Full of the enthusiasm of a New Year, I’m planning on working my way through Updike’s short stories this year. Updike has experienced a decline in reputation, it seems to me, and is seen as somewhat of a dinosaur now, and self-indulgent, too. I always loved him as a stylist, but only a few of his novels I loved without reservation – some I had to put down (Toward The End of Time, ugh). I think probably as a poet and an author of short stories (the latter in particular) he was at his very best.
The first story I read, in the magnificently presented new collected stories published by the Library of America, was also the first notable story he wrote. Ace In The Hole prefigures Rabbit somewhat; a short tale of a young man at odds with the world of work and not succeeding in his own efforts to raise a family. A man who’d rather be on the court, bouncing a basketball.
This bit really struck me. perhaps because I’ve spent a lot of time playing with, observing and marvelling at Vic’s baby daughter this year. But also because it’s in the acute observation of such vital and intimate details of life that Updike evolves beyond the accusations of dinosaur-hood, I think.
In two steps, Ace was at Bonnie’s crib, picking the rattle out of the mess of blocks and plastic rings and beanbags. He extended the rattle toward his daughter, shaking it delicately. Made wary by this burst of attention, Bonnie reached with both hands; like two separate animals they approached from opposite sides and touched the smooth rattle simultaneously. A smile worked up her face. Ace tugged weakly. She held on, and then tugged back.
This entertaining book, by the young British novelist Ned Beauman, struck me as a v bold, energetic bit of writing, & the similes/descriptions are firework-esque. The story itself, which careers from Berlin to Paris to the Los Angeles of the 1930s is winningly free of constraints, which is fun but which makes it a somewhat messy read, a triumph of style over structure. That said, I ended up racing enthusiastically through it & laughing loads, as often as not at the sheer abandon of it. But the 1st half was much stronger for me than the second, where I started to feel that I was losing the central character’s voice – and, essentially, for all that at times it recalls the delightful barminess of Wodehouse or the mischief of early Martin Amis, it’s not quite my type of thing. Clever, witty, self-indulgent, free-wheeling, often a bit tiresome, but often sparking. Definitely worth a read, but insubstantial in the long run.
A day of finishing books today; recently started two short novels which are both pockmarked by European war, and which both begin with escapes. In Schroder, by Amity Gaige, the central character, who is both Eric and Erik, has escaped from East Berlin and remade himself in America, and in Andreï Makine’s excellent A Life’s Music, set nearly 50 years earlier, a young Russian pianist, Alexeï Berg, tries to flee the Soviet Union but succeeds only in getting to the Eastern front. Both novels are scarred by regret and longing, and both are exceptionally beautiful, in very different ways.
Schroder in particular is really wonderful; it’s the story of a man who absconds which his daughter – a love letter to the idea of love itself, and a mea-culpa of many decisive faults. “You liked the feeling of love”, Schroder tells himself, “but you weren’t interested in the work, so you let go of it”.
The obvious comparison is to Nabakov and Humbert Humbert, but most of all Gaige, who writes a male narrator as convincing, frightening & believable as any I can remember, summons up a tone which reminds me of the nervous, constant, intellectual intensity of Europa/Destiny era Tim Parks. Which is a very good thing.
Might be the best book I’ve read so far this year. And A Life’s Music contains some pretty lovely sentences, too – at one point two men dismount from a crowded train: “After days and nights of immobility our feet plant themselves in the snow with the suppleness of a dance”.
Just finished reading Ali Smith’s lovely, confusing, inspiring ‘Artful’, which I’m clearly going to have to re-read if I want to boast to people that I really ‘got it’; it’s a dense, fast-moving combination of intriguing fiction and literary criticism, and I read it as the former, not worrying too much about wringing every ounce of meaning from the many poems and quotations which pepper the text. I did pick out a few lovely things though;
“When human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other”.
EM Forster
There’s lots of Katherine Mansfield in the book, and lots of trees. I never enjoyed reading DH Lawrence, but I like Mansfield’s description of his ‘Aaron’s Rod’ as a tree, “firmly planted, deep thrusting, outspread, growing grandly, alive in every twig”.
