This is a splendid intellectual history of 20th century ideas but I'm wondering if there's any point in me finishing it as I believe my brain is actua...moreThis is a splendid intellectual history of 20th century ideas but I'm wondering if there's any point in me finishing it as I believe my brain is actually full. I'm very concerned that every time I learn a new fact I have to forget an old one. And the one I forget might be something significant. I don't want to have to stop a policeman on the streets of Nottingham and say "Excuse me officer, could you please tell me where I live and perhaps take me back there? And on the way I'll tell you about Schrodinger's Cat, I just read about it, completely fascinating...."(less)
"The dominant influence on American short fiction when Moore started publishing was the stoic minimalism of R...moreAdam Mars-Jones has this to say about LM:
"The dominant influence on American short fiction when Moore started publishing was the stoic minimalism of Raymond Carver, the recovering binger's pledge of: 'One sentence at a time.' She escaped that influence, and was spared the struggle of throwing it off, but its underlying principle of whittling away excess is something her stories badly need. A Lorrie Moore story can sometimes be like a schoolroom full of precocious kids, every sentence raising both hands and squeaking: 'Me! Me! Choose me!'
There's no escaping the fact that most of the outgrowths on Moore's prose, begging to be sanded down, are wisecracks, puns and jokes. In one story, the title character remembers that when she lived in New York: 'Everyone tried hard to be funny. Everywhere you went - a store, a manicure place - someone was telling a joke. A good one... it was like brains having sex. It was like every brain was a sex maniac.' Moore's humour isn't like that. It's closer to a compulsion than a talent, with the desperation of someone trying to repeat a trick that brought the house down once without her quite knowing why, and it prefers bad jokes to no jokes at all. She describes the heroine of 'Community Life' as being 'in bed, a book propped in her lap - a biography of a French feminist, which she was reading for the hairdo information'. Forget about losing respect for the character - it's hard not to lose respect for the writer.
Jokiness percolates down into the narrative voice ('It came out wrong, like a lizard with a little hat on'), but also bursts out whenever people open their mouths. Moore makes a number of attempts to account for this. Might it be a marker of a dysfunctional relationship? ('You see how I'm talking? Things are wacko around here.') Perhaps it's an individual pathology. ('Everything's a joke with you.' 'Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.') There may even be a deeper principle involved - 'Overheard, or recorded, all marital conversation sounds as if someone must be joking, though usually no one is.' Except that every conversation in the book, by this yardstick, qualifies as marital.
Two stories in this collection stand apart, one by virtue of seeming autobiographical to the point of postmodernism, the other by taking place in a parallel universe. The first story is 'People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk' ( Moore never seems to have found a title arch enough to satisfy her, but surely this time she comes close). It's about the Mother, an unnamed writer of Moore's age whose baby boy is diagnosed with a kidney tumour (Peed Onk being shorthand for paediatric oncology). Her husband tells her to make notes for a story, since they may need money for the medical expenses.
In theory, then, this is about a piece of life too raw to be transformed into fiction, but in practice, it's the most mannered and posturing thing in the book. The Husband says (why Husband and not Father?): 'You know, in a way, this is the kind of thing you've always written about.' The Mother agonises in a philosophical register: 'How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveller's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it.. one can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms.'
The wisecracks don't actually stop, they just become grotesque, with the Mother imagining an interlocutor speaking in rebuttal: 'What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future... therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery and - let's be frank - fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels.' It's all simultaneously self-indulgent, while imagining it's writing degree zero. Towards the end of the piece, the Mother bridles at the phrase 'collateral beauty', used by the parent of another child with cancer, thinking: 'Who is entitled to such a thing? A child is ill. No one is entitled to any collateral beauty!' Except her, of course, who a page or two back was describing 'the black marbled sky and the electric eyelash of the moon'.
The other story, 'Like Life', is set in a Eighties New York where it's illegal to unplug the television and the water from the taps is too caustic to bathe in, let alone drink. Young men are dying, so that women have to date men twice their age, except for Mamie, who has Rudy. This is an Aids-era story with the epidemic somehow mutated, and it's fascinating to see how removing the reference points adds to its power. Moore even goes cold turkey on the wisecracks, right up to the moment when Mamie asks Rudy what he fears, and though previously inarticulate he shoots back: 'The Three Stooges, Poverty, Obscurity, Masturbation. Also the three E's. Ennui. Anomie. Misery.' Nothing dispels atmosphere more effectively than jokes fired at random.
The real tragedy is that Moore's self-presentation isn't even an original way of nullifying the threat of being female and clever in America. Nothing could be more traditional than apologising with kookiness for an intelligence too strong to be hidden. Would she really rather be cute and goofy than smart? It's a bad bargain because she cheats herself and her readers of something that had a real chance of being original and fierce."
Ugh No 1. – I thought I’d better grab up a short account of the Reformation as some essential background info for Wolf Hall which I’m ab...moreThe three ughs
Ugh No 1. – I thought I’d better grab up a short account of the Reformation as some essential background info for Wolf Hall which I’m about two thirds through, wow, what a beast that is. In Wolf Hall there is an account of the burning of a Lollard. These were religious radicals who attempted an original Reformation in the 14th and 15th centuries. This particular Lollard was an old woman who was said to have proclaimed that the bread in the Mass is just bread, same as at the bakers, and the figures of the saints are just sticks of wood, nothing more. So they tie her up and load on the fuel and torch her and have a good time watching the old woman howl and writhe. One kindly woman ensures that young Thomas Cromwell has a front row view. The crowd gets a bit irritated if the smoke obscures their view of the writhings of the old woman. So the Reformation was kind of all like that. For your opinions, we will think of a very cruel way to kill you, and we will gain the Lord’s favour by so doing, and indeed, so meritorious is this kind of thing in the eyes of the Lord that you get points by just watching. And points mean prizes, and the prize is : years knocked off the time you will serve in Purgatory. (You know what Purgatory is, right, it’s being in a motel room with a busted tv which is only showing Fox News and, randomly, an Australian porn channel from the 1980s, for 300 years. And when the tv goes off, they pipe the complete works of Boney M through on some kind of hidden speaker. You could spend twelve years just trying to find the speaker so you can break it, but you never do. It’s Purgatory.) Well, this kind of universal hideousness gets an UGH from me, I don’t want to think about it, it’s horrible.
