Bit of a mishmash …

… though unfortunately not the popular Bulgarian summer dish made with tomatoes, peppers, onion, feta cheese, eggs and fresh spices, which sounds delicious (I was checking to see if mishmash was hyphenated).

Enjoyable night at the theatre last Monday.  Relatively speaking is early Alan Ayckbourn – 1965 – and it all seems very traditional now.  As a comedy of social manners it’s aged a bit; it has to be done as a period piece.  But as a comedy of chronic confusion and misunderstanding – classic Ayckbourn – it still works beautifully.  You can cavil at some of the fine details – why would the gal bother to write down her parents‘ address, for example? – but as the set-up for what follows it’s a pedantic complaint.  It’s the parents who get the best lines and opportunities to react and Felicity Kendal and Jonathan Coy (‘look, it’s him,’ we’ll soon be saying at the telly) didn’t waste them.  I always find it reassuring to be reminded that them on the telly can still actually hack it on the stage.  We were well entertained.

Big word-of-mouth title of late is Gillian Flynn‘s thriller Gone girl (2012).  I succumbed and raced through it, don’t regret it.  Amy Elliott goes missing one day; husband Nick Dunne comes home and discovers she’s missing.  Or does he?  And the twists and shifting suspicions just keep coming thereafter, right through the police investigation to the end .. and further, because what happens next, beyond the pages of the book, is a debate that can go on and on.  As a piece of literary construction it’s a tour de force, alternating as it does the two voices: her diary as back story, his observations on what’s going on in real-time.  If that sounds simple, it becomes a lot more complicated than that, but I’m not going to give anything away.

Gillian Flynn is a good writer – she knows, as Amy says, “To show don’t tell and all that other writerly crap” – and Gone girl transcends the crime genre that she has achieved prize-winning recognition in – not that it doesn’t grip as a mystery.  Amy and Nick are media exiles from New York, victims of the internet’s spread, returned to Nick’s hometown in Missouri to look after his ailing parents.  You get the flavour of both.  And as things develop in the full glare of the media (television crime coverage is very different in the States) Nick in particular becomes aware that they are also being forced into playing parts in a script they didn’t write.  Add to this Amy’s background: her parents had had great success with a series of children’s books over more than a decade featuring a character called Amazing Amy, and you have a very rich stew; Amy is somewhat less defeated than A.A. Milne’s model for no Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh was.  As Nick’s lawyer tells him, “You two are the most fucked-up people I have ever met, and I specialise in fucked-up people.“  But the beauty of the book is you can still like them both for some of the time.

Gone girl is full of fine lines and dialogue, and there’s plenty of wit.  The aromas of breakfast preparation are “a culinary orchestra tuning up.”  There’s Nick’s “speculative sister, she of the rocket-science brain and the rodeo spirit.”  I could give you more, but I’ll end with one that never fails to make me cheer (if only it happened on live TV), the on the spot news interview: “ ‘How does it feel?’ she snapped. ‘Are you actually serious?  Do people really answer questions like that?’ “  That and, “It was kind of romantic.  Catastrophically romantic.“  Good book.

Wish I could say the same about Dan Pedoe‘s The gentle art of mathematics (1958).  As you can see, it’s a book I’ve had hanging around for some considerable time, a copy so desiccated that dipping into it in the bath (probably the wrong verb there) would do it no harm (unless I dropped it).  I’ve always fancied the idea of mathematics – indeed, the ideas of mathematics – but never studied it after O-level, and the intro suggests I am just the sort of person it was written for.  Gentle?  You call that gentle?  I got lost on page 12.  Why?  Why have you done what you just did, Dan?  It felt like my brain had simply ceased to function, was no longer a working piece of equipment, was blanked.  Maybe a better intro, one more suited to me, has appeared in the past half century.

Another well foxed book I’ve picked up of late has been ’60s cult classic Trout fishing in America (1967).  I thought maybe I’d, um. grown out of Richard Brautigan, but seemingly not.  It’s still a delightful detour.  The sheer charm is overwhelming but there’s an awful lot more going on than stoned hippy twee (not that he ever was one, it seems, for all the garb).  With a zen logic it’s all over the place, the mixed metaphors, bizarre similes, quirky juxtapositions of locations, people, history and objects make for an entrancing brew.  He even looks a bit like Vivian Stanshall.  Opening chapter is called The cover for Trout fishing in America, and Trout fishing in America continues to make appearances as a character in Trout fishing in America, as well as your actual trout fishing.  Which prompts a word about the title, an original thought (in as much as I’ve never seen it in print); Trout fishing in Europe was the title of a newspaper piece filed by Ernest Hemingway early in his career, and you can certainly hear the rhythms of Hemingway’s prose in Brautigan’s.  How much of the uniqueness of Trout fishing in America would survive if it were not laid out unjustified in old style American typewriter font (Courier New is the closest in your computer) is a reasonable question, but not one I care to address:

Seventeen years later I sat on a rock. It was
under a tree next to an old abandoned shack that
had a sheriff’s notice nailed like a funeral
wreath to the front door.