And there was more nature in the following, which made me think of the ‘We are the clay that grew tall’ line in Melissa Harrison’s terrific book ‘Clay’, which I talked about the other day.
“Decay is the beginning of all birth … it transforms shape and essence, the forces and virtues of nature. Just as the decay of all foods in the stomach transforms them and makes them into a pulp, so it happens outside the stomach … Decay is the midwife of very great things!”
Paracelsus
and here’s Ali Smith herself, talking about something I’ve already mentioned:
“We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe that we’ve read a book after reading it just once. Books and music share more in terms of resonance than just a present tense correlation of heard note to read word. Books need time to dawn on us, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them, because books are produced by books more than by writers; they’re a result of all the books that went before them.”
Just finished reading Melissa Harrison’s lovely first novel, ‘Clay’, and wanted to pen a few thoughts while it’s still fresh in my mind. ‘Clay’ is a terrifically beautiful book, a quiet, sensitive portrayal of the lives of a small cast of slightly lonely, slightly constrained protagonists, and their development over the course of a half year in a South London which is by turns familiar and gloriously unfamiliar.
Familiar because Harrison has a good grasp of the plain-sight city – “nail bars, chicken parlours, newsagents, mobile phone unlocking, cheap calls to Africa”, and exotic because she populates the city with a bewildering cast of living things which our eyes are either untrained to see or disposed to miss; dog foxes, bats, sticky goosegrass and evergreen choisya, butterflies, greenflies and stag beetles, swifts, starlings, and plane trees shedding flakes of polluted bark. Harrison’s prose is poetic but hyper-observant, always sensing new movement in the nearby undergrowth, or a pair of eyes watching high in a tree.
South London which is by turns familiar and gloriously unfamiliar.
All five of the novel’s main characters see more of this hidden city than I (regrettably) do, and are to a smaller or greater extent drawn towards the area’s liminal places – the parts of London in which pockets of extraordinary life are concealed, yet continue to thrive – and in particular to a small park near Tooting Common, which becomes the space in which they meet and interact. At the centre is TC, whose story of neglect is painfully sad but whose resourcefulness and passion for nature is a rebuke to his coddled, careless peers. Around him Harrison conjures a story quite free of sensationalism or sentimentality, but which is quietly gripping and somewhat inspiring.
South London which is by turns familiar and gloriously unfamiliar.
The clay of the title refers to a phrase recalled from childhood – ‘we are the clay that grew tall’, which resonates through the novel; TC is a child ‘on intimate terms with the earth’. Jozef, an exile from Poland, mourns the physical properties of the farm he grew up on. Sophia, growing old on a council estate her family have left, does her best to disrupt the order which the council wish to impose upon the wedge-shaped park she has watched over for decades, her pockets bulging with papery bulbs.
South London which is by turns familiar and gloriously unfamiliar.
‘Clay’ is a very satisfying read; a serious book which evokes important topics like innocence, companionship and trust, but which is driven forward by the author’s obvious, intimate connection with nature.
South London which is by turns familiar and gloriously unfamiliar.
Very pleased that it’s the first thing I read in 2013; it’s a short, brilliant novel that makes me want to rush out into the woods.
"Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere", EM Forster wrote in Howard's End, warning against "the tragedy of preparedness". But some things must be prepared for, and it is a tragedy if they are not – they become Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns. Here's a bitter example.
From Armando Iannucci, a sorry anecdote heard in Whitehall about post-war planning.
"Donald Rumsfeld weeded out from those going to help the reconstruction of Iraq anyone who could speak Arabic, on the grounds they would be pro-Arab. As a result, it took the Americans 18 months to realise that when marines held up the flat of their hand to oncoming cars to signal them to stop, they were actually using the Iraqi hand-signal for "come forward". That's why so many families in cars were shot".
Almost too appalling to contemplate - perhaps not a war crime, but a crime of negligence.
