Many things; no cabbages, no kings

Can you call this graffiti?  So good to stumble upon Hope on the horizon by the artist Heks on a perambulation of Willen Lake in Milton Keynes recently.  His canvas one of the oh so grey concrete supports of the bridge carrying the H5 grid road – Portway – over where the North and South Lakes divide.   Long may it survive.  Saw some gadwall ducks nearby.  Further south, on the approach and under one of the arches carrying the H6 – Childs Way – a more transitional work from the same artist:

And above, from the impossible-to-photo-from-that-angle, detail you can’t see on the approach shot:  “I’m not defacing property, I’m painting a face on it.“  I hope it’s not rubbed out; a nice walk improved.

Meanwhile, in the author-previously-known-as Colin (but is now just) Bateman‘s latest novel,Nine inches (Headline, 2011), the street art is on the cusp of becoming a heritage attraction in post-peace process Belfast.  The setting, is, as I say, post-peace settlement Protestant Belfast, where the para-militaries have demilitarised into pretty much routine violent gangsterdom.  Bateman is the by-blow of Raymond Chandler and Californication (the TV show, not the CD); you can throw in some of Ian Rankin’s take on corruption and some decent stand-up.  His main man, Dan Starkey (not his first appearance between the covers) is Philip Marlowe crossed with Hank Moody ie. he has a sex life and a touching and touchy on-off relationship with his life partner.  If the pace – as a thriller – slackens, it’s a worthwhile detour; it’s nothing but character driven.  Nine inches is compassionate, cynical, gruesome and laugh-aloud funny.  Starkey’s office is situated above a Shankill butcher’s shop; that’s a real butcher,  actually one of the good guys, who used to live in the Shankill, and not one of the characters of recent legend as featured in the Decemberists song.  Try this, from near the end:

So they went looking for him, and that left me with toothless Bobby and four corpses for all of about five seconds, until the cops came storming up the stairs, armed to the teeth and screaming at us to put her hands up.  So I did, but Bobby said, ‘I can’t, I’ll fall over,’ and it was all the funnier because he was pasted in blood.

At this point you probably need to know that 14-year old X-box playing drug dealer Bobby only has one leg (the legacy of a gang knee-capping); the false leg also plays its part in the narrative.  Another page on, still part of the same incident, gives more than a clue where Bateman is coming from.  Trish is, of course, the love of Dan’s life.  She has had no idea what he’d hidden in her car:

The cops were too busy with the carnage in the church, while the people of the Shankill had no further use for her now that they had picked her car clean.  Not only was every twenty-pound note gone, but the cocaine with it; not content with that they’d stolen a family bag of mini Mars bars from the dash, and rifled Trish’s multi-CD player, removing Van, David Gates and Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest hits.  For some strange reason they left behind my sole contribution to her playlist, the Ramones’ It’s alive, even though she pursued them up the street offering it to them for free.

As it happens I was drinking one of the brewer Bateman’s products – their tasty Veto Ale – in a busy Wetherspoons just off the High Street in Southend-on-Sea on Saturday.  Went down to the bottom of the road to see the sea but didn’t venture further down the cliff to the seafront – cold, grey and windy if not – yet – wet.  I can now say I’ve seen Canvey Island, if not been Down by the jetty.  We were there to see Crewe take on Southend United (nickname: The Shrimpers).  A disturbing sight before kick-off: running around in a pointy headed costume featuring the colour pink quite strongly, one of the Southend mascots – dressed as a shrimp.  Not the most distinguished of matches, Southend didn’t look anything like the top of the table side they currently are and that The Alex deserved the point they didn’t get was down to some dodgy refereeing.  “All we want is a decent referee” to the tune of Yellow submarine.  Out of a crowd of 5645, we were 3 of the 188 Crewe fans, a small but significantly vocal section of whom did no-one any favours by chanting “Gypo” every time Bilel Mohsni, Southend’s tall pony-tailed French-Tunisian striker, touched the ball.  So it is with a certain satisfaction that I report it was indeed he who scored the winning goal and good on the lad for his raised arms, relaxed clenched fists and proud smirking (but not smug) response to the away end at the final whistle.  The least said about having to listen to Arsenal’s demise against Sunderland on the car radio on the way back to MK the better.  (Thanks Mark & Sal.)

February’s Scribal Gathering was its second birthday.  The Cock Hotel had managed to double book the room and only told the Scribal team that very morning, which you have to say is impressive, but the Bull stepped up to provide a more challenging last-minute venue, but all was well in the end.  Another fine night – has to be with Badger kicking off the open mic.  Featured artistes were The mighty Antipoet (just for a change) who did what they do, and Kate Lucas a young comedic chanteuse of attractive and innocent demeanour, with a touch of the verbal dexterity of a Tom Lehrer delivered in a pleasing voice displaying the mind and mouth of Joan Rivers not having a particularly good day.  Maybe a little light would have gone a long way, but … Great stuff, and I certainly will be a lot more careful about not – not that I do, but, you know – leaving toast crumbs in the butter in the future.

More Lives of the Novelists

And more from one of the notable absentees from John Sutherland‘s Lives of the novelists: a history of fiction in 294 lives (Profile Books, 2011).  Ladies and gentleman, I give you once again Jack Trevor Story, in a piece from the rag-bag that is Jack on the box (Savoy, 1979):

On location for the Radio Times down in the gorgeous New Forest last week, one of Dave Allen’s merry men who reads my stuff said, “Why don’t you write your life story?”  I asked him what he thought I had been reading.  It now runs into six volumes, four published, two ready for the printer.  “I mean properly,” he said.  Help!