Ugh No 2. - on top of the cruelty-seen-as-good-for-you and the sanctified sadism, you get the completely alien brains of these religious people, which was all people in these centuries. In their brains, beliefs matter, more than anything can conceivably matter to the likes of us except the lives of our children. So a guy will meditate many years about whether, as in the above example, the bread and wine in the Mass actually transubstantiates, becomes the flesh and blood of the Christ or just consubstantiates, becomes like the flesh and blood of the Christ or even, OMG OMG, doesn’t change at all, and merely symbolises the flesh and blood of the Christ. Don’t know about you, but to me, this is very alien thinking. Who in the name of all that creepeth upon the earth gives a flying flootle about it? Well, we don’t now, but by Christ, they did then. The afterlife loomed larger than their actual life, it was really real to them, and what you thought/believed was going to make a difference to how it panned out for you, and God was not the merciful type in to their minds at all, quite the reverse, he was the roasting, crimping and carving and the boiling of babies kind. That was God, Satan was worse. It was a real Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds outlook. It was Ingmar Bergman on a bad day. Now Wolf Hall shows that sensible people could negotiate their way around all this bad craziness, but it was like stepping around the Nazis in 1942, it took nerve and a lot of tact and intelligence. You could find yourself in a sticky situation quite rapidly, after one quick phone call to the Inquisition and a swift tightening of Jennifer’s daughter or the horrible Pear of Anguish. As an atheist, I just can’t for the life of me understand why people couldn’t say yeah, okay, no prob, Pope Clement IV is a cool ruler, yeah, let me have three of them indulgences, hey, 25 ducats, it’s a bargain, see you round bro. But they were all like ARRGH EVERYTHING MATTERS MY ETERNAL SOUL WILL FRY FOR A GAZILLION YEARS BECAUSE I HICCUPPED AT MASS AND PART OF JESUS WENT UP MY NOSE OH NO NOW I HAVE TO BURN TWENTY HERETICS BEFORE GOD WILL SMILE AT ME AGAIN.
Ugh No 3. The blurb on the back of this book says “it is clear, crisp, epigrammatic and memorable… it is great fun to read.”
Well, this is from p 68-9 :
By 1536 Calvin and Melancthon had achieved the Wittenberg Concord, reconciling the south German cities and Saxony. Even Luther did not absolutely reject it, although Swiss cities did and worked their way towards the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549, essentially a Zurich-Geneva axis. Bucer’s own position, close to Calvin’s, was a version of Zwinglianism, and when, after the Schmalkaldic War, Strassburg had a Lutheran straightjacket imposed upon it he went into exile in England
I didn’t really think that was much fun to read. Who is this damned book for ? Not the student of the period, who already has a nine volume history of the Reformation and is eagerly devouring volume 7 as we speak; so must be the general reader (me! Me!) but look, does a general reader really want this kind of thing? Opening lines of chapter 9 :
Cuius regio, eius religio. The pithy phrase was coined in the early seventeenth century to convey the gist of the Religious peace of Augsburg.
To the rack with you Mr Collinson ! And may God have mercy on his prose. (less)
Jack London lived a great life and this is a very readable no-nonsense biography which along with packing in all the frantic eyepopping thrills and sp...moreJack London lived a great life and this is a very readable no-nonsense biography which along with packing in all the frantic eyepopping thrills and spills of Jack’s hectic – I mean HECTIC – life, also throws up some fascinating issues.
Jack was born poor to a bizarre slightly unhinged termagant of a mother and an father who disappeared; the mother got a new husband who had a three-foot long beard and was a cool stand-up guy but no good at paying the bills. At the age of 15 Jack left school and became in his words a Work Beast, doing a string of ghastly jobs for ten cents an hour and working 12 or 14 hour shifts. Then he became an oyster pirate, which was more money but really dangerous, like people died a lot, then he became an oyster pirate catcher, then a seal hunter on the open seas up to his chin in skinned carcasses and a typhoon about to blow, holy shit, did people really do this stuff – yes they DID - Then he became a stoker shovelling coal & quit when he found out he was doing the work of two guys who they’d just fired, then he got turned on to the workers’ struggle and hit the road as part of Kelly’s Army, which was a giant organised/chaotic march/but with a lot of trains involved from various places converging on Washington to protest against unemployment. This was in 1894. So then he dropped out of that and became a tramp.
So by now Jack London’s life is like one of Tom Waits’ great dry ever-more-ridiculous monologues and it just goes on and on. He gets arrested and thrown in jail. He’s released and rides the blinds (that’s the small area between goods wagons that the brakeman can’t see when he’s looking back down the track – if he could see any part of you he’ll throw you off the train, unless you could bribe him, which you couldn’t. Riding the blinds is a lot better than riding the rails, which is where you could lose a hand or a foot. So that’s a good thing to remember if you ever find yourself broke, busted, disgusted, ragged and dirty and looking to get back to San Francisco). Anyway then for a brief spell he went back to school (aged 19) but that was blown out by the Klondike Gold Rush – about a week after the first mad-eyed prospector waddled down the gangplank of the Excelsior on 14 July 1897 shouting “I’m rich, boys!” thousands of idiots were geared up and ready to roll. One such idiot was Jack and the whole adventure nearly killed him – there was no gold for Jack in the Yukon . Or was there? Well, y’know, he brought back gold all right – it’s just that you couldn’t see it until he started writing stories about the frozen north. Then you could, and his vertiginous rise to become America’s favourite author by the age of 27 began to unfold.
By which time he had lived intensely in three very particular subcultures: as a sailor; as a tramp; and as a prisoner. in 1903 he wrote to his second wife to be, Charmian :
Shall I tell you of a dream of my boyhood and manhood? … I had dreamed of the great Man-Comrade… [but:] I could never hope to find that comradeship, that closeness, that sympathy and understanding, whereby the man and I might merge and become one for love and life. How can I say what I mean? This man should be so much one with me that we could never misunderstand it. He should love the flesh, as he should the spirit, honoring and loving each and giving each its due…
He had explained this dream to other women in the past and they’d always reacted with horror and anger, but Charmian was different and it didn’t faze her. She married him and he soon found a Male Companion. At the same time he was at pains to deny he was a homosexual. But James Haley says that that was because he had a very particular view of what homosexuals were : “the only frame of reference they [Jack and his Male Companion:] would have had for homosexuality in that era were the effeminate, rouge-cheeked inverts London had seen lounging about the Flatiron Building, mincing and posing”. Hmm, well – this appears to mean that all the situational homosexuality JL was part of as a tramp, sailor and prisoner (which he half acknowledged) was not thought to make a person homosexual. I think we’re in the realm of Queer Theory here – are there gay people, or just gay acts? Whatever, Jack London makes a fascinating case study.
