Aisles of Plenty

 

I find there's something bittersweet about walking through an antiques mall. The initial sense of wonder from seeing shelves of artifacts from long ago changes over time, becoming more melancholy as you go from booth to booth as the effect of taking in the detritus of people's lives accumulates. I had this feeling as I made my way through the Ohio Valley Antique Mall a few years ago. It's the kind of place where time gets tangled. One stall looks like an old garage from a Stephen King novel, while the next looks like a rec room from 1979.

For example, there was a boxed Six Million Dollar Man board game, still in pretty good condition, with its1970s pulp artwork, stacked next to a wooden doll in a hand-knit bonnet. Below it, Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, and some long-forgotten off-brand cousin to Monopoly. These weren't just games — they were Saturday afternoons and school holidays, and arguments over who got to be the thimble. Anyone who has given away toys or clothes that their children have outgrown will know that it's not as easily done as you may think. Although, having said that, knowing how lousy these movie tie-in games usually were, perhaps it wasn't that difficult to get rid of Lee Majors.

 

Moving forward to the 80s there were the Cabbage Patch Kids — still in their boxes, their adoption papers intact, staring out from behind crinkled plastic like they were waiting for a second chance.  Seeing them again in their cardboard cradles, decades later, made me wonder whose childhoods they were meant for, and why they ended up here.

 

But the most memorable corner of the place was a little nook marked Conspiracy Corner Books. Tucked between a Pyrex shelf and a rack of vintage buttons was an entire stall devoted to second-hand paperbacks with titles like Predator, Cop Killers, The Grim Reapers, Gotti: Rise and Fall, and Who Will Cry for Stacey?. A whole pulpy archive of True Crime, Mafia exposés, satanic panic, and the kind of UFO speculation that used to dominate late-night AM radio in the US.

 

I don't mean to make fun of this. Apart from anything else, the title of the store, along with how it was organised (the only book store I've been in that had a shelf for "Ancient Astronauts") makes me think that it was a bit tongue in cheek. 

 

If you're wondering, I didn’t buy much that day. An ornamental horse which is standing in my bookshelf and which has survived one house move and several spring cleanings. Which says something I suppose. Oh, and a promo red vinyl copy of Introducing Sparks. Not their best. I can see why someone felt they could part with it.

The Number of the Bus

666 is the Number of the Bus. Going from Punggol Drive to Marina Boulevard, a total of 30 km, with 22 stops. Can you see what it's like to travel on Bus 666 via YouTube? Of course you can.

The Beatles Box

(Image from Wikipedia)

Back in 1989, when I was a student in Edinburgh with more curiosity than cash, I walked into a second-hand record shop looking for something to keep me company through late-night study sessions and long weekends with no plans. I walked out with a box set of The Beatles.

Not just any box set, mind — this was the Readers Digest version. Yes, that Readers Digest. The same folks who bring you Laughter is the Best Medicine and condensed novels for people who don’t have time for the full-length kind. Somewhere along the way, they also decided to put out a box set compilation of Beatles tracks, and the cassette version was what I forked out a tenner for. I'm guessing I was eating from the chip shop for the rest of the month. That was fine, I liked salt & sauce.*

This thing was... odd. It wasn't the full Beatles catalogue. It didn’t have the album covers, the lyrics, or any of the artwork. Just eight cassettes in a sober little box with a tracklist that hopped from "Love Me Do" to "Let It Be" with no regard for original album sequence or context. And despite this, or perhaps because of this... it worked.

See, for someone like me — who hadn’t grown up with The Beatles in real-time — this was my first real exposure to their music. And it was unusual in that I developed a familiarity with the Beatles songs without having the famous album covers in my hand as I did so. And come to think of it, that wasn’t all that unusual for those of us in Gen X. A lot of the music we first heard came to us on C90 cassette tapes lovingly, or sometimes lazily, compiled. There were no liner notes or cover art. Just handwriting that said “Side A” and maybe a few track titles scrawled across the insert card.

That kind of blind-listening shaped the way we took in music. You weren’t guided that much by an album’s imagery or to a certain extent by its cultural weight. In some ways, the Beatles Readers Digest box set fit right into that aesthetic. There wasn't much separating it from a bunch of C60s put together by one of your friends. Or, if you prefer a curated playlist.

Years later, I’d hear the albums in their proper form, discover the context, the covers, the controversies. And, of course, that added richness. I like physical product. But at the same time, there’s something to be said for first impressions that arrive stripped of the legend.

*Edinburgh reference, IYKYK.

Joy in Repetition - Finishing Maigret

Some people climb mountains. Some people run marathons. I’ve just finished reading all 75 Maigret novels by Georges Simenon — and honestly, I feel like I’ve done a bit of both.

It’s a strange kind of achievement, reading your way through a series of books that, by a lot of measures, are more or less the same. Same protagonist, most of tthe hem in the same streets of postwar Paris, same grimy cafés and sullen suspects (having said that, the weather changes; it may be possible to group the novels into Spring and Autumn novels more effectively than by decade). The motive may be singular, but the tune is familiar. And this of course is the point. There’s a real pleasure to be found in stories that return you to the same world over and over again — not despite their similarities, but because of them.

It’s not a series you rush through. I read them slowly, over years, helped by the fact that Singapore's public library had most of them available either as hard copies or e-books. Sometimes months passed between books. Other times, I’d read two or three in a week. But every time I returned, it felt like I was visiting someone I knew.

Some of the books stand out more than others. The Yellow Dog is pure atmosphere — a seaside town, a mysterious animal, and a fog that never quite lifts. Maigret and the Minister dips into politics and the anxiety of power. Night at the Crossroads is one of the strangest, most noirish entries — full of fog, confusion, and a wonderfully murky sense of place. Maigret and the Good People of Montparnasse finds the Inspector moving through bourgeois respectability with his usual quiet skepticism. And Maigret in Vichy, another one of the later novels, is a beautiful change of pace — Maigret on medical leave, watching the world instead of pursuing it, a man slowly becoming aware of his own mortality. At the same time, I'd be lying if I could remember all of them: the titles Maigret is Afraid and Maigret's Failure don't ring too many bells.

But part of the enjoyment is that even the “minor” entries are enjoyable. They don’t need to be materpieces. They just need to be Maigret.

Reading all 75 books isn’t about chasing a plot or unlocking a twist. It’s about spending time in a world where human frailty is treated with sympathy, where justice is important but never theatrical, and where smoking a pipe while thinking things through still feels like a legitimate investigative strategy.

There’s a kind of artistic tradition in this sort of repetition. P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle stories are essentially variations on a theme — imposters, pig thefts, romantic mix-ups, and Lord Emsworth in a fog. Yasujiro Ozu’s later films all tell the same gentle story: aging parents, dutiful children, life’s quiet disappointments and dignities. We return to them not because we’re surprised, but because they offer a sense of rhythm, of familiarity, and of quiet beauty in the expected.

Simenon understood that. He once said he didn’t care for plot, really — he was interested in people. That’s what the Maigret novels are: 75 variations on human weakness and quiet understanding, all wrapped in a fog of tobacco and red wine.

And when you turn the last page of the last book, it’s not a grand finale. It’s more like a quiet goodbye at the end of another long walk in the rain.

Tasmania: Land of Led Zeppelin Album Covers

 

I took this photo when I was on holiday in Tasmania about 8 years ago. It's taken from the boat cruise off of Bruny Island and I reckon it would have been a pretty good Led Zeppelin album cover, maybe between Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti.