I love the kill-your-idols musical exercise. Trash legends, destroy past praise and unquestioned adulation and return balance to the scales of critical history. But I don't go as far as our time's greatest practitioner of the exercise. Former Sun-Times critic and famous Springsteen hater Jim DeRogatis literally writes the book on it. I don't have the desire to kill anything, musical acts or otherwise. A thorough deconstruction and devaluation are enough for me. I believe balance in my own opinion is adequate, and the world has plenty of shouters to work the extremes.

Nick Hornby taking on the challenge is intriguing. His sentimentality has been open across much of his writing, often a major artery and subject for complaint upon pure rock writers. But kill-your-idols is exactly what Hornby's latest book, Juliet, Naked, turns out to be. He invents a mess of a once-dramatic, now love-broke, pop-rock singer-songwriter whose life and music appear deep with secret stories but remain emotionally accessible, perfect for aging fan boys to "analyze"-slash-moon-over.

If you've ever read his High Fidelity, 21 Songs, About a Boy, A Long Way Down, Fever Pitch, or generally anything Hornby has written, or seen the movie adaptation of his books, or heard him talk about music live (with Marah or elsewhere), you know he is admittedly — proudly — an aging fan boy. If he didn't admit such, he would on one level feel he was denying his humanity and on another level call himself a wanker.

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To the woman outside Metro Center tonight, the one who didn't need any money, who said she was pregnant and rubbed her belly as such, who had a mysterious government job nearby, who had a home out in Leesburg but just had someone down the street run into her car, who had already stopped into St. Patrick's Church without luck, whom the police wouldn't drive home, and so who needed any money for a long taxi ride home, I was sorry for whatever actually did happen to you.

But early this afternoon at work, I heard Nick Lowe singing about all men are liars ("words ain't worth no more than worn-out tires"). Then Richard Thompson came to us and sang a song called Money Shuffle. After work, I drank a beer called Nosferatu at Chinatown Coffee and met my friend Annie. We sat upstairs at the old synagogue, and Nick Hornby read to us about all the things in life we hide from each other (in his context, with an album leak). Then Ben Folds sang, "You know what hope is? Hope is bastard, hope is a liar, a cheat and a tease."

Lowe told us too, gathered in the office, how "You don't know it, but I've made my mind up, you'll wind up in my arms." And Thompson said, "She's the kind of tease that means good news." I missed Hornby by minutes at the coffee shop, your perfect Nosferatu moment. On stage, Hornby talked about writing in his Songbook, the text that sits in both hard and paperback on my bookshelf, about Folds' Smoke. "You don't have to be Bob Dylan," Hornby argued in that chapter, "and you don't have to be whoever writes the songs for Celine Dion (in other words, you don't have to use the words and phrases, dreams, hero, survive, or inside my/yourself, because life isn't an ad for a new type of Ford); you can, if you're brave, have go at being Cole Porter, and aim for texture, detail, wit, and truth." Folds broke apart one of the new songs they'd written together, Belinda, and explained how their pieces joined up.

I nearly convinced myself today how okay my pipes were in the colder air, and I was lucky to have friends, both early and late today, open up in unexpected ways. To the woman outside the subway tonight, again, I was sorry for whatever actually did happen to you. But lies and truth had filled up the day, and we all had better songs to write tomorrow.

At friend Annie's good suggestion, we're headed to the Historic Sixth and I Synagogue tonight to see Ben Folds and Nick Hornby. I'm not deep into Folds, but I have bootlegs of Hornby readings. Seriously.

Anyway, got to thinking about the last time I was there, and how Mat Kearney pulled a random kid on stage to play drums on a suitcase. The kid, Nate, turned out to be great at suitcase drums. Checked YouTube to see if video had surfaced and, while the angle wasn't perfect, it had.

Go Nate. Also, here's one of my favorite Hornby-Marah readings.

Finally saw An Education. Liked it. Writing the screenplay, Nick Hornby moved past my expectations of his traditional dialogue style, of which I've been a fan in books like About a Boy but thought would be poorly suited for a film about a girl. It was easy to see him enjoying his work.

