… GLIMPSE. It may lose a bit of its poetry in the plural, but a whole lot of glimpses is just what the Anne Marin curated exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery – Saul Leiter: an unfinished world – delivered. Wasn’t just that the photos on display were small, less than a foot either way in most cases – indeed, one of the volunteers suggested using the zoom on my phone rather than peer too hard close up That quote on the right was high up on one of the Gallery walls.
I had a hugely satisfying time following the display through and then wandering back around for a more random second view, and while there weren’t many, as the quote says “important moments” – three of the compositions I’d call ‘important’ that have stayed with me’ are in the block of pictures below – collectively it was an illuminating experience. In one of the explanatory texts, someone (sorry, should have noted) said they were surprised when Leiter told them he was interested in Zen … until he witnessed the man at work, taking photos unobtrusively out on the street. One felt that presence strolling through.
Saul Leiter (1923-2013) took photographs documenting – in, as he said, fragments – the streets of New York in the 1950s & ’60s and beyond. He was retrospectively considered a pioneer of colour photography when his work was widely exposed to the public with the appearance of a first book in 2006, but he’d worked in black and white professionally long before. Fashion, advertising and magazine shoots are featured in the exhibition; fascinating to see in an actual magazine, they follow the same enigmatic approach. Something there was, for him, about raindrops, mirrors, and obscure views. Abandoning commercial work, he saw himself as a flaneur, not looking for anything in particular, just the moment.
He was an artist too and the biggest pictures on display – not the collection of miniatures above, obviously – are some of his abstract paintings, full of a warmth and brightness, and unfashionably not shy of pastel colours; friends suggested he work on a larger scale, that if he did he’d be up there premier league painters, like Rothko. A cheerful Rothko even? I’d like to surmise that in Through boards (right, above) he was even giving a playful nod tto his mate (well, he did knew him). Back with a camera, he worked on a book of nudes, using friends as models, but in the end he chose not to publish, instead giving them to a gouache and watercolour treatment to produce inages of great charm. [Click on the pics to enlarge]
In the last gallery in MK they were showing extracts from Tomas Loach’s In no great hurray: thirteen lessons in life with Saul Leiter, a delightful directed chat than an interview, to feel you’re a part of – his warmth and charm (again those words) drawing you in, there in his slightly chaotic studio; the gentle wit and self-amusement a perfect coda to the exhibition.
There is a trailer for that film at https://www.saulleiterfoundation.org, where you can also find some reproductions of his larger paintings and more photos. You can find more overviews of his photography on Youtube.
Oh yes, I said ‘Glimpse’ was a favourite word. For what it’s worth, here’s one of the first pages I produced for Lillabullero, way back in the day, celebrating a handful of the (big) little blighters (nb. not photos): Glimpses
Originally billed locally as ‘Orphean Spring’, Orphean Sprig, the featured artists at the Song Loft’s March Performers’ Night impressed a packed York House back room with their fluency, energy and musicianship. An instrumental ensemble emerging from the Cambridge session scene – three fiddles, guitar rhythm section (surely RSI beckons) – and looking suitably like a University Challenge quiz team (thank you, Jane L!), they dazzled with a rich and varied mix of traditional, modern, and original tunes of (it says here) Scottish (with a touch of Swedish) inspiration, both moving and moving. (Audience could have done without that explanation of what ‘a session’ is, though).
The band name, though! As stated, they were erroneously billed as Orphean Spring, but what a difference a single ‘n’ can make. Orphean, sure: melodious, entrancing; spring a bit general in application. But Orphean Sprig; so much sharper, pro-active, and specific, like, a joy-bringing sprig of mistletoe or holly, or new plant growth. I’m pretty sure the band name is a borrowing from a poem. ! didn’t get the idea from them, and it’s only a theory and I had no idea at the time, only came to it when failing to find them in a search engine without adding the qualifier ‘band’, but the name comes from a glorious line in a brilliant poem, first published 1968, by Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, called simply Trio. And the band – one of whom is Scottish – do the quote justice.
That line is “Orphean sprig! Melting baby! Warm chihuahua!” and it really isn’t as surreal as it sounds. Given the study guides the search engine threw up, the poem is pretty obviously widely studied at schools in Scotland. Lucky them! It’s a great piece of work that I’m surprised I hadn’t come across before. Because of copyright I’ll not quote the whole thing, but it starts with the poet coming across three young people one cold winter’s pre-Christmas night in Glasgow city centre, enjoying one another’s company:
Coming up Buchanan Street, quickly, on a sharp winter evening a young man and two girls, under the Christmas lights – The young man carries a new guitar in his arms, the girl on the inside carries a very young baby, and the girl on the outside carries a chihuahua.
Consider the poet’s heart truly cockled. And when the three have vanished into the crowd he says (in brackets): “(yet not vanished, for in their arms they wind / the life of men and beasts and music / laughter ringing round them like a guard)“. You can find the whole magnificent life affirming text here: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/trio/
And later that same month, the March Song Loft gig featured The Wilderness Yet. Hey – more young people playing folk music.
With a repertoire drawn from the English, Scottish and Irish traditions plus originals, they delivered an engaging couple of sets. We got various songs and tunes with the instrumentation as per the pics (and occasional banjo), that sat alongside some accomplished a capella three-part harmony songs. [Photo (c) Andy Powell]
Much to the audience’s surprise, singer RosieHodgson – owner of one of those rich British folk voices – announced at the start of the second set that it was guitarist Ben’s first public gig with them; we would never have guessed. As well as delighting the ears, it was an informative – and as you can see from my photo above – fun evening. Nice tale of the old Italian lullaby making it back into the folk repertoire via a Tchaikovsky steal. And Rosie made a claim for 5/4 being the proper time signature for English – Copper Family derived – folk song, leaving me none the wiser; I’ve often wondered if there was any rhythm in the originals I’ve heard, and love it though I do, I’ve never been able to convincingly count along to Dave Brubeck’s Take Five – but what do I know?
‘Poetry fans’ it say at the head of this piece. Well, they did give us a setting of Robert Burns’s Ae fonde kiss, and another poem that I really should have made a note of. Nature – specifically bees, trees, birds (the thrush, the nightingale) – was their more than occasional inspiration, so it only seemed possible that the band’s name could have been borrowed – as spotted by Vicki S, for which thanks – from one of the great nature poets, which was confirmed by the Rosie. Gerard Manley Hopkins‘ poems have stayed with me since first studied at age 18 – “as kingfishers catch fire” has never left me (and so wonderful to discover how true) – and it is from his poem Inversnaid that The Wilderness Yet get their name, from the celebration of its very last line:, “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet“.
Long out of copyright, I’m only too happy to give you Inversnaid in its entirety:
This darksome burn, horseback brown, His rollrock highroad roaring down, In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam Flutes and low to the lake falls home,
A windpuff bonnet of the fawn-froth Turns and twindles over the broth Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning, It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern’ And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet of wildness? Let them be left, Oh let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
… you get to read stuff you wouldn’t normally go out of your way to consider worth the while. The bad thing about being in a Book Group is you get to read titles you wouldn’t normally think about reading iother than in extreme circumstances (like a hostage situation and there’s nothing else to hand, because you have to read – right?). Two other things arise – one a moral dilemma, the other compensatory. Do you keep faith with the group and actually read the bloody book in question? But … you are probably not alone in whatever you feel – the chat can be illuminating in many ways. Sub-text: a Book Group is not necessarily just about books (though in the group I belong to wine doesn’t enter the equation except at Christmas). This year’s titles so far, then (it could have been worse):
The heart of the matter
Doubtful I would have returned to Graham Greene after all these years, and especially not one full of Roman Catholic guilt and anguish like The heart of the matter (1948, the Book Group’s January title. But it turns out that, while it remains central to our main man’s dilemma, he has enough problems to be going on with to engage even a Humanist and sceptic like me anyway; morality and loyalty to a cause are the core of the best of Greene’s books and this novel has strengths that transcend all the theological stuff. Though, indeed, it could well be cited as a witness for the prosecution in that regard. The first speaker below in both quotes is the youngest character in the book:
‘But I simply don’t understand. If you believe in hell, why are you with me now?’ How often, he thought, lack of faith helps one to see more clearly than faith. […] ‘A deathbed repentance,’ she said with contempt. ‘It wouldn’t be easy,’ he said, ‘to repent of this.’ he kissed the sweat off her hand. ‘I can regret the lies, the mess, the unhappiness, but if I were dying now I wouldn’t know how to repent the love.’
She turned her head wearily away and said, ‘I don’t understand a thing you are saying. It’s all hooey to me.’ ‘I wish it were to me. But I believe it.’ She said sharply, ‘I suppose you do. Or is it just a trick? I didn’t hear so much about God when we began, did I?’ (p194)
Later for a bit of context to those quotes. Most of the Book Group I’m a member of are, ahem, of a certain age, and a few of us had read a lot of Graham Greene in the 1970s, when, as far as the contemporary UK novel went, he was, a grand old man, still very much at the top of the tree commercially and critically. So it was really good to be reminded of, simply, what a great writer he was. Character, setting, atmosphere, narrative, finely paced prose and dialogue, gilded with the telling phrase, he had it all, and no gimmicks; the human condition is his subject. The heart of the matter, never out of print, has borne a great variety of book jackets – the one on the right is, I’m pretty sure, from the fondly remembered 1970s Penguin Greene series, one of the very best.