It is one of Sutherland’s themes, the significant place and placing – and manner of placing – of the events and circumstances of writers’ lives in their fictions, along with the creep (or planting) of fictions into their actual lives and personas, and the deliberate mystification of the boundaries by masters like Philip Roth.   JTS often alluded to this sort of thing in his Saturday Guardian columns of the early ’70s, protesting that his journal was not always to be taken as the literal truth.  It was a good game.  Here he spells it out (or, as Sutherland intimates for others, does he?) in a preface to a collection that wasn’t published:

Snakes shed their skins and writers go through doors … Albert Argyle went in one side and Horace Spurgeon Fenton emerged from the other.  Another skin gone, the anonymous third person god-eye removed and a disreputable version of the author babbled directly to his readers.  The last door – apart from the trapdoor that’s always ahead – opened five years further on in 1970/71 and Jack and Maggie came through [...] Two fictional characters but now with skins so thin you could see the blood.  Plots so believable you can almost remember the occasion.  But not quite; the last skin is still there and the blood doesn’t drip.

I keep on batting for Jack Trevor Story because there’s an injustice going on here.  He’s almost been erased from the scene (and I don’t just mean Sutherland’s book).  Because he wasn’t angry, because he wasn’t northern, because he was funny and obtuse and went off at tangents, because the sheer love of writing spilled from his fingers?  For me he catches a certain early ’60s zeitgeist – in the Albert Argyle trilogy (starting with Live now, pay later) particularly – that the literary novelists, writers of what used to be called ‘the Hampstead novel’, missed because they never met Jack’s people.  He’s the novel’s equivalent of Ray Davies‘s songs with The Kinks; Jack may have left the village green behind, and Ray never really lived by an actual one, growing up  in a north London suburb, but there’s an affinity there – little things mean a lot.  Interestingly Sutherland chooses – and I agree – Coming up for air as his MRT (‘Must read text’) for George Orwell, a book I’ve previously mentioned in the same breath as Ray’s Driving, that small masterpiece of a song – one of many – on the Arthur album.

John Sutherland gives us a nice summary of one of the Jack Trevor Story signature traits that make his writing so attractive to aficionados:

disconnectedness [...] requires the reader to leap acrobatically from one sentence to another, often slipping.  Always he wrote ‘against expectation’ [...]

Only he’s describing the work of the American writer Donald Barthelme.  But here’s the thing – Barthelme was always being confused with fellow novelist John Barth, and the same thing happened frequently to JTS.  I distinctly recall reading one of his Guardian columns about it, his getting invitations (and vice versa) to inappropriate book launches and openings  intended for miserable sod novelist and playwright David Storey.  Who, for some reason, is included in Sutherland’s roll call as, I guess, the token northerner of his generation, as opposed to Braine, Barstow or, more’s the point, Alan Sillitoe.

I keep going on about the omissions – there’s a list in my previous post – and to be fair to Sutherland, he does make his excuses, saying the book’s big enough already and that, basically, in a field as broad as this, It’s my party and I’ll include who I want to.  Just English language fiction, including short stories, the book is a substantial achievement, well worth at the very least extensive dipping into.  There is wit, learning and wisdom in abundance in passing.  Look up the book in a library catalogue and you will still find its CIP (Cataloguing in publication) record with its sub-title given as a history of fiction in 282 lives, as opposed to the 294 in the actual published book.  Who are the late inclusions, one wonders; was pressure applied?  It’s a history of the novel form in all its genres but there’s no – to add a few more names to my previous list – J.R.R.Tolkien, J.K.Rowling (there are other children’s authors), Robert Tressell or G.K.Chesterton just for starters.  Someone called Jennifer Dawson (even though she “has left little lasting mark on the annals of literary history“) and Sylvia Plath both get 3 pages.  (The most anyone gets is 6 – step up messers Defoe, Waugh, Updike, Barnes and Roth,P.)

The story emerges that it certainly helps to have a lousy childhood, a disastrous love life and an alcohol problem.  Sutherland sounds a bit of a prude at times (“How, one wonders, can these sexual depravities be related to the novels one used to read with such enjoyment” – that’s Graham Greene) and manages to come up with plenty of period euphemisms for homosexual activity.  His basic thesis – his justified counter attack against the literary theorists, the structuralists et al – is that the lives matter when considering the work.  He bemoans “Henry James’s posthumous exploiters” and talks of them doing “their grisly work” but doesn’t hesitate to mine many examples of the genre for innuendo.  Here’s a low example of the method, about Malcolm Lowry:

On the face of it, the size of the novelist’s tool should be of no more literary significance than Virginia Woolf’s anything but tiny nose, but in Lowry’s case it links – or so it is speculated – to his dipsomania.

There are times when you wonder whether John Sutherland, born 1938, enjoys putting people’s noses out, whether he’s being a waspish imp, a bit of a wag, or just a bitching bore.  Quite what sort of a run-in he’s had with Martin Amis in the past, you wonder, when he gives contemporaries Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes 5 and 6 pages but restricts Martin to sharing a section with Richard Hughes the theme of which is unfulfilled promise (“If Amis is the hare on steroids, Hughes is the tortoise with arthritis“) and he makes no mention of Money.  Ernest Hemingway is reduced to being an adjunct to one part of Scott Fitzgerald’s life while his short stories are only mentioned in the context of crime writers like Dashiell Hammett (who does get his due).

But it is in relation to the rise of feminism that Sutherland really indulges himself, to the extent of making himself sound like a comic character in a campus novel; you can already see a hint of it in that quote about Lowry above.  He talks about Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf biography as blowing away “the fogs of feminist mystification that swirl around the Woolf“.  (You can’t help but smile at ‘the Woolf‘ though).  Then there’s the exclusion of Nobel prizewinner Doris Lessing, which is baffling unless you see it as the deliberate cocking of a snook.  And how about George Eliot (given only 3 pages)?

In 1934 Lord David Cecil, in his [...] Early Victorian Novelists observed, with a donnish sigh, that the dust lay heavier on George Eliot than on her great contemporaries: Dickens and Thackeray. That dust has been blown off […] in the last eight years. Two mighty winds are responsible for the de-dusting of George Eliot: 1. feminism and its energetic search for female Shakespeares; 2. the rise of Ph.D. Sponsored ‘research’.  What once looked like ‘dull’ is now Arnoldian ‘high seriousness’.