From my experience of working in the publishing industry, it can be a mixed blessing when an author offers to lend a hand in the design of a book cover. Often, the author's ideas can act as a springboard which helps bring about a really unique, or apt, design. Equally, an author's dogmatic or unrealistic expectations can lead to many a fraught conversation. Either way, I enjoyed reading this account of Orhan Panuk's input in the design process, from the Guardian.
"Like his earlier melancholic memoirs of his Turkish childhood and youth, the front of Orhan Pamuk's latest novel, The Museum of Innocence, draws the eye with a sepia-tinted image evoking the romance of bygone Istanbul. But at the Southbank's Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Nobel-prizewinning author raised smiles with the tale of his use of technology to enhance the appeal of the cover photograph of the new book. The picture, featuring an open-top car containing three smiling women and two men, the latter with hair gelled back in 1950s fashion, was originally bought by the writer from a website he called "the Turkish eBay". There was just one problem: its backdrop was that of woodland somewhere in Turkey's interior. Pamuk explained how he had used Photoshop to resolve the issue. With a few mouse clicks, the car and its occupants were transported to the Bosphorus, the busy shipping lane running through Istanbul, complete with familiar minarets on a facing shore. Graphics wizards at Faber later introduced burn marks to the top half of the image. Pamuk also revealed that there had been worries about what the car's unknown occupants would make of their unwitting cover stardom. There was relief, however, when one of the women, pictured in a headscarf, was traced. A photo was sent to him showing her, now aged 88, happily holding the novel. Whether other authors take such a hands-on approach to the design of their book covers is unclear. However, for Pamuk, a self-described "repressed artist" who once harboured ambitions to forge a career with a brush, doing so must be particularly satisfying".
Over on the Faber & Faber blog, The Thought Fox, Faber's Editorial Director, Lee Blackstone, has penned a rather curious, slightly sweet and more than a little embarrasing open letter to Morrissey, in which he asks Moz to consider f&f as the publisher for his much-rumoured memoirs. Its high-level of obsequious fawning demands attention.
Dear Morrissey,
In the hope that you might consider bringing your much-rumoured memoir to The House of Eliot, I am posting this letter on the Faber website. Forlorn as this hope may be, I can only fantasise that at least you might read my letter through and consider the pleasures and prestige of being an author at Faber, the last great family-owned independent publishing house in the western hemisphere.
I have been trying to persuade you of the virtues and wisdom of this for some years now. You probably won’t remember. We even corresponded at one point via a friend of yours, an author of mine, most famous for his biography of Roxy Music which ends just as the band are getting together. You see, we love the perverse and the contrary at Faber. And we also like to think we are the custodians of twentieth-century Modernist poetry. In fact we are. Our shelves groan and bulge and spill over under the weight of Ezra, Larkin, Hughes and Heaney. And that’s just the surface; deep as it may seem. We feel very strongly that you belong in this company. To me (and to many of my colleagues) you are already in this company. It would be the fulfilment of my most pressing and persistent publishing dream to see that ‘ff’ sewn into the spine of your Life. Just any other publisher won’t do. You deserve Faber and the love we can give you. History demands it; destiny commands it.
Etc.
I don't really get it. Morrissey has already created his great work - the lyrics he wrote in the 1980s. If Faber really feel that his work belongs in the company of Ezra Pound and Philip Larkin, they should just ask him if they can publish his best lyrics in their poetry imprint.
Yikes, I've been really terrible at blogging this last week, and after such a productive first few weeks of January, too. Here's a poem to tide you over - I'll be back shortly.
Janet Waking by John Crowe Ransom
Beautifully Janet slept Till it was deeply morning. She woke then And thought about her dainty-feathered hen, To see how it had kept.
One kiss she gave her mother, Only a small one gave she to her daddy Who would have kissed each curl of his shining baby; No kiss at all for her brother.
“Old Chucky, Old Chucky!” she cried, Running on little pink feet upon the grass To Chucky’s house, and listening. But alas, Her Chucky had died.