These days I guess if this were being studied there’s a fair chance educators might feel moved to give ir a ‘trigger warning’; which, as might be guessed, practically doubles as a spoiler alert. Henry Scobie, “an obscure policeman in an unfashionable colony, ” is a good man both stuck and adrift. He’s serving in a British west African British colony in the Second World War; over the border is a Vichy French colony. Passed over for promotion, his wife bored (she’s into poetry), he does one small thing – taking a loan (as he insists in seeing it) from a dodgy Syrian businessman who is also a friend, in order to finance his wife’s escape to a city in South Africa. Interesting how vituperative the women in the Book Group were about her, by the way. To complicate matters he has an affair – one of those things that just happen – with a young widow, He was not a happy man to begin with, but the official suspicion and his trying to keep the affair secret, the mushrooming dilemmas drive the narrative to its end (despite what I’ve said – no spoiler). It’s as much his internal struggle that grips the reader, though, aided and abetted by his conversations with a sceptical priest, the only faint hint of humour to be had throughout.
As a picture of the everyday functioning of colonialism on the ground I’d venture The heart of the matter is as good a guide as many a memoir (Greene had been there as a journalist). As a guide to life, as a self-help book, for all Scobie’s stoicism – “What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery. He had cut down his own needs to a minimum” – it is, at face value, no great shakes. How about: “The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being – it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.” But then there’s: “People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution; sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery“. And this doozy: “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil – or else an absolute ignorance.“
This is the situation the modest resigned good man Scobie finds himself in, before the religion kicks in: “He wanted happiness for others and solitude and peace for himself. […] Two people’s happiness was in his hands and he must learn to juggle with strong nerves.” He’s trying, and thinking awhile too: “‘It’s a mistake to mix up the ideas of happiness and love,’ Scobie said with desperate pedantry, as though, if he could turn the whole thing into a textbook case … […] One ought not to lie to two people if it could be avoided – that way lay complete chaos, but he was tempted terribly to lie as he watched her face on the pillow.” It’s powerful stuff, well worth spending time with, so, thank you Book Group.
Before we move on, a trio of quotes: one I think that shows what a great writer and observer Greene was (with a touch of prophesy to it – hello incels), one that’s just plain smug, and another that is … despite its predecessor, sheer poetry:
‘I’m not a squire of dames,’ Harris said with a poor attempt at pride, and Scobie was aware of how Harris watched him as he picked his way reluctantly towards a woman’s hut, watched with the ugly asceticism of the unwanted man,
‘Love isn’t as simple as you think it is, Wilson. You read too much poetry.”
“Hysteria and honesty receded: cunning came back across the threshold like a mongrel dog.”
Gentleman Jack
February’s Book Group book looked promising, especially when you consider the rota in its sub-title as featured on the dust jacket of the hardback edition (lurking below) of Angela Steidele‘s Gentleman Jack; a biography of Anne Lister: Regency landowner, seducer & secret diarist (Serpent’s Tail, 2019). (While much of the text is taken from various journals and letters, what wasn’t required the services of Kay Derbyshire, translating from the German.)
Anne Lister: “history’s first”, as it says on the paperback cover, “modern lesbian.” I watched the original series of Gentleman Jack on the telly and saw it through, interest held by Suranne Jones’s joyful smirk, a notable feature of her reading of the character. Didn’t bother with the second series because it promised to be just more of the same, and it seems I was not alone, because HBO (co=producers with the BBC) withdrew support for any third series. After reading this book that might well be a relief, given how her life ends, on a long and difficult journey to Russia and thereabouts. You can add seasoned traveller to that sub-title’s list as well – an extraordinary woman by any means.
So, yes, it was really interesting to begin with. Born in Halifax, Yorkshire in 1791, died 1840, by the time Jane Austen‘s Sense and sensibility was published in 1811 Anne Lister had just left school, having already developed a secret code involving the ancient Greek alphabet and other signifiers to record her sexual exploits; Anne’s median year, 1816, saw the publication of Emma, which would seem to inhabit a different planet. Angela Steidele doesn’t consider this overlap with the sainted Jane at all, but she does speculate on Anne being known of by reputation to the Brontes, and goes so far as suggesting her being the model for Wuthering Heights’s Heathcliffe. to which we all said, Ho hum. But the real problem with Gentleman Jack the book was that it soon became tedious, the flatness of the narrative, woven together creditably though it be mostly from Anne’s journals, never overcomes the repetition of her pursuits. The amount of foreign travel is a surprise, and her wanderlust came as something of a relief, although you soon have to surrender the ‘wander’ as her travels fall into the same pattern. All of us in the Book Group – true, there were only half of us there – agreed on how soon we tired of it all.
Nor was Anne Lister exactly the heroic figure heralded in the splendid bit of jaunty folk (think Richard Green ‘Robin Hood) featured behind the credits at the end of each TV episode. Yes, she had many qualities, exceptional for her time and gender – I was impressed when she went all the way down a Belgian mine to the coal face to see if there was anything they could learn for use in her mine back home – but she was also a serial shagger, a snob, a social climber, and a gold digger, with no sympathy for the Peterloo marchers or the ‘Great’ Reform Act of 1832. It’s not just me, saying all that – here’s the author, near the end of the book (pbk. p308):
I have had similar experience with Anne Lister to all the women in her life – first she seduced me, then she betrayed me. What I liked even more than Anne Lister’s astoundingly open way of speaking about her desire was her certainty of herself: her desire was an expression of her nature, and that was that. […] Despite all this, Anne Lister was a beast of a woman. Like all of her lovers, I could not escape this conclusion, and yet nor could I let go of her. All the sex in old-fashioned language was just too delightful. Then the thing was over.
Only after the return from Russia did Ann Walker, her ‘wife’ of the last 6 years (who’d not been that keen on going herself) learn what had been going on in their partnership:
Only from the modest yields that Anne Lister’s assets brought in did Ann Walker find out how much her wife had actually owned. There was now only £4,000 left, much less tham Anne had claimed to possess. Ann Walker must have realised that she herself had funded most of Anne Lister’s failed investments. Had Anne ever loved her? Or had she been lying to her from the very beginning? Ann sought answers to these questions in her wife’s diaries and letters …
Ann Walker had a breakdown and spent time in an asylum, which meant that one of those terrible coincidences that can occur in a life came to pass:
We can assume Ann Walker was indeed suffering mentally after her traumatic journey across Europe with her wife’s corpse. Whether she really needed monitoring in a clinic is questionable. Ann must have come across Eliza Raine in the asylum, as she lived there until her death in 1860. Anne Lister’s first and last lovers were both declared insane.
In between those first and last we had learnt, from her journals (I daresay Casanova’s logbooks pall after a while too) that:
In the years since 1820, Anne had renewed her vows with Mariana three times, seduced Miss Vallance and Nantz Balcombe, slept countless times with Isabella Norcliffe, flirted with Harriet Milne, Lou Balcombe and Francis Pickford, spent a long time living in Paris with Maria Barlow and then a few weeks with Mme de Rosny. During all these entanglements, Sibella Maclean had been an iron in the fire that AL sought to heat up from a distance, to forge and shape to her will. (p162)
Those journals are worth considering too. On her travels, “Anne spent hours of every evening writing her impressions of the day in her diary instead of discussing them with her travelling companion, who felt rejected”. And in those last 6 years with Ann, “Her minute detailing of her life grew into an obsession during the 1830s. She lost all sense of what was worth mentioning and what not. Nothing prevented her from writing down for the hundredth time how fast she had walked from Shibden hall to the church“. But it’s the coded sex log in the journals that has fuelled the more recent interest in Anne Lister’s life. Steidele provides an Interesting survey of how historians have chosen to ignore or view them over the years. Here she quotes Phyllis Ramsden, one of the first modern social historians to promote Lister’s import, from 1970:
It is natural to assume that these secret passages are of some special significance, and must be deciphered at all costs. Fortunately this is not the case. With very few exceptions the passages in ’crypt’-alphabet are of no historical interest whatever. […] … the crypt passages tend to be purely personal, and it can be taken for granted that the longer the passage the less it is worth the tedium of decoding.