That’s her sorted then.

I could go on.  There’s a very strange entry for Thomas Hardy (5 pages) which is mostly about public hangings and doesn’t mention his abdication from novel writing.  I’d not heard about The Wizard of Oz being a socialist allegory.  I like the idea of D.H.Lawrence being called ‘Bert’ as a young teenager (and his hating it ever after).  Mark Twain‘s attributes of greatness Sutherland paraphrases as “Voice, eye, attitude” – absolutely – and here at Lillabullero I cannot disagree with his description of Tristram Shandy as “English literature’s greatest comic novel“.  Enough!

 

Lives of the novelists

Next to being a famous and rich writer, instantly recognised on the streets by your gold bicycle, acclaimed in public places, lionised by ladies and bowed to by posh people, much nudged about, next to all this the perennial juvenile dreams of some quieter status; of finding his name listed (not vulgarly, right at the top, but certainly not at the very bottom which is also too conspicuous) and among the significant literary figures of the century.

Thus Jack Trevor Story‘s hopes when reviewing someone else’s book in … I know not where because the rag-bag collection of pieces I’m quoting from – Jack on the box (Savoy Books, 1979) – unfortunately doesn’t give any original publication details.  A not unreasonable aspiration, nevertheless, given that JTS is one of the great English novelists, comic (which he certainly is) or otherwise, and when, in particular, his Horace Spurgeon Fenton trilogy is a bildungsroman of the writing life in his auspicious times.  But it’s a hope dashed even posthumously as far as John Sutherland‘s Lives of the novelists: a history of fiction in 294 lives (Profile Books, 2011) goes.  You’re in decent company, Jack.

Here are just some of the writers who, in no particular order, didn’t make it in either:  Doris Lessing, Thomas Pynchon, your mate Michael Moorcock, John Cowper Powys, Jack Kerouac, Kate Atkinson, Philip K. Dick, Joseph Heller, Philip Pullman, Michael Ondaatje and P.G.Wodehouse.

I mean, we all know how meaningless ‘greatest’ lists of anything can be.  But this is not one of those;  what it purports to be is history of the whole field, including the popular genres, seen in the lives of its significant players.  That list does give cause for serious pause.  Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating overview in many many ways, and I’m still ploughing my way through.  There’s a particularly interesting sub-plot which must reflect Sutherland’s experience of the rise of the feminist wing in the groves of academe in the last 30 years of the twentieth century; how exactly he suffered at their hands one can only guess, but the scars are there for all to see.  More about Lives another time, and the same goes for Jack (“Writer, Artist and Yearbook“) Trevor Story; and indeed he who is up next.

I’ve also got on the go the new book from the author who chooses simply to be known as Bateman these days.  Very funny man, some great lines, and here are just two of them, which are even funnier if you know the context but still work quite well enough if we let them stand on their own here:

‘And how is the poetry business?’
‘Cut throat’

And so to Stony Stratford’s fiercely fought Bardic Trials, held last week, where, in the final, the diminutive (in stature, in stature) Danni Antagonist narrowly – three votes in a crowded room – took this year’s crown in back room at The Crown.  Splendid night, finished off by another storming performance from (yet to be discovered national treasures) The Antipoet.  Double bass and far-from-beat poetry, on this occasion ably augmented by a bongo-ist.  (There’s plenty of previous evidence on TouTube)

Not has Stony got (to the James Brown backing track) got a brand new bard,
but Danni’s got a brand new blog
here at http://stonybard.blogspot.com/

The Artist, another artist & Good Bait

It’s not that often I go to the cinema.  Blame that on a string of disappointments (film critics? – huh!) and other people (the shared experience?) as far back as the late ’70s; that and after feeling ennobled by the first one, coming out of the second Lord of the rings film feeling like I’d been beaten up.  But such was the buzz around Michael Hazanavicius’s The artist (2011) that I was tempted back for an afternoon screening and I was knocked out.  As any fule kno by now – though they were still warning everyone who bought a ticket at the tills – it’s a silent movie.  Set in late ’20s Hollywood, during the time of the changing of the guard with the introduction of talkies, it’s lovely stuff.  No clichéd dialogue for a start, and lots of neat visual gags in the background to supplement the basic good-natured hommage to the history of storytelling cinema.  Beautifully paced and played, with good old-fashioned male and female (I’m in love) leads, it’s an intellectually and emotionally satisfying cinematic experience, a joy in fact.  Go see if you’re at all tempted.

Interestingly enough, mid-way through The artist there is a dream – well, for the silent movie heart-throb awakening to the reality of the brave new talkie world – nightmare sequence when the music stops and all you get are silence and disproportionately loud domestic sound effects.  It’s a disorientation that takes us down the conceptual road to the new show at Milton Keynes Gallery. Artist Daria Martin‘s ‘survey exhibition’ consists of four short 16mm films, projected on screens in the dark.  I’ll quote from the exhibition guide notes:

These films combine elements of painting, sculpture, performance, dance and music [...] Martin’s work often raises questions about what it means to be ‘touched’ by cinema and alternates playfully between luring the viewer through rich sensuous images and pushing them back into an awareness of artifice.  This intentionally crafted ‘push and pull’ draws attention to the essential contradictions of the medium of film.

Maybe.  I wouldn’t vouch for it but I am being drawn into ‘getting’ – for want of a better term – video art (for want of a better term).  The artspiel in the guide goes on (as it invariably does), but I was riveted by Harpstrings and lava (2007); it was like walking into a surrealist painting – de Chirico maybe, or Max Ernst – with a formal harpist playing music I couldn’t quite place and wasn’t quite atonal and I was indeed strangely enchanted.  In Soft materials (2004) “two performers trained in body awareness and acutely sensitive to the nuances of movement” approach specially prepared robots ” as if they were sentient beings.”  Looked like a very odd fluttering dance routine to me, but it fascinated.  The newest film, the title piece, Sensorium tests (2012), revolving around the notion of ‘mirror touch synaesthesia‘, will probably be more interesting if I revisit it, which I probably will.

