I've always been interested in the idea of "praxis" - process and the reflection on process in relation to art. It seems to me that this is the one area that is often missing in creative writing education, which seems strange as understanding the philosophical underpinnings of art is, to me at least, a necessary component of the art - and one that is probably eminently teachable. A fine art education will give you this in spades of course, and its notable that poets from the more experimental end of the spectrum have often come through some such funnel - and may well end up back there.
As often happens when I'm thinking about a new blogpost, several things tend to come together at once; similar to when you first here of someone or something and then they seem to crop up time and again. Alot of the writers I now know are very engaged in process - whether its through initiating projects or collaboration. However, though there's a focus to being part of an anthology or a particular event, I'm more interested, inevitably, about how my own practice works. Though I create individual "units" of art; poems; stories, I've always felt my work is very connected within itself, especially with regard to its themes, and sometimes, its forms (which is not to say form and theme aren't in themselves very connected). Of course, we're not necessarily encouraged, outside of the academic or publicity context, to "talk" about our work. I was reminded of this reading Emily Berry's commentary on her work on the Peony Moon blog.I'll quote the first paragraph in full since it seems very applicable:
"Some people seem to have the language for speaking about their own work
very fluently – I am still not sure I have learnt the language for
talking about mine. It’s like trying to explain one mode of
communication via another very different kind, like telling someone
about a phone call through the medium of sculpture. Still, a sculpture
about a phone call could be something interesting."
That last line struck a chord: in other words just because it might seem counter-intuitive to be using one medium to discuss another doesn't mean that in itself it isn't somewhat of interest. In contemporary art practice we are seeing a lot of blurring of roles between artist and curator, or artist and performer, or artist and audience. Some of this is about control: at what point of the art work does the originator want to control. This seems more intrigueing than the art-as-factory of a Koons or Hirst's spot paintings; it can be the artist as choirmaster or conductor (Spencer Tunick's use of people as material; Jeremy Dellar's "Procession" and "Battle of Orgreave"); but it can also lead to more participatory frameworks - for instance where a curated show tours, only to be added to at each venue or older practices, such as "mail art" where different artists collaborate in producing a limited edition run. Temporary art spaces, and even temporary art organisations, (such as the Lionel Dobie Project in Manchester, or the DIY Art School that is hosted there).
For the writer there is perhaps less obvious scope for creating a "sculpture about a phone call" or rather, the imperative for dabbling in different medium often comes from commercial rather than artistic imperatives. (Ben Elton writing the er..."libretto" to "We Will Rock You.") Yet, those of us steeped in modernism, see that this is a key part of practice - such as Edith Sitwell's collaboration with William Walton for "Facade". I guess that the energies involved in not just one art form, but the attendant expectations around it (the developing of a "career" as a poet or a novelist) have generally been detrimental to any overt thoughts of developed "praxis." Yes, we may read Eliot mostly for his poems, but certainly when I was at school, his plays were often studied, and then there's the "entertainment" that is "Cats." Inevitably with major figures, they can often seem to be doing more "minor" work when they dip away from what they are best known for. Both Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a play; Fitzgerald and Faulkner dabbled in Hollywood; artists such as Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood have directed successful films.
In the underground, it is artistic as much as financial imperative that sees one "switching codes" - for myself, its important that I have the opportunity to explore those themes which interest me most: its why I will occasionally collaborate on a project like Poems for Pussy Riot, as I do have things that I want to say about art, free speech, protest, and (probably as important to me) rock and roll. As an artist who writes politically, the balance here will be different than someone who is a "political artist." I'm defiantly not an activist, for a number of reasons, and many of them are entangled with my views on the role of (my) art - that I reserve the right to explored different political angles, that I might find more difficult if I was more obviously aligned to a cause or party.
As an artist, I guess my own equivalent statement to "a sculpture about a phone call" would be that I'm increasingly keen to defend the artist's right to be wrong. I'm not talking politics here so much as artistic practice. I guess if you're known for a certain type of work; its quite difficult to explore beyond that - whether its the formalist becoming more avant garde, or the controlled writer becoming looser. I'm interested in those past writers who've adopted (and adapted) within that context. (The sad death of Iain Banks, for instance, robbed us not just of a good man and writer, but a good example when it came to working across genres.) In this space a "bad work" by a writer can be as vital as a good one. Mistakes (and I don't really like the word) are enablers - "what if?" moments. And besides, the themes that I addressed in, say, my pseudonymous cartoon, Treeville, aren't that far removed from a poem like "A Colossal Machine" or a story like "The Ikea in Ashton Can Be Seen from Space"; all three are absurdist takes on modern life, and imaginative templates for our possible futures.
Of course, one thing you lack as an underground or unnoticed artist is a critical culture around your work - or even an explicit engagement with that work. Publication doesn't just provide legitimisation it also gives a historio-cultural framework to your work. Why, a future researcher might ask, did he abandon the experimental poems or the realist stories? Chances are that things aren't as linear as all that. I've always been struck that an autobiographical writer like William Burroughs appears to be most literally truthful at his most absurdist. The things we make up, in other words, are probably the things that appear most plausible. Part of what one does as a writer is truth, but part is also a construct. I like to think that a person can be more complex than a fictional character (or rather that our fictional characters should necessarily be complex if we want them to appear human) - and yet I'm well aware of the roles that people inevitably apply to us.
In talking about my writing, I'm not talking about my writing so much as what I'd like a conversation about my writing to be about. There's not so much of it out there that it tells a coherent or even truthful picture; the "unpublished" writings are often as real to me as the published ones. The new work as vital as the old etc. etc. If there is a reason to talk through what I'm doing then I think for me its more about what I'm trying to do with my work. Sometimes that's about the themes and content of the work but other times about the style and the form. There was a point around the millennium where, perhaps through my increased interest in poetry, or because of the amount of concentration I was putting into my writing, I think I fell for a certain type of fictional aestheticism that probably didn't do me too good (at least not in terms of getting published) - it came, I think from reading American writing but with my English accent - I certainly couldn't put on the voice of a Roth or a Bellow or a DeLillo, but I could extract some of their aesthetic juice and apply it to my own work. Same goes, I think, with poetry. I'll never be able to find much to attract me in the Celtic fringes, as I've a very different (very English?) voice in my head; so I've had to look elsewhere than much mainstream British poetry for models. Recently, that's included an unusual one, the formalism of Thom Gunn, but I've had time for Macniece, for Lowell, for Ashbery in the not so distant past. I'm well aware that sometimes these models won't work for me: but perhaps its about that conversation - that extracting of what juice I can from these vivid blooms.
I'm happier talking about art at this level - and this distance - than "what is this poem about" - though maybe that's because I rarely get asked (other than "is it true?" or "who is it about?") We each of us, I think, need to adopt or develop a language for understanding our own work or at least our own practice. I guess some writers would see this as counter-intuitive, as breaking the mystery: but the very fact that I think there is a mystery makes me want to understand it more. Like the onset of a storm, though we can not tell the future, its useful to know whether or not the wind is blowing in our direction, and from where.
Monday, June 17, 2013
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Subcultural Capital
We're all aware of the idea of "cultural capital" - where their is value placed on the cultural activities of a place or person. But what about "subcultural capital"? In other words, does the same equation exist for underground or subversive or even anti- art practice? Where the work and the practitioners are deliberately or accidentally excluded or ignored - is there the same "value"? Many activities, cultural and otherwise are somewhat hermetic; they exist within the bubble of their practitioners - primarily by and for those who are producing the work. Sometimes it might seem that the cultural capital of subcultures is negligible or even non-existent.
I think there are three different kinds of subcultures that I'm thinking of here. Firstly are those activities and institutions that are reactionary in their nature. There can be some snobbishness against certain kinds of "art" and "making". From knitting circles, to networks of cross-stitch fans, to classic car enthusiasts, to fan clubs (including fan fiction) these subcultures are often vibrant, popular, but hermetic. They speak only to themselves: are uninterested in audience; (though perhaps more interested in "market" for their goods). I can't quite dismiss this sort of subculture. Surely a local choir might be applauded for the opportunity it gives people to sing, or the inventiveness of their repetoire, or even the collaborative possibilities with other "professional" musicians. Within this context someone might realise they have a talent that hasn't been explored; or improve technique and skills. Yet there is also a problem of ambition. I have known hermetic creative writing groups, musical groups, art and photography groups where though they may publish, exhibit and perform, the scope of their work can actually be negative for an artist who joins but whose ambitions are slightly outside of the group's more reactionary scope.
The second subculture I'm thinking of may be anything but reactionary, but be self-reverential: about production, more than anything else. It can be the artist moving from one commissioned project to another; the writer endlessly being published in the same small press magazines; the musician spending all their energies on ploughing their narrow furrow without ever expanding it. This kind of grass roots activity has value for sure, but can it exist outside of a certain monomaniacal commitment? Does it self-define in terms of its ambition? In some ways, the micro industries of cult figures like Billy Childish or Momus might be seen in this way. There's an obstinacy here that is admirable whether or not you like the art or not. In a world that tends to let people's creativity wither, there's something to be said about the artist who maintains their production in spite of indifference - and as Childish and Momus show there are small audiences for this. In many ways, the idea of an artist's own capital, at whatever level, is related to this. There are poets published by Faber and others whose "capital" is merely that they produce and keep producing - they may often exist in a critical vacuum, or one that is purely kept going by acolytes, friends of vested interests. And, full disclosure, isn't this my own practice? And constant productivity by an artist is no different if you're Heaney or Duffy when you come to think of it - maybe the opportunities are more that's all; yet artistic opportunities are different than economic and cultural capital opportunities. The obsessive artist could be seen as a tragic figure, but I prefer to appreciate the artistic purity - i.e. if you've next to no cultural capital, then whatever art you produce is self-sustaining. It doesn't of course, make it good, but the difference between those who have got cultural capital is not the quality so much as the acceptance.
The third and most interesting subculture is the most interesting - the creation or emergency of some kind of "scene." I was thinking about this reading Dan Holloway's piece in the Guardian on Alt Lit and the mainstreaming via the new novel by Tao Lin. This self-defining of something called "Alt Lit" and the uncertainty about the term, as well as the annointing of American models seems a very contemporary - or networked - view on both scene building and subcultures. The literary subculture is almost always amongst friends, or co-existent writers: say in New York, London or Paris. What about a badging against which writers can self-define? Holloway talks of Alt Lit practitioners as mostly writing poetry - yet Lin and others are primarily prose writers. Certainly in the UK there's been little sign of or appetite for an experimental prose literature. Rather, avant garde poets and fellow travellers tend to work in hybrid forms. The comments after Holloway's piece are interesting, and amusing - as everyone's looking for a definition of "alt lit" yet surely the name gives it away a bit. Before social media there were newsgroups and listserves - acting as like-minded people networks. The alt. set of news feeds was a way of defining a wide range of subcultural interests. What pieces like this are trying to do I think is to provide the subculture with some capital. Tao Lin's writing is in its own tradition of course, of discursive, stream-of-conscious, non-linear writing. We're not a million miles from the bratpack writing of Brett Easton Ellis, or Mark Leyner's 1995 novel "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist." Hardcovers - or at least book length publication - give an impetus here; and I think subcultural capital has to be essential disruptive, anarchic even.
There's also something essentially fly-by-night about the kind of subcultural scene that we're seeing since the millennium. By the time its named, its over. And in the US where nothing apparently exists unless it has economic value, I can see that just as the ironic-sentimentalists at McSweeney's provided a suitable hipster room for the literary establishment a decade ago; there's a belief in commoditisation in America which insists that all subcultures have got capital - that they eventually crossover. I'm reminded that the first time I heard of "flarf", the post-millenial experimental poetry meme, it was in the most august of places, a special edition of "Poetry." Flarf's built in contradictions (where are the good writers going to come from in a literature that is all about "found" texts?) seem to burst at this point. Old avant gardeists were puzzled at the media storm; writers outside the hermetic scene, such as myself, were wondering where a flarf-type poem such as my "Title Poem of the Collection" which was published in the mainstream journal "The Rialto" as long ago as 2000 fitted into this.
So, Alt Lit or not, I kind of think that cultural capital and subcultural capital are anathemic to each other. For a genuine subcultural capital is in the live nights, the zines, the online debates and discussions that are by their very nature happening on the edge - even to the extent of being outside the countercultural online spaces such as 3AM Magazine or Barcelona Review or in the Prague-based print magazine Vlak. There's also a worry to what extent the academy is providing the "home" for more art-practice based writing; universities being just another kind of hermeticism at times. For subcultural capital is generated for its own purposes often - the writers that hovered online around 3AM and Lee Rourke's Scarecrow magazine a few years ago, have moved up or offstage. Self styled "New Puritans" or "Offbeat Generation" or "Alt Lit" writers provide a bit of a wind in the cultural sails. The citadel remains unbreached however. For subcultural capital isn't quite as clearcut a transference or crossover. It remains in fanzines, blogged, temporary or temporal, and shifts with the moment. If you've heard about it, chances are its over already, but there's something new, something next. Press record. Here's the scene.
I think there are three different kinds of subcultures that I'm thinking of here. Firstly are those activities and institutions that are reactionary in their nature. There can be some snobbishness against certain kinds of "art" and "making". From knitting circles, to networks of cross-stitch fans, to classic car enthusiasts, to fan clubs (including fan fiction) these subcultures are often vibrant, popular, but hermetic. They speak only to themselves: are uninterested in audience; (though perhaps more interested in "market" for their goods). I can't quite dismiss this sort of subculture. Surely a local choir might be applauded for the opportunity it gives people to sing, or the inventiveness of their repetoire, or even the collaborative possibilities with other "professional" musicians. Within this context someone might realise they have a talent that hasn't been explored; or improve technique and skills. Yet there is also a problem of ambition. I have known hermetic creative writing groups, musical groups, art and photography groups where though they may publish, exhibit and perform, the scope of their work can actually be negative for an artist who joins but whose ambitions are slightly outside of the group's more reactionary scope.
The second subculture I'm thinking of may be anything but reactionary, but be self-reverential: about production, more than anything else. It can be the artist moving from one commissioned project to another; the writer endlessly being published in the same small press magazines; the musician spending all their energies on ploughing their narrow furrow without ever expanding it. This kind of grass roots activity has value for sure, but can it exist outside of a certain monomaniacal commitment? Does it self-define in terms of its ambition? In some ways, the micro industries of cult figures like Billy Childish or Momus might be seen in this way. There's an obstinacy here that is admirable whether or not you like the art or not. In a world that tends to let people's creativity wither, there's something to be said about the artist who maintains their production in spite of indifference - and as Childish and Momus show there are small audiences for this. In many ways, the idea of an artist's own capital, at whatever level, is related to this. There are poets published by Faber and others whose "capital" is merely that they produce and keep producing - they may often exist in a critical vacuum, or one that is purely kept going by acolytes, friends of vested interests. And, full disclosure, isn't this my own practice? And constant productivity by an artist is no different if you're Heaney or Duffy when you come to think of it - maybe the opportunities are more that's all; yet artistic opportunities are different than economic and cultural capital opportunities. The obsessive artist could be seen as a tragic figure, but I prefer to appreciate the artistic purity - i.e. if you've next to no cultural capital, then whatever art you produce is self-sustaining. It doesn't of course, make it good, but the difference between those who have got cultural capital is not the quality so much as the acceptance.
The third and most interesting subculture is the most interesting - the creation or emergency of some kind of "scene." I was thinking about this reading Dan Holloway's piece in the Guardian on Alt Lit and the mainstreaming via the new novel by Tao Lin. This self-defining of something called "Alt Lit" and the uncertainty about the term, as well as the annointing of American models seems a very contemporary - or networked - view on both scene building and subcultures. The literary subculture is almost always amongst friends, or co-existent writers: say in New York, London or Paris. What about a badging against which writers can self-define? Holloway talks of Alt Lit practitioners as mostly writing poetry - yet Lin and others are primarily prose writers. Certainly in the UK there's been little sign of or appetite for an experimental prose literature. Rather, avant garde poets and fellow travellers tend to work in hybrid forms. The comments after Holloway's piece are interesting, and amusing - as everyone's looking for a definition of "alt lit" yet surely the name gives it away a bit. Before social media there were newsgroups and listserves - acting as like-minded people networks. The alt. set of news feeds was a way of defining a wide range of subcultural interests. What pieces like this are trying to do I think is to provide the subculture with some capital. Tao Lin's writing is in its own tradition of course, of discursive, stream-of-conscious, non-linear writing. We're not a million miles from the bratpack writing of Brett Easton Ellis, or Mark Leyner's 1995 novel "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist." Hardcovers - or at least book length publication - give an impetus here; and I think subcultural capital has to be essential disruptive, anarchic even.
There's also something essentially fly-by-night about the kind of subcultural scene that we're seeing since the millennium. By the time its named, its over. And in the US where nothing apparently exists unless it has economic value, I can see that just as the ironic-sentimentalists at McSweeney's provided a suitable hipster room for the literary establishment a decade ago; there's a belief in commoditisation in America which insists that all subcultures have got capital - that they eventually crossover. I'm reminded that the first time I heard of "flarf", the post-millenial experimental poetry meme, it was in the most august of places, a special edition of "Poetry." Flarf's built in contradictions (where are the good writers going to come from in a literature that is all about "found" texts?) seem to burst at this point. Old avant gardeists were puzzled at the media storm; writers outside the hermetic scene, such as myself, were wondering where a flarf-type poem such as my "Title Poem of the Collection" which was published in the mainstream journal "The Rialto" as long ago as 2000 fitted into this.