This boggled my mind. Haley is describing the great element of fun in Charmian and Jack’s marriage :
To prove her gameness she even boxed with him. She stood in and took her licks and occasionally landed a shot of her own, one occasionally drawing blood from the other… It would have been a high price for a woman to pay for a man, had Charmian not understood the nature of the sport and been keen to compete…. She also noted that he never took cheap shots at her and never landed punches on any “feminine unmentionables”
What? Read that back to me! Bang! – splurge…. that’s the sound of my brain exploding with the attempt to understand the sexual politics of all of this.
As well as writing he-man, proto-environmentalist novels JL was also a raving socialist, ready to capsize his huge popularity by publicly advocating such things as an end to child labour, better conditions in factories, recognition of unions – all crazy leftwing madness as you see. The public loved his sstories and hated his politics but he didn’t have time to bother about that, he was off to cover a war between Japan and Russia, or he was off sailing round the world, which he didn’t manage, but he did get to Hawaii and discover surfing and wrote an article and thereby become the unwitting grandfather of the Beach Boys (yes, someone would have done that eventually, but Jack did do it).
Jack London had many great and soaring aspects to his personality and his life, as well as a few not great ones (such as alcoholism, which he faced up to and wrote a whole book about. And I wasn’t keen on the wife boxing.). He was a fantastic human being. That's what he was.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Tonight's contest from the palatial surroundings of Monkstown Boxing Club here in Dun Laoghaire...moreCELEBRITY DEATH MATCH
Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Tonight's contest from the palatial surroundings of Monkstown Boxing Club here in Dun Laoghaire is to decide who is to represent the Republic of Ireland in the 2012 London Olympics Most Miserable Contemporary Novelist event.
(Scattered applause from the twenty or so people in the audience)
In the blue corner, we have Anne Enright
(Anne gets up tiredly from her chair in the corner and raises her hands on which giant gloves have been tied - she waves them vaguely at the small audience, most of whom are texting or playing pocket chess with each other)
Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, Anne is a local favourite whose first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, explored themes such as love, motherhood, Roman Catholicism, and sex in a downbeat manner, which she followed up with What Are You Like? which examined tensions and ironies between family members, but recently she won the Booker for The Gathering, which is much more miserable than both of these put together and then some, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you thank you.
In the RED corner, we have Frank mcCourt, world famous author of Angela's Ashes, which milked sentimental cliches of poverty-stricken Irish childhoods until there was not a dry eye in the house, he needs no further introduction from me, he... what?
(Muffled voices, muffled cursing)
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but there has been an administrative mistake made, it seems that Frank McCourt passed away in 2009 after a long and successful career. So, er... it is my privilege to declare that Ireland's Most Miserable Contemporary Novelist is Anne Enright. (He tries to get Anne to come to the centre of the right for a victory salute but she's already climbing out of the ring and leaving.)
Thank you ladies and gentlemen. moving on, our next contest is a 5 round flyweight bout between two local lads (zzzt, click).
I've had enough of that. Sport. I hate it. Especially boxing. And golf. And bloody Formula One. Let's put on some music...
(Sly jazz-rock starts up, with a cheery cockney vocalist)
Singing folk songs in the nude Plates and plates of your favourite food Watching Tory gits get booed
Reasons to be cheerful, part 4 Reasons to be cheerful, part 4
Photos from holidays where nobody fell out Dancing like an idiot, running flat-out Dressing up like a giant trout
Reasons to be cheerful, part 4 Reasons to be cheerful, part 4
Writing graffiti on your abdominal wall Days when you hardly move at all Except to attend a masquerade ball Not being a borrower, nor yet a lender Going on a ten-day bender Throwing The Gathering into the blender
Reasons to be cheerful, part 4 Reasons to be cheerful, part 4 Reasons to be cheerful, part 4 Reasons to be cheerful, part 4
(With apologies to the late great Ian Dury and the late great Frank McCourt)
Note : No copies of The Gathering were harmed during the making of this review
Nico was the proto-Goth Empress of Hideous Smackness, the patron saint of Injecting Between Your Toes, a living breathing vortex of gloom who makes Le...moreNico was the proto-Goth Empress of Hideous Smackness, the patron saint of Injecting Between Your Toes, a living breathing vortex of gloom who makes Leonard Cohen seem like a playful kitten, and she morphed from a swingin' sixties model into a Warhol superstar and then into the deathwish junkie grandma we knew and didn't particularly ever want to be in the same room with.
She got the idea she could write songs and sing them and as she was 6 foot tall and had a violent streak no one dared to tell her she couldn't.
She was not for most people, and that's putting it mildly. But she was proof that some junkies managed to crawl out of their besmeared selves long enough to create something genuinely eerie, genuinely unsettling, haunting, full of icy contemplation and pitiless beauty. I saw her live once, on her last tour. That was 1988, man that's a cruel long time ago. She looked like she'd already died then. It was one of those gigs you can't quite believe you went to. I treasure the memory.
Bonus extra! This is priceless - in 1965 they thought she might be the German Marianne Faithfull or something
"House insurance is often the last thing on your mind in this post-Christmas pre-Western world meltdown period -...moreYou may skip this advert in 4 seconds.
"House insurance is often the last thing on your mind in this post-Christmas pre-Western world meltdown period ----" SSSSSKIPP!!!
Well, I youtubed my way through this vast and really quite beautiful volume more or less faithfully, it took many months, and here's how it shook down.
One star deducted for the first stupid section entitled "Pre-1950s" which is all of 24 pages long. Since probably about 50% of my "1001 songs you have to hear before you croak" list would be from before 1950, you may imagine this was not the best foot forward that this volume could have chosen. Proceeding into the delirious delicious 50s (60 pages), I was glad to scoop up London is the Place for Me by lord Kitchener, la Bamba by Ritchie Valens, I'd forgotten how great that one is, Le Poinconneur des lilas by Serge Gainsbourg and Brand New Cadillac by Vince Taylor and his Playboys, and all the other 50s selections were unarguably great too. That was a hell of a decade, and even the square pre-rock part of it was hip.
Now the 60s - who doesn't know everything from that endlessly retrodden decade already? Well, add back the deducted star for unearthing :
Don't gimme no Lip Child by Dave Berry Go Way from my Window by John Jacob Niles (sounds like it's from 1664 not 1964) La Boheme by Charles Aznavour (consistent acknowledgement of great French music in this book, which, you know, a lot of Anglo-American rock writers patently don't do) Mas Que Nada by Sergio Mendes
all the rest are pretty much shoo-ins, 150 pages of swingingness.