I always look forward to a new John Harvey novel.  I think he’s the best writer of the British crime big three (no surprises: take a bow Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson) showing an economy and subtle matt polish that owes, I guess, to his being a poet, too.  He can usually be relied upon to juggle parallel narratives skillfully, drawing you along at a pace, but I have to admit to a certain disappointment with Good bait (Heinemann, 2012).  On the police procedural level it works just fine, these mean streets and the Harvey compassion are in evidence as ever, but there is an artistically deliberate (I suspect) indeterminacy about the link between the two narrative strands – an East European crime boss who hardly actually appears – that doesn’t really gel into a satisfying crime novel; I think the point is that life’s like that, but then, so what?

There are two police operations in progress, two main protagonists. The first, in London, is Karen, a youngish black woman detective on the Met murder team working in the sharply drawn capital (with a side trip up the M1), while the second is Trevor, a career sidelined good Samaritan ‘tec in Cornwall who graduates to white knight status, spending time in rural France, via London and an ex-footballer private eye mate in Tufnell Park. I’m not sure Karen and Trevor ever actually meet, though they’d probably make a nice couple.

I will still look out for his next book, but apart from what I’ve already said, there are three problems, really.  The first relates to John Harvey, the second to Brit crime in general, while the third applies specifically to Good bait. Plus it must be said there is a big musical bonus.

• The Resnick problem. I hate to have to say this, and I understand why he had to go, but I miss him and his food stained ties. The people at the centre of subsequent books, even Frank Elder, all blur for me. A couple from Good bait may even have appeared earlier in the oeuvre …
• The rise of the East European organised crime gangs has become a blight, a dead hand, on crime fiction, a bit like child abuse was a decade or two back. I know, I know, it’s a real problem, but these days my lids start to droop at the first hint of people smuggling.
• In Good bait there is a climax to the French episode which brings together the resolution of a sexual tension narrative strand and the couple in hiding being found by the representatives of those they are hiding from, which culminates in Trevor getting knocked unconscious by intruders at the moment of … you guessed it. A big bang indeed. Is JH actually putting himself forward as a candidate for the Bad Sex Award? Sorry, disappointing.
• What was not disappointing was the steer to some music (link below). The title of Good bait comes from a jazz standard, an old Count Basie tune that’s been much recorded over the years. Trevor hears it or plays it at various points in his odyssey. It’s one of those jazz tunes – not a song – that is just out there and I couldn’t hum it for you even now. There are plenty of interesting takes on it to be found on Spotify, and I liked the long Dexter Gordon treatment. But the Nina Simone recording is magnificent.  As JH warns, it starts quietly and slowly, so give it time to build and just prepare to be stunned.  Enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNtEUtdUA3Y

Damn.  I thought that should have embedded but seemingly not.  Oh well, the link’s there.  Enjoy.

The hare with amber eyes

I did my duty by this one.  Edmund de Waal‘s prizewinning The hare with amber eyes: a hidden inheritance (Chatto, 2010) was a book group book, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered.  It’s all a bit rich and precious for me.  Should I be annoyed that Ed thinks I should know from the off what netsuke are?  Well I was.  They’re intricate Japanese miniatures carved in mainly ivory or hardwood.  I’ll grant they are fascinating objects, these stylish representations of living things, people included, and can fully understand what he means about touch, feeling them – de Waal is a potter – how they could get to you.  Netsuke were originally decorative toggles with a practical purpose (not that that purpose was described in the book); they got more and more intricate in the hands of their craftsmen, and in the japonisme craze of nineteenth century Europe they became collectible objets d’art.  Are we given any help in how to pronounce the word?  No.  Majority opinion on the web would appear to be netskay or netski, so for a long time I was reading it ‘wrong’.  Other words he pissed me off by expecting me to know without explanation are: bibelots, vitrine, fiacre, redingote, feuilleton.  Am I being unreasonable here?

No, sorry.  This book brought out the class warrior in me.  Talk about lifestyles of the rich and famous.  The netsuke collection is an heirloom and Edmund de Waal is now the custodian.  He is so attached to them (not unreasonable) that he wants to know and see the family places they rested in on their journey to him.  So … a century and a half, Paris, Vienna, Tokyo, South London.  The family history actually starts in Odessa; the Ephrussi dynasty grows from a business cornering the corn market in the Ukraine to a super-rich banking empire on a continental scale.  Charles, who is one of the inspirations for Proust‘s Swann as per Swann’s Way, buys a job lot of Japanese stuff in beau monde Paris.  De Waal does an awful lot of research in obscure cultural journals of the day, but in commenting on the clan’s marital mores can only offer, “I only know about Parisian marriages from the novels of Nancy Mitford …”

When Charles tires of the netsuke in his well hung cultural salon and the Impressionists are making their mark (he’s a patron), he gives ‘em as a wedding gift to one of the Vienna branch of the family.  In Vienna the netsuke reside in young wife Emmy’s changing room: “She spent a great deal of time in it.  She changed three times a day – sometimes more.“  Another beau monde, buddies of – it’s that man again – Maria Rainer Rilke, among others.  (Rilke must be one of the most cited, though pretty much unread, poets of the early twentieth century, and I fully intend to read him one of the days).

Things go awry for the family with the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and they don’t have a good war; the fortune pretty much disappears and Edward’s parents-to-be end up in Tunbridge Wells.  I’m not being facetious here; apart from the obvious, I was shocked at the specifics and individual rapaciousness of nazi art and wealth appropriation – my ignorance, hadn’t really given it too much thought.  But here’s the thing.  The netsuke are saved for the family by the brave subterfuge of Anna, the heroine of the tale – make no mistake – because without her actions this book could never have happened.  Anna was a long-serving Aryan but loyal servant in the Vienna household who stayed in the house after the family had fled.  While de Waal has spent weeks researching the minutiae of the beau monde:

I do not even know Anna’s whole name, or what happened to her.  I never thought to ask, when I could have asked.  She was, simply, Anna.