It was a transmogrifying bee Came droning down on Chucky’s old bald head And sat and put the poison. It scarcely bled, But how exceedingly
And purply did the knot Swell with the venom and communicate Its rigour! Now the poor comb stood up straight But Chucky did not.
So there was Janet Kneeling on the wet grass, crying her brown hen (Translated far beyond the daughters of men) To rise and walk upon it.
And weeping fast as she had breath Janet implored us, “Wake her from her sleep!” And would not be instructed in how deep Was the forgetful kingdom of death.
Sometimes a whimsical observation you read stays with you for days; this was the case with one of Wendy's recent posts over at her Wendy House blog. It was only a light-hearted quip on her part, but it struck me as the kind of playful, sudden thought that shouldn't be mistaken for a hackneyed one. I've heard the phrase 'relief road' a million times, but somehow never quite noticed it's charming quality. Wendy writes:
Here in the UK we have roads who’s whole purpose is to provide relief, relief Roads.
The pleasingly named Rose Kiln Lane is a Berkshire relief road. Roads that provide relief. A very pleasing idea.
Having a stressful day at work? Then visit Rose Kiln Lane to find relief.
Nothing more to it than that. But the phrase has stayed with me. If only the government really did build infrastructure designed solely to console.
Incidentally, I just bought Anna Minton's 'Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City', which I think will be an interesting read, and I hope to blog about it in the future. The Guardian review of the book, which alerted me to its existence, begins:
The important thing about a castle is not that it is comfortable, but that it is secure, which makes the Englishman's proverbial urge to live in one rather bleak. Against whom are we fortifying our homes, if not one another? We pretend that our property obsession is a lifestyle choice, but it could just be misanthropy: worshipping the private retreat out of distaste for being in public. If so, the problem stems from bad policy as much as national character. The British approach to managing urban space is utterly wrong, according to Anna Minton in Ground Control. Successive governments have conspired, Minton argues, to create environments that make people suspicious of one another. That makes them miserable. We are one of the saddest, loneliest peoples of Europe.
I've lost my copy of 'Money' - how did that happen? Looked everywhere for it. Bah.
Now that I am proper adult, and only occasionally a sulky teen, I can say it. Some of the above books are not very good. Ten years ago, I'd have sooner shaved my head than admit it.
Perhaps I'm softening in my old age - not sure I'd have spent much time watching youtube videos of cute kids a few years ago - but this is just lovely. The actor Brian Cox coaches a 30 month year old toddler to recite Shakespeare. Extremely sweet.
A couple of weeks ago myself, Vic, Dan, Ant and Alec went down to the Sallis Benney Theatre to see the screening, as part of the Cinecity Brighton Film Festival, of John Rogers’ new film, London Perambulator, a wonderfully affectionate portrait of Nick Papadimitriou, a writer who lives in North London – in my old haunting ground of Barnet, no less - who dedicates his life to the pursuit of what he calls ‘deep topography’; what you and I might have heard described as ‘pyscho-geography’ – urban exploration through the medium of walking, enacted not through pre-researched routes but by chance and happenstance, working on the assumption that the mysteries of the landscape will be revealed through being ‘found’.
As that muddled definition implies, the practice of deep topography is an inexact thing, occupying a vague, semi-mystical space between geography, anthropology, philosophy, art and science. What Nick Papadimitriou does, essentially, is walk through the overlooked corners of cities, and writes about his experience. His preoccupation is not with finding conventional beauty, whether ancient or modern, but rather in examining the functional areas where mankind, nature, and necessity overlap. In the process of this obsession, which sees him undertaking long ruminative walks, creating a kind of philosophical mind-map of the city, he has carried out research – and acted as somewhat of a poetic muse – for the likes of Will Self and Iain Sinclair (whose own book, ‘London Orbital’, sparked my interest in this area).