The 70s, that very dubious follow-up to the 60s, get 200 pages. My heart sank a little at this, but i persevered, and discovered... disco. Well, I discovered that some disco stuff which I never heard before sounds wonderful , e.g.
Love hangover by Diana Ross You Make Me Feel by Sylvester
also so nice to see some personal favourites in here :
54-46 That's my Number by toots & the Maytals Blackwater Side by Anne Briggs (she came from Nottingham!) A Nickel and a Nail by O V Wright Cocaine in my Brain by Dillinger River Song by Dennis Wilson Solid Air by John Martyn Shot by Both Sides by Magazine (could be my all time favourite single)
and I'd never heard Gloria by Patti Smith before so thanks for that.
This whole enterprise started to sag a little bit in the 80s (190 pages) for me. I mean, there were so many chunky good time semidemimetally middle of the roadie bands that who could bother to sort them out ? Rush, Def Leppard, ZZ Top, Iron Maiden, Bon Jovi, The Cult, Slayer, The Triffids, INXS, Mudhoney, on and on and on, all those white boys with guitars, it's just a big blurry noise to me. I don't really like rock music. It's monotonous.
But there were delights along the way such as the insane Via Con me by Paolo Conte and the two minutes of bliss called Please Don't Touch by Motorhead & Girlschool and the gorgeous Cattle & Cane by the Go-Betweens. You can't have a whole decade of popular music without a shed load of gems as well as a shed load of landfill, but this book's selection of the 80s mostly bored me.
The 90s gets 150 pages and it was good to see the coverage of non Anglo-American stuff coming on strong. Dylan's Blind Willie McTell shares an opposite page to Body Count's Cop Killer as does Snoop Doggy Doggy and Cheb Khaled. Honestly, it's difficult to level accusations of complete shitness against this 90s stuff as one might about a lot of the 80s. They even found room for Ching Soortukchuleringing Yryzy by Huun-Huur Tu. Check page 704 if you don't believe me.
2000 to 2009 gets 112 pages and this was not so interesting for me. i noticed that an awful lot of the songs in this decade were written by a committee who had based it on a riff from a previous song. I think this is called either post-modernism or unoriginality.
But anyway, for a music fan like me, this was a long and exhilarating trek through the last 60 years and I recommend it unreservedly. The writing is nice, not scintillating, but not annoying, and there are a lot lot lot of pix. It really tries its best and there is absolutely no J M Coetzee or Ian McEwan in here, which was the mistake they made with the 1001 Books volume.
And yes, it does say that Lonnie Donegan wrote Rock Island Line!
Oh finally I get it. I read this a couple of years ago and it was supposed to be all about God. But no, it's not a religious allegory at all. It's abo...moreOh finally I get it. I read this a couple of years ago and it was supposed to be all about God. But no, it's not a religious allegory at all. It's about the collapse of communism. As the ocean liner of communism sinks under the weight of its own massive incompetence (a good idea, but the captain was drunk and the crew were sticky-fingered rascals), you leap overboard, clamber on to the only available boat (capitalism) only to find that there's a giant tiger on board which will eat you unless you can keep feeding it your hapless fellow-creatures.
When I thought this novel was about God I gave it 2 stars. It didn't make sense. But now I realise - it's a perfect metaphor - three stars.(less)
A review to mark the occasion of the diamond jubilee of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
On page 385 of this gripping book we find one of the greatest Ac...moreA review to mark the occasion of the diamond jubilee of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
On page 385 of this gripping book we find one of the greatest Acts of Parliament, and certainly the most surprising. It passed the House on 17 March 1649 and the relevant bit is here:
And whereas it is and hath been found by experience the the office of a King in this nation and Ireland, and to have the power thereof in any single person, is unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people, and that for the most part, use hath been made of the regal power and prerogative to oppress and impoverish and enslave the subject; and that usually and naturally any one person in such power makes it his interest to incroach upon the just freedom and liberty of the people, and to promote the setting up of their own will and power above the laws, that so they might enslave these kingdoms to their own lust; be it therefore enacted and ordained by this present parliament that the office of a King in this nation shall not henceforth reside in or be exercised by any one single person; and that no one person whatsoever shall or may have or hold the office, style, dignity, power or authority of King of the said kingdoms and dominions
By the abolition of the kingly office provided for in this act a most happy way is made for this nation to return to its just and ancient right of being governed by its own representatives
This was followed later the same day by the abolition of the House of Lords and on 19 May 1649 by an Act declaring England to be a Commonwealth or Free State.
So, take heart, fellow republicans*, it can be done!
Now, what happened after this exciting turn of events is of the utmost interest and I shall continue the story in an upcoming review.
*Americans will note that the word has different meanings on each side of the Atlantic. (less)
You couldn't pay me enough to re-read this baby now. Well, okay, I'd probably do it for £200. Alright, £100. Cash.
Kerouac took over from Steinbeck as...moreYou couldn't pay me enough to re-read this baby now. Well, okay, I'd probably do it for £200. Alright, £100. Cash.
Kerouac took over from Steinbeck as the guy I had to read everything by when I was a young person. Steinbeck himself took over from Ray Bradbury. All three American males with a sentimental streak as wide as the Rio Grande.
Whole thing nearly turned me into a weepy hitchhiker who plays saxophone while he waits for a ride, then gets abducted by aliens who are these very kind blue globes, I know it sounds crazy, blue globes, right, & who take him back to 1922 where he persuades the boss of the local fruit farm syndicate to double the workers' wages and build a school. (less)
I recently read "The Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton, and that had "cultural cringe" stamped all the way through it like a seaside resort's name in...moreI recently read "The Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton, and that had "cultural cringe" stamped all the way through it like a seaside resort's name in a stick of rock (no, not crack cocaine, a kind of candy). Upper class Americans in the late 19th century were completely in awe of Europe - its aristocracy, its culture, its old money. In the passing of a few decades, this cultural cringe had changed hands. A whole new sexy thing had been invented in America and entire industries were all revved up to tell us about it - principally Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley. This led to kids growing up in Britain in the 50s thinking that British people never wrote songs and only made rubbish films, and were never, ever cool. And seeping out from the slimy depths of 1920s/30s hardboiled pulp fiction came a kind of poetry which celebrated this new thing, this new cool. It was all made out of surfaces and brand names, it was technical language applied to the everyday, it was a whole new way of talking, full of assumptions, and if you were young and British it was like overhearing a conversation in Serbo-Croat, but it was also a dog whistle. When you heard it your nose got pressed up against whichever window it was coming out of. As for instance early Beach Boys and Jan and Dean lyrics :
Chrome reversed rims with whitewall slicks And it turns a quarter mile in one oh six Door handles are off but you know I'll never miss 'em They open when I want with the solenoid system
or
She's ported and relieved and she's stroked and bored. She'll do a hundred and forty in the top end floored
She's got a competition clutch with the four on the floor And she purrs like a kitten till the Lake Pipes roar And if that ain't enough to make you flip your lid There's one more thing, I got the pink slip, Daddy
or
You'll probably wipeout when you first try to shoot the curve Takin' gas in a bush takes a lotta nerve Those hopscotch poledads and pedestrians, too, will bug ya Shout Cuyabunga now and skate right on through
I mean, what does this all mean? Is it still English?