NO TRESPASSING
4/17 OF A HAIKU

Hard to reconcile his work as being that of sad alcoholic prone to depression who died by his own hand at the age of 49.

And I leave you today with a photograph from mine own hand:

That’s what I call billing and cooing.
Now piss off to someone else’s garden.

Bedsit Disco Queen

Her music has meant very little to me over the years but I heard Tracey Thorn talking on the radio and liked what she was saying so I read the book.  Bedsit disco queen: how I grew up and tried to be a pop star (Virago, 2013) is a delightful memoir, one of the very best of its oeuvre – honest, witty, intelligent, ironic, natural. sardonic and life affirming.  The promise of that extended title is more than fulfilled, and there’s the added frisson of integrity of its being published by Virago.

Born 1962, a child of the Hertfordshire suburbs who came to musical consciousness in punk’s year zero, her first efforts surfed the post-punk DIY indie wave.  The unpolished, minimalist Marine Girls – now, she bemusedly reports, lauded on the internet as “a somewhat seminal post-punk DIY band” and a favourite of Kurt Cobain’s – were enthusiastically reviewed in the NME while Tracey was still at school doing her A-levels.  She met label mate Ben Watt in her first week at Hull University; they formed Everything but the Girl (EBTG) and made a name for themselves while still studying full time.   Tracey ended up with a First in English Literature; she did an MA later too.

What makes Bedsit Disco Queen so insightful and charming about the music business is this sense of contingency combined with a certain reluctance and intellectual distance.  They had stumbled into a career:

Part of me enjoyed the limelight, but another part, possibly a larger part, was happier in the library.

Later, after considerable success, in a career limbo -”I hadn’t belonged anywhere for a few years now” – and a few years on from their initial DIY motivation:

Luckily, Ben decided to contract a life-threatening illness, and in doing so, saved us.

And there she is chuckling to P.G.Wodehouse sitting for weeks by Ben’s bed in hospital.  Later again, offered a world tour with the all-conquering U2, she retires to be a mum.  For 5 years she doesn’t miss it, and then she does, so a solo album.  Making videos had always been one of the least favourite tasks on the treadmill, but now:

Here I was again with a stylist and a rail of the latest clothes, having my make up done for me. It was like a mum’s spa-weekend dream come true … to dip into it was a perfect antidote to midlife melancholy.

Ah, yes, mid-life.  What got her back working was:

I wanted to make a statement that I was still that girl who’d gone and bought an electric guitar aged sixteen and formed bands.

We get a lot of that girl and the joy of it is that Tracey kept a diary – don’t you wish you’d kept a diary, even if it was just the bands you saw? – so she can actually take us to the moment.  It’s brilliant, captures that initial unvarnished rush.  Here she is looking forward to the Anti-Nazi League rally in Victoria Park in April, 1978 (hey, I was there and all I can remember is someone selling Rock Against Racism rock):

We are going to see loads of bands we like AND stop the Nazis, all in one day.

(She has a way with CAPITALS throughout, which works beautifully.)  “All of a sudden,” she says, “it seemed as if everyone I knew was forming a band” but then:

If at this point it all sounds a bit Enid Blyton, it was about to get a bit Irvine Welsh.

All this while still doing A-levels remember, and in the full throes of sad teenage angst – one’s heart goes out to:

Meanwhile I was hopelessly in love with someone who was either not interested at all, a little bit interested, or very interested but too inept to do anything about it; I never really knew.

The wise and wary young aspirant could do a lot worse for sanity’s sake than read Bedsit disco queen as a career 101.   By page 289 Tracey is telling us “How peculiar and unpredictable and uncontrollable a career in the music business can be,” and her story certainly bears that out.  I won’t go into details of the twists and turns involved – the out of the blue involvement of Massive Attack is, well, massive – but there’s certain demystification, a de-mythification of after the event hagiography at play here:

There’s a random element to how bands develop, which goes against the idea that there has to be some unifying plan or manifesto giving rise to the band’s sound and identity.  Often, it’s more that there are chance meetings with people who turn out to be important.

There’s the recognition that “An element of almost ritualised humiliation seemed to be part of the process” and given the pandering that goes with this, “You can see why celebrities turn into arseholes…” while Spinal Tap “isn’t a cartoonish satire at all but in fact the most accurate film ever made about what it’s like being in a band – any kind of band.”  And then there’s the record company:

Now I’m not saying you should never listen to your record company, or that no one ever knows better than the band themselves, but in this instance, IN THIS INSTANCE, that really was not what we should have done. And what’s more, it didn’t even work.