"Graham might become a famous author, for all you know."
"Becoming one isn't the same as knowing one."

Where Hornby's style did show was in taking plausibly reserved people or culture and finding so many things for them to say. And the music — of course. This is Nick Hornby. But it's fascinating in the movie to see a writer with such full musical tastes aim for confusion. In this transcript, Hornby talks to Fresh Air's Terry Gross about that period in English life.

Well, I think if you look at '50s American rock and roll, it was a product of affluence to a certain extent. You think about, you know, big cars and driving your girlfriend around and that's what a lot of the songs were about. Well, that just didn't happen in England. Nobody had cars. You waited for buses in bad weather normally. And we were completely ruined by Word War II and America was made in some ways by World War II. And it took a while for us to be able to recognize something in the music, I think, that made some kind of sense.

When I was thinking about music for this movie, I was looking on my iPod and realized that I don't have one song that was made in England before 1960. I have a great deal of American music made before 1960 but no English music at all, and then suddenly that changed with what happened obviously, and I think that's revealing of something.

The soundtrack ends up assorted. My favorite, from the titles, is below. "To recognize something in the music" — I like the phrase. If we make mixtapes for that reason, An Education is a sociological High Fidelity.

While not super-new, this song was new to me on my radio last week. And while it's no work of art, it is Jet continuing to be Jet, and I'm okay with that. It rocks hard for a Monday morn, in both guitar and theme.

And one more. When I posted last week about Marah, I was surprised to find out friend Chuck W. at work also a fan. (I never run into other Marah fans beyond the ones I've known for years.) Chuck said he'd discovered the band through Nick Hornby's Songbook/31 Songs, and that made me think of Teenage Fanclub. If you read Songbook, you learn Hornby loves Teenage Fanclub almost as much as Bruce and Marah and any given sunny moment may love them even more.

The other part of this story: I'm flipping channels recently and find the weak-but-watchable Jason Biggs and Isla Fisher vehicle The Pleasure of Your Company. In the soundtrack, there's a nice little song called Love Is a Game for Two to Play. I looked it up and apparently the singer, Francis MacDonald, is the sometimes drummer in Teenage Fanclub.

So, I guess I need to say something about Teenage Fanclub. The best thing to say may be Hornby writing on the band's Ain't That Enough.

It is important that we are occasionally, perhaps even frequently, depressed by books, challenged by films, shocked by paintings, maybe even disturbed by music. But do they have to do these things all the time? Can't we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer? Please? Just every now and then, when we've had a really shitty day? I need somewhere to run to, now more than ever, and songs like "Ain't That Enough" is where I run.

Which brings us back to Monday morning. This'll do well for you.

Here is a sunrise, ain't that enough
True as a clear sky, ain't that enough
Toy town feelings here to remind you
Summers in the city do what you gotta do

Says one YouTube commenter on the video, "No matter how unoriginal this song is, there is always room in the world for songs like this."

That's the central lesson I took from the movie version of Fever Pitch yesterday. When I read the book four years ago, the genius part was the exploration of sulking. For the movie, while the plot switched from soccer to baseball and the lead switched from interior-monologued, Hornbyesque main character to, well, Jimmy Fallon, the Farrellys still had a chance to do a better job at the sulk. Fallon wasn't bad when they pushed him the right away. But the film's pushing everywhere — inconsistent directing I believe is the term — was off. I blamed Drew. She couldn't help who she was, sure. I just imagined her showing up to shoot and the Farrellys forgetting the name of that Boston team. Given the force, how did anyone ever make a movie with Barrymore and not suffer cuteness undertow? How did Grey Gardens escape?

But the movie was better than I expected, and the soundtrack rocked. Missed the Marah song, remembered it got a few seconds at the start of a party scene, scanned back afterward and found it. I watched the movie half on Laura's recommendation and half for Hornby and Marah ties. Good sign you still love a band, to remember its spot in a half-OK movie you've never seen before. Even if it's just you, Hornby and real fans still loving them. Which, in this case, is a perfect reason to watch.