American authors do this a lot - Don DeLillo is a prime conjurer of technobrandnameism, great long paragraphs of White Noise for instance are pure abstractions to British readers because we only catch about one reference in twenty. And so with George Pelecanos.
Cody, with his black-on-black DC dog-tag hat, plain black T, Nautica jeans, and blck Air Force highs, looked like any rough-edged city kid...
Markos rose and went to the open kitchen, equipped with a Wolf cooktop and wall oven, an ASKO dishwasher and a Sub-Zero side-by-side.
BSR turntable, belt drive. Got the Shure magnetic cartridge on the tone arm. Marantz receiver, two hundred watts, driving these bad boys right here, the Bose Five-Oh-Ones.
America - this kind of America - is always cool. It never goes out of date, it's a style, a verbal legerdemain, all flash but real too, right from the 1920s up to three minutes ago. George Pelecanos does it well. And as for this particular novel, it's a slow burner, takes a whole hundred pages to get all the threads started up and get interesting. And in the end it turns out that this no-nonsense tough-talking book has a big ole liberal heart that dances on the very edge of schmaltziness. But that's okay. Talk tough to me some more, George. More guns, more cars, more stereos and kitchen appliances. You know I love it.(less)
The Falls (1980) - not seen it, must see it The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) - brilliant - must see!! A Zed & Two Noughts...moreThis is how it goes so far
The Falls (1980) - not seen it, must see it The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) - brilliant - must see!! A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) - not seen it, must see it The Belly of an Architect (1987, 120 min) - my God, if I ever saw Peter Greenaway in a restaurant I'd run across the room and lunge at his head and bite hard at his nose and not let go, there would be sauvignon rouge and caviar flying all over, Helena Bonhan Carter would be shrieking and dabbing at her ridiculous hair, and when they haul me off, with Greenaway traumatised and part of his nose missing, I'd say - that's for making The Belly of an Architect, what arrant nonsense, sir, arrant! Drowning by Numbers (1988, 118 min) - gave up on this - you can see the early enthusiasm of Draughtsman's Contract was beginning to wear off. It was deadly boring. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989, 124 min) - well, it's got Helen Mirren in it so it's by no means a waste of time, but it is a bit on the wanky side Prospero's Books (1991, 129 min) - this is a laugh riot - this is Shakespeare's Tempest in which a) ALL of the ENTIRE text is spoken by John Gielgud as Prospero; and b) everyone except Gielgus is naked. Okay, laugh riot is an overstatement. It gets a little trying. The Baby of Mâcon (1993, 122 min) - not seen it, must see it The Pillow Book (1996, 126 min) - as Belly of an Architect but much much much more beautiful. Still, as I was saying to Catherine Deneuve and Julie Delpie the other night, fabulous beauty only goes so far. That was after they'd beaten me at chess ten times in a row. 8½ Women (1999, 118 min) - not seen it, must see it The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1-3: (2003) - not seen it, must see it Nightwatching (2007) - not seen it, must see it
So, in sum, he's an interesting systems-obsessed film-maker, quite unique, you should try a couple, expect to hate them. (less)
That's a completely nostalgic four stars of course. Has there been a writer whose reputation has plummeted quite so much between the 70s and now as jo...moreThat's a completely nostalgic four stars of course. Has there been a writer whose reputation has plummeted quite so much between the 70s and now as jolly Jack and his tales of merry misogynism? But like Bob Dylan says
While riding on a train goin’ west I fell asleep for to take my rest I dreamed a dream that made me sad Concerning myself and the first few friends I had
With half-damp eyes I stared to the room Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon Where we together weathered many a storm Laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn
With haunted hearts through the heat and cold We never thought we could ever get old We thought we could sit forever in fun But our chances really was a million to one
As easy it was to tell black from white It was all that easy to tell wrong from right And our choices were few and the thought never hit That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split
Well that was me and my pals. I know where each of them are to this day, but we don't see each other. The choices multiplied and it became no longer easy to tell black from white. Back then we built a whole galaxy of heroes up from wild trips to the art house cinema to quarry Bergman or Pasolini from the granite cliffs of existentialism, or raids on libraries and second hand bookshops when we got to hear first about Kerouac and Kesey, not to mention Tolkien and Mervyn Peake, not to mention Emily Dickinson and Captain Beefheart and folk music and Alan Lomax and Alan Watts and John Fahey and Buffy Sainte-Marie. In those days every discovery hit like an express train and every bookshelf held high explosives. Life is not lived at that intensity for too many years. So forgive me for my four stars for Kerouac, the old bum, the old broke down disgraced beat with his typing not writing and every other reviewer on this site liking to put the boot in, and justified too, really, they're not good books - would I recommed any young person with any marbles to read nearly the whole of Kerouac's pile of typing as I myself did? NO!! Read almost anything BUT Kerouac! But my half damp eyes are staring back to that room. It was on Willow Road in Carlton. You can find it on Google Earth but some other people live there now. (less)
A Bob Dylan fan is browsing in a record shop and on comes Bob over the speakers. The guy says to the sales assistant "Are you a Dyla...moreI liked this one -
A Bob Dylan fan is browsing in a record shop and on comes Bob over the speakers. The guy says to the sales assistant "Are you a Dylan fan too?". Sales assistant says "Huh? It's ten minutes to five, I always put that record on to clear out the shop before I close." (less)
I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried — “La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!”
(In this poem by John Keats La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a symbol of the Internal Revenue Service.)
*
Well, it's an appropriate day to be reviewing The Pale King. Look at today's news headlines, here in the UK. They couldn't be duller!