How things have changed. For all that I’ve said about O’Hooley & Tidow’s theme tune, for the television series, doubtless those readers who remember it well will now have a hankering to hear it again anyway (I did). You’re welcome:
… StonyWords 2024, that was, stretching from the 19th of January 19 to February the 4th. 37 events (https://stonywords.org.uk/) at 6 venues from x organisations (even though I heard Rob Gifford say it at every event I went to, I’m afraid that didn’t stick). Here’ are the one’s I was at (and beyond):
Actually the first event listed in the programme was the tuneful Kites Collective at January’s Song Loft, already mentioned in despatches on the previous post here (click on Catching up with myself – left above Say the word here – if you feel so inclined)
Oddest Bardic Trials so far to elect the 13th – yes, that many – Bard of Stony Stratford. York House packed as ever for what might in another time have been called a Palace of Varieties. Only two, very different contenders. Alex started strongly reciting a Stony tale with props against an impressive soundscape, but blew it for me (not just me) with some low camp humour punning on the making of tea with, um, tea bags; he finished with an accomplished bit of anguished acting, but it was not exactly Bard-stuff. Craig Hudson, a Bletchley boy, entertained with some autobiog and details of his Stony connections (including first performing gig when really quite young in a Stony pub); can’t remember what he did in the middle (poem?), finished with a song.
Craig it will be then, for 2024. Should be fun with the man who constitutes in various guises one half, two thirds or one quarter of the excellent band – formed with ex-Bard Mitchell Taylor – whose name is an anagram of his own: Coda Rushing, no less. I do wonder what the Mayors of Milton Keynes – on the judging panel – make of the proceedings. Varied supporting acts, with Seven Sentinels being a one woman wordsmith with a hip-hop soundtrack (best response when she went acapella which was not part of her Murderville sequence), Morning Tourist a busking singer-songwriter, and another ex-Bard, poet Vanessa, whose wit and wisdom (with a touch of filth) got a big joyful reception. Another grand teeth-of-their pants job from The Bardic Council.
Intellectually stimulated, informed and entertained by the Drama Llamas‘ interpretation of the strange beast that is playwright Caryl Churchill’s Love and information – seven sections of seven brief and briefer scenes, which can be done in any order but must stay in the same section Into this mix go ten short ‘Depression’ scenes, which can go anywhere; some of which, for all the darkness on display therein almost had me on the verge of laughing out loud (at others attempts to help the situation).
Caryl Churchill has provided the script and little else save the random (not quite random) structure. No settings specified, no stage directions, no set dramatis personae (as many in the company as you want, but – get this – no character appears more than once, so any attempt at continuity is out the window) ; it is, as their programme suggests, one extended roller coasting channel hop. Presented in the round upstairs in the Library to a sell-out crowd, Drama Llamas did it with four actors (ok, plus one, paint brush in hand, puzzlingly briefly), subtly dressed in seven pastel shades of top and trouser, and one darker purple, which worked well, with four ever shifting (was it even that?) chairs and a couple of small tables. Tremendous acting and an accomplished theatrical experience.
Churchill also gives an option of some Random scenes (… ‘random particles …’) which I’m told many productions don’t bother with. Dunno why, because the pub quiz sequence at the end, questions vaguely appertaining to some of what has gone before, as delivered here, was a comic tour de force. what was it all about? – life, the universe, everything; science and spirit; consciousness, free will, what human beings can, can’t, won’t and don’t do with it.
Great show from the Living Archive Band at a sold out York House, featuring songs and tales of songs drawn from the musical drama-docs that have grown out of Living Archive Milton Keynes‘s work over the years. We got songs ranging over a century and a half of local history, from the 1830s and the coming of the railways and the growth of Wolverton, he first railway town, to the 1960s and the coming of the Rolling Stones to Bletchley.
In between we got a taste of hard and high old times in Stony Stratford, life in Wolverton Works, and the experiences of post-war emigration (the lovely I want a little more from life) and London overspill in Bletchley (Who do they think we are). It’s a fine and varied back catalogue gleaned from the stories actual people told, delivered this evening from what the programme described as “a new assemblage of previous members Described in the programme heralding “a new chapter” in the band’s history. And there’s more …
Living Archive Milton Keynes has been going four decades now, and I’d say it’s one of the things that makes MK special among the New Towns, and it is keeping on keeping on, as can be seen from this latest initiative (from which I quote):
Since its foundation, Living Archive MK has been committed to sharing the stories of local people in creative ways; songs and music have always been a rich and important part of that mix. The Living Archive Band, which was formed to create music for Living Archive’s community documentary plays, began life in 1976. Over 100 songs have been written by local musicians for Living Archive MK about local people and their stories and we would like to find new songwriters who are interested in taking this legacy forward and creating new work based on material in the Archive. We plan to select some of the songs arising from the project to be developed further for performance at our 40th Anniversary concert in October 2024.
Book talks
I ducked Robert Gildea’s Backbone of the Nation (about the impact of the Miner’s Strike) because I’m still deeply unhappy at Arthur Scargill’s Lenin act, and a lot of the others weren’t really my period or cup of tea (and sorry for a couple I forgot about), but I still managed three, all highly informative and entertaining (click on image to enlarge):
Diane Purkiss was talking about the food 95+% of the population actually eat rather than the stuff of cook books; including how she fed her family while of welfare. She has it in for that Elizabeth David and her refined notions, and, opposed to what she sees as the stuck notion of say, Italian or French food, praised the open-ness and variety – albeit a side effect of the British Empire – of what the English actually eat. Interesting: when asked, well over a third of the audience put their hands up to being vegetarians. Sub-title in the book: A social history of England told through the food on its tables.
Annabel Streets spoke in praise of walking, the benefits from folklore confirmed by the latest science. She had us standing up, adopting the correct posture; apparently it’s good to bounce, among other things. The book is sub-titled The surprising science of walking for wellness and joy, one week a time; the weeks cover many topics and themes – walking through forests, backwards, meditating, in all weathers, like a pilgrim (though not, it seems, like an Egyptian). I’ve been a slave to my FitBit since lockdown, and yes, though the 10,000 steps was a marketing ploy, it remains valid – she uses one – given you do about 2,000 steps without thinking about it, and after 8.000 steps you have to put in a lot more effort to achieve fewer gains. Charmed, I bought a copy.
I’d meant to ask Kirsty Sedgman about the contrasting hard- and paperback covers of her On being unreasonable – has there been greater variance so soon between editions? – but missed my chance. I think she called herself ‘a public discourse analyst’ – just Cultural Studies scholar on her website – and of course, the key thing is: who decides and defines ‘reasonable’; hers was no nihilst call to arms, but … This book grew out of her academic work on the hot topic of theatre etiquette, and, working in Bristol, she used the Colston statue affair as an example; after years of ”reasonable’ lobbying and actions getting nowhere, the toppling of the statue lead to his name disappearing pretty much throughout the city within a year. Keen Q & A session afterwards.
An afterword word …
Talking of walking … outdoors it has begun again (aconites and snowdeops), and it’s been a bit wet. The River Great Ouse doing its flood plain stuff has restricted one’s trails – in whatever way one walked – somewhat:
Seeing as I’m still here, might as well bring Lillabullero relatively up-to-date with February’s Scribal Gathering (photos courtesy of Jonathan JT Taylor – click to enlarge):
Yes, February saw the return of the singer songwriter to Scribal, with at least three open mic-ers of the persuasion in addition to both headliners; not that the poets had gone away. Chilcraft warmed and chilled, the many colours of the cello aiding and abetting the songs, while energetic new Bard Craig Hudson stuck with the songs, yea even unto one from his Billy Nomad days, when he allegedly scared a child or two busking in the High Street in his spare clown make-up.
Have to admit I dodged February’s main Song Loft show and the prospect of an evening full of concertinas. Nothing personal, I am full of admiration, but it was self-protection. Either I could have overdosed such that I might never have wanted to hear another one for quite some time, which would never do, or I might, heaven forbid, have become a convert. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
Meanwhile, as this post has grown, the water went … and then the rains came back again even more suddenly; the ground is sodden. And the Agatha Christie jigsaw got done. Which was fun.
Working backwards, to shield the embarrassment (Lillabullero as up to date as ever) … Opening event of the StonyWords 2024 programme, but later for that because it was also the Song Loft’s regular February show at York House, was Kites Collective:
The tuneful acoustic ensemble that is the Kites Collective gave us a rich variety of material drawing on rock and folk influences with a nod to pop into the bargain. Judiciously chosen covers and some originals were delivered by an ever-shifting combination of band members; worth saying that mandolin in the photo above was never far away from the action. What a great voice Heidi Carsacon has, and what energy!
Eclectic? Well, not only did they do, among others, the Beatles ( hey! – Things we said today) and Dylan (great to hear the not widely known masterpiece that is Born in time), but also Alison Moyet (the lovely Only you), a Robert Burns song (’twas near the night), and … something from Kylie Minogue’s repertoire (I would never have known if they hadn’t said, made it sound folky). Highlight for me was all five of ’em harmonising on a rousing Wayfarin’ stranger. Most unexpected was probably It’s only a paper moon, as sung by Nat King Cole (and, apparently, Neil’s dad).
Not for the first time,photos borrowed from (C) Chrissy Leonhardt) thanks again. Just because she’s in black and white is not so much a suggestion that Heidi was not colurful (far from it), as a feeble attempt here from Lillabullero at being a bit arty.