So, Alt Lit or not, I kind of think that cultural capital and subcultural capital are anathemic to each other. For a genuine subcultural capital is in the live nights, the zines, the online debates and discussions that are by their very nature happening on the edge - even to the extent of being outside the countercultural online spaces such as 3AM Magazine or Barcelona Review or in the Prague-based print magazine Vlak. There's also a worry to what extent the academy is providing the "home" for more art-practice based writing; universities being just another kind of hermeticism at times. For subcultural capital is generated for its own purposes often - the writers that hovered online around 3AM and Lee Rourke's Scarecrow magazine a few years ago, have moved up or offstage. Self styled "New Puritans" or "Offbeat Generation" or "Alt Lit" writers provide a bit of a wind in the cultural sails. The citadel remains unbreached however. For subcultural capital isn't quite as clearcut a transference or crossover. It remains in fanzines, blogged, temporary or temporal, and shifts with the moment. If you've heard about it, chances are its over already, but there's something new, something next. Press record. Here's the scene.
Saturday, June 01, 2013
Ripples on a smooth sea, or storm in a teacup?
The news that my publisher, Salt, was stopping publishing single collections following a drop-off in sales was alarming. Not only was Salt best known for its poetry, but having gone through a few choppy waters, had appointed a renowned poetry editor, Roddy Lumsden, had had a successful series of anthologies, and was finally seeing commerical success through its fiction arm, and the Booker shortlisted "The Lighthouse." In the way of things, the Guardian, who has conspicuously not reviewed most of Salt's single collections over the years, wrote it up as a news story primarily about the market for poetry. As a counter balance, Billy Mills made the counter-case that one publisher's decision isn't the last rites for poetry, and that poetry is actually thriving.
Serious as I am about my writing, I'm an amatuer writer in one sense: I've never got paid for it - and so I do look on these things with differing perspectives; as a writer, (and as someone published by Salt and in two of the award-winning anthologies mentioned by Billy Mills I guess I can declare an interest), and as a reader. When I hear of a falling off of sales - I wonder where from? I certainly buy more poetry now than I did five, ten, fifteen years ago. Many of these books haven't even got an ISBN. There's certainly more fish in the pool - so I don't think anyone will be making a living out of my largesse; still with books, magazines and readings, I contribute quite a few quid to the local (and wider) literary scenes. Where were these readers who have left off buying poetry? Poets are always poor - and, though much is talked about "poetry on the internet", you'll still be hard-pressed to find much work by published poets on there. I've been saying for years that this is stupid - that making poetry books available to download might actually increase sales rather than decrease them. The devil, I suspect, is in the detail.
Yet Salt did one thing very well; their books were lovely things; better even than Fabers in some ways; and with a much more contemporary look than Bloodaxe for instance. Only Carcanet look quite so well-formed on my shelves. I've bought Armitage,Berry and Riviere from Faber, Donahaye, Kennard, McCabe, Goldsworthy, Croggan and McCullough from Salt, Ivory, Williams and Wright from Bloodaxe and Ashbery, Murray, Welton and Letford from Carcanet in the last couple of years. A good spread, I think, though a mix of the well-seasoned favourites and the bright and bursting newcomers. All lists have their bigger names and more stable favourites, and I guess whoever you are, you need to nurture those if you are going to be able to take risks on the new. I've still no idea why Salt has done so badly in Poetry Book Society Recommendations or Guardian reviews, but Armitage aside I'm not sure when I last bought a PBS recommendation.
Bookshops are still important for picking up books - and you'll rarely find contemporary poetry from any of our publishers in these bookshops. The market may well have changed irreversibly; yet its hard to know really. I do think, same as anything else, a poetry book (or a poet) needs to have had some reviews, to have good word of mouth, to have some contemporary relevance and to be available: and though there are good books out there - not so many get all of these: and where one does (William Letford's "Bevel" for instance), its a tiny splash. In the small world of poetry publishing, there seems an unusually close relationship between press and poet - certainly no big transfer fees between them (though I notice the new Sophie Hannah revised Selected is from Penguin, not Carcanet.) Yet as the above list proves: I'm not one to choose one press above another as a reader. (Though I don't seem to have much of a liking for Cape or Picador's mainstream lists.)
So we get a bit of a storm in a teacup that makes me think that if I had a large fortune, maybe now would be the time to turn into a small one, by becoming a poetry publisher. I can think of half a dozen Salt poets I'd pick up immediately, and perhaps another half dozen from the Modern Voices series that I'd also find time for. I'm sure some enterprising individual is probably doing the same thing right now. Yes, there is no money in poetry, but as someone else said, there is no poetry in money either.
It may all turn out to be ripples on a smooth sea - Salt may have just been unlucky, publishing widely at a time of industry upheaval, gave it a good strong list, but also without the history to back it up, and, with a back catalogue of 400 or so collections nothing stops them coming back into the market in a few years if they felt it was worth doing so. Poetry as I know it is a cottage industry. Yet culturally its more important than a few jars of home made marmalade. I think that "audience" has long been neglected - both by publishers and bookshops who've not known what to do with their poetry (and that includes long neglect of electronic dissemination) and by the arts establishment. Was it Saatchi's touting of the YBAs or the Turner Prize and Tate Modern that made contemporary art both successful and edgy? I'm not sure; but it was certainly not by "dumbing down" and introducing a National Art Day where we all paint pictures of village greens; which is pretty much where the National Poetry Day has found itself. I've always felt the audience - if there is one - for poetry needs to come from left field; and certainly I've seen large audiences for poetry in Manchester on a regular basis than for Booker listed novelists. The difference is that the poetry reading is the art, whilst the book launch is merely a promotional tour to support it.
Not all of those in the room will have bought a poetry book: but all will have experienced the scene. A little ripple here and there doesn't stop us from seeing the calm straits of the blue ocean: if the horizon is only in our imagination, and really this is no bigger than a duckpond, then I don't much mind: perhaps we're okay in our skiffs, and don't need an ocean liner.
Serious as I am about my writing, I'm an amatuer writer in one sense: I've never got paid for it - and so I do look on these things with differing perspectives; as a writer, (and as someone published by Salt and in two of the award-winning anthologies mentioned by Billy Mills I guess I can declare an interest), and as a reader. When I hear of a falling off of sales - I wonder where from? I certainly buy more poetry now than I did five, ten, fifteen years ago. Many of these books haven't even got an ISBN. There's certainly more fish in the pool - so I don't think anyone will be making a living out of my largesse; still with books, magazines and readings, I contribute quite a few quid to the local (and wider) literary scenes. Where were these readers who have left off buying poetry? Poets are always poor - and, though much is talked about "poetry on the internet", you'll still be hard-pressed to find much work by published poets on there. I've been saying for years that this is stupid - that making poetry books available to download might actually increase sales rather than decrease them. The devil, I suspect, is in the detail.
Yet Salt did one thing very well; their books were lovely things; better even than Fabers in some ways; and with a much more contemporary look than Bloodaxe for instance. Only Carcanet look quite so well-formed on my shelves. I've bought Armitage,Berry and Riviere from Faber, Donahaye, Kennard, McCabe, Goldsworthy, Croggan and McCullough from Salt, Ivory, Williams and Wright from Bloodaxe and Ashbery, Murray, Welton and Letford from Carcanet in the last couple of years. A good spread, I think, though a mix of the well-seasoned favourites and the bright and bursting newcomers. All lists have their bigger names and more stable favourites, and I guess whoever you are, you need to nurture those if you are going to be able to take risks on the new. I've still no idea why Salt has done so badly in Poetry Book Society Recommendations or Guardian reviews, but Armitage aside I'm not sure when I last bought a PBS recommendation.
Bookshops are still important for picking up books - and you'll rarely find contemporary poetry from any of our publishers in these bookshops. The market may well have changed irreversibly; yet its hard to know really. I do think, same as anything else, a poetry book (or a poet) needs to have had some reviews, to have good word of mouth, to have some contemporary relevance and to be available: and though there are good books out there - not so many get all of these: and where one does (William Letford's "Bevel" for instance), its a tiny splash. In the small world of poetry publishing, there seems an unusually close relationship between press and poet - certainly no big transfer fees between them (though I notice the new Sophie Hannah revised Selected is from Penguin, not Carcanet.) Yet as the above list proves: I'm not one to choose one press above another as a reader. (Though I don't seem to have much of a liking for Cape or Picador's mainstream lists.)
So we get a bit of a storm in a teacup that makes me think that if I had a large fortune, maybe now would be the time to turn into a small one, by becoming a poetry publisher. I can think of half a dozen Salt poets I'd pick up immediately, and perhaps another half dozen from the Modern Voices series that I'd also find time for. I'm sure some enterprising individual is probably doing the same thing right now. Yes, there is no money in poetry, but as someone else said, there is no poetry in money either.
It may all turn out to be ripples on a smooth sea - Salt may have just been unlucky, publishing widely at a time of industry upheaval, gave it a good strong list, but also without the history to back it up, and, with a back catalogue of 400 or so collections nothing stops them coming back into the market in a few years if they felt it was worth doing so. Poetry as I know it is a cottage industry. Yet culturally its more important than a few jars of home made marmalade. I think that "audience" has long been neglected - both by publishers and bookshops who've not known what to do with their poetry (and that includes long neglect of electronic dissemination) and by the arts establishment. Was it Saatchi's touting of the YBAs or the Turner Prize and Tate Modern that made contemporary art both successful and edgy? I'm not sure; but it was certainly not by "dumbing down" and introducing a National Art Day where we all paint pictures of village greens; which is pretty much where the National Poetry Day has found itself. I've always felt the audience - if there is one - for poetry needs to come from left field; and certainly I've seen large audiences for poetry in Manchester on a regular basis than for Booker listed novelists. The difference is that the poetry reading is the art, whilst the book launch is merely a promotional tour to support it.
Not all of those in the room will have bought a poetry book: but all will have experienced the scene. A little ripple here and there doesn't stop us from seeing the calm straits of the blue ocean: if the horizon is only in our imagination, and really this is no bigger than a duckpond, then I don't much mind: perhaps we're okay in our skiffs, and don't need an ocean liner.
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
In Deborah Levy's Booker shortlisted "Swimming Home" nothing is quite as it seems on the surface. The poet Joe Jacobs ("JHJ") is in a villa near Nice with his wife and daughter and a couple of their friends. The sleepy village is one of bored intrigue, where a number of people have ended up drifting - the villas and cottages owned by an absentee landlady who apparently earned her money through high class prostitution. In some ways, this tableaux is one of the bored, classic tropes of the middle class English novel. It "Hotel du Lac" or "A Year in Provence" or "The Pregnant Widow" or "The Ebony Tower" or any number of Iris Murdochs. A retired doctor looks on curiously at the family in the neighbouring villa, and a German hippy acts as a reluctant concierge, but would rather smoke dope than do the odd jobs he's paid for.
Joe's wife Isabel is a war correspondant, and therefore they've reversed the usual patterns of family. He has stayed at home and looked after Nina, his fourteen year old daughter, whilst she has been away. They are, as always in the bourgeois novel, more than comfortably off. The setting - in a not-so-distant 1994 gives the story distance, if not quite enough; for despite Levy being one of our more interesting contemporary stylists, the novel is defiantly old-fashioned in many ways. There are modernist echoes, of course, back to "Tender is the Night" or "The Good Soldier" where the ennui of the hot summer abroad seems to sap the characters nerve, and slowly strip them of the pretence in which they live their lives.
Yet, "Swimming Home" is very comfortably contemporary as well - in that the modern novel revels in surfaces uncovered, and secrets to be hidden and then revealed at the author's own time. Joe and Isabel's friends, the corpulent Mitchell and his wife Laura, are escaping their own disaster - their shop is going bankrupt - whilst for the poet and his wife, the tenuous tie of their marriage, almost always at risk from his affairs and her absences, is stretched taut ready for breaking. Into this walks disaster in the shape of Kitty Finch, a beautiful but painfully thin redhead, who is first seen naked in the pool, her body easily mistaken for a corpse. Finch has come over there for a purpose: to meet Joe, whose poetry she has found empathy in. Against all good sense, Isabelle carelessly invites her to stay, "buying" the clear lie of her story that she got the wrong dates for coming to the villa.
Rarely wearing any clothes, Kitty is a obviously a dangerous interloper into this fragile family tableau. The sensible 14-year old, who has done without a mother for so much of her life, is at first intrigued by this big sister, particular as she finally has first period.
So is this a coming of age novel? A family breakdown story? Or a tale of mental illness? A bit of all three it turns out. Kitty - known as "Kitty Ket" to the German who loves her - has been there before. A "botanist" and "poet" she has come to the apartment with a single poem in an envelope, entitled "Swimming Home" which she wants Joe to read. On such thin grounds is this novel of surfaces built, and part of her success, I think, is in keeping this fragile edifice upright. She does this through her writing which is careful, calibrated, and as shimmering as the French heat.
Yet this small group of people are thrown together not so much by circumstance as by wilfulness. This is the unfortunate dinner parties of the people-loving Divers in "Tender is the Night" but here it feels forced. Mitchell is a boorish Abe North type, drinking and eating too much, and not much liking (or at least resenting) his richer friends. JHJ is a poet like none that really exist, closer to the artist in Fowles' "The Ebony Tower" than any real writer; somehow living off his royalties. His own past is of the changeling. Born before the war he is a Polish Jew, whose own past and identity are pretty unknown to him. The novel starts with him in a car with Kitty, so the obviousness of their having an affair is flagged from the start, but when she takes her hands off the wheel, where will this riskiness take them? That in some ways is the novel's "tease." This group of people though don't really garner much of our sympathy. Its a short novel, and could easily have been called "dreadful people." Not a single character comes across as deserving our sympathy. They are selfish, and self-centred, and pulling those around them into their own self-absorbtion.
In some ways, the novels strength is this clinical characterisation. Everyone's actions, however well meaning are freighted with consequence. Isabel letting Kitty stay for instance (and why is it that Isabelle has the casting vote?) - is this because she really wants Kitty to have an affair with her husband? The retired doctor Sheridan is an accomplice in the melodrama from having called the paramedics to a crazed, naked Kitty Finch the previous summer. Sheridan is scared at what Kitty will then do as revenge. Yet what doctor wouldn't have take that decision? Claude the Mick-Jagger lookalike who runs the local bar is leching after the pre-pubescent Nina; whilst Jurgen is the classic unreliable servant, doing favours only where he feels it can give him some kind of an edge.
Into this appalling group, the damaged Kitty seems to swoop in to somehow be both angel and devil. Its not that she captivates the group so much - she's too obviously mentally estranged and self-obsessed for that - more that she provides some kind of necessary grit in the unsaid seething politeness of this middle class cliche. Her own background is hardly mentioned - other than her time in hospital - but she swims in, literally, and everyone either falls in love with her, loathes her, or thinks she can be useful to them. We don't see the poem at the heart of things: and its a thin thing to hold things together. At one point the list of reasons that Joe Jacobs has come up with not to read a single poem becomes almost comical. I think the novel's small power is based upon its accumulation of little things: Nina's period; the growing tab that Mitchell has built up at the restaurant; Kitty's nakedness, Isabel's disappearance into town. They are staging their own drama (a melodrama in many ways), playing some kind of multi-dimensional chess game, the ending of which could go either way, but also feels inevitable.
This sort of fatalism is what drives the novel more than the characters - though the accumulation of detail, in small telling scenes is what Levy does best. There is not a chapter that is wasted. In many ways its a long short story. Apparently her first novel for 15 years, it doesn't feel like a book that was dying to be written. Its setting and characters are too familiar. There's little to make you think this is a parody of the bourgeois novel, instead it feels like it is the bourgeois novel exactly, albeit with more than a frisson of existentialism. Kitty is the heart of the book, but she's a distant heart as well, and all too familiar - the broken girl, the beautiful but mentally unstable woman. She's there in Nicola Barker's "Clear" and Lee Rourke's "The Canal" and also in the TV series Luther; a brilliant, seductive, but damaged waif, almost a signifier for contemporary neuroses. As we reach the denoument - as, if you like, the novel's fatalism reaches its point of closure - I wondered again about its mid-90s setting. Its just pre-internet which helps (Jacobs having a fax machine in the villa seems a clumsy detail, for instance) but the timing seems more to do with how Jacobs is aged. It has to be set in the 1994 to enable Joe Jacobs to have been a Polish Jewish evacuee who never saw his parents after the war; yet this ghostly past is so lightly sketched I'm not sure it has any greater reality to it. Levy's interest is in the psychological deadness of her damaged characters, and that's inevitably focussed on their vulnerable present, rather than the demons of their past.
Outside of the tableaux the characters feel they don't exist - and that anti-realism just about gives the novel an intrigue that takes it away from its slightly characterless origins. Its symbols might be slight, but they are not without some intellectual weight.
Joe's wife Isabel is a war correspondant, and therefore they've reversed the usual patterns of family. He has stayed at home and looked after Nina, his fourteen year old daughter, whilst she has been away. They are, as always in the bourgeois novel, more than comfortably off. The setting - in a not-so-distant 1994 gives the story distance, if not quite enough; for despite Levy being one of our more interesting contemporary stylists, the novel is defiantly old-fashioned in many ways. There are modernist echoes, of course, back to "Tender is the Night" or "The Good Soldier" where the ennui of the hot summer abroad seems to sap the characters nerve, and slowly strip them of the pretence in which they live their lives.