But then hardly anyone but the super-rich or subsequently famous are deemed worthy of a mention thus far anyway.  The 264 strong collection of netsuke end up with a gay uncle in Japan who did actually have to work for a living – another story, with a certain amount of gloss – and now with the author in South London.

I can see how this narrative enchanted so many, but I cringed at stuff like “The lack of tactility makes me panic” and similar  self-dramatisation.

I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things.

How about mid-life crisis? -  I say, unkindly, no doubt.  “There are things I cannot know,” he says early on, but he imagines a fair amount, puts thoughts in people’s heads.  “Somehow I imagine …”; “I suppose Charles might go in a carriage, I worry, but I can’t time that.”  And he even criticises some of Charles’s writing on art: “His prose becomes a little much here, a little breathless …”  Surely not!

A few things I owe, though.  I am surprised and disappointed to hear that Cezanne, Renoir and Degas are all on the side of the baddies when it comes to the Dreyfus Affair, and absent themselves from the salons of the jewish houses; anti-semitic Impressionists sound so wrong.  I learnt a fair bit about  aspects of European social history I’d previously taken for granted.  And after this exposure, I shan’t be bothering with Proust; a long-held guilt of omission assuaged there, so thanks.

And thanks of a different kind to Danni Antagonist and Fay Roberts, our charming hosts at Poetry Kapow! (“Kapow!) on Friday night at Wolverton’s Madcap venue.  Given the theme was Into the enchanted wood maybe I should say, our enchanting hosts.  A fine night’s wide ranging poetic entertainment and a good natured and lively atmosphere.  Storming performance again from Ian Freemantle with Jessica spectacularly clogging, but plenty of other good stuff, not least the slightly quirky songs of Nicky & Naomi, which get better with each hearing.  And people continue to characterise Milton Keynes as a cultural desert.  Bring on the Stony Bardic trials!

Mat Coward is a comic genius of the written word

Let’s get the ethics of this post out the way.  Mat Coward is an old friend and comrade from way back when, even though I still think of him as a young man.  So I didn’t pay for You can jump; and other stories – I got a review e-copy for free – and anyway I couldn’t have borrowed it from a library, because the actual paper and card object you can drop in the bath edition isn’t out yet (though it is imminent).  Not that that would have made the slightest difference to what I’m going to write next.

 

Is this not one of the great opening sentences of all time?  Resistance is futile:

My grandfather, for instance, created an entire religion based on chips.

That’s from Persons reported, the second story in You can jump: and other stories (Alia Mondo, 2012), Mat’s new anthology of quirky crime short stories.  His grandfather is – in passing – an ‘anti-Faith healer.’  There are crimes – mostly murders or attempts therat – at the heart of each tale, and the denouement is never obvious (well, not to me , anyway).  But it’s the tone that really scores – conversational, confiding, drenched in a wry, relaxed wit – that and the observation.  And the one-liners.  That “for instance” above, for instance, is crucial.  We are never told what it’s an instance of; we’ve just been privileged to drop in on the never dull mind of Mat Coward.  It’s beautifully done.

The opening tale,  If all is dark, starts with something almost (seemingly) tangential that happened at school

“Yes,” I said.  “I did write a poem.  About depression.  Though, in mitigation, I should say I’ve never written one before or since.  A teenage aberration.”

and skips to a flirtatious job hunting interview (“I do insist on Luncheon Vouchers“) , which leads to an odd love triangle involving japes with a philosopher who favours deadpan downer sloganed t-shirts and badges.

Once, we all dressed up in dark suits and went from door to door in a respectable suburb, telling whoever opened the door that we brought good news about the Bible.  The good news was “It’s all a pack of lies, so you can do anything you want to do.”  The only snag with that one was that most people shut their doors so quickly that they missed the punch line.

Trust me, I’ve barely scratched the surface.  The story concludes years later with revelations at the funeral of one of said triangle and is a fine example of the basic Coward signature move:

Over the years, I’ve only rarely written what you might call “straight” short stories [...] but there is something about historical fiction which sometimes seems to inhibit my usual practice of “twisting” my stories (or at least filling them full of jokes).

There are 12 stories here, two of them historical.  What he say above holds for one of them.   And what can they show, or what reasons give? takes place on the eve of the big Peasants Revolt demo and is played relatively straight.  The Wodehousian Hope of the world is a country house mystery straight out of Michael Palin’s Ripping yarns, reflecting 1920s establishment paranoia of communism, complete with some wonderful twist and turns; indeed, if the Monty Python boys ever contemplated a return to the movies, here with The Bolshevist League of Urgency is a ready-made plot for them.  The politics of both these stories make for a wonderful springboard of socialist (but never hectoring) wit.

The other 10 stories draw on the last 30 years or so, often in the same piece.  Two of the stories are barmen’s tales, where the dialogue is delicious and the comic timing straight out of classic radio shows; when reading So where’ve you buried the missus then, Paddy  I would warn you especially against operating heavy machinery at the same time. In Jizz we get introduced to the concept of ‘special birding‘ – you see, you’re intrigued, I can tell.  Reason to believe lets loose some delicious banter doubling as the interrogation of the astrologer suspect.  There’s not a dud among ‘em and you get the bonus of Mat commenting on their  genesis afterwards.  You can jump, the title story, is as serious as it gets, reflecting its author’s thoughts on what the social movement that was punk meant, or should have meant, to the foot soldiers, how its empowering philosophy is still valid today.  That and melancholy too.

The only thing that disappointed about You can jump; and other stories is that not much was new to me.  I’d read most of the stories before.  All of them have appeared before in mainstream crime anthologies edited by major players in the genre like Martin Edwards, so don’t let the fact that this book comes out via a small publisher put you off; rather it’s a reflection of the moribund state of British publishing.  You can purchase the e-book in any format (including .pdf) for a measly $3.99 from the Smashwords site; the paperback will be available soon.