John Verity is a veritable rock and roll survivor. Argent is the band most would know, though he achieved a certain success with a few others over the years that I may not have heard of but others in the crowd in York House did. His book’s title – This rock’n’roll won’t last you know! – is a quote from his nevertheless supportive mother to the teenage JV. It was the sight of a Fender Stratocaster in a shop window in Leeds that confirmed him off on his musical quest. First album in 1966 and he just kept on, playing and producing. He was in fine voice and humour, and in fine fettle on the guitar, delivering a number of songs – including some originals – and talking entertainingly of his times, his career, and his contemporaries. The Dave Berry (he was in his backing band) and Ringo Starr (a recording date in LA) stories stick in the mind, both involving alcohol but in diverging ways.
First half of the evening was an acoustic set. He’d joined Argent as songwriter and lead Russ Ballard’s replacement, but said, To be honest, it wasn’t really his thing (not that that stopped him doing their two main anthems later). So we got an impressive selection of songs from the music that had motivated him from the start, like the blues standard Before you accuse me and Hi-heeled sneakers. And there was a bravura performance melding Steven Stills’s Love the one you’re with with Argent’s Hold your head up.
John went electric in the second half, employing a backing track for most of it. B.B.King’s The thrill has gone stood out for me. When asked he said Jeff Beck was his favourite guitarist (pass, for me), and was disappointed that Clapton, a big inspiration, was never, in his opinion (and mine, this time), as good again as he’d been with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Interesting tale, too, about almost becoming a Kink. There was a skilled rendition of Jimi Hendrix doing The star-spangled banner at Woodstock – and another good tale about fearfully opening for him, but him (JH) having a bad day – so I’d rather he’d not slipped into a God save the King with it. (Republican me still has nightmares about Brian May up on the roof of Buckingham Palace for the Jubilee).
He finished with Russ Ballard and Argent’s anthemic God gave rock and roll to you, and a singalong on the tame side from the audience (it’s not that well known after all). But still, an interesting, worthwhile evening; if I’m sounding a bit lukewarm I would still say, If you get the chance it’s an absorbing experience.
Pure self-indulgence: I did know God gave rock and roll to you from when I reviewed Argent’s In deep album for the UK Cream (along with Let it Rock the precursor of the glossy rock music monthlies) in August 1973 – before John Verity joined the band. This is what I said: “I reject the theology (don’t care if it is a joke), am appalled by the clever liberalism of ‘Love Cliff Richard / but Please don’t tease’, insulted by ‘It’s never too late to work 9 to 5’. Worst of all, it plods. Home counties suburban rock …” Of course I was so much younger then, and freshly employed as a full-time librarian, I had my pride; these days, I’d drop that ‘clever’.
Longstanding bee in my bonnet: Somewhere in there he did a decent rendition of the BeeGees’ To love somebody, a much-covered song that continues to puzzle me. Hard to imagine what it must be like to have someone moaning at you , “You don’t know what it’s like / To love somebody / The way that I love you”, and not feel the emotional blackmail card being played. Far healthier, surely, Bonnie Raitt’s devastatingly sad acceptance of the situation, I can’t make you love me.
First Scribal of 2024 and headliner The Word Guerilla, previously seen and heard as an acapella open mic-er) gave us a bit of everything it promised on the poster (though with no filthy limericks this time). Standouts were a paen to Northampton in the ’90s and a frenetic trip around the phonetic alphabet (so many words in the memory bank), but generally accomplished, energetic, inventive and enabling. Again good to see some first-time poets. The evening finished with a nice surprise – the one and only Ukusnaile (Uku-snail-ee). Has to be seen to be believed – one man, with songs, an obviously quirky wit, and a ukulele … with a knitted shell on his back (knitted by his wife).
The post-Christmas jigsaw – Forbidden Books – was only a 500-piecer and relatively easy. American inspired, so along with the old well-read favourites a lot of the LGBTQ+ teenage titles that evangelists and Trumpers seem to find such a problem. There’s a 1,000 piece Agatha Christie waiting for the next cold or cold spell.
Ancient history now of course but not to be ignored here on Lillabullero because it was a bit special, with pretty much all the invited performers in great form and doing something beyond the usual, with seasonal un-corny bells on, you could say; even if the Antipoet’s splendid contribution did include their anti-Christmas anthem.
The MK Women’s Choir have come on a bundle since last year. Poets on wordslinging parade were Vanessa, Mossman and Dani Antagonist, with storyteller (and Bard) Lynette Hill holding the audience in the palm of her hand. Tukay & Ryan wove a spell (what a voie Rebecca Ryan!), Stephen Ferneyhough accordioned as he does (and we sang, as we do), B-road’s quiet sensitive set entranced; Andy Powell did a bit of everything.
Another year beckons. As per, a stroll down to Stony’s Market Square and environs to wander and wonder among the motors on display is the order of the day. It had been raining before and it has rained again in the days after – the flood plain is truly doing its stuff – but, charmed again, the car gathering gets a decent helping of deserved good weather. Good turnout all round, grand job done.
I’m nogreat car buff – I once had a Lada – but I do like a bit of hall of mirrors Dali-esque distortion of familiar buildings. Hastening to add I feel quite strongly that this is the province of photography and not the sort of thing that often wins the judges’ favour on Landscape Artist of the Year. So here we have a Daimler or a Lancaster (they share a devotee’s club badge) and it’s always good to see that immaculate Buick 8, a regular visitor to the Square. [Click on the photos to enlarge].
I like a good mascot or logo too. Clockwise: self-portrait with early Vauxhall logo, an American Ford V8, an early outing for the more familiar Vauxhall wyvern, a gleaming Morris 8, and a leaping snarling Jaguar.
More reflections: on the horns of an Alvis (there seemed to be a fair number of surviving nay thriving Alvises around); how could I resist a reflected mascot?; more blue sky and the Medical Centre refelcted in the fast and bulbous (you either get that reference or you don’t) Talbot.
Another self-portrait with Morris Oxford, and currently there’s a FaceBook meme about What would you look like as a viking? Here’s a pre-war (I think) and a 1950s Rover playing the game.
A pink Cadillac and a Vauxhall Cresta; Elvis and Cliff.
Mondrian meets Roadrunner in a lovely postmodern artwork on probably the oldest vehicle in the show. And the meaning of life this year is a Morris Countryman (could be a lot worse).
Beautifully written as it is, Ocean Vuong‘s On Earth we’re briefly gorgeous (2019) is still a hard read. ’Grueling’, was the word people murmured agreement with at Book Group (it was October’s title), and yet pretty much everyone could identify the point in the book where they’d decided it was absolutely worth the effort; nor was that the same place for everybody.
I only kept going, basically, to keep faith with the Book Group … until page 212 of the 242 in the Vintage edition just blew me away, justifying all that had gone before:
In the Hartford I grew up in and the one you grow old in, we greet one another not with “Hello” or “How are you?” but by asking, our chins grabbing the air, “What’s good?” I’ve heard this said in other parts of the country, but in Hartford it was pervasive. Among those hollowed-out, boarded buildings, playgrounds with barbed-wire fences, so rusted and twisted out of shape they were like something made out of nature, organic as vines, we made a lexicon for ourselves. A phrase used by the economic losers, it can also be heard in East Harford and New Britain, where entire white families, the ones some call trailer trash, crammed themselves on half-broken porches in mobile parks in HUD housing, their faces OxyContin-gaunt under cigarette smoke, illuminated by flashlights hung by fishing lines in lieu of porch lights, howling, “What’s good?” as you walked by.
There are two pages of this stuff, expanding reassuringly on the meaning of this “What’s good?”, and I am on the floor – “And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe”, as mister Dylan concluded in Chimes of freedom; it’s simply one of the most stunning and sustaining pieces of prose I’ve ever read.
On Earth we’re briefly gorgeous is a misery memoir-cum-novel hybrid. The ‘You’ in the quote above is the narrator’s mother; the structural conceit of the novel is that what we have here is a sequence of letters from the narrator – known only as Little Dog – written to his mother: “I am writing to reach you – even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.” Except she’s never going to read it: “You always tell me it’s too late for you to read, with your poor liver, your exhausted bones, that after everything you’ve been through, you’d just like to rest now. That reading is a privilege you made possible for me with what you lost.” As he writes he’s, against all the odds, a university student.
“I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck,” he writes, “– the pieces floating, finally legible.” He’s explaining how he became, as he puts it, “the queer yellow faggot that I was and am”. Little Dog is Vietnamese, living in the US with mother, Rose, health wrecked working in a nail salon, and his grandma, Lan, who is dying of cancer. They have not had a good time of it, suffered domestic and social abuse in Vietnam and America (Rose passing it on to Little Dog until he tells her, No more), and are struggling. As a teenager he works shifts at a local tobacco farm where he meets and, to his amazement, becomes friends with a white boy, Trevor, son of a trailer trash drunkard – both there to spend time away from their homes; they become lovers, Trevor wondering, ‘Are we always going to be like this?’ The writing about their time at the tobacco farm, the sights, sounds, smells, how it feels, is incredibly vivid – everyone in Book Group full of praise for these descriptive passages – and for Little Dog, liberating. I’ll not say what happens to Trevor.
