Touch Down

Got back from the moon this morning, with the help of that most fascinating guide to all things magical, Mr Norman Mailer, but feeling I'd spent quite long enough in his company, thank you. I felt the best part of Fire on the Moon, his account, or rather meditation upon the Apollo 11 moon landing, was the segment about the astronauts on the moon itself and the coda following, of Mailer and yet another marriage in a mess at the end of a decade that felt to him like the actual end of the century. (That's something that chimed oddly with my own sense of the period.)

There's a passage about how the lunarscape visually and possibly mentally affected Armstrong and Aldrin that, in itself, is worth the price of the book - though since I only paid 25 pence for it second hand back in the dear old cheap days, that's not saying enough: let's say the passage is worth the advance old Norman got paid for his ultra high-class journalism. Reading it put me in mind of the odd little fuss created this week about Nasa wiping its own tapes of their two heroes (or are they? - read Mailer - but I think yes) trotting around on the moon for the first time and having to ask for replacement footage from elsewhere. The claim that historically valuable material had been lost struck me as silly - there's plenty of extant film. But more than that, and surely more importantly, there're all the words to tell us more than the eye could ever see or read into some grainy film stock, which was never very interesting anyway. Mailer's words are a good place to start for anyone interested in the mission - rich, thought-provoking and surprisingly informative.

But I'm off back now to the late-eighteenth century with that old anarchist William Godwin and his lost soul Caleb Williams. It's good to get away sometimes