And while we’re at it, Mat’s novel of the near future, Acts of destruction (Alia Mondo Press, 2009) is full of ideas and more of the same.  It’s a crime novel – a gentle police procedural even – set 20 years hence in a London where society is adapting to the non-apocalyptic failure of capitalism and the climate change chickens having come home to roost.  It’ll make you think, remind you there are alternatives to the way we live.  You can read its first two chapters here.  Every library system should have at least one.  Not that they will have, so reserve it so they do.

I should mention January’s Scribal Gathering before its memory recedes, given I’ve mentioned all the others – and another goodie it was too. Danni Antagonist gave us some of her words, Naomi Rose sang some of her songs, both to good effect.  We also had another fine set from Ian Freemantle, the official Bard of Stony Stratford, now approaching the end of his year’s election, but I won’t mention Steve Hobbs & his human Powerpoint demonstration.  And I was dead chuffed to win a much-prized Scribal Gathering mug in the post-it note poetry competition by rhyming Gaddafi and library with Rastafari and tsunami.  

Reviewing the situation

Now here's a look into futures past. It's a car they might just have seen in the streets of Berlin in the second book discussed here. It's a 1938 Tatra, on display at the annual New Year's Day vintage and classic car event in Stony Stratford's Market Square.

End of year clearance

The autumn of the Egyptian Geese

In August we spotted what we first thought were a couple of obscure ducks.  It was at the weir close to Wolverton Mill, betwixt Stony Stratford and Wolverton, on one of our regular walks along the Ouse .  First sighting was actually the male seeing off the heron that had initially caught our eye, but they were obviously not your common or garden Anglo water bird.  Our books didn’t help; we were baffled, even with the rich brown of those eyes and the colours at the rear.  Next time we went back there were goslings.  Eight at first,we were later told, seven when we first saw them, and down to six the last time, but you have to say … result!

It became a regular jaunt for me, checking on the family’s progress, an important part of my autumn, and occasionally one met others who were doing the same.  It was from one such couple I learned that they were Egyptian geese, almost certainly strays from a collection of decorative exotics.  Under the protective eyes of their parents the goslings prospered and grew, even going native, picking up on the feeding habits of the local ducks and swans and readily showing an interest in potential bread benefactors.

At a certain stage I noticed the male had difficulty walking and though the next time I saw him he seemed a bit steadier on his legs, that was the last time I saw him.  Did he become a victim or – one asks with an element of wishful thinking – do the males just leave the mums to it at this stage in the breeding cycle?  It saddened me.  But the goslings continued to grow.  They even started coming up onto the river bank, by which time they were almost the same size as their mum; it was only the lack of marking around the eyes that gave them away.

I was surprised by the intensity I found in the relationship.  And then they were gone, migrating (presumably) to where?  I do hope they’ll be back next year.

And here’s a thing or two I’ve meant to mention
the past few months but somehow never quite got round to them. 

I love this photo, found on the web, and I’d like to be able to credit it (if indeed, there aren’t any objections to its being here).  It’s Jackie Leven, sitting somewhere entirely appropriate.  I still feel hollow at the thought that I’m not going to be able to see him sing and talk and play again, a unique experience.  A true troubadour, he was special in many ways, not least in his championing poetry, his confidence that enough of us would get it.   We’re fortunate that there is so much music out there to keep returning to.  Today I am floored by his setting of Robert Frost‘s Stopped by woods on a snowy evening, on the Creatures of light and darkness album.  Is there anything more lovely and at peace (though he knows he must move on) than that voice crooning, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”

In a previous post I mentioned how Jackie eschewed encores, but I could only précis his words.  This is what he said performing at ‘A Cornish pub in Germany‘ in November, 2005, quoted from an official bootleg of the gig.

I think we’re coming towards the end of our time together. So we won’t be doing an encore; it’s a load of bullshit. I know that, you know that. What is the point of us going and standing through there, while you’ve got to go: “More! More! More! More!” and then we come back. It’s fucking ridiculous. We’re not going to go through that … So this is our last song, and we look forward to seeing you again next year.

A slight return to another JL gone too soon.  Tim Riley’s recent John Lennon bio, reviewed here earlier this year, contains a tale or two about his life with Yoko in the apartment in New York and her reliance on a “coterie of astrologists, psychics and numerologists” – leaving a rather obvious question, which I’ll let lie – up to and beyond choosing a label for the release of Double fantasy, their return to recording.   Label head David Geffen was invited over, after, Riley cites Geffen himself, “she ran “his numbers” (a combination of his birthday, address, phone number, and ‘who knows what’)“.  On the album they used a couple of musicians from the band Cheap Trick, and – I really like this story, which reassures me somewhat – Carlos, one of those musicians, reports of the sessions:

“Yoko’d be in the booth and say, ‘Does anyone want some granola?’ or whatever she had, and it looked like animal feed. And John would be like down the hall with the roadies, you know, sneaking a slice of pizza.”

After reading Riley’s book I hunted out a copy of Double fantasy from my local library and was underwhelmed; any more is best left unsaid, so I’ll leave it at that, I think.