On Earth we’re briefly gorgeous is an extraordinary book, something really special. The picture it draws hard times in an emigrant community, of domestic and social abuse, of the wider devastation wrought by corporate America and the opiate crisis is uncomfortable to read: “They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, ‘It’s been an honour to serve my country”“. But there is a heartening narrative twist that emerges from the chaos of the American-Vietnam conflict – they can scatter Lan’s ashes in Vietnam – and you just have to trust the book’s title. For all the size of my to-be-read pile I shall be revisiting its pages, expecting further riches missed first time. I’ll pinch the title of a D.H.Lawrence poem to conclude: this is one hell of a ‘song of a man who has come through’.
After all that heaviness my poor head needed a bit of light relief, and Bob Cryer’s Barry Cryer; Same time tomorrow?; the life and laughs of a comedy legend (Bloomsbury, 2023) was at hand. I’d seemingly always been aware of Barry Cryer, loved hearing him on I’m sorry I haven’t a clue (of which there is much in the book), seeing him on Have I got News for You? (deemed not worth a mention!), and knew he’d a wide-ranging CV as a writer and collaborator across pretty much the whole spectrum of British comedy and satire, but seems I didn’t know the half of it.
This is no standard biography. Bob Cryer is Barry’s youngest son, born 1973, only a year after I’m sorry I haven’t a clue started, so a lot of the story of Barry’s start in show business is constructed from anecdotage courtesy of his many colleagues and friends in the business (sometimes third hand), supported by what can be gleaned from the family archives, as well as Bob’s own memories. There is an element of candour with the latter – “Where Dad could read a room in a comedy club, he could sometimes be tone-deaf at the dinner table” – but the overwhelming tone is one of affection; the text is relentlessly peppered with “My father”, or “Dad” as things develop, Professionally the conclusion he and many before him reach is that Barry was, basically, “a professional amateur”, which is how he lasted:
By 1960, dad was living in a bedsit … We have a saying in the family that Dad had a ‘bedsit mentality’, which is to say that he was frugal in most things and didn’t allow for anything resembling an extravagance. […] Dad didn’t need or want much, aside from his family, friends and work. So long as there was a radio, a pen, a packet of Consulate cigarettes, a typewriter, a copy of the Evening Standard, salted snacks, a pub and a train station nearby, he was generally happy.
… which I find splendid. The early career is fascinating. He got the taste at university; he contributed sketches to the 1956 Leeds Rag revue, and performed along with poet Tony Harrison (one of my favourites – check out his epic V or A kumquat for John Keats) and Nobel prize winning playwright and novelist Wole Soyinka; he didn’t finish his degree. Early mentors included magician David Nixon (used to be big, I’d completely forgotten about him, his charm, bow tie and bald pate) and Frankie ‘Green Door’ Vaughan.
This is the minutiae of biography that I love: He learnt his trade as a comic as compere at Danny la Rue’s Soho night club, exotic dancers and all, dealing with impatient audiences many shows a night. Initially he’d also aspired to being a singer and movie actor; chronic eczema inhibited his chances there, though not before he’d appeared, in 1958, as the leader of a skiffle group in the theatre tour of Expresso Bongo – the show that became Cliff Richard’s cinema debut – alongside such luminaries as Paul Schofield, Millicent Martin and Susan Hampshire. He married, and stayed married to, a singer who’d been going out with Lonnie Donegan’s guitarist when they first met. His love of early rock’n’roll fed into a successful Edinburgh Fringe much later on. He was a big fan of J.B.Priestley and – not mentioned in the book – wrote an introduction to an edition of his Lost Empires, a novel with a music hall and variety theatre background**
Lovely story of a heckle from the post-Beyond the fringe satire boom, to which he had effortlessly adapted:
“This is satire, I suppose?” Dad looked over at a table containing Peter Sellers and Lionel Blair but saw only smiles. He fired back into the darkness: ‘It’s nightclub filth. You need to get out more’ Turned out it was John Lennon.
Meeting Lennon a few years on, John admitted, “I was out of it in those days. I don’t remember much about them”.
Chaptersin Barry Cryer; same time tomorrow are separated by some classic jokes from his repertoire. The Archbishop of Canterbury joke, apparently one of the last he ever told, in hospital, is absolute comic genius. We get a Epilogue too, a report on the Memorial Concert organised by Bob that sounds a hoot, featuring all sorts of people including Michael Palin, Stewart Lee (indeed), Jack Dee and a roll call of survivors of British comedy over half a century.
*Tony Harrison’s Kumquat starts: “Today I found the right fruit for my prime / not orange, not tangelo, and not lime …”
What a delight to chance upon yet more evidence – texts previously unknown to me – of Neil Gaiman‘s genius, browsing in the public library, an institution Gaiman has long championed himself. There are four stories in The problem of Susan and other stories (Dark Horse Comics / Headline, 2019), two of which are outstanding examples of the man’s storytelling intelligence, wit and – of course – imagination in full flight. As the cover suggests, P. Craig Russell is the artist.
The title and cover story examines C.S.Lewis‘s Chronicles of Narnia, the seven book children’s fantasy sequence of which The lion, the witch and the wardrobe is the most read and best known; as can be seen, the lion and the witch here are not exactly given a traditional treatment, something that develops more as the story unfolds. The problem of Susan starts with the disturbing dream of a famed but retired academic, author of ‘A quest for meanings in children’s fiction‘. She is then interviewed by a young journalist, The story ends with the journalist waking that night from another worrying dream that had started on the page as the academic’s, with an appearance from Mary Poppins for good measure. They have discussed what the young journalist calls ‘the problem of Susan’, which is: what happens to Susan in the Chronicles, who ultimately did not believe in Narnia, and so does not ‘escape’ there, unlike the other family members after a fatal train crash. The prof had given her some suggestions. It is only just now … checking back to make sure of something before typing this … that the penny has dropped for me as to what has been going on (or has it?). I mean, I’m not slow but … such storytelling Chutzpah!
It’s there too in October in the chair (with Scott Hampton the artist), the story that originally had me reeling in awe. What you see there is the monthly campfire meeting of … the months; the current month takes the chair and tells a story. What follows is a brilliant satire of official meetings, of the work or committee meetings that you dread. April burns her mouth on a sausage, September chides her, May intervenes. January then calls for the ‘Minutes of the last meeting’; February has a point of order, September tells a tale everyone has heard before and so it goes until October gets to tell his story
And what a story. I think I’ll leave it there – it’s long – save to say it follows the fortunes of the runt of a family, bullied by his elder brothers, who runs away and befriends and has fun with a lonely young ghost in a graveyard, after which he has a big decision to make. It’s another extraordinary piece of work from the Sandman writer, right up there, dedicated to, and well worthy of it, to Ray Bradbury.
And now for something completely different …
Stephanie Butland‘s The woman in the photograph (Zaffre, 2019) begins in 1968, with the women’s strike for equal pay at Ford’s, Dagenham, where Veronica Moon takes a photograph that changes her life, and ends in 2019 with the opening of an exhibition celebrating her once distinguished career as a photographer, albeit a career that stopped in 1984, for reasons that fuel the melodrama that drives the novel.
The actual woman, in the photograph, Leonie Barratt, is Veronica’s (Vee’s) original inspiration and mentor in feminism. Vee is a bit of an ingenue: “Leonie says she shouldn’t be ashamed of that, because it’s not her fault the patriarchy has normalised this shit. Vee loves the way Leonie talks, education and swearing in equal measure“. But she becomes a bit of a monster:
Leonie has no idea how lucky she is, how her life is full of possibility. Every time she doesn’t get what she wants, she asks one of her posh friends for help – and she gets it too. She has a trust fund, too, though Vee isn’t completely clear on what that is. She does know that Leonie has a degree in something called PPE, and might do a ‘doctorate’, which is nothing to do with medicine. And that she spends a lot of her time – when she isn’t writing – organising, volunteering, and helping women. (p70)
Seemingly not enough friends though, to get published, which is what she desperately wants; apparently Virago don’t want her because she’s “the wrong kind of feminist” (the ground-breaking Women’s Press don’t get a mention). She ends up taking the Andrea Dworkin obesity route to intellectual purity, actively negating her health along with the patriarchy’s notion of how a woman should be. She is bitter about those, like Veronica, who compromise with ‘the patriarchy’ to get on; such discussions form some of the more engaging moments in the book.
Author Stephanie Butland was born in 1971, so some of the crucial early passages concerning the first Women’s Liberation Movement meeting at Ruskin College and the Miss World contest flour bombing in 1970 have to be seen as an historical novel; they seemed to have had more fun in Misbehaviour, the 2020 movie about the same period; indeed, the novel is pretty joyless altogether.
The woman in the photograph regularly switches mode – not that that’s bad thing, it works well – so we get, along with the historical and contemporary narratives of Vee’s career ascendancy as a photographer, and the mounting of the exhibition, curated by Leonie’s neice: quotes from radical art critic John Berger; quotes from Vee’s unpublished book Women in photographs; passages from the exhibition catalogue; selections from Leonie’s strident Dear John (Letters from a feminist) magazine column; and lists of what else was going on in the world at certain junctures (with no mention of Punk in 1977).