Plans announced to end confusion over complex domestic fuel tariffs
EU heads agree on new bank supervision rules
Ministers criticise banking regulators over RBS purchase of ABN Amro
Okay! Let's go.
Right there on page one, alright, page 3 actually if you're pedantic, and if you're not pedantic then please stay FAR away from this novel, which is a full-throttle celebration of pedantry, amongst many other things, and doesn't have a plot, which I know many readers hanker for, is this :
invaginate volunteer beans
What a lovely phrase. Come on, let's have a few more – on page 5 :
A staggering girl underhanding you nuts
(that's a description of a stewardess on a very small plane!). Another one, a bit longer :
The birds at dusk and the smell of snapped pine and a younger one's cinnamon gum. The shimmying motions resemble those of a car travelling at high speeds along a bad road, making the Buick's static aspect dreamy and freighted with something like romance or death in the gaze of the girls who squat at the copse's risen edge, appearing dyadic and eyes half again as wideand solemn, watching for the sometime passage of a limb's pale shape past a window (once a bare foot flat against it and itself atremble), moving incrementally forward and down each night in the week before true spring, soundlessly daring one anotherto go get up close to the heaving car and see in, which the only one who finally does sothen sees naught but her own wide eyes reflected as from inside the glass comes a cry she knows too well, which wakes her again each time across the trailer's cardboard wall.
I could copy pages of this stuff out with pleasure, about 25% of the book is like that, but we must get on. Hustle, bustle.
One thing novels do, which they've always done, and it might be not one thing but the thing, is drag in enormous chunks of human experience for our contemplation, to try to make some kind of sense of. They set you behind the eyes of a multiplicity of characters, who usually aren't like ourselves at all except in a you are me and we are all together kind of way, and The Pale King is no exception, it is dragging in the subject of stultifyingly tedious deskwork for our edification, which actually means, since also, there is nothing you could mistake for a plot even if you have really poor eyesight and the characters fade in and out randomly, that The Pale King is more like our own lives than a lot of other novels where you get things actually happening and outcomes and motivations made clear and exciting events like kissing and policemen and all that. We will always need novels because we will always need to compare realities, yours with mine and theirs, and because we need to counteract our own technologically-induced solipsism, which you might say is an odd thing to say, since non-readers think of readers as somewhat on the introverted-solipsistic side, but you are not alone when reading, you are the opposite, you're right inside someone else's thought, an intimate relationship you hardly get anywhere else. What you're reading really is what the author thought.
But otherwise The Pale King does pretty much the opposite of all other novels, it's about all the stuff novelists avoid like the plague, it revels in boring technical jargon, it bathes you in excruciating detail, people say shit like "Here they get standard kicks from Martinsburg, plust ESTs, plus exam requests from CID. They do fats that St Louis doesn't even bother to open they're so fat. They do contract work for Corporate Audit when a CA goes multiyear. The whole thing's almost Phillygrade."
I will be frank – if you take the 25% of this novel which isn't like that, isn't all about the hapless wigglers, is about, instead, the bizarre story of the boy who wished to press his lips to every part of his own body (he begins this task by giving himself a spinal injury), or chapter 8 (early life of Toni Ware), all this other non-IRS stuff, what you have there is the beginning of one of the all time great American novels. But that is not the novel DFW wanted to write. Unfortunately for me! He wanted to write this one, or some approximation thereof, since it's unfinished.
Reading and reviewing TPK is a double problem, the same one posed by the monologues of Spalding Gray (which also revel in run-on sentences and "tornadic" presentation; and both witty brilliant men bursting with life and ideas in their art, and suffering chronic depression in their life and presenting us with this painful conundrum) plus the other one you get from Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone and Dickens' Edwin Drood. You just don't know if some sections were first drafts which he would have fixed. One character, for instance, repeats the phrase "Type of thing" so many times it becomes enraging and puerile. But maybe that was his intended effect. And maybe he would have rewritten that section. Another instance is chapter 46, a 60 page conversation between a devastatingly beautiful woman and a complete dork. To steal a line from that well-known sitcom Friends (!I know!), it's not that this chapter is bad, it's that it's so bad it makes me want to push my finger through my eye into my brain and swirl it around. So yes, there are multiple problems with this document called The Pale King.
If I didn't know that DFW intended his novel to be "a series of set-ups for things to happen but nothing ever happens" (DFW quoted by the editor) then I'd be describing the whole thing as like watching a big beautiful bird with a broken wing making numerous painful attempts to get airborne but always crashing back and trying again. Just when you think the novel has found the take-off point, it stops and reboots.
I only found one single bad review of this novel, in the Washington Post, which was saying its publication was merely a cynical cash-in, and unworthy. I disagree. But I also disagree with the reviewers who find traces of grand themes and big points here. I don't think Wallace got that far. It seems this thing would have needed to be another thousand-pager. It's possible he WAS going to make such points as that government bureaucracy is actually a bastion against chaos and not the enemy it is knee-jerkily scapegoated as; that there was a battle for the soul of the IRS going on in the 1980s; and that this battle was joined by IRS wigglers who had curious and very mild super-powers (two such people are mentioned); or that
Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
And surely we are getting close to some kind of declaration of intent in the following great quote from a substitute lecturer :
I wish to inform you that the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic...gentlemen: here is a truth : enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is...No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth - actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it, no one is interested.
And later, on p 438 :
It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
(Note – I have seen that given as the explanation for Stalin's mysterious ascent in the Bolshevik party. None of the other revolutionaries could be bothered with the bureaucratic grinding involved in actually running the party, but he could – nicknamed Stone-arse for his ability to sit at his desk for hours. He could have been a great wiggler.)
So – this could have been a towering novel but what we actually have is a hotch-potch. There are stretches of insanely tiresome dialogues, there are beautiful vignettes, there is deadpan satire and there are really long sentences. Do I recommend it? Well…. You know, what can I say except
Invaginate volunteer beans!
*****************************************
Some previous notes which can now be ignored.
Half-way!
A Guardian review of TPK said :
. There's a wonderful 100-page monologue in the middle of the book describing a man's quasi-religious awakening from slacker "wastoid" to the high calling of accountancy, after an accidental encounter with a Jesuit teacher. There's a stunning passage about men on a work break: they're just standing outside talking about nothing in particular, but the few pages nail a condition of bleak office-life vacancy with definitive accuracy.