Yet, "Swimming Home" is very comfortably contemporary as well - in that the modern novel revels in surfaces uncovered, and secrets to be hidden and then revealed at the author's own time. Joe and Isabel's friends, the corpulent Mitchell and his wife Laura, are escaping their own disaster - their shop is going bankrupt - whilst for the poet and his wife, the tenuous tie of their marriage, almost always at risk from his affairs and her absences, is stretched taut ready for breaking. Into this walks disaster in the shape of Kitty Finch, a beautiful but painfully thin redhead, who is first seen naked in the pool, her body easily mistaken for a corpse. Finch has come over there for a purpose: to meet Joe, whose poetry she has found empathy in. Against all good sense, Isabelle carelessly invites her to stay, "buying" the clear lie of her story that she got the wrong dates for coming to the villa.
Rarely wearing any clothes, Kitty is a obviously a dangerous interloper into this fragile family tableau. The sensible 14-year old, who has done without a mother for so much of her life, is at first intrigued by this big sister, particular as she finally has first period.
So is this a coming of age novel? A family breakdown story? Or a tale of mental illness? A bit of all three it turns out. Kitty - known as "Kitty Ket" to the German who loves her - has been there before. A "botanist" and "poet" she has come to the apartment with a single poem in an envelope, entitled "Swimming Home" which she wants Joe to read. On such thin grounds is this novel of surfaces built, and part of her success, I think, is in keeping this fragile edifice upright. She does this through her writing which is careful, calibrated, and as shimmering as the French heat.
Yet this small group of people are thrown together not so much by circumstance as by wilfulness. This is the unfortunate dinner parties of the people-loving Divers in "Tender is the Night" but here it feels forced. Mitchell is a boorish Abe North type, drinking and eating too much, and not much liking (or at least resenting) his richer friends. JHJ is a poet like none that really exist, closer to the artist in Fowles' "The Ebony Tower" than any real writer; somehow living off his royalties. His own past is of the changeling. Born before the war he is a Polish Jew, whose own past and identity are pretty unknown to him. The novel starts with him in a car with Kitty, so the obviousness of their having an affair is flagged from the start, but when she takes her hands off the wheel, where will this riskiness take them? That in some ways is the novel's "tease." This group of people though don't really garner much of our sympathy. Its a short novel, and could easily have been called "dreadful people." Not a single character comes across as deserving our sympathy. They are selfish, and self-centred, and pulling those around them into their own self-absorbtion.
In some ways, the novels strength is this clinical characterisation. Everyone's actions, however well meaning are freighted with consequence. Isabel letting Kitty stay for instance (and why is it that Isabelle has the casting vote?) - is this because she really wants Kitty to have an affair with her husband? The retired doctor Sheridan is an accomplice in the melodrama from having called the paramedics to a crazed, naked Kitty Finch the previous summer. Sheridan is scared at what Kitty will then do as revenge. Yet what doctor wouldn't have take that decision? Claude the Mick-Jagger lookalike who runs the local bar is leching after the pre-pubescent Nina; whilst Jurgen is the classic unreliable servant, doing favours only where he feels it can give him some kind of an edge.
Into this appalling group, the damaged Kitty seems to swoop in to somehow be both angel and devil. Its not that she captivates the group so much - she's too obviously mentally estranged and self-obsessed for that - more that she provides some kind of necessary grit in the unsaid seething politeness of this middle class cliche. Her own background is hardly mentioned - other than her time in hospital - but she swims in, literally, and everyone either falls in love with her, loathes her, or thinks she can be useful to them. We don't see the poem at the heart of things: and its a thin thing to hold things together. At one point the list of reasons that Joe Jacobs has come up with not to read a single poem becomes almost comical. I think the novel's small power is based upon its accumulation of little things: Nina's period; the growing tab that Mitchell has built up at the restaurant; Kitty's nakedness, Isabel's disappearance into town. They are staging their own drama (a melodrama in many ways), playing some kind of multi-dimensional chess game, the ending of which could go either way, but also feels inevitable.
This sort of fatalism is what drives the novel more than the characters - though the accumulation of detail, in small telling scenes is what Levy does best. There is not a chapter that is wasted. In many ways its a long short story. Apparently her first novel for 15 years, it doesn't feel like a book that was dying to be written. Its setting and characters are too familiar. There's little to make you think this is a parody of the bourgeois novel, instead it feels like it is the bourgeois novel exactly, albeit with more than a frisson of existentialism. Kitty is the heart of the book, but she's a distant heart as well, and all too familiar - the broken girl, the beautiful but mentally unstable woman. She's there in Nicola Barker's "Clear" and Lee Rourke's "The Canal" and also in the TV series Luther; a brilliant, seductive, but damaged waif, almost a signifier for contemporary neuroses. As we reach the denoument - as, if you like, the novel's fatalism reaches its point of closure - I wondered again about its mid-90s setting. Its just pre-internet which helps (Jacobs having a fax machine in the villa seems a clumsy detail, for instance) but the timing seems more to do with how Jacobs is aged. It has to be set in the 1994 to enable Joe Jacobs to have been a Polish Jewish evacuee who never saw his parents after the war; yet this ghostly past is so lightly sketched I'm not sure it has any greater reality to it. Levy's interest is in the psychological deadness of her damaged characters, and that's inevitably focussed on their vulnerable present, rather than the demons of their past.
Outside of the tableaux the characters feel they don't exist - and that anti-realism just about gives the novel an intrigue that takes it away from its slightly characterless origins. Its symbols might be slight, but they are not without some intellectual weight.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Writing With and Without Fear
I used to write without fear. I didn't know what I didn't know. Like a child playing in front of the open grate, mesmerised by the flames and warmth but unprotected by a fire guard, I would write until I was roasted on one side, with nobody to pull me away. Partly this was because I didn't know any different; I'd always written - since being a child - and since nobody had took much interest in it, then why should they take much interest in warning me off? During my twenties I wrote a couple of novels, a number of short stories; beginning to photocopy them for distribution to a few friends, occasionally getting a poem or story published. This didn't happen until my late twenties by which time I was probably unteachable, caught in my own bad habits.
I began to take things more seriously: first a competition entry; then sending off to agents and others. I applied, and finally got on, an M.A. I still wrote with abandon, why shouldn't I? The fear came slowly, I think. Not the course, or my tutors or my fellow students - more the work was to blame. This new novel was different somehow. It could burn me. It could take me places I wasn't keen on going. It was more than a story. More than a tall tale. Slowly, I burned, slowly I moved away from the flame, put precautions in place. Then the writing world, which I'd known of, but never had much of an entry-point to, seemed ever nearer, and I approached that equally without fear. Beware of sabre-toothed tigers! At some point I began to write out of terror rather than unaware of the terror.
The fear was helpful. It kept my words under constant surveillance, it made me aware of their limitations; it made me think of what I needed to do to make them better. Fear made me a better writer. It made me a slower writer, it made me a more scared writer. Yet, the old fearlessness somehow remained. It would take a late night session; a glass or two of wine to intervene. But I'd trained myself to write breathlessly, fearlessly and that training held me in good stead. Only in the morning would I wonder what I'd done - think about this other fearless self that wrote at night and left something that I could only wonder at in the sober morning. Then the fear helped, I suppose, it clarified the confusions of the night before, it worked into the detail of the fearless work. At least sometimes: other times it stopped me. It stopped me from following through on the idea or the piece.
Time went on. I am older. I am a curator of old work now, as much as writer of new work. That was a different me, I think, that fearless one. It is better to be terrified; and to make sure things are perfect before you show them around; before you consider their vulnerability - yet I need the fearless writer to write the damn thing in the first place; the fearless me was the one that got to the end; the terrified writer is needed to look on this work with horror and make it approach some kind of completion. The fear has exactly the same role as my lack of it once had. It is to enable.
I began to take things more seriously: first a competition entry; then sending off to agents and others. I applied, and finally got on, an M.A. I still wrote with abandon, why shouldn't I? The fear came slowly, I think. Not the course, or my tutors or my fellow students - more the work was to blame. This new novel was different somehow. It could burn me. It could take me places I wasn't keen on going. It was more than a story. More than a tall tale. Slowly, I burned, slowly I moved away from the flame, put precautions in place. Then the writing world, which I'd known of, but never had much of an entry-point to, seemed ever nearer, and I approached that equally without fear. Beware of sabre-toothed tigers! At some point I began to write out of terror rather than unaware of the terror.
The fear was helpful. It kept my words under constant surveillance, it made me aware of their limitations; it made me think of what I needed to do to make them better. Fear made me a better writer. It made me a slower writer, it made me a more scared writer. Yet, the old fearlessness somehow remained. It would take a late night session; a glass or two of wine to intervene. But I'd trained myself to write breathlessly, fearlessly and that training held me in good stead. Only in the morning would I wonder what I'd done - think about this other fearless self that wrote at night and left something that I could only wonder at in the sober morning. Then the fear helped, I suppose, it clarified the confusions of the night before, it worked into the detail of the fearless work. At least sometimes: other times it stopped me. It stopped me from following through on the idea or the piece.
Time went on. I am older. I am a curator of old work now, as much as writer of new work. That was a different me, I think, that fearless one. It is better to be terrified; and to make sure things are perfect before you show them around; before you consider their vulnerability - yet I need the fearless writer to write the damn thing in the first place; the fearless me was the one that got to the end; the terrified writer is needed to look on this work with horror and make it approach some kind of completion. The fear has exactly the same role as my lack of it once had. It is to enable.
Do Movies Make us Culturally Lazy?
Last week I went to the cinema twice; first to see "A Taste of Honey", a film that is over 50 years old, and then to see the freshly pressed "The Great Gatsby." Suitably the first was in the grand surroundings of Stockport Plaza, and the second in the Dolby-enhanced experience zone of our local multiplex. I saw the latter in 2D, as 3D hurts my eyes, but the cinema was nonetheless full.
I mention this because I rarely go to the cinema these days. Not purposely, but amongst everything else its gone down my list of priorities. Besides, big TVs means that missing a film on the "big screen" is no longer the disaster it used to be. There may well be something about the falling off in quality of cinema - but I kind of don't necessarily buy that. The latter experience left something to desire. The multiplex had a small bar area with seats that had seen better days and lukewarm white wine; the first fifteen minutes of the film had large groups of people arriving late to find their seat; and, like most contemporary movies, Gatsby passes the 2 hour mark.
Yet cinema has proven remarkably resilient - albeit if the experience seems primarily aimed at a teenage/early 20s audience - with popcorn, and an adjacent Nandos. The films match this of course. There can be times when I've wanted to go and see a film but there's nothing on other than kids movies. (Its a bank holiday on Monday, I should probably have saved Gatsby for then.) Our art house cinemas are as likely to show a Tarantino as the "new" Tarantino, though festivals offer some hopes, though "catch it or miss it."
I love film. I used to sneak out of sixth form when I had a free afternoon and pop to an afternoon showing at the Cannock Classic, a three mile walk from school. The film club at university was the best and cheapest education I received in my first year at that institution. The video shop provided access to a smorgasbord of movies: from trash to classics (and sometimes they were both.) Yet at some point I kind of stopped going to films. The "must see" movies I haven't seen - whether its "Prometheus" of "Avatar." I catch things occasionally years afterwards on TV. I feel I've seen Harry Potter though I don't think I've caught more than a whole film.
It is, I think, easily to get culturally lazy through cinema. Partly as a shorthand for what other people are watching/seeing. The meme about "I've never seen Star Wars" shows our shock when people have opted out of this mainstream culture (and when did "cult" science fiction become necessarily ubiquitous?) - but also, and here's the rub, out "star" culture, our "celeb" culture, is primarily focussed on the beautiful people in the movies. Twas ever thus, I guess. Warhol understood: with his screen tests and his Factory "stars" - but he made unwatchable movies. The great artform of the twentieth century reduced to material...
...and I'm at one with thinking it is a great art form. Its certainly influenced by writing as much, if not more than novels have. I've written poems about cinema; and I still feel about the medium in a way that - even in the age of the HBO boxset, in itself a new "artform" - I've never felt for TV. Partly its the sort of films I've liked: noir is a genre that exists more on film than in books. You don't get noir on stage, that's for sure.
But "liking" a film is the easiest thing in the world it seems. The money spent is astronomical. Even now Goldman's warning that "nobody knows anything" is shown in the failure of something like "John Carter" (SF adaption - start of a new franchise - surely a winner?) or the unexpected success of the "The Artist". Yet a few days after seeing Gatsby, its Fitzgerald's prose that still shimmers, rather than Luhrmann's surfaces. I thought the film was thoroughly entertaining, surprisingly close to the book; but all of that effort and that's it a memory to be replaced - for most of the audience - by the new Star Trek movie or whatever big film is next. De Caprio, a good actor, is trapped in modern cinema as other good actors like Christian Bale or Ryan Gosling often are.
The Review Show was pretty dismissive of Gatsby the film, because it failed to get under the book. Would it ever be able? Great books rarely become great movies - though people try. This version of Gatsby was neither revolutionary or reverential. It worked best when it was more the former, and its a good modern movie, yet some well known in the source material that it was never in danger of celluloid overwhelming it.
Part of the reason I rarely go to the cinema is a social one of course. Two hours spent not talking to the person you went with! Catching up with particular friends too rarely these days, we tend to want to spend the time. But there's something I else I think. A list of the 100 best films of all time and I'll have only seen half - there's still time of course, but I've a pile of DVDs of classics and non-classics. I guess I've seen enough - just as I speak to people who feel they've read enough novels. As a creative practitioner do I want art that entertains or enriches? I can learn quite a lot from the structure and style of a great movie that might translate somehow into fiction - but many mulitplex films aren't that complex. The more complex narratives of the Sopranos or Fringe or The Wire seem to repay us more for the investment of time: movies are all about bang for the buck.
But if there is something "culturally lazy" about watching films I think its more to do with the Hollywood blockbuster as its evolved than something in the medium. These movies are such big events: the sequels create a narrative that feeds through from children's toys to pop culture parody (e.g. Spaced) to creating our own personal cultural signature. It becomes easy to fit in when everyone knows who Spiderman is. (Far easier than knowing who Fellini is.)
What place do movies play in the culture now? Where rock stars have faded in their excess, movie stars remain paramount in our celebrity culture - but the films themselves are more than that - they are so often cultural battering rams. Whereas a song or poem or a novel can still come from nowhere, a film - with its multi-million budget, its A-list stars, its billboards and trailers - can sometimes seem to scorch the cultural earth beneath it. Of course, the bigger the film the bigger the success, the less cultural impact it might really have - yes, you can see it three, four, many more times, but box office is primarily about reach: how many millions of people have been drawn into the cinema.
I was surprised as an adult rewatching "Jaws" and seeing "Saturday Night Fever" for the first time, how gritty those movies were. Like a book that surprises, they are still nuanced, despite the big set pieces that everyone remembers.
Some of my best artistic memories are seeing movies. "Breaking the Waves" at Brixton Ritzy on my own in 1996 after I'd just moved to London - what an overwhelming movie that was; "Reservoir Dogs" at the Cornerhouse; years before (not a great film - but a great day, I was in Manchester for the anti-Clause 28 march) "Sammy and Rosie Got Laid"; "Vertigo" at the Lumiere St. Martin's Lane, in 70mm; "Blue Velvet" for the first time at Lancaster university cinema club.... though sometimes I've seen favourite films on TV, even in the black and white portable in my old teenage bedroom. I'm sure there are lots of great movies out there even today; from all over the world; but wonder as well if they're a little drowned out by the loud culture of the blockbuster; of the sequel. Will I ever see the lovely Spanish film "Solitary Fragments" again? A split-screen movie about the Madrid bombings I accidentally caught at the Viva! Spanish film festival. Or what about "Target" that brilliant b-movie, "Targets" featuring Boris Karloff and directed by Peter Bogdanovich? Will Hollywood ever make a film as perfect again as "Once Upon a Time in the West?"
I began this blog post with a provocation - wondering if film culture - the multiplex showing the next Star Trek sequel or whatever - was the worst kind of culture; its sheer excessive professionalism drowning out everything else - yet there's something to be said for the craft and intelligence that goes into even the dumbest movie. Luhrmann overplays the symbolism in "Gatsby" but I can't help but be impressed by the zoom in and out of the New York apartments. One wonders at the utter pointless spectacle of the party scenes - everything over the top, but little different at heart than last Saturday's "Eurovision" song contest in Sweden, or the set-pieces of the Olympic opening ceremony. Was it really a surprise that we got one of our most imaginative film directors to direct that live event?
My real concern is that there will be more column inches for big blockbuster movies this year than for every book, poem, play that is out there - and something "little" - like "A Taste of Honey" was "little" (though how large were its concerns, wonderfully, achingly large....) cannot hope to compete in this world. The "shock of the new" that came briefly with the Dogme directors; or with Tarantino; is now subsumed into the whole mad machinery it takes to make a major movie. In a world of "franchises" the first casualty often seems story - with plots turning on the needs of the special effects makers rather than the other way round. An endless stream of Star Wars movies, or a reboot of Star Trek look like having none of the inventiveness that's there in J.J. Abram's small screen "Fringe." For British movie makers, films only seem to get a green light when they are picking up on a tabloid worthy subject - such as Winterbottom's life of Paul Raymond. Film has always been a magpie looking for the best source material - but sometimes it feels like books are being written as film treatments first.
I've lost my thread: I guess I'm trying to say that the most thrilling things I've seen lately have been live events one way or another - and its been a long time since I felt compelled to go see a new movie. Probably my loss, of course, and I'm sure there are some great films out there. Just not sure when I'll get around to them...