Papadimitriou is self-evidently an idiosyncratic individual, pursuing with admirable single-mindedness a line of enquiry which many would dismiss as eccentric. Rogers’ film cannot help but play on this, observing its protagonist in reveries of post-industrial romanticism, waxing lyrical over water treatment plants and manhole covers, standing rapt on brownfield sites transfixed by concrete posts. As one might expect of a close confidante of Will Self, Papadimitriou is not only incredibly literate but also extremely funny. So it’s easy for the film to poke affectionate fun at him, not least because a contributor like Russell Brand – who is insightful throughout – can’t resist sending him up.
Speaking after the film – which is only 45 minutes long – Papadimitriou expressed a little wry frustration at the fact. And that is understandable; there is something innately comic about the intensity of his passion for, say, Mogdon Water Treatment Plant – but the film plays up his eccentricity without sacrificing the opportunity to include many thought provoking and poetic displays of language and thought. And the more involved with his subject matter he gets the more profoundly interesting he becomes. It’s in Middlesex, that absent county at the top of London that was folded into Hertfordshire, Surrey and Greater London but which retains a geographical presence of its own, that his most fervent interest resides, and for a period in the film I found myself transported back to the vocabulary of my youth – Barnet, Southgate, Potters Bar, Finchley, Hendon. Papadimitriou is not myopic in his interests – he has a long term plan to walk across the Ukraine – but it’s obvious where his heart resides. He tells us:
“My ambition is to hold my region in my mind… so that I am the region. So that when I die I literally do become Middlesex in some way. For me that is my highest spiritual aspiration, I will be the tarmac that you race along on the A41-T, I’ll be absorbed into the mildewed lintels hidden in overgrown knotweed by the side of the Hendon way…”
My own youth was spent mapping out this part of the world; rambling through Hadley Wood, waiting for tubes into the city at Oakwood station, tracing cycle paths through Totteridge, scrabbling over high fences to let off firecrackers behind the Sainsbury’s car-park in New Barnet. I’m not especially nostalgic for those years, but Papadimitriou’s enthusiasm is infectious. I understood him best, I think, when he stopped suddenly between two semi-detached houses in a glum suburb, and pointed out the contour of the ageless landscape through the gap; where a river once flowed. These buildings, he pointed out, could be destroyed in moments, but it would take something immense to change the shape of land which has held its form for thousands of years.
I’m not sure I fully understand to what end his infectious, limitless enthusiasm can be taken, but in his current role, mid way between philosopher and naturalist, urban historian and dreamer, it strikes me that Nick Papadimitriou is doing something terribly important – chronicling parts of the city which are all around but rarely seen; liminal, overgrown, ambiguous places where mankind has made marks on nature which we would do well not to forget. Their unsystematic, unresolved, chaotic distribution seems to have some significance when counterbalanced against our own unsystematic, unresolved, chaotic lives.
You can watch a short clip of John Rogers’ incredibly enjoyable film below, visit his website here, or download the regular podcasts (“Ventures and Adventures in Topography”) which he and Nick make for Resonance FM here. Nick’s own website, misleadingly named Middlesex County Council, and as chaotic a site as you might expect, is essential reading. Here’s the link.
Some amazing quotes in tonight's episode of the Apprentice. The young bucks are stood in a Charing Cross Road book shop while a pair of studious booksellers carefully examine some literature they've been given to sell. Quietly, diligently, they set about making a valuation. They take their time, because they are methodical people. The Apprentices are outraged at this abuse of their time.
"We can't take any more shit from them" Ben cries.
His colleague agrees. "You know what they're like, though", she replies. "They're book people, they want to waste your time".
He nods, crossly. "I'm fed up with these book people talking shit to me for too long".
The other night I dropped by McNally Jackson, a really lovely independent bookstore in New York's SoHo, to see Erica Jong read from her new collection of poems, Love Comes First. I'm a huge fan of Jong's brilliant, fabulously rude 'Fear of Flying', so it was great to see her talk and a pleasure to hear her witty and wise poetry, which is simultaneously accessible and thought-provoking, as you'd expect from a writer of Jong's stature. That's not to say, however, that I'd swap her prose for her poems. I've spent much of my time in the US reading the poems of John Ashbery, and Jong is not in the same class. But that's a mean observation to make, and perhaps an unworthy comment. What's more important is that I really enjoyed Jong's reading, and am very glad I caught it.