And at a certain stage, the Is that all there is ? moment:

The success we’d managed to come by in the last couple of years had been seemingly at our own expense, in that it left us feeling impoverished.

I really liked this book but I’m sorry to have to say that I’ve never been able – and regrettably still can’t – to transcend the problems EBTG have had with the gap betwixt the perception and appreciation of what they do with their perception of what they were trying to do.  Their concern that “the quiet, minimalist thing could easily be misinterpreted as easy listening” because “sounding like Astrid Gilberto while coming on like Gang Of Four [brilliant! say I] was always going to be a problematic approach.”  Later on “those dreaded words, background music and easy listening” got an upgrade and they “found ourselves being offered a new radio home, within a new format called New Adult Contemporary, or NAC, which would turn out to be a very scary place indeed.”  Still, two decent people are making a decent living out of it, and that is good.

This is Edward Bishop’s fine photo that currently (May 2013) fronts Tracey Thorn’s official website. I hope they don’t mind my putting it here. At http://www.traceythorn.com/ among other things you can hear some tunes and access her gardening blog.

At times Bedroom disco queen feels like it’s come from different planet to that of the last music biz memoir I read, Pete Brown‘s disappointing White rooms and imaginary westerns.  Indeed, Tracey and Ben belong to that post-punk DIY generation of musicians that Pete scornfully resented as “scab labour“.  I’m still surprised he couldn’t appreciate the spirit of the age, but then I guess they were getting the recording contracts when he wasn’t.  What does link Pete and Tracey, though, is a shared crisis of confidence in their vocal abilities, the feeling that they were not as good singers as the accompanists and session musicians they were working with warranted.  Even now – “I still really think of myself as ‘someone who sings’ rather than ‘a singer” – the modest but never dismissive of her talents Ms Thorn makes no great claims for  the in-demand entity that is ‘The voice of Thorn’.

As it happens I’ve been listening to Living life backwards, the interesting anthology CD of Pete Brown‘s ’70s bands, the Battered Ornaments and Piblokto, and I have to say that, though obviously influenced by the man, I prefer his vocals to the bluster and bombast of his vocal hero Jack Bruce.  Good collection of songs that grew on me, in particular the haunting  Thousands On A Raft (that’s us, that is) and the brilliant Things May Come And Things May Go But The Art School Dance Goes On Forever (that’s us too).

Ernest Hemingway’s ‘To have and have not’

Meanwhile, back at the reading group, it was bring-your-own month, a sort of freestyle show-and-tell.  Being the only man in the group, I chose Ernest Hemingway‘s third ‘proper’ novel, the unloved one that sits between A farewell to arms and For whom the bell tolls.

Hemingway himself wasn’t that keen on To have and have not (1937) – he told director Howard Hawks, who was making a movie of it, that it was his worst book, “a bunch of junk” no less – but I think it’s under-rated and deserves to be up there rubbing shoulders with what are generally seen as his best books.  Written piecemeal and revised and published while he was reporting on the Spanish Civil War, without directly preaching it is Hemingway’s most overtly political book, reflecting his republican socialist sympathies in that conflict.  The writing is, as you’d expect, tight, taut and spare – on one level it’s an action thriller – and he takes you there, on land and sea, in the bars and cafés and on the boat, but there are longer introspective (though never extravagant) passages too which suggest to me he was no stranger to James Joyce’s work.

The tale is told in various voices, mainly working-boat owning protagonist Harry Morgan’s and an omniscient author, which broadens our view of events somewhat.  A word of warning is necessary, I guess, of the old Huckleberry Finn problem, and the prevalence in parts of the ‘n’ word (and indeed Chinks for Chinamen); as with Huck, I’d say live with it, the whole atmosphere of period and place that To have and have not carries are lost otherwise.  Set in Havana and Miami in the post-Crash 1930s, family man Harry is cheated by an absconding rich tourist and forced into dodgier work.  His morality is compromised but not abandoned.  He loses an arm and his boat.  In another desperate throw he agrees to help some Cuban revolutionaries only to discover they are bank robbers for the revolution.  Has to be a bit of a spoiler to say that things do not go well.  Harry’s conclusion:

‘A man,’ Harry Morgan said [...] . ‘One man alone ain’t got.  No man alone now.’ He stopped. ‘No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody chance.’