And now for something completely different.  After some additions to the list of words that barely exist outside of a 15×15 crossword square, a few more faves from the Guardian cryptic.   When was the last time you saw or heard used in everyday speech or print the words ague, alack, tarry, litotes or stevedore?  Thought so.  And so to some clues that gave pleasure.  As you’ll see, I tend towards the simple life:

• from Tramp the awesome: Ulterior motive of Haagen-Dazs? (6,6)
• from Rufus the beautifully simple: It became you (4)
• and the classic: Lover of Bess in musical heading off for wild party (4)
• from anon Everyman in the Observer: A motoring offence in Shepperton (6-7)
• zen from Orlando: Al most (6,3)
• and the elegant: Effie is in Sheffield but he is in Manchester (4,6)
• a cringing pun from Araucaria: Don Quixote’s horse, say? (6)
• and a couple more from Rufus: More than one rock group (6)
• Metal detector (6)
• redeemed by: Treatment for refusal to play guitar (7)
• and the simplicity of:  A round game, perhaps (3.3)
• the sweet punning of Arachne gives us: Dames popular with sailors (6)
• but weep at the sheer majesty of Auracaria: Complaint that one could hear Forsyth greeting relative? (11) (which I would never have got without a Warren Zevon song)

Answers at the end of this post …
underneath evidence (well, you’ll have to take my word for it) of one of my great achievements in 2011.  You know how you say of something, That is just fucking im-poss-ible?  I speak of Advanced Heading in the Balance category of WiiFit exercises.  Never mind that it’s told me on occasion I’ve got the body of a 20-year-old and that my movements are full of grace, after months of doing Advanced Heading on WiiFit I managed to avoid all the boots and pandas it could throw at me and successfully made contact with all the footballs and racked up a Perfect Score.  More than once.  Hell of a buzz.

So after all that excitement I leave you with the Crossword answers:

• from Tramp the awesome: Ulterior motive of Haagen-Dazs? (6,6)
• from Rufus the beautifully simple: It became you (4) THOU
• and the classic: Lover of Bess in musical heading off for wild party (4) (P)ORGY
• from anon Everyman in the Observer: A motoring offence in Shepperton (6-7) Double parking
• zen from Orlando: Al most (6,3) Nearly all
• and the elegant: Effie is in Sheffield but he is in Manchester (4,6) City centre
• a cringing pun from Araucaria: Don Quixote’s horse, say? (6) DONKEY
• and a couple more from Rufus: More than one rock group (6) STONES
• Metal detector (6) COPPER
• redeemed by: Treatment for refusal to play guitar (7) NO-STRUM
• and the simplicity of:  A round game, perhaps (3.3) CUP TIE
• the sweet punning of Arachne gives us: Dames popular with sailors (6)  (Norfolk) BROADS
• but weep at the sheer majesty of Auracaria: Complaint that one could hear Forsyth greeting relative? (11)  BRUCE-(E)LLO-SIS !!! (it’s a lung disease of cattle, mentioned in Play it all night long, Warren Zevon’s paen to the farming life, his comment on the getting back to the land hippie fallout movement after the gold-rush, so to speak)

New Year’s wishes to each and all.

The social whirl

Feels like I’ve done more socialising in the last ten days than in the last hundred.  But first, a word from our sponsor.  Now it’s safe to have Herbal Essences branded product in the house again – now that those blatant Meg Ryan fake orgasm rip-off TV ads are history – we have just added to our extensive collection of shampoos one called ‘Fresh balance‘, which claims to be a ‘clarifying shampoo’. I am, ahem, unclear as to what exaclty this means.  The mirror gives no hint that anything new has happened (either that or the shampoo has simply failed) though the citrus blossom and green tea odour was pleasnt enough.  Mind, I know about shampoos.  In the mid-60s my mum worked on the shop floor at 4711 on Slough Trading Estate, where they produced some of the first specialist shampoos – Stablon (for blondes) and Brunatex for … you guessed.  Except it was the same stuff put into differently labelled plastic bottles of contrasting hue.  True story.

So … the last Scribal Gathering of the year saw a performance by Final Clearance  – and it worked well that the lead guitar/vocals looked like the politely bearded, be-tied and be-jacketed manager of an emporium advertising just that – who teasingly prefaced half their songs with slow ornate airs from Christmas songs before jumping off into some lively and very together, energetic yet controlled, ditties of their own, the presence of a violinist doing no harm at all.  No featured poet so mine host Richard Frost stepped up to the plate with among other pieces a splendiferous poetic performance of his prize winning bitter-sweet Weekend dads rant and rue.  I did a slot that wasn’t embarrassing and thus a relief.  I-wish-I-could-remeber-his-name did some of his Chemistry poems to great acclaim.  How can a man fail who starts his set, arms reaching out, chanting ‘Chem-ist-try-yee’ in the manner of Gary Glitter’s finest 3 minutes (Rock and roll).  Another good night’s culture.  Somewhat distracted at one stage at our table by not being able to remember Galliano‘s name (the acid jazz rappers), whose works I re-acquainted myself with later in the week; to just mention and say that Stoned again is one of the all-time great comedy records probably does them a dis-service, but wotthehell, Archy, wotthehell.

And from Scribal to Scrabble.  Helped the Scrabble Queen of Milton Keynes get her mojo back by losing by a couple of lengths in consecutive games.  Then the local Humanists solstice party included a Wooing Play (a Mummers variant) and Stewart did Jake the Peg complete with extra leg.  Oh, and a first public performance on ukulele by your resident blogger, backing the Quaylettes for the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Daydream.  What a day.

More mummers at a musical solstice evening on the shortest day.  These were mainly proper musicians with proper voices who would say things like, “Let’s do number 13 in the Green Book,” so I recited Adelaide Ann Proctor‘s epic of good bad verse The lost chord of 1858 (“Seated one day at the organ / I was weary and ill at ease …“).  I was St Andrew in the Mummers play (one of Andy’s innovative insertions, like the Queen of the May) but my Scottish accent became problematic.  One of the songs that I could join in on was The Holly and the Ivy done to the rollicking pub version of the tune (as opposed to the usual hark-the-angels-sing melody).  I wish I knew what to call it – you know, there’s something like Crimond for a hymn with opposing tunes – but here the internet (and a ‘proper’ musical chum) has failed me.

Yet more mummers in a pub yesterday and full-on full-blooded and musical it was too.  The Stony Stratford Mummers (the bunch in the picture at the top of this post) in the Fox and Hounds in the full white-faced, morris beribboned, top hatted fashion parade of tradition, Bealzebub an effective foil for crowd control.  They finished with a rousing non-mainstream Holly and the ivy too.  How I relish the memory of  sixth-form wassailing for charity in the pubs of Burnham at Christmas – the Boar’s Head Carol the fave – ending up at the trad jazz bearded communist (so exotic) music teacher’s house where he plied us with drink (well, a glass thereof).