Bit early for a post-mortem on Red Riding, but... wow - massively intense and frightening, and it seemed both seriously artistic and bitingly realistic simultaneously, which is surely a hard thing to achieve. Some of the camera work was sublime, especially the framing and use of focus - but most significant was the depth of Peace's plotting and the brilliance of the adaptation. Acting not far behind.
Going to bed seems like a mad thing to do now. I need to find something soothing on Radio 4 before I can contemplate sleep.
This is from Tim Parks' lovely, teasing new novel, 'Dreams of Rivers And Seas':
Elaine was kind to him, but busy. In the past, she had been the vulnerable one. Now she had her rehearsals, she had a place in the world. Practising her mime in the sitting room, she swayed round the sofa with staring eyes, arms waving languidly. 'After the explosion,' she said. 'I'm supposed to be looking for my baby. But how can I really know what it would be like after an explosion?'
John watched her, her arms and wrists in particular. They were the movements of a plant underwater, he thought.
This is rather marvellous; Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a German literary critic - who has been made the recipient of a lifetime achievement award in the country's annual TV backslapping ceremony - has reacted in the customarily curmudgeonly way which we have come to expect from eminent literary types; he's handed it back and had a jolly good moan, too - wonderful.
"I don't belong here among all this rubbish," the 88-year-old critic and author said from the stage of the annual German Television Awards gala in Cologne. "I have been given many literature prizes in my life, but I don't belong in this line-up. If the prize was linked with money, I would have given the cash back too."
- It's two o'clock in the morning the day after my birthday, and I am standing in Dan's bedroom with my arms flailing around. To my right, Dan is doing the same. Victoria stands opposite, and she is bent double with laughter. Eva is shouting "Now!" at me. At that moment an inflatable globe hits from me, as if from nowhere, square in the face. The room flashes repeatedly from dark to light.
- My birthday is passed now, and my hangover fully faded, so I can look back objectively on another really pleasant anniversary spent in the company of my friends. On Friday I went for a quick drink with AS and Rich, which was ace, and met up with Dan, Morgan and Ant too before I dashed out for dinner with Siobhan, and then on Saturday night pretty much my whole group of friends accompanied me out to the Crescent for a night of drinking and cheering - and lots of lovely and extremely well-chosen present-giving, too.
- Lots of bird-related presents this year, which is wonderful. I appear to be fast developing a reputation as the bird-man of Brighton, although I think it vital that I point out that my love of my feathered friends is primarily aesthetic and cultural rather than ornithological; but Ant hit the nail on the head exactly with his present, Graeme Gibson's 'The Bedside Book Of Birds', which is the most beautiful anthology of poems, stories and illustrations pertaining to the amazing little animals. That may sound boring to some, but it's not, so anyone with an interest should scurry to the bookshop in search of a copy immediately. Elsewhere, I got a host of amazing pressies, including wonderful books from AS, Vic and Andrew and a CD from Dan which I've been listening to all evening; 'Nigeria Rock Special', which is a bewildering and brilliant compilation of psychedelic afro-rock and jazz-funk from 1970s Nigeria. Ace.
- At the end of the night we raided the late-night shops for cheap beer and repaired to Dan's; from which point on I only remember so much - fetching Ant a glass of water when he'd drunk too much, Ant throwing a tube of pringles at me, dancing to Blur with Ant in Dan's room. And lots of other cool things which didn't involve being drunk with Ant.
- And now we discover the strobe lights. Dan bought them for a party, so we position one at either end of the room, turn the effect to slow and switch off the lights. What remains is just a series of stills; four or five of us throwing a ball around and watching it shudder across the room, one moment visible and the next obscured. Perhaps three times out of ten someone will catch it. We holler and whoop and laugh, and miss again. I don't mind getting older one bit.
"Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right." David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
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