I mention this because I rarely go to the cinema these days. Not purposely, but amongst everything else its gone down my list of priorities. Besides, big TVs means that missing a film on the "big screen" is no longer the disaster it used to be. There may well be something about the falling off in quality of cinema - but I kind of don't necessarily buy that. The latter experience left something to desire. The multiplex had a small bar area with seats that had seen better days and lukewarm white wine; the first fifteen minutes of the film had large groups of people arriving late to find their seat; and, like most contemporary movies, Gatsby passes the 2 hour mark.
Yet cinema has proven remarkably resilient - albeit if the experience seems primarily aimed at a teenage/early 20s audience - with popcorn, and an adjacent Nandos. The films match this of course. There can be times when I've wanted to go and see a film but there's nothing on other than kids movies. (Its a bank holiday on Monday, I should probably have saved Gatsby for then.) Our art house cinemas are as likely to show a Tarantino as the "new" Tarantino, though festivals offer some hopes, though "catch it or miss it."
I love film. I used to sneak out of sixth form when I had a free afternoon and pop to an afternoon showing at the Cannock Classic, a three mile walk from school. The film club at university was the best and cheapest education I received in my first year at that institution. The video shop provided access to a smorgasbord of movies: from trash to classics (and sometimes they were both.) Yet at some point I kind of stopped going to films. The "must see" movies I haven't seen - whether its "Prometheus" of "Avatar." I catch things occasionally years afterwards on TV. I feel I've seen Harry Potter though I don't think I've caught more than a whole film.
It is, I think, easily to get culturally lazy through cinema. Partly as a shorthand for what other people are watching/seeing. The meme about "I've never seen Star Wars" shows our shock when people have opted out of this mainstream culture (and when did "cult" science fiction become necessarily ubiquitous?) - but also, and here's the rub, out "star" culture, our "celeb" culture, is primarily focussed on the beautiful people in the movies. Twas ever thus, I guess. Warhol understood: with his screen tests and his Factory "stars" - but he made unwatchable movies. The great artform of the twentieth century reduced to material...
...and I'm at one with thinking it is a great art form. Its certainly influenced by writing as much, if not more than novels have. I've written poems about cinema; and I still feel about the medium in a way that - even in the age of the HBO boxset, in itself a new "artform" - I've never felt for TV. Partly its the sort of films I've liked: noir is a genre that exists more on film than in books. You don't get noir on stage, that's for sure.
But "liking" a film is the easiest thing in the world it seems. The money spent is astronomical. Even now Goldman's warning that "nobody knows anything" is shown in the failure of something like "John Carter" (SF adaption - start of a new franchise - surely a winner?) or the unexpected success of the "The Artist". Yet a few days after seeing Gatsby, its Fitzgerald's prose that still shimmers, rather than Luhrmann's surfaces. I thought the film was thoroughly entertaining, surprisingly close to the book; but all of that effort and that's it a memory to be replaced - for most of the audience - by the new Star Trek movie or whatever big film is next. De Caprio, a good actor, is trapped in modern cinema as other good actors like Christian Bale or Ryan Gosling often are.
The Review Show was pretty dismissive of Gatsby the film, because it failed to get under the book. Would it ever be able? Great books rarely become great movies - though people try. This version of Gatsby was neither revolutionary or reverential. It worked best when it was more the former, and its a good modern movie, yet some well known in the source material that it was never in danger of celluloid overwhelming it.
Part of the reason I rarely go to the cinema is a social one of course. Two hours spent not talking to the person you went with! Catching up with particular friends too rarely these days, we tend to want to spend the time. But there's something I else I think. A list of the 100 best films of all time and I'll have only seen half - there's still time of course, but I've a pile of DVDs of classics and non-classics. I guess I've seen enough - just as I speak to people who feel they've read enough novels. As a creative practitioner do I want art that entertains or enriches? I can learn quite a lot from the structure and style of a great movie that might translate somehow into fiction - but many mulitplex films aren't that complex. The more complex narratives of the Sopranos or Fringe or The Wire seem to repay us more for the investment of time: movies are all about bang for the buck.
But if there is something "culturally lazy" about watching films I think its more to do with the Hollywood blockbuster as its evolved than something in the medium. These movies are such big events: the sequels create a narrative that feeds through from children's toys to pop culture parody (e.g. Spaced) to creating our own personal cultural signature. It becomes easy to fit in when everyone knows who Spiderman is. (Far easier than knowing who Fellini is.)
What place do movies play in the culture now? Where rock stars have faded in their excess, movie stars remain paramount in our celebrity culture - but the films themselves are more than that - they are so often cultural battering rams. Whereas a song or poem or a novel can still come from nowhere, a film - with its multi-million budget, its A-list stars, its billboards and trailers - can sometimes seem to scorch the cultural earth beneath it. Of course, the bigger the film the bigger the success, the less cultural impact it might really have - yes, you can see it three, four, many more times, but box office is primarily about reach: how many millions of people have been drawn into the cinema.
I was surprised as an adult rewatching "Jaws" and seeing "Saturday Night Fever" for the first time, how gritty those movies were. Like a book that surprises, they are still nuanced, despite the big set pieces that everyone remembers.
Some of my best artistic memories are seeing movies. "Breaking the Waves" at Brixton Ritzy on my own in 1996 after I'd just moved to London - what an overwhelming movie that was; "Reservoir Dogs" at the Cornerhouse; years before (not a great film - but a great day, I was in Manchester for the anti-Clause 28 march) "Sammy and Rosie Got Laid"; "Vertigo" at the Lumiere St. Martin's Lane, in 70mm; "Blue Velvet" for the first time at Lancaster university cinema club.... though sometimes I've seen favourite films on TV, even in the black and white portable in my old teenage bedroom. I'm sure there are lots of great movies out there even today; from all over the world; but wonder as well if they're a little drowned out by the loud culture of the blockbuster; of the sequel. Will I ever see the lovely Spanish film "Solitary Fragments" again? A split-screen movie about the Madrid bombings I accidentally caught at the Viva! Spanish film festival. Or what about "Target" that brilliant b-movie, "Targets" featuring Boris Karloff and directed by Peter Bogdanovich? Will Hollywood ever make a film as perfect again as "Once Upon a Time in the West?"
I began this blog post with a provocation - wondering if film culture - the multiplex showing the next Star Trek sequel or whatever - was the worst kind of culture; its sheer excessive professionalism drowning out everything else - yet there's something to be said for the craft and intelligence that goes into even the dumbest movie. Luhrmann overplays the symbolism in "Gatsby" but I can't help but be impressed by the zoom in and out of the New York apartments. One wonders at the utter pointless spectacle of the party scenes - everything over the top, but little different at heart than last Saturday's "Eurovision" song contest in Sweden, or the set-pieces of the Olympic opening ceremony. Was it really a surprise that we got one of our most imaginative film directors to direct that live event?
My real concern is that there will be more column inches for big blockbuster movies this year than for every book, poem, play that is out there - and something "little" - like "A Taste of Honey" was "little" (though how large were its concerns, wonderfully, achingly large....) cannot hope to compete in this world. The "shock of the new" that came briefly with the Dogme directors; or with Tarantino; is now subsumed into the whole mad machinery it takes to make a major movie. In a world of "franchises" the first casualty often seems story - with plots turning on the needs of the special effects makers rather than the other way round. An endless stream of Star Wars movies, or a reboot of Star Trek look like having none of the inventiveness that's there in J.J. Abram's small screen "Fringe." For British movie makers, films only seem to get a green light when they are picking up on a tabloid worthy subject - such as Winterbottom's life of Paul Raymond. Film has always been a magpie looking for the best source material - but sometimes it feels like books are being written as film treatments first.
I've lost my thread: I guess I'm trying to say that the most thrilling things I've seen lately have been live events one way or another - and its been a long time since I felt compelled to go see a new movie. Probably my loss, of course, and I'm sure there are some great films out there. Just not sure when I'll get around to them...
Friday, May 17, 2013
Time to appraise late-period Fall?
Just over a decade ago the Fall appeared to be in a sorry state, close to terminal decline. After the excellent "The Unutterable" album, released on yet another obscure label, a disastrous tour had led to a major line-up change - not for the first or last time - cancelled or aborted gigs, and even a certain distancing from their number one supporter John Peel. Between 1998 and 2003 the Fall failed to come in for a session. Whether or not their live unreliability at this point or the lack of coherent management was to blame, who knows? The band that let out "Are you are missing winner?" was as brutally incoherent a combo as he'd ever assembled. Though it contained somewhat astonishing covers - Leadbelly, Iggy Pop and R. Dean Taylor - the rest of the album was hamfisted - the worst selection of original songs that had ever come out under the Fall name.
Yet if long-term Fall watchers had become worried that this was the start of a terminal decline it wasn't so. Endless touring had enabled them to road-test new songs that two years after "winner" were a world better. The first signs of this were on the 2003 Peel session, and the much-delayed new album "The Real New Fall LP (formerly Country on the Click)" was a massive return to form. It also included as close as the Fall would get to a hit these days, "Theme from Sparta FC" which got used on Football Focus every Saturday whilst the results were coming in. Despite the usual travails - an injury to Smith that had him in a wheelchair by the following year the sense was that the Fall were on a roll and as good as they'd ever been. Always playing the majority of their set from the last couple of albums, it was a relief when the weaker songs from before "TRNFLP" had been dropped and new songs such as "Blindness" and "What About us?" entered the set. First appearing in the odd interim release "Interim", this messy set of outtakes and live tracks is a crucial document in someways, bridging their two finest albums of the century. Those two tracks were on their final Peel session, for by the time I got to see them at the Manchester Bierkeller in the autumn, John Peel was dead. "Fall Heads Roll" was even better than the previous album, probably their best album of the century, yet even it doesn't really showcase the power of the band at this time. The call and response of "What About Us?" often followed on closely by classic "Wrong Place, Right Time" with the audience taking the microphone, showcased a band that was reinvigorated.
It wouldn't or couldn't last of course - and halfway through the next American tour his band left. Like an ageing soul singer, he carried on regardless, his local support band becoming a "pick up band" for him It took a while for a new record however, and yet "Reformation Post TLC" is actually a double album - some long krautrock type tracks alongside the usual mix of rockabilly and alt.country. His wife Elena Poulou the one constant during the decade, oddities such as "The Wright Stuff" where she sings lead vocal, are added to the Fall's repetoire of unexpected tricks. Always at least partially an electronic band, "Reformation Post TLC" reaffirmed that side of the band's sound for the first time since "The Unutterable" albeit more Krautrock than Chemical Brothers. Its one of their least essential albums, the band an interim solution - good musicians mostly, but lacking a sense of feel. Yet the most obvious statement of electronic Fall came in 2007's other album, the excellent "Tromatic Reflexxions", which was released under the name Von Sudenfed - a collaboration between Smith and Mouse on Mars. The oft-quoted "if its me and your granny on bongos, its the Fall" clearly didn't apply here - yet it remains the most successful of Smith's offshoot projects.
The next record "Imperial Wax Solvent" was rawer and more coherent than the previous record, its probably the strongest album of the band of Greenway/Spurr/Smith/Poulou/Melling which would continue through until at least the new 2013 album "Re-Mit." The album made the top 40, after all, their first album to do since Top 10 "The Infotainment Scan" in 1993. Maybe it was the sad death of Peel, or possibly the increased "legend" status of Mark E. Smith (including the writing of the autobiography "Renegade") - but the Fall seemed bigger than ever, and he soon signed up for a proper tilt at the big time, joining major-indie Domino for "Your Future, Our Clutter." They'd also put out the Von Sudenfed album. A second top 40 hit followed and the album included at least one all-time Fall classic in "Bury Parts 1 and 2" where Smith intones "I'm from Bury." Yet seeing them in 2009, the band were sturm und drang than I'd remembererd: heavily dependent on a heavy bass and with an almost heavy-rock (or at least 70s rock feel to them.) "YFOC" was a darker album and the usual inconsistencies live - Smith abandoning the stage half way through songs, or being drunk, or fiddling with the amps, seemed to have become part of the show. A certain type of Fall fan revelled in the uncertainty - yet this record and the following "Ersatz GB" were somewhat hard to love.
For quite a while the Fall's writing technique has seen his various musicians come up with jams, songs, backings, and Smith has gone away and decided which ones to use and write lyrics for. Each of the last half dozen albums has had at least a couple of new classics, but whereas "Sparta FC" and "Blindness" amongst others were good enough to leave us no longer in awe of the great tracks of previous decades, only "Bury" from the last two or three albums has the same lustre. The new album "Re-mit" is again a more electronic record: here its Poulou lo-fi keyboards which have more of a dominance. The sound is experimental and esoteric, and there's a case to be made that its their best record since "Imperial Wax Solvent". Yet I'm struck by comparing it with the "Fall Heads Roll" and "The Real New Fall LP". These high points haven't been matched since. What we are maybe seeing is not a real dimming of the Fall, but a decade where he has had two bands: that first one, which left him in the lurch in America, and the one he's been with since. The everpresence of Poulou alongside Smith has created some coherence - yet this band's set, made up almost entirely of recent songs, with a couple of old crowdpleasers, is not amongst the best the Fall have ever had.
"Re-mit" though offers a new "remit" I think - less about the rockabilly riffs and more about a somewhat caustic electronic melange, it hints at the margins of the Fall's sound over the years. How does a Mark E. Smith grow old? His voice becomes growlier, yet its still quite sprightly on "Sir William Wray" and the remarkably odd "Hittite Man." The mix of caustic commentary (LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy gets the kicking this time round), and Lovecraftian mysticism, seems better for being coated in a patina of cheap electronica. Its short 40 minutes still finds space for the meandering solo track "Pre-MDMA years" one of the (increasingly infrequent) Smith interludes that in this appearance comes as a welcome reminder of how consistent his vision has been despite the many inconsistencies along the way.
I've not seen this band since a rather disappointing Manchester Academy some six months before "Your Future, Our Clutter" came out - yet hearing the tape of that gig, it was more about the Academy's muffling sound and the uncertain meandering of Smith that night.They are still playing live in a small town near you - and chances are that you won't hear anything as old as "Reformation Post TLC" never mind things from previous incarnations (though "Mr. Pharmacist" and "White Lightning" have proven resilient crowdpleasers). The run from "The Real New Fall LP" to "Re-mit" is quite a remarkable one for a band who seemed a spent force only a couple of years before. The modern record industry hasn't been kind to a band like the Fall. No room for singles or E.P.s where they once did some of their more interesting work, and yet the remorseless album-tour grind doesn't seem that kind to them either. Like in the mid-90s, their last three or four albums have been a mixed bag, the latest dozen songs or so from the kitbag, that's all. Whether or not "Re-mit" is the end of a particular era, the start of another, or just another step in the road is hard to tell. Late Fall? He could have another thirty years in him yet.
There's a case to be made for the 21st century Fall as being as vital as previous versions - and certainly not any kind of retro act. The plethora of line-ups and the plethora of record labels haven't helped the casual Fall fan make sense of it all -go into the Fall selection in a record shop, and old albums jostle with the new; random compilations next to unecessary live releases. The thread of Peel sessions came to an end - and as far as I know the BBC hasn't invited them back in the door since - so those career spanning compilations "The Peel Sessions" and "50000 Fall Fans Can't be Wrong" haven't been joined by a good recent compilation. Where would you draw the line anyway? The things that many people love about the band are songs from a different life that Smith probably hasn't much thought about in twenty years or more. Yet the 21st century Fall is quite a robust outfit even so; even though there are different versions of it. He's talked about his many line up changes seeing him as seargent major dragooning the cadets into some kind of order; and there's something in that I think. Whereas previous bands might have been special forces, parachuted into enemy lines, this version of the Fall seems more of a combat unit, benefiting from their close comradeship over four or five albums, and battling resiliently to stay fit and focussed in the inhospitable terrain of the contemporary music scene.
That they still have more cultural capital than most bands is clear - and I'm reading at "Prole Art Threat - Poems for the Fall" next Thursday at the Lass O'Gowrie in Manchester.. To paraphrase one of his best loved songs: he is (still) not appreciated, but we're trying.
Yet if long-term Fall watchers had become worried that this was the start of a terminal decline it wasn't so. Endless touring had enabled them to road-test new songs that two years after "winner" were a world better. The first signs of this were on the 2003 Peel session, and the much-delayed new album "The Real New Fall LP (formerly Country on the Click)" was a massive return to form. It also included as close as the Fall would get to a hit these days, "Theme from Sparta FC" which got used on Football Focus every Saturday whilst the results were coming in. Despite the usual travails - an injury to Smith that had him in a wheelchair by the following year the sense was that the Fall were on a roll and as good as they'd ever been. Always playing the majority of their set from the last couple of albums, it was a relief when the weaker songs from before "TRNFLP" had been dropped and new songs such as "Blindness" and "What About us?" entered the set. First appearing in the odd interim release "Interim", this messy set of outtakes and live tracks is a crucial document in someways, bridging their two finest albums of the century. Those two tracks were on their final Peel session, for by the time I got to see them at the Manchester Bierkeller in the autumn, John Peel was dead. "Fall Heads Roll" was even better than the previous album, probably their best album of the century, yet even it doesn't really showcase the power of the band at this time. The call and response of "What About Us?" often followed on closely by classic "Wrong Place, Right Time" with the audience taking the microphone, showcased a band that was reinvigorated.
