago, I’ve nothing in print. Nor am I an English Lit graduate. I’m not a graduate, full stop
I have to admit to having gone to art school. Something I’ve never been too sure what that qualifies anyone for. What might then qualify me to have opinions about literature?
That is beyond the seemingly inalienable right we all believe we possess to hold forth on any subject regardless. The right to be the pub bore. So why listen to me?
My qualifications might be ones that many, including pub bores, possess. Since learning to read some sixty years ago I’ve done so unremittingly. Like a fishy to the wet stuff. If it had print on it my nose was in it.
I spent a childhood in a house full of books and magazines and newspapers and arguments about ideas.
And I read everything. From the Bible to comic books. From Science Fiction to my mom’s ladies’ magazines. From the classics to the sort of books that got passed around at school (you know the kind I mean) to biographies to popular science to…
Some days I would get home from school, sit down with a pint of milk and a package of Graham Crackers and polish off a paperback.
Art school, of course, meant a focus on art history, monographs, art theory, philosophy and whatever books on human perception fell into my hands, as well as the usual diet of novels.
From the mid-70s through the mid-80s I went on binges; French authors, German authors, Scandinavian plays, Greek tragedies, Japanese literature, Henry James, Proust, 20thcentury poetry and so on.
The decade of the 1980’s I was involved in an art community that, besides other painters and sculptors, comprised authors, journalists, film makers, actors and playwrights, musicians of all stripes, dancers and all the usual bohemian suspects. For a few vibrant years we were in and out of each other’s disciplines and the audience and readers for each other’s product.
I relocated to the UK in the early 90s and then became a parent. That led to 10 years of another kind of reading.
For the past 18 years I’ve been employed as a bookseller. Hog heaven for a reader, I’ve normally three on the go at any one time. For the past three years I’ve been interviewing authors in various venues.
Five days a week I’m talking, and listening, to people about books. At least I was until this virus thing came along.
This blog is an attempt to keep that dialogue continuing with other readers
Thank you and well done for reading this far.
Bob
I’m semi-retired as a visual artist. Those interested in seeing selected examples what I did, and still do in a rather desultory fashion, as an artist are invited to have a look at the Facebook page I keep for that purpose.
https://www.facebook.com/robertcsmithartist/