I mentioned melodrama earlier, and I’m not going to expand much on it here, save I stand by the word; secrets and lies. Leonie’s sister, for whom the patriarchy is not a big problem, plays a crucial part in Vee’s dramatic career end; Leonie’s neice Erica is changed by her curatorial experience; the suspense of a brain tumour figures strongly.
As I say, not much fun. Just the glimmer when Leonie claims, ‘There’s no such thing as maternal instinct. It’s just another bullshit construct designed to keep women down and I’m not buying it’, and backs it up with, “There are some primitive tribes where …’” and “Vee sometimes wonders whether there’s a tribe to fit every argument“.
Could have done with more of that. I’m afraid I laughed at the unconscious humour of another of Leonie’s rants about not getting published:
“”Your best way of being a published feminist here is to be Sylvia fucking Plath. Or Stevie Smith.’ ‘Aren’t they poets?’ ‘Exactly. You’re not allowed a voice of your own, here. Not if you’re trying to be factual. You have to be poetic. So the powers that be, MEN, can write it all of as … ‘ she twists into a simper, ‘feelings. Which they can then ignore.’
Which may have been sort of fairish comment. But sorry, that ‘Sylvia fucking Plath’ still makes me – absolutely no disrespect – smile.
A slight return, only here to get over the algorithm that means when I post this to FaceBook it always chooses the wrong illustration. [Update: failed again] Did I mention what a great book it is? Happy New Year, dear readers.
So many questions. Should I recognise this face? Is it actually iconic? (Last time, I promise, I use that word unless there are genuinely extenuating circumstances because, well – too much – it’s one of those words now seen everywhere). Are all those drips intentional or bad technique? Art can be so difficult. Tears I can live with, but a runny nose? I’m guessing a woman … but every now and then I see Bogart. One thing for sure, though: further proof if any were necessary that vaping can never be cool. [Image on temporary metal gates New Street, Stony Stratford.]
The Megsons entertained mightily at The Song Loft‘s November show in York House’s Beechey Room The packed sold out audience – they were lantern-making in the main hall (see below) – got a sprightly couple of sets of mostly original material. It was an evening of wit, good humour, social commentary, heart and hair. Apparently at least half of the audience had seen them before, whereas I came along with hardly the faintest idea of what to expect, having faith in the Song Loft team. I was impressed. Out of Teesside, their covers gave a nod to their northern compatriots – a, um, joyful singalong treatment of Chris Rea’s Road to hell (on that “We’re on the road … ” refrain) that worked beautifully, and Martin Stephenson’s (are you reading this Sally?) rather lovely Rain. Especially when the 8-string mandolin was featured I couldn’t help hearing echoes of Lindisfarne. Now resident near Cambridge, at the prompting of locals they have broadened their geographical repertoire to include a song – ballad style – regarding the saga of a local Judo Club. Another fine night at the groundfloor Song Loft.
Photos as ever from estimable chronicler of the local music scene Chrissy Leonhardt. I messed – cropped it – with the middle one. He doesn’t look as odd as the one on the right might suggest, but it does give full measure of the famous quiff.
Autumnal
the Mill Race, Stony Stratford. [Click on an image to enlarge]
November Scribal Gathering and what it says on the poster from Spoz. Some people will make fun of the Birmingham accent (I wish I could remember where that quote about it being “the death of thought” came from) but Spoz – Giovanni Esposito – made it sing (though he did not sing that evening). A varied set including the tale of The hipster hamster that he gets away with in schools, an incantory love letter to Chris Packham, with less so offered to Farage (“is he dead yet”) and Clarkson. Centrepiece was his Mi heritage, a glorious celebration of his Italian heritage (his parents came over from Siciliy), something he proudly shares with Joe Pasquale. you can find a version here: spozsite.wordpress.com
Kate Paton gave us strong impassioned songs of domestic strife and all kinds of love and angst with just acoustic guitar on the night, an affecting blend of blues and soul, with some jazz chords blended in for good measure. A strong open mic too, with Coda Rushing Lite, this evening featuring their “squonk box” for instrumentation. An poetry from Paul Eccentric, putting the boot into glory-stealer Thomas Edison (didn’t he invent … ? oh no he didn’t).
Earth, water fire and air
I’m counting those bricks as earth. The old, abandoned Wolverton railway works, the River Great Ouse flood plain doing its stuff, the view one night out the back, and clouds over the Floodplain Forest. [Click on an image to enlarge]
Late News: Yesterday (Saturday, December 1) the Stony Stratford Xmas kick-off. But Jebus, was it cold? Serious hat-wearing weather, so trouble recognising people, but it didn’t stop the inhabitants and volunteers coming out and braving it. A huge nod of thanks to the organisers and all involved. Weed that I am, have to admit it did stop me from taking any photos this year (the couple below are pinched from the Christmas Lights at Stony Stratford FaceBook page).
Almost old enough to call it traditional: lantern parade (the lanterns just keep getting better and better with all that practice), the (official) turning on of the lights, and all this special day’s usual activities that went before – a variety of stalls, morris teams (and more) dancing in the High Street, the Mummers, the calliope organ, and much much more (damn, forgot to check out the model railway in the church). And not forgetting music making in Market Square. You can see how cold it was. Great performances though, which deserved a bigger audience, from the two dedicated groups I came back for – a powerful set from Coda Rushing Lite (them again), blending music and poetry, general enabling advocacy to the fore (even when the guitar de-tuned itself in the cold it remained janglely nuanced, not out), and the power of the human voice from a well-wrapped up Five Men Not Called Matt; apologies to the others, i was too cold):
Yup, here it is again. An experiment to see if, one way or another, this is the image that crops up on FaceBook when I advertise these words, my humble ware …
Refreshing that some recent titles from Cape arriving with trad (modern of old) dust jackets, referencing classic book design of the sixties or thereabouts. Anne Enright’s The wren, the wren (Cape, 2023) is another tour de force from over the Irish Sea, a powerful novel that takes its title from a poem written by one Phil McDaragh, the father and grandfather of the novel’s two main protagonists. The fictional Phil, who died in 1985, was a charismatic poet of international – iconic even – repute; also an abusive husband and no great father, who had left them and moved to, and died in, the US.
The dust jacket blurb tells it well: “This is a meditation on love, spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A generational saga that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the glorious resilience of women in the face of promises false and true. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter …”; there’s more but I’ll leave it there. We get daughter Nell direct, in the first person, a running narrative starting well on in what’s happening to her, while mother Carmel is delivered third person, full absorbing back story, episode by episode. When we start they have been apart a while; quite long alternating passages interspersed with examples of Phil McDaragh’s poetry, and a crucial recorded interview with him, found on YouTube.
Nell, whose opening passages approach delirium, could have stepped out of a Sally Rooney novel:
As a teenager, Nell had been mad for chilli. Not so much now. Now she was all about quinoa and silky tofu. Nell was twenty-seven, she had an MA in Social Media and Communications, she had a diploma in Digital Marketing, she earned like mad for three months at a time and then, by some gargantuan effort that Carmel could not understand, went off and did what she pleased. And what pleased her was a slightly irritating purity, yoga breaks, surfing weekends, teaching English to refugees.
Carmel, meanwhile, has been not so much an independent woman as a woman living an independent life, not that she’s been doing too much seeking (“Carmel couldn’t figure it out. How had she ended up with this job, for which she had never applied? Was it the sex – which got good for about two minutes and then wasn’t?“). She’d fallen out with her sister Imelda over her mother’s estate, and life was not easy with the teenage Nell; there’s a compelling drawn out passage concerning a disturbing incident with Nell revolving around a light bulb and an orange. The narrative moves into overdrive when Phil’s second wife brings his archive back to Ireland and Nell decides to come home and introduce her fiancee to Carmel. Nell has something of a revelation when she finds a YouTube interview of Phil, whom she had never met:
But he is so familiar to me, I feel I have met him already. There’s my aunt Imelda’s wry, sour little aside. Carmel’s hunchy way of sitting forward, the same emphatic finger. He has my quick twist of a smirk at the end of a sentence – like maybe we got away with saying that. The McDaraghs are all jumbled up inside him, and we sound so honeyed and warm coming out of Phil. We sound just lovely.
I’ll say no more of how it ends. The wren, the wren is a fine novel, full of insight. As Nell says, speaking of kingfishers: “The way to see the bird you want to see, is to stop looking for it, we all know this. You have to undo your gaze, let the bird happen without you. Be alert to blue.” Nor is it devoid of humour: “(If something happens online and no one clicks, can it be said to have happened at all?)“
Oh Lackaday, lackaday …
Oh lackadaisical Lillabullero to be over a month late with the first of this trio of local musical adventures:
Trevor Babajack Steger was outstanding last year performing his many shades of trance blues solo, but the Trio this time around at York House was something special. Such frenetic dexterity, Trevor, with three guitars at his disposal and a swirling blues harp mounted on his chest, cajon player Jesse Benns and fiddler Jo Chambers are a heady mix, a force of nature,especially when you add in the Howlin’ Wolf inspired vocals. When Trevor is in full flow it is as if man, guitar and blues harp have melded into one noble being. Jo is a sometimes leavening source of calm when not adding to the never chaotic maelstrom. Don’t think I’ve seen anyone hit a cajon harder, or to such collective effect. Trevor’s soft friendly Gloucestershire burr betwixt his songs was a charming bonus.