It wouldn't or couldn't last of course - and halfway through the next American tour his band left. Like an ageing soul singer, he carried on regardless, his local support band becoming a "pick up band" for him It took a while for a new record however, and yet "Reformation Post TLC" is actually a double album - some long krautrock type tracks alongside the usual mix of rockabilly and alt.country. His wife Elena Poulou the one constant during the decade, oddities such as "The Wright Stuff" where she sings lead vocal, are added to the Fall's repetoire of unexpected tricks. Always at least partially an electronic band, "Reformation Post TLC" reaffirmed that side of the band's sound for the first time since "The Unutterable" albeit more Krautrock than Chemical Brothers. Its one of their least essential albums, the band an interim solution - good musicians mostly, but lacking a sense of feel. Yet the most obvious statement of electronic Fall came in 2007's other album, the excellent "Tromatic Reflexxions", which was released under the name Von Sudenfed - a collaboration between Smith and Mouse on Mars. The oft-quoted "if its me and your granny on bongos, its the Fall" clearly didn't apply here - yet it remains the most successful of Smith's offshoot projects.
The next record "Imperial Wax Solvent" was rawer and more coherent than the previous record, its probably the strongest album of the band of Greenway/Spurr/Smith/Poulou/Melling which would continue through until at least the new 2013 album "Re-Mit." The album made the top 40, after all, their first album to do since Top 10 "The Infotainment Scan" in 1993. Maybe it was the sad death of Peel, or possibly the increased "legend" status of Mark E. Smith (including the writing of the autobiography "Renegade") - but the Fall seemed bigger than ever, and he soon signed up for a proper tilt at the big time, joining major-indie Domino for "Your Future, Our Clutter." They'd also put out the Von Sudenfed album. A second top 40 hit followed and the album included at least one all-time Fall classic in "Bury Parts 1 and 2" where Smith intones "I'm from Bury." Yet seeing them in 2009, the band were sturm und drang than I'd remembererd: heavily dependent on a heavy bass and with an almost heavy-rock (or at least 70s rock feel to them.) "YFOC" was a darker album and the usual inconsistencies live - Smith abandoning the stage half way through songs, or being drunk, or fiddling with the amps, seemed to have become part of the show. A certain type of Fall fan revelled in the uncertainty - yet this record and the following "Ersatz GB" were somewhat hard to love.
For quite a while the Fall's writing technique has seen his various musicians come up with jams, songs, backings, and Smith has gone away and decided which ones to use and write lyrics for. Each of the last half dozen albums has had at least a couple of new classics, but whereas "Sparta FC" and "Blindness" amongst others were good enough to leave us no longer in awe of the great tracks of previous decades, only "Bury" from the last two or three albums has the same lustre. The new album "Re-mit" is again a more electronic record: here its Poulou lo-fi keyboards which have more of a dominance. The sound is experimental and esoteric, and there's a case to be made that its their best record since "Imperial Wax Solvent". Yet I'm struck by comparing it with the "Fall Heads Roll" and "The Real New Fall LP". These high points haven't been matched since. What we are maybe seeing is not a real dimming of the Fall, but a decade where he has had two bands: that first one, which left him in the lurch in America, and the one he's been with since. The everpresence of Poulou alongside Smith has created some coherence - yet this band's set, made up almost entirely of recent songs, with a couple of old crowdpleasers, is not amongst the best the Fall have ever had.
"Re-mit" though offers a new "remit" I think - less about the rockabilly riffs and more about a somewhat caustic electronic melange, it hints at the margins of the Fall's sound over the years. How does a Mark E. Smith grow old? His voice becomes growlier, yet its still quite sprightly on "Sir William Wray" and the remarkably odd "Hittite Man." The mix of caustic commentary (LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy gets the kicking this time round), and Lovecraftian mysticism, seems better for being coated in a patina of cheap electronica. Its short 40 minutes still finds space for the meandering solo track "Pre-MDMA years" one of the (increasingly infrequent) Smith interludes that in this appearance comes as a welcome reminder of how consistent his vision has been despite the many inconsistencies along the way.
I've not seen this band since a rather disappointing Manchester Academy some six months before "Your Future, Our Clutter" came out - yet hearing the tape of that gig, it was more about the Academy's muffling sound and the uncertain meandering of Smith that night.They are still playing live in a small town near you - and chances are that you won't hear anything as old as "Reformation Post TLC" never mind things from previous incarnations (though "Mr. Pharmacist" and "White Lightning" have proven resilient crowdpleasers). The run from "The Real New Fall LP" to "Re-mit" is quite a remarkable one for a band who seemed a spent force only a couple of years before. The modern record industry hasn't been kind to a band like the Fall. No room for singles or E.P.s where they once did some of their more interesting work, and yet the remorseless album-tour grind doesn't seem that kind to them either. Like in the mid-90s, their last three or four albums have been a mixed bag, the latest dozen songs or so from the kitbag, that's all. Whether or not "Re-mit" is the end of a particular era, the start of another, or just another step in the road is hard to tell. Late Fall? He could have another thirty years in him yet.
There's a case to be made for the 21st century Fall as being as vital as previous versions - and certainly not any kind of retro act. The plethora of line-ups and the plethora of record labels haven't helped the casual Fall fan make sense of it all -go into the Fall selection in a record shop, and old albums jostle with the new; random compilations next to unecessary live releases. The thread of Peel sessions came to an end - and as far as I know the BBC hasn't invited them back in the door since - so those career spanning compilations "The Peel Sessions" and "50000 Fall Fans Can't be Wrong" haven't been joined by a good recent compilation. Where would you draw the line anyway? The things that many people love about the band are songs from a different life that Smith probably hasn't much thought about in twenty years or more. Yet the 21st century Fall is quite a robust outfit even so; even though there are different versions of it. He's talked about his many line up changes seeing him as seargent major dragooning the cadets into some kind of order; and there's something in that I think. Whereas previous bands might have been special forces, parachuted into enemy lines, this version of the Fall seems more of a combat unit, benefiting from their close comradeship over four or five albums, and battling resiliently to stay fit and focussed in the inhospitable terrain of the contemporary music scene.
That they still have more cultural capital than most bands is clear - and I'm reading at "Prole Art Threat - Poems for the Fall" next Thursday at the Lass O'Gowrie in Manchester.. To paraphrase one of his best loved songs: he is (still) not appreciated, but we're trying.
Monday, May 13, 2013
30 Years of the Smiths
"Hand in Glove", the first single by the Smiths came out 30 years ago today. I know this because I was at Stockport Plaza where Stockport Film Festival put on a great afternoon event. A showing of "A Taste of Honey" was preceded by a discussion with the music critics Mick Middles and Len Brown about their memories of the Smiths.
For those who don't know the connection its an interesting one. For Shelagh Delaney, the young Salford woman who wrote "A Taste of Honey" in 1958 was an inspiration for Stephen Morrissey. The line "I dreamt about you last night" from "Reel Around the Fountain" comes from the film, and the song "This night has opened my eyes" was a retelling of the story. Delaney was also one of the Smiths' many "cover stars."
Its 30 years since "Hand in Glove", yet that was released only 23 years after the film of "A Taste of Honey." Yet I think its fair to say we're more in the world of Morrissey and the Smiths, than the early 80s were in the world portrayed by Delaney. Though the demographic at Stockport today was around my age or older, there were quite a few younger people as well - and one old gentleman who was clutching a photograph of himself, as he was one of the urchines featured in the film. "They picked me because I was scruffy, whilst all the rest of my classmates were too tidy," he said, remembering.
And here's the connection, I think. For The Smiths, though instantly popular, spoke clearly and loudly to anyone who was an outsider - and that was the message of "A Taste of Honey." The articulate Delaney thought she could do better in depicting real life than the Terence Rattigan play she'd seen. In an age of "angry young men" and "kitchen sink dramas" "A Taste of Honey" still stands out as radical. Her heroine, Jo, is no victim, even though her life is grim. There's a hope and a tolerance here that speaks of a community spirit that was difficult but genuine.
As well as the film, we had a short video montage of "Hand in Glove", an interview with Morrissey from the 90s where he endearingly talks about his love for singers such as Sandie Shaw and Cilla Black. "Cilla Black broke up the Smiths," he said, half-jokingly, referring to their final recording, a cover of her "Work is a four letter word." Also, a short film, called "Unloveable", where an American Smiths fan comes to Manchester to see Salfords Lads' Club, the Kings Road, Southern Cemetery and the Moors, and is taken for a ride (literally and figuratively) by a Morrisseyesque stranger. Best of all, and coming before "A Taste of Honey," a short film about Delaney's Salford, which was filmed by Ken Russell for "Monitor" in the early 1960s. Delaney is a delight in this - and the pictures of a poor but thriving Salford, are contrasted with the bleak new housing estates that people were being relocated to. There's so much of post-war social history in this documentary fragment and "A Taste of Honey" itself; something that flows into the work of The Smiths.
But its also much more than "social history." Like so many great artists Morrissey made us see the mundane in different ways. The stealings from Oscar Wilde or Delaney; the references to the Moors murderers; the tongue-in-cheek but seriously meant ethical politics of "Meat is Murder" or "The Queen is Dead" speak of an outsider viewpoint that wasn't about "coming out" or being part of a "cult" but about allowing and enabling individuals to be outsiders. Jo and her mother in "A Taste of Honey", her black sailor lover, Jimmy, and her gay friend Geoff, are equally outsiders - and the connections become clearer.
I was also interested in how we choose to remember our social and cultural histories. A reminder that the Smiths were a "student band" even if Morrissey and Marr were never at university, that was their natural constituency - so a particular type of outsider. No wonder Tony Wilson never signed them - he preferred the boys in the gang mentality of the Happy Mondays. Yet, the Smiths, at least before the legal fallouts, were a tight-knit group. Only afterwards did we realise the band had internal troubles or that their lack of a manager led to them absorbing all the pressures of their success. Middles and Grant made the point that the Smiths were very different than the music around them at the time - and that's key I think. Also, the sixties wasn't really a touchpoint in the early 80s: the punks had dismissed the Beatles and the Stones; whilst the new music was all electronic instruments and production. A jangly guitar band that echoed the Byrds or the Hollies was not what the music industry was looking for; so of course they were immediately what it needed.
In many ways the politics of their songs was a personal one - so though Morrissey was a great lyricist, you could be a young David Cameron and think this is for you; at least if you didn't look too deeply. I remember that the NME and others tried to instigate a new movement of so-called "handsome bands" of which the Smiths were at the Vanguard. With the notable exception of James, all the bands that Morrissey favoured, came to very little. His own tastes were too esoteric, too uniquely his. And through this personal mythos he created something that had not a little success.
The world we see in that Salford film or in a "A Taste of Honey" would have been pretty recognisable to someone in the days between the wars, or even earlier; yet that world - of full employment, working class culture, ships on the Manchester ship canal - had changed massively by the eighties, not always for the better. This is pre-Beatles Britain, a time, in some ways, of innocence. Its fascinating that a great British film like this, filmed in part in Stockport, can draw a big audience over 50 years after it was filmed, at least partly because of a young man from Stretford who made it part of his legend 30 years ago.Its important that he could find inspiration, not just from the otherworldy New York Dolls, but from something that spoke to him from his own background. I guess that's what we found in the Smiths as well; a poetry of the mundane.
Both Delaney and Morrissey seem to be outsiders who succeeded because their vision wasn't exclusive: but was actually as relevant or more relevant than the so-called mainstream of the day. Delaney's a world away from Rattigan's drawing room dramas; whilst the world according to Morrissey seems to have a relevance that few of us will find in Duran Duran's hedonistic "Rio" for instance.
If the theatre workshops of the late 50s gave Delaney her chance; it was the DIY culture of punk that opened Morrissey's eyes. Where the outsider connects with the hidden stories of others, there is always the possibility of a change in the culture, more a shudder, perhaps than a seismic quake, but significant nevertheless.
For those who don't know the connection its an interesting one. For Shelagh Delaney, the young Salford woman who wrote "A Taste of Honey" in 1958 was an inspiration for Stephen Morrissey. The line "I dreamt about you last night" from "Reel Around the Fountain" comes from the film, and the song "This night has opened my eyes" was a retelling of the story. Delaney was also one of the Smiths' many "cover stars."
Its 30 years since "Hand in Glove", yet that was released only 23 years after the film of "A Taste of Honey." Yet I think its fair to say we're more in the world of Morrissey and the Smiths, than the early 80s were in the world portrayed by Delaney. Though the demographic at Stockport today was around my age or older, there were quite a few younger people as well - and one old gentleman who was clutching a photograph of himself, as he was one of the urchines featured in the film. "They picked me because I was scruffy, whilst all the rest of my classmates were too tidy," he said, remembering.
And here's the connection, I think. For The Smiths, though instantly popular, spoke clearly and loudly to anyone who was an outsider - and that was the message of "A Taste of Honey." The articulate Delaney thought she could do better in depicting real life than the Terence Rattigan play she'd seen. In an age of "angry young men" and "kitchen sink dramas" "A Taste of Honey" still stands out as radical. Her heroine, Jo, is no victim, even though her life is grim. There's a hope and a tolerance here that speaks of a community spirit that was difficult but genuine.
As well as the film, we had a short video montage of "Hand in Glove", an interview with Morrissey from the 90s where he endearingly talks about his love for singers such as Sandie Shaw and Cilla Black. "Cilla Black broke up the Smiths," he said, half-jokingly, referring to their final recording, a cover of her "Work is a four letter word." Also, a short film, called "Unloveable", where an American Smiths fan comes to Manchester to see Salfords Lads' Club, the Kings Road, Southern Cemetery and the Moors, and is taken for a ride (literally and figuratively) by a Morrisseyesque stranger. Best of all, and coming before "A Taste of Honey," a short film about Delaney's Salford, which was filmed by Ken Russell for "Monitor" in the early 1960s. Delaney is a delight in this - and the pictures of a poor but thriving Salford, are contrasted with the bleak new housing estates that people were being relocated to. There's so much of post-war social history in this documentary fragment and "A Taste of Honey" itself; something that flows into the work of The Smiths.
But its also much more than "social history." Like so many great artists Morrissey made us see the mundane in different ways. The stealings from Oscar Wilde or Delaney; the references to the Moors murderers; the tongue-in-cheek but seriously meant ethical politics of "Meat is Murder" or "The Queen is Dead" speak of an outsider viewpoint that wasn't about "coming out" or being part of a "cult" but about allowing and enabling individuals to be outsiders. Jo and her mother in "A Taste of Honey", her black sailor lover, Jimmy, and her gay friend Geoff, are equally outsiders - and the connections become clearer.
I was also interested in how we choose to remember our social and cultural histories. A reminder that the Smiths were a "student band" even if Morrissey and Marr were never at university, that was their natural constituency - so a particular type of outsider. No wonder Tony Wilson never signed them - he preferred the boys in the gang mentality of the Happy Mondays. Yet, the Smiths, at least before the legal fallouts, were a tight-knit group. Only afterwards did we realise the band had internal troubles or that their lack of a manager led to them absorbing all the pressures of their success. Middles and Grant made the point that the Smiths were very different than the music around them at the time - and that's key I think. Also, the sixties wasn't really a touchpoint in the early 80s: the punks had dismissed the Beatles and the Stones; whilst the new music was all electronic instruments and production. A jangly guitar band that echoed the Byrds or the Hollies was not what the music industry was looking for; so of course they were immediately what it needed.
In many ways the politics of their songs was a personal one - so though Morrissey was a great lyricist, you could be a young David Cameron and think this is for you; at least if you didn't look too deeply. I remember that the NME and others tried to instigate a new movement of so-called "handsome bands" of which the Smiths were at the Vanguard. With the notable exception of James, all the bands that Morrissey favoured, came to very little. His own tastes were too esoteric, too uniquely his. And through this personal mythos he created something that had not a little success.
The world we see in that Salford film or in a "A Taste of Honey" would have been pretty recognisable to someone in the days between the wars, or even earlier; yet that world - of full employment, working class culture, ships on the Manchester ship canal - had changed massively by the eighties, not always for the better. This is pre-Beatles Britain, a time, in some ways, of innocence. Its fascinating that a great British film like this, filmed in part in Stockport, can draw a big audience over 50 years after it was filmed, at least partly because of a young man from Stretford who made it part of his legend 30 years ago.Its important that he could find inspiration, not just from the otherworldy New York Dolls, but from something that spoke to him from his own background. I guess that's what we found in the Smiths as well; a poetry of the mundane.
Both Delaney and Morrissey seem to be outsiders who succeeded because their vision wasn't exclusive: but was actually as relevant or more relevant than the so-called mainstream of the day. Delaney's a world away from Rattigan's drawing room dramas; whilst the world according to Morrissey seems to have a relevance that few of us will find in Duran Duran's hedonistic "Rio" for instance.
If the theatre workshops of the late 50s gave Delaney her chance; it was the DIY culture of punk that opened Morrissey's eyes. Where the outsider connects with the hidden stories of others, there is always the possibility of a change in the culture, more a shudder, perhaps than a seismic quake, but significant nevertheless.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Ever since her first novel "Behind the Scenes at the Museum" Kate Atkinson has managed to write novels that are both artistically and commercially successful. She's always been interested in genre - as the stories within stories of "Human Croquet" show as much as the Jackson Brodie crime novels that she has been writing for the last through years - but also in unusual structures. That first Brodie novel, "Case Histories" was about the juxtaposition of seemingly distinct stories. One connecting thing between the crime fiction and her other novels has been a constant exploring of the messiness of life, particularly of families, of which she is perhaps our best chronicler.