Alas, I didn't find the 100 page monologue wonderful (except for little tiny bits) or the work break chapter stunning. What I did find is that our author by the use of multi-layered irony is able to have his cake and eat it too. In the 100 page monologue the at-that-point unnamed Chris Fogle grinds on and on about several tedious topics in awful and improbable detail (unless he's the reincarnantion of Funes the Memorious, which maybe he is) - his father's dress sense, his recreational drug intake, blah blah - all punctuated with the phrase "I'm not sure I'm explaining this very well" at frequent intervals. His locutions are clumsy, no raconteur is he, a depressing kind of guy with an autistic-spectrum tendency to geek out for pages and pages about IRS procedures and other similar stuff. Then, in the next but one chapter, the fake David Foster Wallace pops up in the by now not unexpected post-modern way and complains about the previous chapter!
I'm not going to be one of those memoirists who pretends to remember every last fact and thing in photorealist detail. The human mind doesn't work that way and everybody knows it...At the same time I'm not going to waste time noodling about every last gap and imprecision in my own memory, a prime cautionary example of which is "Irrelevant" Chris Fogle's vocational soliloquy
"DFW" then calls Chris Fogle a "maundering grandstander" and I'd have to agree with that.
It's not by any means all grim, of course, but the bits where I'm perking up and exclaiming "wow this guy can really write" are few and far between.
**************
First 100 pages - progress report !
I'm getting the very strong impression that DFW was a writer of immense gifts and brains who never really found his thing, his field, whatever you call it, so he ended up writing about any thing he happened to trip over (the non fiction) and then two giant anti-novels - this one's acknowledged "subject" is dull jobs which is a kind of admission of defeat which he then turns into a demonstration of virtuosity - look, I can even write great stuff about boredom. But this can also look like flailing about - this is called a(n unfinished) novel by default, because it's not anything else particularly; but so far it's actually a collection of disconnected DFW writings, some of which are about the IRS and some not. Every chapter in this book so far is in a different style, a different tangent, like a collection of unrelated short stories or riffs. So far it's different and not too difficult. Interestingly, the hardest chapter was far and away the best.
Maybe the rest of the book will tie all this disparateness together but since it was unfinished I'm thinking not. But we will see!
(My cat just poked his head round my monitor and looked at me with an expression which said "are you sure about all this?" No, Hatter, i'm not!
***
Smites brow, emits blasphemy - I just realised I have my own IRS story although as I'm English my run-in is with HM (=Her Majesty's) Revenue & Customs.
PB's STUPID STORY
18 months ago I noticed mysterious amounts were appearing in my current account. Regularly. Every week! They came from the tax office and they were tax credits. I hadn't applied for any tax credits. So I phoned them up. They said "We can't stop it unless we know what account these monies SHOULD be paid into and we won't know that until someone complains." I said well, what are you going to do? they said, we'll be in touch. So - last month I got a letter through the post saying oh, remember all that dough we paid you by mistake, well now we want it back. Total of money paid to me which shouldn't have been : £4026 ($6493).
Well it wasn't my money so i hadn't spent it so I can pay it back but you know, I'm a little peeved with their casual maladministrative ways and who's to know that if I send the idiots a cheque they might lose it or cash it and stick it in the wrong account.
**********
MY UNFINISHED SYMPATHY
Am I really doing this? I feel like a boxer in his corner being checked over by my trainer, checking my mouthguard, checking my gloves, checking if I feel okay – do you feel okay? Yeah boss – are you gonna get this bastard? Yeah boss – well lemme hear you say it – yeah boss YEAH BOSS – that's better, what are you gonna do to this sucker? I'm gonna read it, boss, READ IT – yeah, that's right, you's the champ you know that – yeah boss
Well in spite of my previous run-ins with this much-loved author I do feel all right about The Pale King because
a) as I understand it, it's about really crushingly tedious jobs, so that sounds like something I can relate to on a hormonal level because my job is crunching and titivating databases for clinical trials and dealing with frazzled/frantic nurses on the phone, most of whom have English as their second language, who are calling up because our fucking IVR system has broken again and they have 10 patients waiting very impatiently for it to start working again so they can get their meds and get out the clinic door to their actual jobs, though bless them they don't say exactly that; so it's a job that marries extreme dullness with extreme anxiety – just like the IRS
b) I peeked at the opening sentence and it was astonishingly lovely, that's a very good sign
c) I just read a blistering attack on DFW by none other than BEE, yeah Mr Easton Ellis; so that kind of inspired me on the principal that my enemy's enemy is my friend
d) it's unfinished – so that at the end of it I can say "well, clearly, he didn't have time to cement everything in place so there are many incoherencies here and frankly it's all a bit incomprehensible and I couldn't make head nor tail of it but that's not because of me, no, it's because it's unfinished, see?"
22 April 1965. Lizzie Donahue (friend of the band) :
I went to a recording session for the first album...moreDavid Crosby sounds like a very annoying person.
22 April 1965. Lizzie Donahue (friend of the band) :
I went to a recording session for the first album and it was clear that david Crosby wasn't getting along with Jim Dickson [producer]. Jim had David on the floor and he was choking him.
4th October 1965. Terry Melcher (producer) :
Michael Clarke left his drums, walked over to Crosby and smashed him in the mouth. He literally knocked him off his stool and said "I've wanted to do that for a long time."
October 1967. David is fired. Jim Dickson :
David hated being a Byrd. He wanted to be a Buffalo Springfield, a Jefferson Airplane or a Door.
Jumping on 20 years, I read that in the 1980s when he toured his band refused to stay at the same hotel as him as they were convinced he'd eventually burn the place down. This was because he had a habit of zonking out in the middle of smoking crack. Like Keith Richard, he appears to be completely unkillable.
**
I also liked this quote :
6 May 1966. Jim McGuinn on the sound effects on "The Lear Jet Song" :
It was not a vacuum cleaner. It was a Lear jet. I really resent the fact that some people think it was a vacuum cleaner.
I found this little book in my loft, didn't realise I had it. Remarkable what I find there sometimes. Perhaps books spontaneously generate up there. I...moreI found this little book in my loft, didn't realise I had it. Remarkable what I find there sometimes. Perhaps books spontaneously generate up there. It is a mysterious space. For me there are three English artists who were without a doubt graced or cursed by some kind of mysticism, there was William Blake, everyone knows him, there was Stanley Spencer, with his visions of the Resurrection in Cookham, Surrey (various frumpy middle aged types clambering out of their graves and tut tutting about it), and there was Samuel palmer who I think is the least known
He did scenes of rural England in which sheep feature quite often and which seem to me to be very like the Eden we were all thrown out of by an angry Landlord some time ago.
