Holabird — like a lot of children — loved to dance as a kid. She grew up in Chicago with three sisters, and they spent hours dressing up and dancing around the house in ballet costumes, made by her set-designer father. Later, when she was a freelance writer living in London, she had two young daughters who also loved to dance.
"It just seemed to me this was a wonderful story about little girls and how empowering dance and music can be," says Holabird.
Youth itself is novelty, and everyone loves when something is new. In this ecosystem where all the instruments are tuned toward whatever is new, youth will always make the loudest noise. The young take up the most space online, by cultural volume if not necessarily by actual numbers. Everyone else online is old–I know this, because we all talk to each other about it all day long–and yet it is always possible to feel like the only person over 30 left on the internet.
My favorite band is on the road and I’m putting on a mask and going with them. I’ve been a little beaten up by the world the last couple years — maybe the same amount as anyone, but that’s plenty. I need to get out. Like the saddest, oldest groupie in the world, I’m following the Scottish indie band Belle and Sebastian down the west coast of America.
For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry, roaming from the nature of reality and the truth quotient of fact, memory and fiction to the instantaneousness of childhood friendship – so much more “fatal”, as Agnès puts it, than the endlessly crooned about love at first sight. There’s room, too, for a spiky, often droll critique of what it takes out of an author to be published and compelled to engage with the outside world.
This book’s title might suggest a history of the London Underground map of 1933 (which is technically a diagram), the one created by Harry Beck and resembling electric circuitry. But it’s really a history of London Underground maps plural, albeit with Beck as the star of the show. After all, there were underground maps before him, and there have been others since, because his original game-changer has been much messed with. Caroline Roope’s lucid and thoroughly researched study can also be read as a history of London Underground per se. In other words, she sets Harry Beck in the fullest possible context – a well-merited honour.
You’re standing in the doorway in my red bathrobe,
one arm stretched out into the sun, a cigarette burning at the tip.
You’re leaning on the jamb, talking
about ghosts or contrails, the loneliness of Tony Soprano,