"Life after Life" is her first non-Brodie novel for a few years and its a triumph. Ursula is born on a snowy night, but is strangled by her umbilical chord, and the doctor and midwife arrive too late to save her. The novel is over on the first page, except its not, for Ursula - "my little fox" her father calls her - has a second chance, and another, and another - life after life after life. In this ingenious novel of starts and endings, Atkinson plays around with the might-have-beens, the accidents that mean we might not survive beyond a particular unlucky incident. Ursula, slowly becoming aware of her "deja vu," accidentally or purposefully alters her history. Around her are a large middle class family, and there story is told from before the first world war until the 1960s. A story of a century of tumult, where Ursula and her siblings, her aunt and friends are to play pivotal roles. Her unlikeable brother Maurice gets a top job at the ministry, Ursula a more lowly one. Her father is a solid, kind banker, her mother Sylvia, a bright woman who gets increasingly angry and frustrated by the life she has been given, the downsizing of the family fortune after her father died leading her to always regret the loss, rather than revel in what she has: the strong family based around a lovely house that they name Fox Corner.
This is the southern middle class life of "Howard's End", perhaps the constant touchstone for a certain kind of English novel. Like in that book, this class have their own familial connections with Germany, a closeness that will be ruptured in a century of two great wars. Into this bigger story, Ursula's part slowly becomes clear. A summer visit to the Brauns gets her close to Eva, the daughter who will one day be Hitler's mistress. For like Stephen King's recent time travel novel, Atkinson wants to do much more than untangle a life of many second chances. King had to consider the possibility of an altered history where Oswald doesn't kill Kennedy; for Atkinson, and Ursula, the possiblity that she might alter the course of history and kill Hitler before he comes to power is an equally powerful possibility.
Yet though this second story - again, foretold in the first few pages of the novel - helps deliver the book's forward tension; it is in Ursula's life and family that Atkinson concentrates our interest. This is a book about the affirmation that a life should be lived, regardless of the bigger stories that can consume many lives. As we move seamlessly between different epochs, Ursula's life becomes more than its fractures and by the Second World War, she becomes one of the many stories of Londoner's battling against the might of the Luftwaffe, either (in one scenario) as an air warden or (in another) as a worker within the ministry. Her love affairs; the relationship with her scatty but lovely aunt Izzy; and the claims on family that periodically draw her back to Fox Corner, are all deftly worked into the tapestry of the novel.
There's an effortlessness about the construction which has always been one of Atkinson's key strengths. The joy of reading her is not in the withholding of what to come, but in the guessing what will come next. Her Brody novels frequently didn't need much working out; but the pleasure was in the way she engages us in her characters. She remains one of our best writers about people, and it seems to me that it is in many ways a more successfull book than, for instance, the similarly scaled "The Strangers Child." Always a joy to read, in "Life After Life" we're pleased to re-encounter the bigger canvasses of her early novels, for enjoyable as her detective stories were, the demands of the genre always seemed to hem her in a little. In "Life after Life" she is gloriously unhemmed. I knew from the structure that it was worth waiting till I had a good long period to read this long novel, and I was right to wallow in it. The multiple starts and endings work best when encountered in quick succession and I think the book would lose some of its power if read slowly or over a long period. So engaging is it that you'll not want to put it down anyway.
The only part of the book I had my reservations about was the one story that dominates at the centre - which I wonder whether was the starting point for the novel. For at the heart of "Life after Life" is another novel set in the days of the London Blitz. She writes well on this; her stories are very human ones, so well have we got to know Ursula, but so familiar is the British story here - from sitcoms to novels set in and around the war - that we don't really get anything new. Its a period that invites cliche, even when, as here, the characters are so well-formed, and the stories so believable. For the war has within it a million tragedies. In this context we see that Ursula's multiple endings are as nothing to the randomness of a bomb falling at a particular time and place. We are all survivors of our own lives, and that survival is what makes us human - we learn from our mistakes - but what of those who are cut short by their mistakes or worse, the grander mistakes of history?
As the last memories of the Second World War fades, it becomes history, a place for imagining, rather than one for remembering. For me it was the least successful part of the novel, not because its badly written or uninteresting, but because its a story that's been told in so many ways. Like in other alternate histories, Atkinson has found an ingenuity in retelling the story, but is interested in a single life - that of Ursula - and what might become of it through life's many twists and turns rather than the reshaping of world histories.
Its something of a tour de force, but eminently readable - that reminds us that over a writing career of nearly two decades, Atkinson has rarely failed to disappoint. A lovely, powerful, inventive novel that I'd highly recommend.
"Life after Life" is her first non-Brodie novel for a few years and its a triumph. Ursula is born on a snowy night, but is strangled by her umbilical chord, and the doctor and midwife arrive too late to save her. The novel is over on the first page, except its not, for Ursula - "my little fox" her father calls her - has a second chance, and another, and another - life after life after life. In this ingenious novel of starts and endings, Atkinson plays around with the might-have-beens, the accidents that mean we might not survive beyond a particular unlucky incident. Ursula, slowly becoming aware of her "deja vu," accidentally or purposefully alters her history. Around her are a large middle class family, and there story is told from before the first world war until the 1960s. A story of a century of tumult, where Ursula and her siblings, her aunt and friends are to play pivotal roles. Her unlikeable brother Maurice gets a top job at the ministry, Ursula a more lowly one. Her father is a solid, kind banker, her mother Sylvia, a bright woman who gets increasingly angry and frustrated by the life she has been given, the downsizing of the family fortune after her father died leading her to always regret the loss, rather than revel in what she has: the strong family based around a lovely house that they name Fox Corner.
This is the southern middle class life of "Howard's End", perhaps the constant touchstone for a certain kind of English novel. Like in that book, this class have their own familial connections with Germany, a closeness that will be ruptured in a century of two great wars. Into this bigger story, Ursula's part slowly becomes clear. A summer visit to the Brauns gets her close to Eva, the daughter who will one day be Hitler's mistress. For like Stephen King's recent time travel novel, Atkinson wants to do much more than untangle a life of many second chances. King had to consider the possibility of an altered history where Oswald doesn't kill Kennedy; for Atkinson, and Ursula, the possiblity that she might alter the course of history and kill Hitler before he comes to power is an equally powerful possibility.
Yet though this second story - again, foretold in the first few pages of the novel - helps deliver the book's forward tension; it is in Ursula's life and family that Atkinson concentrates our interest. This is a book about the affirmation that a life should be lived, regardless of the bigger stories that can consume many lives. As we move seamlessly between different epochs, Ursula's life becomes more than its fractures and by the Second World War, she becomes one of the many stories of Londoner's battling against the might of the Luftwaffe, either (in one scenario) as an air warden or (in another) as a worker within the ministry. Her love affairs; the relationship with her scatty but lovely aunt Izzy; and the claims on family that periodically draw her back to Fox Corner, are all deftly worked into the tapestry of the novel.
There's an effortlessness about the construction which has always been one of Atkinson's key strengths. The joy of reading her is not in the withholding of what to come, but in the guessing what will come next. Her Brody novels frequently didn't need much working out; but the pleasure was in the way she engages us in her characters. She remains one of our best writers about people, and it seems to me that it is in many ways a more successfull book than, for instance, the similarly scaled "The Strangers Child." Always a joy to read, in "Life After Life" we're pleased to re-encounter the bigger canvasses of her early novels, for enjoyable as her detective stories were, the demands of the genre always seemed to hem her in a little. In "Life after Life" she is gloriously unhemmed. I knew from the structure that it was worth waiting till I had a good long period to read this long novel, and I was right to wallow in it. The multiple starts and endings work best when encountered in quick succession and I think the book would lose some of its power if read slowly or over a long period. So engaging is it that you'll not want to put it down anyway.
The only part of the book I had my reservations about was the one story that dominates at the centre - which I wonder whether was the starting point for the novel. For at the heart of "Life after Life" is another novel set in the days of the London Blitz. She writes well on this; her stories are very human ones, so well have we got to know Ursula, but so familiar is the British story here - from sitcoms to novels set in and around the war - that we don't really get anything new. Its a period that invites cliche, even when, as here, the characters are so well-formed, and the stories so believable. For the war has within it a million tragedies. In this context we see that Ursula's multiple endings are as nothing to the randomness of a bomb falling at a particular time and place. We are all survivors of our own lives, and that survival is what makes us human - we learn from our mistakes - but what of those who are cut short by their mistakes or worse, the grander mistakes of history?
As the last memories of the Second World War fades, it becomes history, a place for imagining, rather than one for remembering. For me it was the least successful part of the novel, not because its badly written or uninteresting, but because its a story that's been told in so many ways. Like in other alternate histories, Atkinson has found an ingenuity in retelling the story, but is interested in a single life - that of Ursula - and what might become of it through life's many twists and turns rather than the reshaping of world histories.
Its something of a tour de force, but eminently readable - that reminds us that over a writing career of nearly two decades, Atkinson has rarely failed to disappoint. A lovely, powerful, inventive novel that I'd highly recommend.
Saturday, May 04, 2013
Golden Ages exist alongside Humdrum Times
Asked on twitter whether we'd know if we were living through a golden age....
I was thinking about this with all the Thatcher-fanfare. I grew up with a wealth of cultural opportunities - I really did. NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror competed for my attention (lets not forget Smash Hits, Flexipop and Zig Zag among others). Post-punk, goth, new wave, new romantic, electro, rap, reggae, NWOBHM, industrial... a whole load of musical genres spoke of the fluidity of the age. This wasn't the downbeat message of Tory Britain or the legacy of the late 70s, this was a newness. I didn't think it was a golden age at the time, because I just assumed that there would always be that excitement...
Similarly, in film and TV: we had the launch of C4, and whole new strands of programming as a result, as well as the home video, which allowed us to sample all kinds of films, and record our favourite programmes for relistening. The 4-track recorder put recording tools in my 18 year old hands; and if we computing was still nascent, the iconography of the video game was already well established, so that TV shows like Max Headroom and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy seemed genuinely now. In fiction, not only Douglas Adams, but Iain Banks was creating a contemporary narrative that appealed. Stephen King was still at his best ("Christine", "Pet Sematary", "The Body"), and his earlier books were widely available. "Money" "Blood and Guts in High School" and "Cities of the Red Night" and "The Place of Dead Roads" came out just before I started University and I would read these classics not long after their publication.
I think the early 80s was a bit of a golden age - the explosion of creativity that came with punk leading to many different things - and new technology, from VHS to 4-track to early computers and affordable synthesizers bringing culture (and counter culture) even into a small art-free village twenty miles from Birmingham. None of this, of course, was helped by Thatcher or the Tories, much of it - low art, I guess - antithetical to their view of things. Or maybe, everyone's late teens is a golden age?
Did I at the time know it was a golden age? I don't think so - and, here's the rub, I was very much a consumer of it, rather than an active participant. There wasn't a lot of space in my University or in the wider world for suburban teenagers who thought they could write a bit. You had to be American or in London or in a whole different millieu to "make it." I scrubbed a way at fanzines and college magazines, at 4-track recordings, and handwritten poems, but without, I have to say, much in the way of a peer group.
That's what interests me about now - for if I said there's a clear distinction between the arts of then and now its that the internet in particular, but also the rise in participatory arts, has enabled a lot of writers, artists, musicians to go beyond their group of friends and put things out more publicly. Ironically, at the same time that this is happening, the mainstream media (and mainstream institutions: bookshops, HMV, universities) pretty much ignores what's going on. DIY culture may have begun as a web-infused space, but its now happening at a "pop up" near you. These scenes are rarely "public" because the one thing they haven't got is a marketing and publicity budget. It is word-of-mouth, or the networking of individuals that draws people in. But this is only as it should be. Kenneth Branagh in Macbeth may be the big sell at this year's Manchester International Festival, but its grassroots stuff such as the 247 Festival that surely create the cultural vibrancy...and if not leading to the next Shakespeare, may at least provide an opportunity on which the next Branagh can cut their teeth.
A "golden age" probably needs audience as well as practitioners - and perhaps, those few individuals who lift or get lifted above the scene which spawned them. That's yet to happen I think. Mainstream still looks to Oxbridge before it looks to the 3 Minute Theatre in Afflecks palace for instance. Chris McCabe's "Shad Thames, Broken Wharf" or Lars Ilyer's "Spurious" seem to me to have a better chance of being talked about in a decade than more mainstream works. Had we been going to literary nights in the Bowery with Kathy Acker and Dennis Johnson in the late seventies; fetching up at CBGBs to see Blondie and Television, would we have known that this was the golden age?
And I'm biased here of course: the literary works are odd things - happening in the oddest of places. "Scenes" are more closely allied with music or film - where you need different people to gather together. Yet there's something else as well, and this is perhaps where we are falling short, or yet to make the mark. There are plenty of good, competent books, plenty of nicely written short stories - but I'm not seeing that much in the way of the innovative, or the unusual. A "scene" has the advantage of drawing people in - even those outsiders whose work doesn't fit a prevailing mode - but it can also create a flattening; a desire to please, hoping for laughter, hoping for applause.
Artistically, I think these are good times, but there's still tinder here waiting for a spark - nostalgia too often rules - the old institutions are a bit impervious as ever, and nobody's got the money to build new ones; the audience is ourselves, and needs to be widened. Golden ages exist alongside humdrum times after all, and its not always easy to see where the one finishes and the other begins.
I was thinking about this with all the Thatcher-fanfare. I grew up with a wealth of cultural opportunities - I really did. NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror competed for my attention (lets not forget Smash Hits, Flexipop and Zig Zag among others). Post-punk, goth, new wave, new romantic, electro, rap, reggae, NWOBHM, industrial... a whole load of musical genres spoke of the fluidity of the age. This wasn't the downbeat message of Tory Britain or the legacy of the late 70s, this was a newness. I didn't think it was a golden age at the time, because I just assumed that there would always be that excitement...
Similarly, in film and TV: we had the launch of C4, and whole new strands of programming as a result, as well as the home video, which allowed us to sample all kinds of films, and record our favourite programmes for relistening. The 4-track recorder put recording tools in my 18 year old hands; and if we computing was still nascent, the iconography of the video game was already well established, so that TV shows like Max Headroom and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy seemed genuinely now. In fiction, not only Douglas Adams, but Iain Banks was creating a contemporary narrative that appealed. Stephen King was still at his best ("Christine", "Pet Sematary", "The Body"), and his earlier books were widely available. "Money" "Blood and Guts in High School" and "Cities of the Red Night" and "The Place of Dead Roads" came out just before I started University and I would read these classics not long after their publication.
I think the early 80s was a bit of a golden age - the explosion of creativity that came with punk leading to many different things - and new technology, from VHS to 4-track to early computers and affordable synthesizers bringing culture (and counter culture) even into a small art-free village twenty miles from Birmingham. None of this, of course, was helped by Thatcher or the Tories, much of it - low art, I guess - antithetical to their view of things. Or maybe, everyone's late teens is a golden age?
Did I at the time know it was a golden age? I don't think so - and, here's the rub, I was very much a consumer of it, rather than an active participant. There wasn't a lot of space in my University or in the wider world for suburban teenagers who thought they could write a bit. You had to be American or in London or in a whole different millieu to "make it." I scrubbed a way at fanzines and college magazines, at 4-track recordings, and handwritten poems, but without, I have to say, much in the way of a peer group.
That's what interests me about now - for if I said there's a clear distinction between the arts of then and now its that the internet in particular, but also the rise in participatory arts, has enabled a lot of writers, artists, musicians to go beyond their group of friends and put things out more publicly. Ironically, at the same time that this is happening, the mainstream media (and mainstream institutions: bookshops, HMV, universities) pretty much ignores what's going on. DIY culture may have begun as a web-infused space, but its now happening at a "pop up" near you. These scenes are rarely "public" because the one thing they haven't got is a marketing and publicity budget. It is word-of-mouth, or the networking of individuals that draws people in. But this is only as it should be. Kenneth Branagh in Macbeth may be the big sell at this year's Manchester International Festival, but its grassroots stuff such as the 247 Festival that surely create the cultural vibrancy...and if not leading to the next Shakespeare, may at least provide an opportunity on which the next Branagh can cut their teeth.
A "golden age" probably needs audience as well as practitioners - and perhaps, those few individuals who lift or get lifted above the scene which spawned them. That's yet to happen I think. Mainstream still looks to Oxbridge before it looks to the 3 Minute Theatre in Afflecks palace for instance. Chris McCabe's "Shad Thames, Broken Wharf" or Lars Ilyer's "Spurious" seem to me to have a better chance of being talked about in a decade than more mainstream works. Had we been going to literary nights in the Bowery with Kathy Acker and Dennis Johnson in the late seventies; fetching up at CBGBs to see Blondie and Television, would we have known that this was the golden age?
And I'm biased here of course: the literary works are odd things - happening in the oddest of places. "Scenes" are more closely allied with music or film - where you need different people to gather together. Yet there's something else as well, and this is perhaps where we are falling short, or yet to make the mark. There are plenty of good, competent books, plenty of nicely written short stories - but I'm not seeing that much in the way of the innovative, or the unusual. A "scene" has the advantage of drawing people in - even those outsiders whose work doesn't fit a prevailing mode - but it can also create a flattening; a desire to please, hoping for laughter, hoping for applause.
Artistically, I think these are good times, but there's still tinder here waiting for a spark - nostalgia too often rules - the old institutions are a bit impervious as ever, and nobody's got the money to build new ones; the audience is ourselves, and needs to be widened. Golden ages exist alongside humdrum times after all, and its not always easy to see where the one finishes and the other begins.