On the High Fidelity book tour. Via TMN, he admits as much in an essay for the Guardian about MP3 blogs that also promotes his new book.

At signings, people gave me lovingly made compilation tapes, occasionally demo tapes of their bands, or their friends' bands, and sometimes bootleg tapes of shows by artists they thought I'd like. Towards the end of the tour I no longer had room for it all, and I had to leave little piles of cassette boxes next to the waste-bins in my hotel rooms. (I couldn't bear to put them in the bins. I wasn't throwing them away; I was leaving them behind. There was a difference.)

The new book is on how we live music now.  Your "we" may determine your reactions. "Juliet, Naked is in part about how a middle-aged man devotes a large chunk of his life to keeping alive the work of a long-forgotten 80s singer-songwriter; he runs a messageboard, posts essays online, and virtually lives in a virtual world, talking to people he wouldn't ever have met 10 years ago," Hornby writes. If you are Sasha Frere-Jones, or many other people, you do not share Hornby's "we."

I'm going to have to read the book eventually — paperback, probably — to find out if I do or not. The Independent gives the plot quickly:

Announcing its bathetic register from the off, Nick Hornby's sixth novel opens in the men's toilet of an unremarkable music venue in Minneapolis. Annie and Duncan, an unmarried couple with an unevenly shared passion for the music of the American singer- songwriter Tucker Crowe, have made a pilgrimage there from Gooleness, the northern English seaside town in which they live, because it is the site of the mysterious event in June 1986 which, part-way through his tour in support of the classic break-up album Juliet, marked the beginning of Crowe's ongoing period of reclusiveness. Duncan is an academic but considers "Crowology" his life's real work, and runs Can Anybody Hear Me?, a website forum named after an obscure EP, dedicated to the obsessive search for hidden meaning in Crowe's life and music. Annie, who used to be a teacher but now runs the Gooleness museum, enjoys Crowe's music, but has had to tolerate Duncan's passion as one might a mistress. Fifteen years into their stagnant and childless relationship, however, she is tiring of the arrangement.

Making up a credible fictional cultural figure, even an obscure and reclusive one such as Crowe, isn't easy, but Hornby has fun inventing and weaving into his story song titles, Wikipedia entries, snatches of lyrics and biographical mythology, until you catch yourself thinking that you ought to track down a copy of Juliet for yourself and hear what all the fuss is about. So it comes as almost as much of a surprise to the reader as it does to Annie when Crowe emails her and, unbeknown to her partner, they begin a correspondence which will cause all three of them to reassess and resist the stasis of their lives.

Early reviews are mixed on whether the book is Hornby's best since High Fidelity or not. A writer in The (London) Observer makes a criticism that, in that vein, having read the intermediate books, sounds fair:

"Elasticity "“ a sense that a novel has been written, in part at least, because its author needed to find something out for themselves "“ is an underrated part of what creates narrative atmosphere and tension. It's also a large part of why we read on. Nick Hornby is an enormously accomplished writer, but next time I'd love to read less about what he's already decided and more about what he still needs to find out."

To that end, I'd like apologize for using Hornby to dismiss Facebook.

For the oversimplification in one listing? "Walter Bobbie (Chicago) directs this musical based on Nick Hornby's best-selling novel, about a record store owner whose girlfriend breaks up with him." Or this sentence in the next one? "The result is a tone poem that is as rich and frustrating as a night of half-finished dreams."

One of the things I admire about Nick Hornby's writing is the way he can balance obsession and immediate feeling. Take pop music. In his Songbook/31 Songs, going into a chapter of detail on each of his favorite songs, he gives one of the spots to Nelly Furtado's I'm Like a Bird just because it's on the radio when he's writing the book and he enjoys it. There's no guarantee of future enjoyment, but the song works for its time.

To this day for me, when Top 40 gets a likeable song that has a pop preponderance of guilty pleasure evidence, I cite that Hornby chapter in the argument in my head and bolster my defense.