The climax of the book, as opposed to the action, features a mesmerising panoramic sweep of Key West and the rich men’s yachts in the harbour as Hemingway goes into each boat and tells its owner’s tale (and even how it ends for some) – a devastating picture of where American capitalism had got to in the Depression era 1930s.  There’s a particularly telling – calming even – interlude on the boat of a man who made his money out of manufacturing useful things that people wanted.

This was, I think, the third time I’d read To have and have not, but the first time I’d noticed the poignant yet hopeless parallelism of two people’s brief glances of one another, its significance to the book and Hemingway’s own world, even himself.  One of the people who feature in Harry Morgan: Winter, the third and longest section of the novel, is a successful novelist:

Riding his bicycle, he passed a heavy-set, big, blue-eyed woman, with bleached-blonde hair showing under her old man’s felt hat, hurrying across the road, her eyes red from crying. Look at that big ox, he thought. What do you suppose a woman like that thinks about? What do you suppose she does in bed? How does her husband feel about her when she gets that size. Who do you suppose he runs around with in this town? Wasn’t she an appalling looking woman? Like a battleship. Terrific.
He was almost home now. He left his bicycle on the front porch and went in the hallway, closing the front door the termites had tunnelled and riddled.
‘What did you find out, Dick?’ his wife called from the kitchen.
‘Don’t talk to me,’ he said. ‘I’m going to work. I have it all in my head.’
‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you alone.’
He sat down at the big table in the front room. He was writing a novel about a strike in a textile factory. In to-day’s chapter he was going to use the big woman with the tear-reddened eyes he had just seen on the way home. Her husband when he came home at night hated her, hated the way she had coarsened and grown heavy, was repelled by her bleached hair, her too big breasts, her lack of sympathy with his work as an organizer. He would compare her to the young, firm-breasted, full-lipped little Jewess that had spoken at the meeting that evening. It was good. It was, it could be easily, terrific, and it was true. He had seen, in a flash of perception the whole inner life of that type of woman.
Her early indifference to her husband’s caresses. Her desire for children and security. Her lack of sympathy with her husband’s aims. Her sad attempts to stimulate an interest in the sexual act that had become actually repugnant to her. It would be a fine chapter.
The woman he had seen was Harry Morgan’s wife, Marie, on her way home from the sheriff’s office.

Henry and Marie’s life together is, of course, nothing like that.  Their love story and life together is fetchingly revealed, unvarnished, in the course of the book.  Later we find Marie, making a sad journey home, spotting briefly a man we readers know to be a famous writer (and philanderer and cuckold):

As they turned in the white coral of the Rocky Road the headlight of the car showed a man walking unsteadily along ahead of them.
‘Some poor rummy,’ thought Marie. ‘Some poor goddamn rummy.’
They passed the man, who had blood on his face, and who kept on unsteadily in the dark after the light of the car had gone on up the street. It was Richard Gordon on his way home.

I’ve always loved John Bryson’s famous photo of Ernest Hemingway kicking a beer can down the road. Even had it on my wall for a time as a student. Often mocked, I still think he’s one of the great writers.

 

 

 

The Seagull …

… by Anton Chekhov and some other clever bastards.

The set was clever.  Minimalist, symbolic and undoubtedly clever.  But a few round stepping stones do not a lake make.  And the text, for all its inventive reworkings (courtesy of John Donnelly) still makes a big deal of the lake, of being in the country.  The concept of the water absorbent blank backdrop was fine, but if you’re going to spray-write on it maybe some will find it frustrating if the scrawl has all the legibility of a doctor’s signature, especially if, like me, you’re not familiar with the play.

I don’t know.  I wasn’t emotionally engaged and, looking at free e-texts afterwards – presumably ancient translations – not as intellectually engaged as I could have been either.  “A play about unrequited love – a story about how we create stories” runs the publicity, but I’d say that this modern dress staging also seemed to foreground the forging of a successful career in the creative industries a lot of the time.  The cast of Headlong’s production of Chekhov‘s The Seagull was good enough individually, no problems there except the wimp of a teacher (who had presumably been directed to walk and talk that way) and the audience’s applause at the end was enthusiastic enough, but for me – I was not grabbed.  I wasn’t sure why these people spent so much time together and I didn’t feel the love, unrequited or not.  It might be me, but being up in the circle last Friday at Watford’s refurbished Palace Theatre (where Marie Lloyd once performed) may not have helped in the appreciation of this decidedly modern and modern dress production.

It’s always going to be difficult, isn’t it, seeing new life injected into a classic when you don’t know the re-worked classic in the first place, but I’m not sure how much Chekhov would have appreciated the masturbation scene; ok, the idea of a writer getting off to his ego being stroked is valid (and she doing the verbal stroking gave the audience a wink) but the literal portrayal of the wank (thankfully just the back view) rather overwhelmed what was actually being said in the original text, was in dramatic effect out of all proportion overall.