First encore was this song, River’s got a red dress on, the quietest of the night. Trevor lives on a canal boat and here gloriously paints a picture of a red sky in the morning (and never mind the shepherds). Shall long remember the simple sigh of the woman in front of me, who’d been modestly headbanging – okay, nodding along – to the music all night when he’d finished this thing of beauty (albeit only a solo version below).
October Scribal kicked off with a nice surprise – After the Flood, the delightful of voice and smile Corinne Lucy‘s latest musical venture, this time with her husband, who gave us what he introduced as “the obligatory songwriter’s song about not being able to write any more songs” because you’re too happy” (or words to that effect); doesn’t seem to have stopped Corinne. Couple more fine female voices from the exquisite Wednesday’s Wolves; such harmony and intricate weaving of voices on an original set of songs. So good they can get away with featuring a xylophone for their opening number. Might be nice to hear them operating in a major key!
Happened to be World Mental Health Day, which ex-Northampton Bard Nathan Jones – “idiot sage in an age of intellectuals” – acknowledged and contributed to with a long biographical piece that was a lot more than just poetry as therapy. A consummate entertainer, he also contrbuted some well-received filthy limericks later on in the evening. (Can’t remember much else; really must take some notes).
Latest Song Loft triumph nearly didn’t happen thanks to Storm Babet and some flooded Nottinghamshire roads, which meant the sell-out York House audience were treated to an early bonus – the late-running Track Dogs‘ soundcheck. Unperturbed, they gave us a treat. Two Irishmen, an Englishman and an American operating out of Madrid since 2006 – their website promising “Folk/Americana/Blues” – it was an intriguing prospect that was delivered mightily.
They covered pretty much all the varieties within what was promised and more – Latin American bounce, Tex-Mex, a touch of Espana. Apart from stunning four-part acapella on what turned out to be an Eagles cover (I’d never have guessed), a speeded-up version of Carolina in my mind (it worked, apparently as James Taylor had originally intended) and a pop song circa 1972 (didn’t catch the details) it was originals all the way. Vocals and instruments were variously shared as required. Except the trumpet, left to the conservatoire trained Englishman, which added another lyrical dimension; obviously listens to Miles as well. We got two cajon solos (one each) which did not get in the way, the most musical I can recall. Excellent banjo-driven blues too. Great show, huge energies, much enjoyment; there was spontaneous congo-ing (not that I want to see too much more of that).
Oh, happy day!
What do you know? I’m going to add a couple more witness statements to things that I saw last week (I know, so soon):
Finally made it to a Song Loft Singers Night, where invited artists Karen Pfeiffer and Paul Walker gave us a couple of engaging sets of songs, mostly their own. A good-humoured and unorthodox marriage of gentle English folk (out of Stoke) and Cabaret-style, um, cabaret … with a smile (and occasional woodwind instruments). And an absolutely stunning version of Joan Baez’s Diamonds and rust. A charming couple of auto-harp tunes (sorry, forgotten who) featured in the open mic.
Dracula: a new adaption by Carabosse Theatre Company was a work of epic ambition and achievement delivering some major theatrical moments that will stay with me for a while yet. This was community theatre at its very best (hey, I know some of these people!): great ensemble acting, some fine individual performances, hugely inventive sets and staging, with the imaginative use of music did indeed give us, as it says on the poster, an “immersive sensory experience”. The sanitarium, the shipwreck, the blood!
It helped to be familiar with Bram Stoker’s novel (as opposed to Hammer horror movies) and was good to see they kept faith with it … until the end. The sexual power of the title character featured stringly, and there were all sorts of ideas floating about that deserve exploring (but time, time …). The use of the MK Women’s Choir, as ‘Dracula’s wings’ and an on-stage Chorus may have looked a bit dodgy on paper but it worked to great effect, Brilliant work, Sally Luff and team! (I’ve had a few conversations; what’s the theatrical phrase? – some of us may have “Notes”).
Couple more things. Any production that chooses to feature songs from P.J. Harvey and Nick Cave mid-action had better be really on it, and indeed it was (I’ve always passed on Creep, but that’s my problem it seems). And what the full cast did to the upbeat Feeling good at the end – so entertaining to see the BSL interpreter bopping along on the job – proved to be … chilling. No really a spoiler given there’ll not be another showing soon, but, you know, the book – no kidding – has a schmaltzy ending. Look at that sky – winning battles and losing wars come to mind.
Bonus item!
Sorry about this, but I feel the need to share. There was a performance of note in the garden last month too – a naturally formed yin-yang symbol no less. You know how they say hedgehogs are useful for eating slugs? Not in my experience. I’ve seen slugs on the food we put out for hedgehogs, and I’ve seen hedgehogs eating from the same plate at the same time (we have a cheap night camera), but never … maybe they don’t taste so good, or we shouldn’t pamper. Cheerio for now.
I read Kate Atkinson‘s second short story collection, Normal rules don’t apply (Doubleday, 2023) at a pace because there was a waiting list for it at the library and one does not want to leave other Kate fans in abeyance. I enjoyed it immensely. It’s bonkers in a good way. She must have had a lot of fun, but as ever with Kate there’s serious stuff going on under the surface. Or rather she can’t stop herself mucking about with the archetypes underpinning various fictions. A lot of fun to read, too, of course.
As was the case with her first short story collection, Not the end of the world (Doubleday, 2002) the individual stories are linked in one way or another. Characters (including a couple of talking animals), themes and locations crop up in vaguely shifting guises throughout. In the opening story, set in the recurring Yorkshire village of Hutton le Mervaux, the set of the recurring TV soap Green Acres, you can’t help feeling you’re in Douglas Adams territory. In The Void everything (except for birds and bees) just stops for a while worldwide, then carries on again until it happens again (until … but no). The effects are seen through the eyes of first a grandfather, then his daughter (stuck in a supermarket), and then her daughter.
What is causing the void is revealed in a later story; it might be a modern daughter of a female Zeus (also operating as a high-powered PR exec at the same time) let loose, or some instructive fails playing an addictive world building computer game, with a nod to the Matrix. Made me think of that groundbreaking ’60s science fiction anthology Dangerous Visions. Other stories are more grounded.
To tell the truth I’ve forgotten a lot of the detail, but the book is packed with sharp satire – if not without skewed affection – of contemporary foibles and obsessions, along with nods and winks to the old tales. Are you ready for an old actor called Phoebe Somethingorother? Here some story titles might also give a flavour: Existential marginalisation; Shine! Pamela! Shine!; and, tellingly, Classic Quest 17 – Crime and punishment. Puppies and rainbows is a trad retelling of the whole Harry, Megan, Kate and Wills fairy tale. One of Kate atkinson’s joyful signature strokes, the skillfully executed bracket, is much in evidence (not unlike this one).
The book of Sheffield; a city in short fiction, skillfully curated by Catherine Taylor (Comma Press, 2019), comes from a series stretching from Riga to Rio via Birmingham. The lives touched on in the ten stories – and there are no duds – really do give a broad flavour of a city I’ve had a great deal of affection for ever since my student days there in the late ’60s (is that not the Arts Tower top right on the cover?).
Sheffield is mapped out in Helen Mort‘s opening story Weaning, which dives right in: “She was losing the names of places. Every time she dropped a feed, let the ,ilk in her breasts come then lessen, another part of the city disappeared.” Margaret Drabble – born and raised in an affluent part of Sheffield – contributes an engaging story of returning, examines what could have happened to as much as what did. In Desiree Reynolds‘ powerful prose poem Born on Sunday, silent a young black girl finds a route to herself thanks to a plain headstone in a graveyard recording a very brief life and death in 1902. (Not really a spoiler: a footnote explains how in that year a group of Africans from an Ashanti village were brought to Sheffield for the purposes of entertaining the populace.)
My favourite has to be Johnny Pitts‘s nightlife odyssey, Like a night out in Sheffield – the title taken from the The greasy chip butty song, Sheffield United fans’ reworking of John Denver’s Annie’s song, belted out at kick-off: “You fill up my senses, like …”. The narrator is a young man working in B&Q: “I’m 20 now and I’ve made it my new millennium resolution to expand my world, read books, watch foreign cinema and pull student birds” :
… Roots Manuva is playing a live gig [at the students’ union] and I’ve decided to branch out from the usual. Half my mates don’t even know who Roots Manuva is, the other half think he does soft hip-hop for students who don’t really like hip-hop. i tried to convince them to come along by telling them about all the student lasses they were leaving to indie boy art wankers, but they thought that the girls looked like indie art wankers too. That none of them had tans or showed enough cleavage.
Kinda makes me think times have changed from when my mate Neil, of recent mod heritage, maintained that local girls were streets ahead in presenting themselves to the world. Young people making music – one of Sheffield’s strengths – is at the centre of Naomi Frisby‘s The time is now.