And after that entertainment,  home to catch up with the final two episodes of The Killing II.  Bloody hell.

And the birds pick up on the change, time to start singing again.

 

Endings on this shortest of days

As it happens I’ve just read two books featuring two suicides and in both the first death is a minor thematic precursor to the main act.  Two books, one published in the year I was born, the other just this year.

So – back to Greene-land, briefly (see my previous post).  Graham Greene‘s misery-fest The heart of the matter (1948) was the title of the month that coincided with the Book Group Christmas meal.  There it was agreed that the only characters with any joie-de-vivre were the corrupt Syrian merchants.  A certain sympathy with Scobie was volunteered by some – a good man full of good intent tying himself up in the knots of Catholicism, hoist ultimately with his own petard of pride and pity.  Ridiculous though this hand ringing is – at one stage he posits JC as a suicide up there on the cross (actually, now you think about it, not a bad shout) – the book does, as a couple of people at the meal said, stay with you.  Not least for that coda of a last chapter laying out what happened after his badly judged – he was fooling himself – demise.  Tremendous writer, of course; see how he reports from the depths of joylessness.  You have to agree with Orwell in querying what the point was – pity, Scobie claims – or whether the pleasure accrued was worth the eternal damnation when he can tell himself:

He thought sadly, as lust won the day, what a lot of trouble it was; the sadness of the aftertaste fell upon his spirits beforehand.

This from the man who had earlier warned (in probably the only half-way humourous line in the whole book):

Love isn’t as simple as you think it is, Wilson.  You read too much poetry.

The suicide at the heart of the narrative in Julian Barnes‘s prize winning The sense of an ending (Cape, 2011) happens quite early on and is Camus-ian.  You know, Albert Camus: “Il n’ya qu’un probleme philosophique vraiment serieux: c’est le suicide” (from The myth of Syyphus – 1942); notice how, in French, even that sounds un peu enticing – “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”.  As quoted by Adrian, the newly arrived charismatic sixth form clear thinking clever clogs who joins three other pretentious school chums, at the start of Barnes’s really rather good journey into the workings of memory, the meaning and making of histories and the shadings they give to the loves, the decisions and the responsibilities of living a life.  Happily it’s not the narrator who does himself in, but what happened in the ’60s and early ’70s is brought back into focus for him 40 years later when he is the benefactor of a puzzling bequest in a will which sets off a sequence of events that undermine his view of himself and the past and confound his imaginings.

Much was made of The sense of an ending‘s length – only 150 pages – and its eligibility for the Booker Prize.  In passing I have to admit I can no longer claim to be allergic to Booker winners, which was a good tag line but can no longer be justified (following on the Booker tail of Wolf Hall and The Finkler question) because I liked this beautifully paced book a lot.  It is much more than a novella; there is more going on here than in many so-called contenders coming in at at least twice the page count.  There are sections I won’t even mention, or mention again, like narrator Tony Webster’s marriage – an illuminating side issue as he asks her advice – that are rich in nuance on their own.  The core relationship is the problematic one with Veronica at university, his quirky maybe manipulative and/or damaged girl friend who ends up with Adrian.

There is no real ending – much remains un-revealed – and given the information to hand there’s not much of a sense of one to be had; things don’t turn out as Tony expects, didn’t occur as he’d surmised, and the narrative doesn’t take the expected path.  There’s a major twist I’ve given no hint of here.  The last words are – his  conclusion is – “There is great unrest“; the puzzlement and remorse when things present and past go awry is made all the more effective because Tony’s voice throughout is invariably good-natured and peppered with a whimsical wit.  How can we really know that Adrian “didn’t grandly refuse an existential gift” – the existential gift of life, that is, vide Camus – rather than it just being that “he was afraid of the pram in the hall“?  We end up in a strange place – “You just don’t get it. You never did and you never will,” Veronica tells him bracingly.  But despite all the drama, much that is observed applies simply to the passage of time.

And the period detail is pretty good.  Although Tony seems to have steered clear of the politics and drug scenes, these were recognizably my years too.  At school the wearing of one’s watch on the inner wrist bestowed … something, and

There was, apparently, some secret masculine code, handed down from suave twenty-year olds to tremulous eighteen-year olds, which, once mastered, enabled you to ‘pick up’ girls and, in certain circumstances, ‘get off’ with them.  But I never learnt or understood it, and probably still don’t.  My technique consisted of not having a technique [...]

Me too.  “I’d better explain what the concept of ‘going out’ with someone meant back then …” he explains.  So he’s got the university courtship rituals of the day down pat.  And this is probably how I danced:

Basic male display behaviour of the period, determinedly individualistic while actually dependent on a strict imitation of prevailing norms: the head-jerking and the foot-prancing, the shoulder-twisting and the pelvis-jabbing, with the bonus of ecstatically raised arms and occasional grunting noises.

Among other buttons pressed: Veronica is sniffy about his owning “a two-disc boxed set of Donovan called (in lower case) a gift from a garden to a flower” (too right) while his book shelves contain “orange Penguins for fiction, blue Pelicans for non-fiction” that are “Functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into“.  Then there’s the dreaded visit to the girlfriend at uni’s parents – “I was so ill at ease that I spent the entire weekend constipated” – though here the mother warns him against her own daughter, which sets up uncomfortable resonances later.  “Her father drove a Humber Super Snipe.  Cars don’t have names like that anymore, do they?“  No, but back in the present day, there’s some very funny dialogue in a pub between Tony and a barman establishing that when you see ‘hand cut chips’ on a menu what it actually means is ‘fat chips’, and that thin is not an option, a dialogue taking place just before a significant moment as the action is played out.

This was one of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.

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