There were some nice tweaks of the text I discover on reading some of the trad translation, not least the opening, and I wish I could remember them better.  This is, again, from the production’s website:

Idea for a story. A beautiful young girl lives by a lake all her life. She loves this lake. She’s happy and free, like that bird was once. Then a man comes along and for no reason at all – what do you think he does?

The dead seagull, offered as a token, returns later to the action as a professionally stuffed and mounted bird, which someone mentions is actually a tern.  Rather than dwell on the throes of unrequited love, Masha’s explanation at the start of the second half (Act 3) of why she is going to marry a man she doesn’t love, is paraphrased as something like:
“One must do something to counteract the misery of existence in this world.”
“How will you do it?” asks the writer.
“By marrying Medviedenko,” she says.
“The school-teacher?” he queries.
“Then don’t marry a school teacher,” says the woman sitting next to me, fairly obviously, from chat of her three companions during the interval, at the very least married to one.

 

Wooden floors, Dancing nuns

Resisting the temptation to make my heading Nuns dancing on wooden floors because it aint necessarily so; I don’t know what sort of floors they’re dancing on …

Will Wiles‘ first novel Care of wooden floors (Fourth Estate, 2012) is a darkly comic mix of paranoid farce, guilt (pondered against the concept of deniability) and alienation.  At one stage the narrator cites Edgar Allan Poe’s The tell tale heart, but it’s the actual floor boards rather than anything hidden under them that are his problem, at least at the beginning (the dead cat has been disposed of elsewhere) and Poe was never one for providing belly laughs.

Our narrator, a stuck writer whose main corpus of work consists of local government websites and information leaflets, accepts the invitation from Oskar, an old university housemate – a successful minimalist composer of works such as ‘Variations on tram timetables’, to house sit his immaculate modernist apartment with its expensive oak floors and look after his cats (named Stravinsky and Shostakovich) in an unspecified city somewhere in an unspecified post-communist East European country, the language of which he speaks not one word.  A stranger in a strange land, then, for whom the pristine condition of the flat, a matter of pride for Oskar, is also a challenge to his normal way of being.  Oskar has left instructions all over the flat, some notes only coming to light having been placed in anticipation of the disasters that do indeed transpire.  He lasts eight days before fleeing.

There is a neat denouement as to the why and wherefore of the narrator’s mission that you’ll get no hint of here, but on the way connoisseurs of drunken literature will appreciate a spectacular binge through the depressing fleshpots of the city in the company of a musician friend of Oskar’s, and a couple of prime hangovers.  Will Wiles has a fine eye for the original simile and metaphor that is refreshing.  On the binge our man encounters a pole dancer who “had the bored, focussed expression of a fork lift truck-driver” while waking from the hangover of that evening he finds, “Any movement set off the pain in my head like an earthquake in a bulk discount china store“. A subsequent night of solo imbibing results in his head throbbing “with wine and dehydration, and when I raised it, I found that my cheek was stuck to the floor. It peeled off like the free CD attached to the cover of a magazine.”  I guess you’d have to say Wiles takes a bit for granted when, in a supermarket, “The fluorescent lights were on, sizzling like the radio trace of the Big Bang” and elsewhere he mentions “the bell curve of human existence” but it works for me, and I really appreciated (as a lover of typography) our man’s surprise at discovering Oskar’s down-market porn mag collection, and his description:

These brash beauties frolicked in the graveyard of good taste. […] Around the images was a slaughterhouse of page layout. Working as I did in local government publications, I thought that I had seen all the evil that could be done when powerful desktop publishing tools were placed in inexperienced hands. I had, it seemed, been living in a fool’s paradise.

And the popular science reading ex-librarian in me was mightily tickled by Michael’s revealing, early on in the drunken evening on the town, that Oskar was working on “a symphony based on the Dewey decimal system,” his perfect muse:

The Dewey system arranges everything. It is the perfect muse for Oskar. He will arrange the world. A symphony of everything. A Grand Unified Symphony.

Andrea Büttner at MK Gallery

Not sure what it is about this big – nearly 2 metres wide – woodcut diptych in German artist Andrea Büttner‘s exhibition at MK Gallery, but I like it a lot.  Nuns dancing has simply got it all – joy, movement, celebration, getting down.  Nuns feature in an absorbing video too – Little sisters: Lunapark Ostia – where two of the nuns helping run a small amusement park near Rome take a ride on the (very gentle) roller coaster and answer to camera questions about happiness and spirituality;  for me what they say is not so crucial, but the faces while they explain are great, and the smile of the older white-haired one is (literally) wonderful.