Last story of The book of Sheffield is a hell of a way out – think Lewis Carroll meets J.G.Ballard, though come to think of it, multi-discipline artist and writer Tim Etchell’s Long fainting/ Try saving again(‘a true story of Endland’, set in S________) wouldn’t be that much out of place in Normal rules don’t apply. It starts off promisingly enough:
Martha’s daughter (Gina) was 12 yrs age when she probably by accident but possibly on purpose uploaded herself to internet and disappeared from her bedroom b4 tea time.
… and what follows is a quirkily delivered tale on the dystopian side. It seems to be a partially recovered text document – “Some pieces of information are missing … Try checking a connection … Try saving again” – with some crossed out passages still visible. She does disappear; that’s not a metaphor, though the whole thing probably is, with real events and phenomena mentioned in passing but with the after-effects of two presumably civil wars still being felt. I could say Gina returns after 8 years and ends up running a failing pub on the outskirts of the city but that hardly scratches the surface of this swirling fantastical and uncomfortable ride. Oh, and did I say it is also very funny?
September’s Book Group book was Margery Allingham‘s Look to the lady (1932), which made a change. Most enjoyed this sojourn into Golden Age crime fiction, though, with no August meeting, early readers had trouble remembering much about the plot; I myself had forgotten all about one of the leading baddies. Still, much agreement on her delightfully sardonic and relaxed prose style, her effective conjuring of atmosphere, sense of place (London, and was it Norfolk?), and excitement when the chase was on. Appreciation of the women, too, in particular the plucky Penny, a deb not playing the deb game. The plot was verging on the ridiculous: international art thefts to order for wealthy private collectors (nothing new there, then) and the McGuffin of the Chalice, an historical artifact of national spiritual import (with a nice touch of there being a facsimile of a facsimile doing the rounds). Less agreement on the main man, Albert Campion (Look to the lady is the third book in a long running sequence) – over-determined? – and his faithful assistant, Magersfontein Lugg.
So who is Campion, what is he?
‘It’s rather difficult to explain,’ he said. ‘I am – or rather I was – a sort of universal uncle, a policeman’s friend, and master-crook’s factotum. What it really boiled down to, I suppose, is that I used to undertake other people’s adventures for them for a small fee. If necessary I can give you references from Scotland Yard, unofficial, of course …’
In the course of 23 pages his, um, distinguishing feature gets mentioned three times. He is, “a little more inane than usual“; “smiling and ineffably inane“; with a “habitual expression of charming inanity” that “never wavered”. Earlier that habitual expression had been one of “affable fatuity“. Not forgetting his saying, “with affable idiocy”: ” ‘I’ve buttered my bun and now I must lie on it.” This repetition irked some of the Book Group more than others. But when a foe avers to not “allow a little rat like you to interfere” in his affairs, Campion politely warns them not to underestimate him: “Manly courage, intelligence and resource are my strong points”. He also explains to Penny how poetry is ‘Soul juice’; she declines his offer of a recitation. At the conclusion she tells him, ” I’d offer you my hand if I thought I could bear you about the house.”
Lugg himself is a rather fine character, if now somewhat cliched, a reformed criminal who, as Campion says, has “always got the courage of his previous convictions. He used to be quite one of the most promising burglars, you know.” In turn he can say of his boss that, ‘It’s either nobs or nobodies with ‘im, and I loathe the sight o’ both of ‘em – begging your pardon, miss.’ It would be a pale sequence of adventures without him:
‘The last time I came past ‘ere’, said Mr Lugg sepulchrally, from the back of the car, ‘it was in a police van. I remember the time because I was in for three months hard. The joke was on the Beak, though. I was the wrong man as it ‘appened, and that alibi was worth something, I can tell yer.’
Of course, it’s dated, but not horribly so if you can not think about social class too much. I worried about the ‘race gangs’ until I realised that meant organised thuggery focused on horse racing. The romantic view of the gypsy life (vide Laura Knight’s paintings of the same era) holds sway. A young man in his early twenties is still considered ‘a boy’: “a pure Anglo-Saxon type” no less, but in context that’s not sinister. Campion couldn’t get more corny (could he?) than: “He felt himself hampered at every step. Forces were moving which he had no power to stay, forces all the more terrible because they were unknown to him, enemies which he could not recognise”. Not the rise of fascism, I hasten to add. Favourite anachronism, though is, “However you look at it, I think you and your family are in for a pretty parroty time.”
All good entertainment, with Margery Allingham’s wit and sense of period fun never far away:
“Peck’s cottage was one of those picturesque, insanitary thatched lath-and-plaster dwellings which stir admiration and envy in the hearts of all who do not have to live in them.”
‘Well, she’s bitten by the quasi-mystical cum “noo-art” bug, or used to be before I went away,’ Val went on casually. ‘Wears funny clothes and wanders about at night communing with the stars and disturbing the game. Quite harmless, but rather silly.’
‘That’s not the worst, though. When she was in London last she developed a whole crowd of the most revolting people – a sort of semi-artistic new religion group. They’ve turned her into a kind of High Priestess and they go about chanting and doing funny exercises in sandals and long white night-gowns. Men too. It’s disgusting. She lets them in to see the Chalice. And one man’s making a perfectly filthy drawing of her holding it.’
[finally, a nod to previous generation of crime writers, awful punning invoking Raffles,’the gentleman thief’, a popular character created by Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law as a sort of opposite to Sherlock Holmes] ‘He simply set himself up as a “fence”, and let it be known in the right quarter he would pay a fabulous sum for the article indicated. I dare say it sounds rather like a “Pre-Raffle-ite” Brotherhood to you,’ he added cheerfully.
Briefly, more Golden Age or classic crime from one of the short story collections edited by Martin Edwards, the modern doyen of its celebrants and published by the British Library, Murder by the book: mysteries for bibliophiles (2021). Sixteen stories from some big names in the genre arranged chronologically, the earliest first seeing the light of day in 1933, the latest from forty years on.
It’s a mixed bag of mostly murder stories, not so much whodunnits as more exercises in irony. For me themost effective pieces were those where the writing and publishing of crime fiction was a big part of the plot, and my favourites came from some later pieces, the writer having fun within the genre. I liked the wit of Edmund Crispin‘s We know you’re busy writing, but we thought you wouldn’t mind if we just dropped in for a minute on the perils of trying to earn a living writing; you might like to guess how that ends. While Christianna Brand’s Dear Mr Editor is a delightful and disturbing exercise on what can happen when an editor’s invitation to contribute to a collection gets into the wrong hands.
Odd to find the most disappointing for me was from the man whose Bloody Murder – From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (1972) was the book that got me reading further afield from Raymond Chandler when I read it to inform my work as a public librarian. Julian Symons’s The clue in the book relies on the pure coincidence of the killer’s name. Nevertheless, the whole enterprise of the British Library Crime Classics series is a fascinating one that I will probably investigate further one of the days.
Honourable mention to Marjories Bremner for her Murder in advance, which begins, “‘Now who,’ said Dacre, who was an inspector of Scotland Yard, ‘would want to murder a playwright?” and after a paragraph of scene setting and introductions, gets the response: “Allerton grinned. ”I would. Plenty of playwrights. When I think of some of the evenings I’ve spent …'”
A happy coincidence: ’twas ever thus
In The country and the City (1973) Raymond Williams documented the passage of yearnings for a return to a ‘golden age’ right back to the beginnings of literature. In Look to the ladyMargery Allingham had Campion’s aide de camp Lugg scorning a modern trend:
‘The inner Campion protests,’ he said. ‘We must eat. You go and lose yourself, Lugg.’ ‘All right,’ said Mr Lugg. He was very much aware of his gaffe, and had therefore adopted a certain defiance. ‘Whilst you’re messing about with “the Motorist’s Lunch” – seven and a kick and coffee extra – I’ll go and get something to eat in the bar. It’s mugs like you wot changes “The Blue Boar” into “Ye Olde Stuck Pigge for Dainty Teas”.’ […] We’ll go in and see what the good brewery firm has to offer.’ Val followed the slender, slightly ineffectual figure down the two steps into the cool brick-floored dining-room, which a well-meaning if not particularly erudite management had rendered more Jacobean than the Jacobeans.
And here’s the pub Gina takes over in the near future in Tim Etchell‘s story in The Book of Sheffield:
It (the pub) was organised like a straightfwd converted mega franchise come Open-Plan Beer Zone & Video Jukebox Sky Sports and Karaoke Palace (also Microbrewery) and had long been abandoned by its supposedly natural olde clientele while the younger ladz and chicas of the area round it considered going there an insult to their cosmopolitan dignity … […] In her new job (ie as landlord of the pub) G … soon skipped away the worst of useless interior decor and other gimmicks introduced by … the previous managers. She it was who got rid of their blackboards for menus and jokes of the day [and other specifics], repainting the whole place, re-branding and re-opening again but w the old name (The George and Dragon) restored as replacement for the new smart ass self-conscious name that ogres had chosen and no one was ever able to remember.
(She does actually get a real dragon in, but that’s another story …)
Lillabullero 