Friday, April 26, 2013
BOYB in Manchester
10 days after its announcement, 3 of the Granta Best of Young British Novelists came to the Anthony Burgess centre in Manchester to read to a reasonable crowd. The book itself is a handsome, massive thing, worth comparing its heft with the slimmer 1983 original. With either novel extracts or occasional stories from the 20 authors, plus some spiritedly conceptual author photographs, and with an introduction from Granta editor John Freeman it feels more like a "taster" menu than a coherent feast. One of the prevailing puzzles of the publishing industry is how slow it takes for books to make it from author to list - so half a dozen profiles talk about an extract that is from a "novel published in 2014." That said, it would probably take till then to read the published novels by the 20 on the list.
Manchester's "three" were Adam Foulds, Stephen Hall, and Xiaolu Guo, who all gave short readings then were interviewed by Granta's online editor Ted Hodgkinson. In some ways, you begin to see the futility of the exercise. All three writers have much to recommend them, but are so different in backgrounds, style and aspirations as to make any connections hard to fathom. They responded gamely to the questions; but finally fell down when asked about their fellow contemporary novelists. Guo said she didn't read contemporary fiction, as there was so much older stuff that she needed to catch up on. Foulds said it was probably not a good thing for writers to read too many of their contemporaries, before realising the absurdity of this, and mentioning that he "read all the time," and Hall was just pleased to be here.
Foulds new novel is another historical affair. I much enjoyed his Clare/Tennyson novel "The Quickening Maze" and the extract from his new book, full of his precise, evocative descriptions, is set in the Second World War, as a soldier leaves home to finally end up in Sicily. Lines like "we were listening to the wireless" seemed a bit phoned in, but he's a tricky writer, adept at atmosphere and unspoken connection, and extracting something from a new novel may have been not that easy to do. His interest in a very English history (he has also written about the Mau Mau rising) rather than contemporary Britain, intrigues me; it felt that he was looking for stories that resonate. Such a displacement is particularly true of Xiaolu Guo, who has been prolifically published in both Chinese and English, and is also a film-maker. She read a piece from her first novel - written nearly two decades ago - to highlight her interest in being between two languages. It came out of her being unhappy with the English translation of her first novel, and she decided to do it herself.
She felt that this displacement was a key part of her writing, but at the same time, disavowed the idea of the "immigrant" writer. There is no need to think that way, she felt, in a world where people frequently a nationality different from where they now live. Stephen Hall is in some ways the most interesting writer on the Granta list because of his interest in the trickiness of the novel form. The new book he previewed has two parallel stories and he gave us a choice - the one that is set the day after tomorrow, or the one in the 1850s. Both are extracted in the Granta book; you have to turn it upside down and change direction to read the second story.
In his introduction John Freeman shows some chutzpah in, pace Bellow, beginning "I am an American, Cleveland born" and there does seem an air of the transatlantic NY-LON line about this Granta selection. I think our Granta crew were all catching the train back to London after the reading for instance. Its strange, for as an advocate of American fiction for so long, I'm feeling for the first time a bit of a disjuncture between the two countries and traditions now in a way that I haven't in the past. This might be a good time for British fiction, though as the Granta list shows, "British" is more a flag of convenience when it comes to these selections of late. Like the English Premier League there's now more imports from further afield than from, say, Northern Ireland and Scotland.The merits of the list will be debated here and elsewhere over time. As one of the judges is quoted as saying in the introduction, that its an unreal way of reading, reading 150 novelists "under 40". Writers missing the cut off included "young Turks" like Mieville and McCarthy (and there's a notable cluster of writers in their late 30s in the list) inevitable in a decade-apart survey. More strange, I felt, was the focus, still, on the "novel" and the "novelist" - if anything is breaking down over the next few years, its that description I think. Guo is a film-maker; Hall (like Naomi Alderman, also on the list) contributes to video games.
Freeman has just announced he is returning to New York (somewhat oddly for an editor, to teach creative writing.) The size of this Granta collection means that he may well have to pay excess baggage. I'm looking forward to reading the selections, but also some of the novels. Any taster menu should lead you onto things you haven't tried but hope to enjoy.
Manchester's "three" were Adam Foulds, Stephen Hall, and Xiaolu Guo, who all gave short readings then were interviewed by Granta's online editor Ted Hodgkinson. In some ways, you begin to see the futility of the exercise. All three writers have much to recommend them, but are so different in backgrounds, style and aspirations as to make any connections hard to fathom. They responded gamely to the questions; but finally fell down when asked about their fellow contemporary novelists. Guo said she didn't read contemporary fiction, as there was so much older stuff that she needed to catch up on. Foulds said it was probably not a good thing for writers to read too many of their contemporaries, before realising the absurdity of this, and mentioning that he "read all the time," and Hall was just pleased to be here.
Foulds new novel is another historical affair. I much enjoyed his Clare/Tennyson novel "The Quickening Maze" and the extract from his new book, full of his precise, evocative descriptions, is set in the Second World War, as a soldier leaves home to finally end up in Sicily. Lines like "we were listening to the wireless" seemed a bit phoned in, but he's a tricky writer, adept at atmosphere and unspoken connection, and extracting something from a new novel may have been not that easy to do. His interest in a very English history (he has also written about the Mau Mau rising) rather than contemporary Britain, intrigues me; it felt that he was looking for stories that resonate. Such a displacement is particularly true of Xiaolu Guo, who has been prolifically published in both Chinese and English, and is also a film-maker. She read a piece from her first novel - written nearly two decades ago - to highlight her interest in being between two languages. It came out of her being unhappy with the English translation of her first novel, and she decided to do it herself.
She felt that this displacement was a key part of her writing, but at the same time, disavowed the idea of the "immigrant" writer. There is no need to think that way, she felt, in a world where people frequently a nationality different from where they now live. Stephen Hall is in some ways the most interesting writer on the Granta list because of his interest in the trickiness of the novel form. The new book he previewed has two parallel stories and he gave us a choice - the one that is set the day after tomorrow, or the one in the 1850s. Both are extracted in the Granta book; you have to turn it upside down and change direction to read the second story.
In his introduction John Freeman shows some chutzpah in, pace Bellow, beginning "I am an American, Cleveland born" and there does seem an air of the transatlantic NY-LON line about this Granta selection. I think our Granta crew were all catching the train back to London after the reading for instance. Its strange, for as an advocate of American fiction for so long, I'm feeling for the first time a bit of a disjuncture between the two countries and traditions now in a way that I haven't in the past. This might be a good time for British fiction, though as the Granta list shows, "British" is more a flag of convenience when it comes to these selections of late. Like the English Premier League there's now more imports from further afield than from, say, Northern Ireland and Scotland.The merits of the list will be debated here and elsewhere over time. As one of the judges is quoted as saying in the introduction, that its an unreal way of reading, reading 150 novelists "under 40". Writers missing the cut off included "young Turks" like Mieville and McCarthy (and there's a notable cluster of writers in their late 30s in the list) inevitable in a decade-apart survey. More strange, I felt, was the focus, still, on the "novel" and the "novelist" - if anything is breaking down over the next few years, its that description I think. Guo is a film-maker; Hall (like Naomi Alderman, also on the list) contributes to video games.
Freeman has just announced he is returning to New York (somewhat oddly for an editor, to teach creative writing.) The size of this Granta collection means that he may well have to pay excess baggage. I'm looking forward to reading the selections, but also some of the novels. Any taster menu should lead you onto things you haven't tried but hope to enjoy.
Friday, April 19, 2013
The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman
"The Teleportation Accident" is a long, ribald shaggy-dog story that is both about that simplest of stories - boy chases girl - and something a little more ambitious: the way that we experience the times we live in. The protagonist, a German set designer called Egon Loeser (the "loser" reference isn't a coincidence), it tired of Berlin in the early 30s, utterly oblivious to the rise of the Nazis and wondering whether he will ever get laid again. Meeting the unfortunately named Adele Hitler, he becomes infatuated, but too late, for she has already gone off with a British novelist, a comic version of Christopher Isherwood, who has already riled Loeser by fictionalising the story of a 17th century set designer, Adriano Lavicini, that Loeser was slowly turning into a a play. The Teleportation device of the title is either a wooden contraption for quickly moving characters across stage without the audience realising it, or an actual teleportation device. In many ways, this ambivalence is the novel's real strength, as the shaggy dog story sees the teleportation device appearing at different places in history - and therefore maybe it is real after all?
Not that Beauman particularly cares, for this is an apparatus for him, just as much as it is for Loeser/Lavicini in their plays. The "accident" sees Lavicini's device exploding on stage, killing a large number of the audience and devastating the theatre its in. Flash forward a few hundred years and is the same thing about to happen in in 1940s Los Angeles? The novel plays around with this "steampunk" apparatus at will, occasionally forgetting it entirely, but coming back to it towards the end. The novel's main structure is picaresque as Loeser, never at home wherever he sits, moves restlessly from late Weimar German, to pre-war France, to Los Angeles on the edge of war. The narrative style shifts as well. From the excellent first section which richly satirises Isherwood's Berlin novels; to a slightly leaden Paris episode where Loeser gets involved with an American con artist, that's like a cut price "A Moveable Feast", to a Chandler-esque Los Angeles, where he rocks up for the remainder of the book.
The problem is that as inventive as these are, what begin as enjoyable riffs become entangled in the shaggy dog plotting that never entirely convinces. Whereas the Berlin sequence has a real tension, as the young horny Loeser wilfully ignores the growing Nazi presence, the Paris sequence is just a comic turn, as Loeser helps an American con man sew "monkey gonads" onto unsuspecting rich women's necks, in the hope for longer lives. The American section, which takes up so much of the book, quickly becomes loose, somewhat nonsensical and paranoid, where a vast cast of characters - including quite a few displaced Berliners - role in and out of an overly complex story that sees Beauman losing his way somewhat. The riffs and the clever-clever juxtapositions from earlier in the novel are buried under pages of crass dialogue and over-exposition. By the time Loeser meets Adele again (she's sensibly changed her surname) both him and us have lost interest. Loeser's main interest now is recovering a dirty book that he lost on the way over; meeting his hero the novelist Stent Mutton; and somehow staging his Lavicini play at long last.
There's much to praise in the novel, but there's also so much slackness (and some woeful editing at times) as Beauman gets tied up in knots with the ridiculousness of his plot. The characters we meet in Los Angeles are all grotesques, and maybe this is the J.K.Rowling generation coming of age, but its as if he can't resist any half-hearted joke, or possible digression that comes along. The irony about the breakneck speed and confidence of his writing, is that it doesn't stop to realise how leaden it has become.
New characters come in and take over the narrative and the book feels like a series of long shorts hung together - a bit like Adam Robert's adolescent steampunk comedy "Swiftly" - by an almost random picaresque. Compare with the brilliant "The Sisters Brothers", and Beauman's book feels adolescent, rushed, and trying too hard to please. It's been well received, and for a certain type of reader wanting something that fills that previously unfilled need for something that's both Pynchon and Python, I guess I can see the appeal. Oddly enough, for all its pyrotechnics, the writing is somewhat old-fashioned. At times it comes across like one of the hoary seventies comedies by Guy Bellamy (or even Leslie Thomas' ribald The Virgin Soldiers) albeit with a baroque imagination which is all Beaumans. In the L.A. segment it hardly comes close to the brilliance of James Robert Baker's "Boy Wonder" and "Fuel Injected Dreams" though it attempts something of their wild brio.
The ending(s) when they eventually come, are a bit of relief, and rescue the novel somewhat from its own failings - offering several conclusions to the story that tie things up or make some kind of sense. There's enough in the book to make you think that Beauman is making some comments on our sense of history, the McGuffin that is the Teleportation device, offering an excuse for any numbers of fractures in the narrative, even as he tells the story somewhat straight. More a smorgasbord than a coherent meal, his appearance on Granta's Best of Young British novelist lists is perhaps more surprising because of riffiness of his prose, which disappointed me, than the fecundness of his imagination, which - one feels - employed in shorter doses will come up with much to recomment it in the future.
Joe Dunthorne liked it a lot more than I did, if you want to find an alternate view.
Not that Beauman particularly cares, for this is an apparatus for him, just as much as it is for Loeser/Lavicini in their plays. The "accident" sees Lavicini's device exploding on stage, killing a large number of the audience and devastating the theatre its in. Flash forward a few hundred years and is the same thing about to happen in in 1940s Los Angeles? The novel plays around with this "steampunk" apparatus at will, occasionally forgetting it entirely, but coming back to it towards the end. The novel's main structure is picaresque as Loeser, never at home wherever he sits, moves restlessly from late Weimar German, to pre-war France, to Los Angeles on the edge of war. The narrative style shifts as well. From the excellent first section which richly satirises Isherwood's Berlin novels; to a slightly leaden Paris episode where Loeser gets involved with an American con artist, that's like a cut price "A Moveable Feast", to a Chandler-esque Los Angeles, where he rocks up for the remainder of the book.
The problem is that as inventive as these are, what begin as enjoyable riffs become entangled in the shaggy dog plotting that never entirely convinces. Whereas the Berlin sequence has a real tension, as the young horny Loeser wilfully ignores the growing Nazi presence, the Paris sequence is just a comic turn, as Loeser helps an American con man sew "monkey gonads" onto unsuspecting rich women's necks, in the hope for longer lives. The American section, which takes up so much of the book, quickly becomes loose, somewhat nonsensical and paranoid, where a vast cast of characters - including quite a few displaced Berliners - role in and out of an overly complex story that sees Beauman losing his way somewhat. The riffs and the clever-clever juxtapositions from earlier in the novel are buried under pages of crass dialogue and over-exposition. By the time Loeser meets Adele again (she's sensibly changed her surname) both him and us have lost interest. Loeser's main interest now is recovering a dirty book that he lost on the way over; meeting his hero the novelist Stent Mutton; and somehow staging his Lavicini play at long last.
There's much to praise in the novel, but there's also so much slackness (and some woeful editing at times) as Beauman gets tied up in knots with the ridiculousness of his plot. The characters we meet in Los Angeles are all grotesques, and maybe this is the J.K.Rowling generation coming of age, but its as if he can't resist any half-hearted joke, or possible digression that comes along. The irony about the breakneck speed and confidence of his writing, is that it doesn't stop to realise how leaden it has become.
New characters come in and take over the narrative and the book feels like a series of long shorts hung together - a bit like Adam Robert's adolescent steampunk comedy "Swiftly" - by an almost random picaresque. Compare with the brilliant "The Sisters Brothers", and Beauman's book feels adolescent, rushed, and trying too hard to please. It's been well received, and for a certain type of reader wanting something that fills that previously unfilled need for something that's both Pynchon and Python, I guess I can see the appeal. Oddly enough, for all its pyrotechnics, the writing is somewhat old-fashioned. At times it comes across like one of the hoary seventies comedies by Guy Bellamy (or even Leslie Thomas' ribald The Virgin Soldiers) albeit with a baroque imagination which is all Beaumans. In the L.A. segment it hardly comes close to the brilliance of James Robert Baker's "Boy Wonder" and "Fuel Injected Dreams" though it attempts something of their wild brio.
The ending(s) when they eventually come, are a bit of relief, and rescue the novel somewhat from its own failings - offering several conclusions to the story that tie things up or make some kind of sense. There's enough in the book to make you think that Beauman is making some comments on our sense of history, the McGuffin that is the Teleportation device, offering an excuse for any numbers of fractures in the narrative, even as he tells the story somewhat straight. More a smorgasbord than a coherent meal, his appearance on Granta's Best of Young British novelist lists is perhaps more surprising because of riffiness of his prose, which disappointed me, than the fecundness of his imagination, which - one feels - employed in shorter doses will come up with much to recomment it in the future.
Joe Dunthorne liked it a lot more than I did, if you want to find an alternate view.
Friday, April 12, 2013
The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
I'm late to the party with reviewing Alison Moore's debut novel "The Lighthouse" which received so much praise last year and was shortlisted for the Booker. Not for any reason, as I've liked Alison's writing since first reading her in Nightjar Press's pamphlet series, but I've finally got round to it.
It's a short novel but in no way feels slight, its circular narrative reminding me a little bit of Sebald's circumnavigation in "The Rings of Saturn." In this novel Futh, a middle aged man with a Germanic surname, is going on a walking tour of the Rhine, catching a ferry over and having his bags transferred from guest house to guest house as he completes a lonely week's holiday. We meet Futh on the ferry over. He's middle aged, somewhat self-preoccupied and not very good with people. Moore has created a very believable protagonist, and throughout his journey we are given flashbacks of his life and its key moments. Bullied by his father after his mother left them (because she found her husband boring), his own childhood was a typically circumscribed one. Moore is brilliant at the deadness of so much suburban life, where, unable to leave the place you grew up, you can never get more than a few miles away from the people you were at school with or neighbours with. His best friend Kenny moves away when his parents split, and Kenny's mother becomes close to both Futh and his father. There is always an undertow of bleak sexual tension in this novel, as characters are unable to love or to hate properly, but are also unable to break away. This might sound dispiriting but it comes with such a layer of unrealised hope that one reads each short chapter almost breathless with the sadness of it all. Futh, a kindly man, wrecked in many ways by the circular nature of his life - from his broken home, to his now ended marriage - gives a fellow passenger a lift to Utrecht as its on his way. These brief encounters with strangers on the road give an added frisson to the novel, for one is never quite sure what will happen next. Futh travels with the suitcase he took on his disastrous honeymoon, a silver lighthouse-shaped perfume container that reminds him of his mother, and a packet of condoms that he knows will remain unused.