Overall it’s a contemplative show, but full of life.  For a change it’s one that does actually seem to be about something – poverty, happiness, spirituality – rather than just self-referencing art practise, though there’s plenty of that going on too; this time the exhibition guide is relatively free from art bollocks and does help and make some sense.  I can live with:

Running throughout [...] are a number of threads: representations of hunger and poverty across art history [...]; an interest in materials and textiles from nuns’ habits to backrests and tents; and a grid-like motif that evokes institutional models and modernist design.  All of these substantial themes carry a variety of personal, historical and symbolic associations presented from numerous different perspectives.

Actually I thought the tents were simple two colour rainbows, but there you go.  There are more woodcuts than anything else but I found the nattily arranged collection of things on the four tables in the Long Gallery absorbing even before sussing (well, I read the guide) what they represented (“commerce and consumption, hunger and poverty, eating and digestion“).   There are some blown up xeroxes of black and white letterpress printed photos from an art magazine of teenagers looking at someone else’s exhibition on the way into the long gallery; their subtle horizontal arrangement draws you in, the visual satisfaction hitting before the realisation that you’re in an art gallery looking at people in an art gallery looking at art.  As it says on a couple of the woodprints:

Ja

Poets of Page, Pitch and Stage

Michael Ondaatje‘s The cat’s table (Cape, 2011) starts off like one of those boys’ adventure stories of old – and an entertaining one at that – but deepens grippingly as it progresses into a meditation on memory and on what matters in the becoming to what we become.  It’s the early 1950s.  Three boys aged 11 or 12 are voyaging with minimum adult supervision on the liner Oronsay from Colombo, in what was then Ceylon, to London, where Michael, the narrator, is to link up with a mother he’s afraid he won’t even recognise.  High jinks as they explore, plot and delve.  For meals Michael is seated at the Cat’s Table, the furthest – and therefore lowest in status – from the Captain’s Table, with some interesting adults who are also travelling alone; “It would always be strangers like them, at the Cat’s Tables of my life, who would alter me” he can reflect later.  So there are no cats, though dogs do have a part to play in one of the unfolding dramas.

While Michael Ondaatje has played down suggestions that the novel is autobiographical, it does parallel the progress of his life; born Ceylon, educated in England (at the same school as Raymond Chandler), successful writer, long time Canadian resident.  He has long been one of my favourite authors.  Though best known for the award-winning The English patient (1992) it’s his first novel, Coming through slaughter (1976) and In the skin of a lion (1987) that top my list.  The first is the best music novel I’ve ever read, elliptically unfolding and poetically relating the tragic rise and demise in the first decade of the twentieth century of New Orleans trumpeter Buddy Bolden, the charismatic but never recorded originator of that first great  jazz style, while the second is a riveting tale of love and politically driven sabotage set in Quebec.  He has also published several books of poetry and, as we shall see, it shows in the unique way he uses language in his novels, of which The Cat’s Table is only his sixth.

There is a passage at the core of The Cat’s Table – the nighttime passing of the liner Oronsay through the Suez Canal (or rather El Suweis as the adult writer Michael resonantly calls it) – that is fit, I would submit, to stand alongside the Piper at the gates of dawn chapter of Kenneth Grahame‘s The wind in the willows without having to invoke the god Pan. Though they never really talk about it, and they soon lose contact once in England, the experience is crucial to the later fame of one of Michael’s young onboard friends’ success as an artist.  What I was saying about Ondaatje being a poet: you could lay the so carefully weighted words out on the page as a poem and they’d be equally valid.  Listen:

We were not active, but a constantly changing world slid past our ship, the darkness various and full of suggestion. Unseen tractors were grinding along the abutments. The cranes bent low, poised to pluck oner of us off as we passed. We had crossed open seas at twenty-two knots, and now we moved as if hobbled, at the speed of a slow bicycle, as if within the gradual unrolling of a scroll. (p175 pbk ed).

I remember still how we moved in that canal, our visibility muted, and those sounds that were messages from shore, and the sleepers on deck missing this panorama of activity. We were on the railing bucking up and down. We could have fallen and lost our ship and begun another fate – as paupers or as princes. (p177)

It’s magical prose, and that has always been his trademark; he takes you there.  There is so much more to be enjoyed in The Cat’s Table, so many characters among the men and women they are befriended by or just meet.  There is great poignancy in Michael’s growing awareness and a brief lyrical episode of simple physical contact with comforting cousin Emily.  There is excitement too, of course, in the boys’ adventures on board and the mystery and drama of the prisoner in chains, and intrigue of a different kind in the oblique relating of Michael-in-the-book’s subsequent life leading to the writing of this book.  Which, even though my pile of unread books is high, I shall almost certainly be reading again at bit further down the line.