Mariah Carey's line about taxis falls there these days — "shake it off, like a cab on commission." The lyric's given me weeks of half-second thought bubbles and stabs at images of taken cabbies shaking off would-be hailers. If last weekend in Chicago taught me anything, it's that those taxi roof lights are doing better than my eyesight. But weeks later it turns out I'm all wrong. Mariah is saying "Calgon commercial," making more sense (full lyrics), and I've got reason to keep listening.

What I've been working on recently is Hornby's first book, Fever Pitch, the narrative of his lifelong obession with soccer. It's definitely a good read. As bad as I've heard the original film adaptation and the Jimmy Fallon baseball version are, I now think they've got to be even worse. The book's too good at repetition, at the repetitive act of watching and enjoying soccer for decades, for any half-decent film to render the pacing well. Beyond that success, it's also readable on this side of the pond. I'm sure British soccer history helps, but it's not required. If you know Adu, you have a shot. If you played Montgomery County youth soccer for, say, 10 seasons, you're in.

The spots where obsession and immediacy collide best in the book are the reasoning sections. Hornby's not going anywhere directly at these parts, and he's only talking to justify something else. He has time to spare. So he finds himself letting go on things like taste and defeat. On living his 30s, "I have noticed that certain type of music — hip-hop, indie guitar pop, thrash metal — all sound the same, and have no tune," he says.

You can of course take issue, but that's his statement for the time, unspinning from some larger and unexplained ideology. On hearing positive talk before a difficult game, "their positiveness … on this beautiful May morning made me sad for them, as if these chirpy and bravely confident young men and women were off to the Somme to lose their lives, rather than to Anfield to lose, at worst, their faith." More reasoning for a larger cause — engaging the world of competition and doubt.

It's a feeling that something needs to be said, something needs to be considered, informed, or all that base of understanding built from the in-between moments of life — the healthy obsession parts, unconsciously relapsing — might go to waste.

My favorite instance comes midway through the book, when he's talking about a girlfriend falling for his soccer team. The passage brings out the methodology and ethics of sulking better than most sulkers could admit.

All my footballing life I have lived with people — my mum, my dad, my sister, girlfriends, flatmates — who have had to learn to tolerate football-induced moods, and they have all of them, more or less, done so with good humour and tact. Suddenly I found myself living with someone who was attempting to claim moods for herself, and I didn't like it. Her elation after the 1987 Littlewoods Cups Final … that was her first season. What right did she have to swagger into the pub that Sunday evening with an Arsenal hat on? No right at all. For Pete and me, this was the first trophy since 1979, and how could she, who had only been going for the previous four months, understand what that felt like? 'They don't win things every season, you know,' I kept telling her, with all the pointless and bilious envy of a parent whose Mars Bar-munching child has never experienced the deprivations of wartime rationing.

I soon found that the only way to claim all the emotional territory for myself was to go on sort of sulk war, confident in the knowledge that when it came to football I could pout and grump any pretender to the Football Pain throne right off the terraces, and eventually I beat her, as I knew I would. It happened at the end of the 88/89 season when, after a home defeat by Derby, it looked as though we were going to miss out on the Championship after having led the First Division for most of the season. And though I was genuinely inconsolable (that evening we went to see Eric Porter in King Lear at the Old Vic, and the play didn't engage me because I couldn't see what Lear's problem was), I nurtured every bit of the misery until it grew to monstrous, terrifying proportions, I behaved badly in order to prove a point, and inevitably we had an argument (about going to see some friends for a cup of tea), and once it had started I knew that Arsenal was all mine once again: she was left with no alternative but to say that it was only a game (she didn't use those words, thankfully, but the implication was, I felt, clear), that there was always next year, that even this year all hope was not lost, and I leaped on these words triumphantly.