He remembers an earlier trip with his father - taken when Futh was twelve and his father was in his forties - and his memories of the different women that he picked up each night and shagged in the bathroom whilst his son tried to sleep in the hotel bedroom. Yet we are not totally enclosed with Futh's memories, for there is the parallel story of Ester, an ageing hotelier who sleeps with her guests in the hope of getting a response from her violent husband. Moore is brilliant on the accumulation of small details to sketch out believable lives, the switching back between present and past handled deftly. Her prose is forensic in its detail, unshowy, but never afraid to pull out and emphasise the symbolism that is at the novel's heart - whether its Futh's father's anecdotes about lighthouses or memories of watching movies and eating popcorn. Like "rosebud" in Citizen Kane, life is seen here as a tapestry of key memories. If there are the occasional missteps (Futh's father is a chemistry teacher so would he really be so disdainful of his son's job creating artificial scents?) they are so slight as to hardly matter. I believed in the whole cast of characters through a few deftly told details. Though, like a lot of contemporary novels, Moore shares with a sense of impending doom, there is no authorial withholding as there is in the first person narratives of "The Sense of an Ending" or "The Gathering", rather we are prompted to think that this apparently mundane holiday by a sad man in his fifties has meaning.
Whereas so many first novels show promise, "The Lighthouse" has rightly been lauded because it fulfils it. Saying anymore about the plot would be a terrible spoiler, but like previous reviewers, I can only say that its well worth your time - but short as the novel is, you'd do best to savour it.
It's a short novel but in no way feels slight, its circular narrative reminding me a little bit of Sebald's circumnavigation in "The Rings of Saturn." In this novel Futh, a middle aged man with a Germanic surname, is going on a walking tour of the Rhine, catching a ferry over and having his bags transferred from guest house to guest house as he completes a lonely week's holiday. We meet Futh on the ferry over. He's middle aged, somewhat self-preoccupied and not very good with people. Moore has created a very believable protagonist, and throughout his journey we are given flashbacks of his life and its key moments. Bullied by his father after his mother left them (because she found her husband boring), his own childhood was a typically circumscribed one. Moore is brilliant at the deadness of so much suburban life, where, unable to leave the place you grew up, you can never get more than a few miles away from the people you were at school with or neighbours with. His best friend Kenny moves away when his parents split, and Kenny's mother becomes close to both Futh and his father. There is always an undertow of bleak sexual tension in this novel, as characters are unable to love or to hate properly, but are also unable to break away. This might sound dispiriting but it comes with such a layer of unrealised hope that one reads each short chapter almost breathless with the sadness of it all. Futh, a kindly man, wrecked in many ways by the circular nature of his life - from his broken home, to his now ended marriage - gives a fellow passenger a lift to Utrecht as its on his way. These brief encounters with strangers on the road give an added frisson to the novel, for one is never quite sure what will happen next. Futh travels with the suitcase he took on his disastrous honeymoon, a silver lighthouse-shaped perfume container that reminds him of his mother, and a packet of condoms that he knows will remain unused.
He remembers an earlier trip with his father - taken when Futh was twelve and his father was in his forties - and his memories of the different women that he picked up each night and shagged in the bathroom whilst his son tried to sleep in the hotel bedroom. Yet we are not totally enclosed with Futh's memories, for there is the parallel story of Ester, an ageing hotelier who sleeps with her guests in the hope of getting a response from her violent husband. Moore is brilliant on the accumulation of small details to sketch out believable lives, the switching back between present and past handled deftly. Her prose is forensic in its detail, unshowy, but never afraid to pull out and emphasise the symbolism that is at the novel's heart - whether its Futh's father's anecdotes about lighthouses or memories of watching movies and eating popcorn. Like "rosebud" in Citizen Kane, life is seen here as a tapestry of key memories. If there are the occasional missteps (Futh's father is a chemistry teacher so would he really be so disdainful of his son's job creating artificial scents?) they are so slight as to hardly matter. I believed in the whole cast of characters through a few deftly told details. Though, like a lot of contemporary novels, Moore shares with a sense of impending doom, there is no authorial withholding as there is in the first person narratives of "The Sense of an Ending" or "The Gathering", rather we are prompted to think that this apparently mundane holiday by a sad man in his fifties has meaning.
Whereas so many first novels show promise, "The Lighthouse" has rightly been lauded because it fulfils it. Saying anymore about the plot would be a terrible spoiler, but like previous reviewers, I can only say that its well worth your time - but short as the novel is, you'd do best to savour it.
Literary Idol, Book Factor....BOYB
Its a big week in the literary calendar. Before X-Factor, before Pop Idol, there was the Best of Young British Novelists, celebrated every ten years since 1983 with a special edition of Granta - in itself a reason for this particular prize to continue, as it makes a lovely book. The 2013 list will be announced on Monday with the launch of a special edition of Granta. There's a Manchester launch next Thursday at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation next Thursday. Obviously we don't know who will be reading, but I'm looking forward to it.
Nice article on the BBC about this week's list. Granta has used the idea beyond these shores in recent years, best of young American novelists, best of young Brazilians... but its the British one that matters. This is a test the pulse of British literature. Amongst those writers who might have a few books behind them (e.g. Gwendoline Riley) and are still under 40, there will be others who may be yet to burst forth, lying in manuscript somewhere in a London agent/publishers desk. That "London" I use advisedly, as I hope that in the first list to have come of age in the era of blogs that there will be a widening of the net, though if anything the literary scene (or at least the officially sanctioned one) is more London-based and flavoured than ever.
Its rather odd that Granta has been the place for this as over its history Granta has often been a little bit sniffy about fiction, preferring reportage for much of the 80s and 90s than making things up. On the "reality hunger" argument Granta always used to be very much on the David Shields side of the argument. I would say that's changed a little over the last two or three years. Recent Grantas have been big, dynamic affairs and have been actively recruiting new and younger authors such as Jon McGregor and Evie Wyld into their pages; though I imagine there will be a few on the list who have never graced its pages before.
So Granta hasn't given up on fiction - and BOYB novelists represents that. commitment. Though its not without problems. Ironically the BBC article mentions Alison Moore, a debut novelist for Salt last year who made the Booker shortlist. Alison was born in 1971, so just outside of the cut-off point for the list. Young is relative. Since 2003 there has been a massive increase in the number of creative writing courses in the UK, and that must surely feed through into the list. Then there's that blog culture. Will any 3AM Magazine alumni make the list, for instance? I'm sure the Granta list will have a few surprises, a few new names, a few predictables, and is generally for the good - though I think they may have harder job than their predecessors in taking the temperature of literature. Part of it is Granta itself, which has quite a prescriptive view of fiction at the best of times; a hangover from a culture where literature was more important than it is now. Yet from blogs to the "The White Review" there's a vibrancy about that culture at the moment that seems stronger than it was in 2003. That list was filled with thirty-somethings, (though 25 year old Adam Thirlwell could make it two lists in a row...) and in Peace, Barker, Mitchell, Kennedy and Litt had five of the most important novelists of the last decade.
Literary fiction, whether we call that a genre (as Paul Magrs did) or simply a list of what's good, is important to the culture; and like with music or poetry, there's a professionalism and competency about so many writers these days that is probably as good as at any time in history. Whether we have writers who are able to dominate the culture is another thing entirely, and to be honest, I don't know any writers who even think that way. The desire is to write good books and hope someone likes them. If the Barnes-Amis-Rushdie generation had a swagger and an ego to go with it, the writers I know are remarkably sanguine about their reputation. John Freeman, Granta's editor says, somewhat ominously that "my own preference is for novelists who can tell big stories, which sounds easy, but in my experience is as rare as the long-whiskered owlet." It would be interesting to ask him, once the list is announced how many of the twenty are telling "big stories" - as in the encomium's on the list there will be a sense that this is a generation with stories to tell and ways of telling it that are the equal of the last three lists. Writers aren't pack animals however; there's only one David Peace, one Nicola Barker, after all. My own preference is for writers who might conceivably be doing something with the language, and have something to say about our contemporary world. I imagine that there will be a bit of both on the list when its announced.
Nice article on the BBC about this week's list. Granta has used the idea beyond these shores in recent years, best of young American novelists, best of young Brazilians... but its the British one that matters. This is a test the pulse of British literature. Amongst those writers who might have a few books behind them (e.g. Gwendoline Riley) and are still under 40, there will be others who may be yet to burst forth, lying in manuscript somewhere in a London agent/publishers desk. That "London" I use advisedly, as I hope that in the first list to have come of age in the era of blogs that there will be a widening of the net, though if anything the literary scene (or at least the officially sanctioned one) is more London-based and flavoured than ever.
Its rather odd that Granta has been the place for this as over its history Granta has often been a little bit sniffy about fiction, preferring reportage for much of the 80s and 90s than making things up. On the "reality hunger" argument Granta always used to be very much on the David Shields side of the argument. I would say that's changed a little over the last two or three years. Recent Grantas have been big, dynamic affairs and have been actively recruiting new and younger authors such as Jon McGregor and Evie Wyld into their pages; though I imagine there will be a few on the list who have never graced its pages before.
So Granta hasn't given up on fiction - and BOYB novelists represents that. commitment. Though its not without problems. Ironically the BBC article mentions Alison Moore, a debut novelist for Salt last year who made the Booker shortlist. Alison was born in 1971, so just outside of the cut-off point for the list. Young is relative. Since 2003 there has been a massive increase in the number of creative writing courses in the UK, and that must surely feed through into the list. Then there's that blog culture. Will any 3AM Magazine alumni make the list, for instance? I'm sure the Granta list will have a few surprises, a few new names, a few predictables, and is generally for the good - though I think they may have harder job than their predecessors in taking the temperature of literature. Part of it is Granta itself, which has quite a prescriptive view of fiction at the best of times; a hangover from a culture where literature was more important than it is now. Yet from blogs to the "The White Review" there's a vibrancy about that culture at the moment that seems stronger than it was in 2003. That list was filled with thirty-somethings, (though 25 year old Adam Thirlwell could make it two lists in a row...) and in Peace, Barker, Mitchell, Kennedy and Litt had five of the most important novelists of the last decade.
Literary fiction, whether we call that a genre (as Paul Magrs did) or simply a list of what's good, is important to the culture; and like with music or poetry, there's a professionalism and competency about so many writers these days that is probably as good as at any time in history. Whether we have writers who are able to dominate the culture is another thing entirely, and to be honest, I don't know any writers who even think that way. The desire is to write good books and hope someone likes them. If the Barnes-Amis-Rushdie generation had a swagger and an ego to go with it, the writers I know are remarkably sanguine about their reputation. John Freeman, Granta's editor says, somewhat ominously that "my own preference is for novelists who can tell big stories, which sounds easy, but in my experience is as rare as the long-whiskered owlet." It would be interesting to ask him, once the list is announced how many of the twenty are telling "big stories" - as in the encomium's on the list there will be a sense that this is a generation with stories to tell and ways of telling it that are the equal of the last three lists. Writers aren't pack animals however; there's only one David Peace, one Nicola Barker, after all. My own preference is for writers who might conceivably be doing something with the language, and have something to say about our contemporary world. I imagine that there will be a bit of both on the list when its announced.
Monday, April 08, 2013
Now is not the Time for Your Tears.
Margaret Thatcher has died, aged 87, after a stroke. She had her final days and weeks in a subsidised suite of rooms at the Ritz, which seems only fitting. Even a couple of years ago I'd have thought of having a drink to her passing, but now, well, rest in peace, Margaret - your crimes are history now; and we're too busy fighting the disastrous policies of your Conservative party successors. Too much of my adult life has been under a right wing prime minister, and it's rarely a pleasant time; and one wonders why, when apparently, according to all the encomiums, Thatcher "made Britain great" again. I've never bought this idea, at least partly because it assumes that Britain all felt the same about her - yet in Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and much of the North this "greatness" was sucked away by her policies, rather than increased.
I saw Gordon Brown just before the last election and he gave a great speech listing all Labour's achievements, from civil partnerships, to peace in Northern Ireland to new schools, and reduced waiting lists. Sure he ignored the authoritarianism, the laxness of the financial regulation and the Iraq war, but there was plenty here to be proud of - real achievements. Listening to Thatcherites speaking there's nothinig other than generalisations, as if Britain would still be in 1979 if she hadn't been in power - ignoring the modernisation that has happened in countries across Europe without having the wrecking ball of Thatcherism.
Her "achievements" are all in negatives - opposing the miners, winning the Falklands war (after prev. removing the battleship that was patrolling the South Atlantic), liberalising the city (that worked well didn't it?), selling off council houses (and that!) The only building projects I associate with her era are Canary Wharf (which lost its backers millions) and the Eurotunnel (ditto). Even things I agreed with, such as longer licensing hours and shops being open on Sundays, aren't so much about reversing the unions, but reversing a Churchillian sense of a state at war. All of her liberalisation projects seem to have merely stacked money in the hands of the speculators and unbalance the economy in favour of the south of England. Maybe I'm forgetting things, but I can't remember a single thing that made life better for me, my family and friends. The idea that the unions would have held Britain to ransom in the 80s is a myth, did it happen elsewhere in a much more militant Europe? No, of course not. Even her "rebate" from Europe had much less effect than the need for the wasted north to access structural funds during the 90s and 00s... finally providing some of the infrastructure that she'd left to the "market." Her immediate legacy was the limp administration of John Major who gave us the millennium dome, greenlighted a toll motorway and privatised the railways - none of which are unalloyed triumphs, even if New Labour foolishly went along with all three.
Visit France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, anywhere in Northern Europe and you'll wonder what was so special about the British "miracle" - these competitors, often with left wing or even communist governments, are more educated, more productive. That the south of Europe is in dire recession now is for following the same liberalisation of banking and property markets that Thatcher also followed. Economically her solution has proven a disaster that keeps on giving; there's not a single bit of social legislation that she wouldn't have instinctively have opposed. I don't deny her historical importance, or that she was a leading figure on the world stage - her character is not in doubt, it is her judgement that I reject. Her successor David Cameron and his chancellor are currently doing their best to demonise many of the British people whilst wanting "Britain" to be great - and its exactly the same confidence trick as Thatcher's governments played on us. Divide and rule. Had Tony Blair and Gordon Brown been more sceptical about her achievements then their own negative lists might have been a little bit shorter - their achievements came from the left not the right. Following a couple of weeks when that truly great leader, Nelson Mandela, has been in hospital in his nineties, it is worth remembering that Thatcher the world statesman called him as a terrorist (so much of her family and friend's business interests were based in the corruption of apartheid) and Chile's Pinochet a friend.
Yes, the Baroness is now dead, and for those who loved her, that is sad, but as Bob Dylan once wrote, for the rest of us, now is not the time for your tears.
I saw Gordon Brown just before the last election and he gave a great speech listing all Labour's achievements, from civil partnerships, to peace in Northern Ireland to new schools, and reduced waiting lists. Sure he ignored the authoritarianism, the laxness of the financial regulation and the Iraq war, but there was plenty here to be proud of - real achievements. Listening to Thatcherites speaking there's nothinig other than generalisations, as if Britain would still be in 1979 if she hadn't been in power - ignoring the modernisation that has happened in countries across Europe without having the wrecking ball of Thatcherism.
Her "achievements" are all in negatives - opposing the miners, winning the Falklands war (after prev. removing the battleship that was patrolling the South Atlantic), liberalising the city (that worked well didn't it?), selling off council houses (and that!) The only building projects I associate with her era are Canary Wharf (which lost its backers millions) and the Eurotunnel (ditto). Even things I agreed with, such as longer licensing hours and shops being open on Sundays, aren't so much about reversing the unions, but reversing a Churchillian sense of a state at war. All of her liberalisation projects seem to have merely stacked money in the hands of the speculators and unbalance the economy in favour of the south of England. Maybe I'm forgetting things, but I can't remember a single thing that made life better for me, my family and friends. The idea that the unions would have held Britain to ransom in the 80s is a myth, did it happen elsewhere in a much more militant Europe? No, of course not. Even her "rebate" from Europe had much less effect than the need for the wasted north to access structural funds during the 90s and 00s... finally providing some of the infrastructure that she'd left to the "market." Her immediate legacy was the limp administration of John Major who gave us the millennium dome, greenlighted a toll motorway and privatised the railways - none of which are unalloyed triumphs, even if New Labour foolishly went along with all three.
Visit France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, anywhere in Northern Europe and you'll wonder what was so special about the British "miracle" - these competitors, often with left wing or even communist governments, are more educated, more productive. That the south of Europe is in dire recession now is for following the same liberalisation of banking and property markets that Thatcher also followed. Economically her solution has proven a disaster that keeps on giving; there's not a single bit of social legislation that she wouldn't have instinctively have opposed. I don't deny her historical importance, or that she was a leading figure on the world stage - her character is not in doubt, it is her judgement that I reject. Her successor David Cameron and his chancellor are currently doing their best to demonise many of the British people whilst wanting "Britain" to be great - and its exactly the same confidence trick as Thatcher's governments played on us. Divide and rule. Had Tony Blair and Gordon Brown been more sceptical about her achievements then their own negative lists might have been a little bit shorter - their achievements came from the left not the right. Following a couple of weeks when that truly great leader, Nelson Mandela, has been in hospital in his nineties, it is worth remembering that Thatcher the world statesman called him as a terrorist (so much of her family and friend's business interests were based in the corruption of apartheid) and Chile's Pinochet a friend.
Yes, the Baroness is now dead, and for those who loved her, that is sad, but as Bob Dylan once wrote, for the rest of us, now is not the time for your tears.
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