Wembley on a sunny afternoon

One of us was desperately reading the tea leaves for omens. Southend United were bringing 30,000 fans, had lost two previous Johnstone Paint Trophy finals (or whatever it was called back then), and it was their first time at Wembley.  Crewe Alexandra could only muster just over 10,ooo and it was their second time at the Stadium inside a year. On the other hand Crewe were a division above and the form team, I was unbeaten at Wembley, we went in their ‘lucky’ gate and – the clincher – one of us (hi Sal!) had her photo taken with Gresty, Crewe’s cuddly leonine mascot. So the scene was set.  Whereas last year we were sat sweltering in the blazing May sun, this year, still on the same side, we could relax in the gentle, welcome and welcoming warmth (finally) of that so far this year seldom seen solar life and light giver; while the vastly outnumbering Southend lot – we felt a little sorry for them – were stuck in the shade.

Crewe started well, their passing game instantly in place and playing like they owned the park.  They scored in the sixth minute, a beautifully worked corner: Davis stepping over the flatly delivered ball to the edge of the area for captain Murphy to stride up and hit a beauty.  Mark and I turned to one another, mouthed “Training ground” and so it proved to be.  Southend, big and strong, winning pretty much everything in the air, came back and were particularly dangerous at corners; Crewe needed a second goal.  They got it five minutes into the second half after a fine passing move finished off by teenage striker Max Clayton and while it remained a contest – Crewe keeper Steve Phillips was a significant presence – the longer it went on the less likely an upset became.  At the time we thought giving Max Clayton ‘Man of the Match’ was an odd decision given the midfield, in particular Arsenal loanee Chuks Aneke had worked hard, but watching the edited highlights on telly later that night it made sense; the lad has class and his movement was revealed holding a lot more threat close up, with a neat touch.  Good game, very satisfying afternoon; thanks S & M.

Scribal Gathering

Not actually this very night. Nevertheless, photo by Jonathan JT Taylor

A solid night’s Scribal for March. A thoughtful and varied set of poems covering a lot of ground from featured poet and Scribal regular, Alan Bainbridge, while featured music act Ernest Herb sat at a couple of keyboards, hit and stroked some keys ,  twiddled a few knobs, and sang a bit, covered a broad range of musics – I’m sure I heard Graham Bond on the Hammond organ on his best number – and finished suitably with a Bob Marley song.  Open mic of usual high standard, no ifs or buts this time (though I can’t possibly comment on myself).  Biggest cheer of the night was for a storming version of an unlikely cover for Scribal – Taylor Swift’s We are never ever getting back together from The Last Quarter,who are certainly waxing, not waning.  Go, Nicky, Go!

 

Famous bus spotters – No.1: Pete Brown

“The Cream legacy continued to haunt me in various ways …” writes Pete Brown near the end of his autobiography, White Rooms & Imaginary Westerns: on the road with Ginsberg, Writing for Clapton and Cream – an anarchic odyssey (JR Books, 2010).  This is such a bad thing that the paperback edition has been freshly titled as Eric, Jack, Ginger and me; Oh! And Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs and Ferlinghetti too … (Clarksdale, May 2013).  The main title of the hardback at least only alludes to that connection – interestingly there actually was a white room in Chalk Farm that was the Brown abode before it became White room the Cream song, while the Jack Bruce track Theme for an imaginary western is in fact in part the story of “pioneers and outlaws” saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith and Graham Bond, two of Pete’s friends – though both hardback and paperback books might well fall foul of the Trades Descriptions Act; the pages on which Ginsberg and the Beat poets are mentioned can be counted on one hand, and Eric Clapton is easily the least mentioned of the musicians in Cream.

I had high hopes of this book because it’s Pete Brown. I’m not sorry I read it, but it should have been a more satisfying read.  Anyway, the man’s own words, from the opening paragraph of the introduction:

I think I’ve had quite an interesting life […] However, I’m not a book writer [… ] Originally, perhaps in a fit of musician’s laziness, I wanted Harry [music biographer Harry Shapiro] to write it; but [publisher and friend] Jeremy liked my sample chapters ‘because they had my voice in them’. That gave me a signal – I would not try to do beautiful writing (which would have added several years to the project) but tell the story more or less as if I were speaking it.

Which, sad to say, is a shame, because Harry might have pulled a few of the themes of this undoubtedly interesting life together and given the book some sort of shape rather than the chronological litany it is, and probably not slipped so often into pub bore – inconsequential, repetitive and self-serving – or sour raconteur mode that I’m pretty sure is not the man at his best.  I hate to say it, but Peter Cook’s E.L.Wisty even sprang to mind at one point.