'You don't understand,' I shouted, as I had wanted to shout for months, and it was true — she didn't, not really. And I think that once I had been given the opportunity, once I had uttered the words that most footballs fans carry around with them like a kidney donor card, it was all over. What was she left with? She could attempt, or pretend, to behave even worse than I had done; or she could withdraw, yield ground, leave the agony and the ecstasy more or less entirely to me and use her own distress merely to buttress mine. She is much too gentle a person to attempt to out-tantrum me, so she chose the latter course, and I can safely and smugly say that I am top Arsenal dog in this house, and that when and if we have children it will be my bottom exclusively that fills our season-ticket seat. I'm ashamed, of course I'm ashamed, that I have had to play dirty like this, but for a while back then I was beginning to worry.

All around, means worth the ends?

Over the last month, I've slowly worked my way through the Picador Book of Sportswriting, a mostly British collection edited by Nick Coleman, a U.K. newspaperman, and Nick Hornby. I finally finished yesterday and was glad.

Coleman and Hornby picked some great pieces of writing, many going back decades, but some were easier for me to read than others. One might have expected the language to be an issue, yet that wasn't it. The clarity of the writing made the differences between the Queen's English and my own more exciting than frustrating. The problem was cricket. I didn't know anything about cricket. There were many stories about the game, and I didn't understand a single one of them. I got the themes (among them, youth, concentration and social progress) and asides (among them, crowds and groundskeeping), but the gameplay was Greek to me. But British. Like the Elgin Marbles.

Harold Pinter's "Hutton and the Past" confused me the most. It was all gameplay. The second paragraph, for example, started with a simple sentence about the sun, and then it all went downhill.

"The sun was strong, but calm. They settled into the afternoon, no hurry, all in order. Hardstaff clipped to midwicket. They crossed. Simpson guided the ball between mid-off and the bowler. They crossed. Their cross was a trot, sometimes a walk, they didn't need to run. They placed their shots with precision, they knew where they were going. Bareheaded. Hardstaff golden. Simpson dark. Hardstaff off-drive, silently, Simpson to deep square leg. Simpson cut. Hardstaff cut, finer. Simpson finer. The slips, Robertson, Bennett, attentive. Hardstaff hooked, immaculate, no sound. They crossed, and back. Deep square leg in the heat after it. Jim Sims on at the pavilion end with leg-breaks. Hardstaff wristed him into the covers, through the covers, fielder wheeling, for four. Quite unhurried. Seventy in ninety minutes. No explosions. Batsmanship. Hardstaff caught at slip, off Sims."

That much, I didn't get. A taut piece of sportswriting for sure, but "Simpson to deep square leg"? It was like when they practiced "Bamboozled" on Friends (full script). "You spin the Wheel of Mayhem to go up the Ladder of Chance. You go past the Mud Hut through the Rainbow Ring to get to the Golden Monkey. You yank his tail and — boom! — you're in Paradise Pond!" It was startling. There was a competition in the world of which I had absolutely no comprehension.

In their introduction, Coleman and Hornby wrote about the differences between British and American sportswriting, and I wondered if they thought we were spreading ourselves a little bit thin.

"Maybe one of the most crucial differences between sports culture in the US and the UK is that very few Englishmen and -women describe themselves as sports fans. Football fans, cricket fans, rugby fans, sure. But sports fans? Over the other side of the Atlantic, it is not uncommon to find people who care about the New York Giants and the Nicks [sic] and the Yankees and the Rangers; but in England there are simply not enough thriving professional sports to sustain that kind of devotion. … Only football and rugby league draw in the big crowds on a week-by-week basis. In America, by contrast, the nearest they get to international sport is the World Series; the pro leagues in the major sports are everything. Maybe this is why they have sports fans and we have cricket fans, or rugby fans, or boxing fans who enjoy a spot of football on the side."

This passage seemed friendly enough. Until I got to stories like Pinter's, which noted the sun and then blocked it out because the game was beginning. His approach was singular, almost defiantly, and he had plenty of company elsewhere in the book. The selections spoke to focus. I wasn't sure at the end — after jumping forward and backward, the middle for me — which fanatics were missing out on more.