Cover art by the late great Mal Dean

But it’s not Pete Brown‘s fault that he didn’t write the book I wanted (which was, rest assured, not more Cream stories).  No, it was the poet I wanted more of, and there’s not a line of poetry to be had in the whole book, so if you didn’t know his work before you’d be none the wiser after reading this; hardly a song lyric either, for that matter.  I think this important because if it wasn’t for the beat poetry scene, the pioneer performance poetry gigs with Mike Horowitz and the jazzers who were part of that (including the 2/3rds of Cream for whom claims of deity were not made) then the invite to help with those song lyrics would not have arisen.  And to be honest, when assessing Cream’s success, I don’t think the lyric content actually counted for much (which is not an exercise in lit crit, I hasten to add).  Towards the end he says he’s writing and performing poetry again;  we are vouchsafed not a hint, not a line, of its nature.  Shame.

‘Thousands on a raft’ album cover

So.  War child, Jewish parents’ bombed out East End shop, safe Surrey abode.  Bus spotting, boys’ high jinks.  Fails English Literature O level.  Jazz, beat poetry.  Early ’60s beatnikdom, hitchhiking to poetry gigs all round the country, booze to obliteration.  With partner in lyrical crime Oxford drop-out Mike Horowitz.  Edinburgh, Albert Hall Poetry Incarnation, Ginsberg et al (as previously blogged about here at Lillabullero).  Somewhere in there giving up booze leading to an improved sex life.  A guarded welcome to the Summer of Love, Cream, growing musicianship, own band, blowing hot and cold with Jack Bruce (employee? friend?), often being the only sober drug free bloke in the vicinity.  Money comes, money goes.  Session work, producing, writing for films; true love, dodgy health scare but surviving, unlike some of his big chums; new work, autobiography.  It’s a life all right.

Shame too about the sneering: Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are “so-called poets“; Dire Straits and Elvis Costello’s “musical efforts” are not to his taste (efforts?); Keith Richards is “grossly over-rated” – all with no explanation.  And then there’s punk:

I believe that nearly all the Beat poets … had musical aspirations. Unfortunately, it was their punk disciples such as Lou Reed and Patti Smith who later had such a destructive and counter-musical influence.

He has a real problem with punk (but he was a punk poet ahead of his time!) courtesy of which he was made by the music industry to feel like “a fossil“.  So even the telling of the impact of the coming of skiffle gets a welcome with a proviso: “British amateurism […] was born, and it would reach its ultimate ghastly flowering in 1976 with the horror of punk.”   Never mind the gig that – legend has it – sowed the seeds for so much creativity in the city, “In Manchester we played in a place where the Sex Pistols had preceded us, and punters who had gone to see them out of curiosity had been appalled at how bad they were.”  I’d love to know what poet Pete thinks of John Cooper Clarke but he’s not mentioned at all. “Most artists harbour some kind of desperation,” he generously grants, “but the punks, having no skills, would do anything for money. They were, in effect, scab labour.”  What can you say to that?

2010′s ‘Road of cobras’ with Man keyboards player Phil Ryan

There’s candour and honesty aplenty about personal and professional failures along the way, but little of the humour that was a major characteristic of the poetry – after all, Let ‘Em Roll, Kafka was the title of one of his slim volumes.  There are flashes: in the East End of his youth there’s a  “nearby family of rampant greengrocers“; there’s the friend of a friend who, “took it upon herself to gradually dismantle my virginity.”  The Edinburgh Festival one year was, “a mixture between a holiday, an emotional trauma, an alcoholic binge and the Paris Commune,” while at the legendary Albert Hall Incantation, “It was great to see so many spectators at the poetry zoo.”  Pete Brown‘s White Rooms & Imaginary Westerns is certainly some sort of document of its times.  His music, with Piblikto and beyond, is worth a visit to Spotify too.

Last thoughts:

• our hero can be spotted in the ’60s cash-in-now-cult-classic movie of awfulness Gonks go beat  – “there’s trouble brewing between the rock and roll loving residents of Beatland and their ballad-singing neighbours on Balladisle” says the Amazon blurb – which has now become a must-see item for me
• and he also appears in Alasdair Gray‘s epic cult novel Lanark.  (There are cults and cults).
• Oh how I wish I hadn’t let go that The Not Forgotten Association vinyl album of Brown reading his early poems with occasional accompaniment from an impressive roster of muso pals.  Not because it sells for a packet on eBay these days, but because I fancy hearing it again and it’s nowhere to be found (apart from occasionally for silly prices on eBay).
• this is the second book running I’ve read – the other a novel not yet blogged about – that mentions Sidney Bechet in glowing terms.  He’s one I’d somehow missed; no longer – thanks, chaps.