The guy had talent but reading his stuff is like being locked up in that Hansel and Gretel house made of confectionery. You get to feeling ill. In fac...moreThe guy had talent but reading his stuff is like being locked up in that Hansel and Gretel house made of confectionery. You get to feeling ill. In fact you need a bucket quite soon. There should be a Marathon Keats Reading Competition to see who can read the most pages of the Complete Poems without losing their lunch. I bet if Keats had been around in the 1970s he'd have been a Genesis fan - and then a Peter Gabriel fan! I can imagine him earnestly glomming onto "Selling England By The Pound" or some such prog rock shite on his Keatsian headphones (ordinary headphones garlanded with anemones). And he would have wanted to write the lyrics for the next one. Yes, that's right, he would have been a lyricist for a prog band - like Yes or Marillion or Van Der Graaf Generator! Ha ha ha! Tough luck, John, you missed a really modest career as a prog rock lyricist. The girls would have loved your soft curls and your early death would have gone down a treat.
This is a great little book about an English guy studying the Fulani people in Cameroon and getting drawn into their complex lives. The humour is spot...moreThis is a great little book about an English guy studying the Fulani people in Cameroon and getting drawn into their complex lives. The humour is spot on, self-deprecating of course (he's English) and warm. Here's one of my favourite bits. Please note - animist religion isn't always the most politically correct thing. Neither is any religion for that matter. Just saying!
The circumcision-of-the-bow ceremony is just one of the complex rites by which a man moves from being a dead individual to being an ancestor available for reincarnation. ... The ritual involves the men running around naked except for penis sheaths and ends in a little play that all men can witness. It deals with the origin of circumcision in the beating of an old Fulani woman. She is played by one of the men, old, decrepit, excessively cantankerous and timorous. He dresses up in the bulky leaves favoured by old ladies and makes great play with bending down in such a way as to expose his genitals. This is hugely enjoyed by all the men present.
The highpoint involves the ambush of the woman by men who crouch down with sticks. All this has to happen under a special tree challed a Fulani Thorn. But sometimes there is no Fulani Thorn available and the tree must be played by a human actor. This part was assigned to myself.
Since the tree-actor is permitted only a penis-sheath as garb and has to wear certain branches of the unpleasantly thorny Fulani tree as a concession to naturalism, it is perhaps not a popular role. All the men sat around afterwards smoking and drinking warm beer. There was some discussion as to who should spit on the widows of the dead man, so releasing them for remarriage.
I see this book now seems to be out of print, in a world where bookshops are groaning with shelf-fulls of Twilight, The Da Vinci Code, The Slap, 50 Shades of Self-Loathing and all the usual nonsense. The world is what it is. I don't have to like it much.(less)
I love the slightly tipsy green mummy on the cover. He's saying "Er...yeah...ah...what was the question?"
I would like to write a whole thing on the Pa...moreI love the slightly tipsy green mummy on the cover. He's saying "Er...yeah...ah...what was the question?"
I would like to write a whole thing on the Pan Books of Horror Stories, all of them, which thrilled and gurgled my very brains and spinal fluids when I was the merest of boys. But certain people may find the material a little distasteful.
What a glorious gallimaufry of Grand Guignol it all was though.
For anyone thinking of reading this slender novel by such a reknowned writer I say ... devote your time instead to this little movie from 1974 which t...moreFor anyone thinking of reading this slender novel by such a reknowned writer I say ... devote your time instead to this little movie from 1974 which takes the same theme but pushes it to the VERY LIMIT
That's what Doris Lessing SHOULD have written.
Note : prospective parents may be advised to steer clear.(less)
I guess Mick Jagger was born irritating. He's like the cocky leery pestilential tosser at school who goes out with all the girls you wanted to but did...moreI guess Mick Jagger was born irritating. He's like the cocky leery pestilential tosser at school who goes out with all the girls you wanted to but didn't, never does any revision, is hated by all the teachers and gets jussst enough A levels to go to university where he continues to go out with all the girls you wanted to, never does any revision, is hated by all the lecturers for his insolence and hated by all the earnest political types for his frivolous condescending attitude, does no revision, attends very few lectures and jusssst manages to get himself a very moderate degree but who cares because with a bunch of very ugly friends he's formed a band which has already begun to eat the whole of the Western world, including all the girls and all the drugs.
Also, he is possibly - no, probably - the very absolute worst singer ever to sell a great number of records, worse than Donny Osmond, worse than Madonna, worse than Mark Knopfler, his voice thin, sneery, unsoulful, embarrassingly fake-Deep South, fake-black, an unconvincing 15 year old with a Wilson Pickett fixation, a pimply boy trying to come on strong. So hideous when compared with Lennon or McCartney or Daltrey or Ray Davies, none of whom felt the need to pretend to come from Mississippi. Mick Jagger was the last minstrel, a grotesque white English boy version of a black man, a caricature, flapping his private parts about on a giant stage made entirely out of his own ego. Everything stolen from James Brown down to the last mince. But of course, he was the singer in the Rolling Stones, so he didn't have to revise any more. And for the next 40 years he pouted and sashayed and wiggled his ass all over the world.
But actually, I'm a fan.
What an embarrassment of riches British popular music in the 60s was, when the Stones with their fantastic string of singles from Come On to Brown Sugar were probably about the third or fourth best band around, after the Beatles, the Kinks and the Who. Starting with some powerful covers (Berry, Holly, even Lennon/McCartney) and then figuring out how the songwriting trick was done, and then for a while becoming brilliant and experimental songwriters at that, all their early singles are great, not one dud. There's some spot-on social satire (19th Nervous Breakdown, Out of Time, Mother's Little Helper, Get off of my Cloud), some flowery pyschedelical beauties (2000 Light Years, She's a Rainbow, Dandelion, Ruby Tuesday), some real achy breaky ballads (Wild Horses, As Tears Go By), political songs, drug songs, blues (Little Red Rooster, Love in Vain, not bad at all) stupid songs about nothing at all (Jumping Jack Flash, Honky Tonk Women) and of course some big fat anthems (Satisfaction, You can't always get what you want, Midnight Rambler). They flirted with everything going in the 60s and they did it with imagination and wit and melody and power, which is the best pop music has to offer. And so I forgive them for all the unexciting rifftastic rigmarole that the wind-up zombie Stones perpetrated on the tickle-my-happy-spot Western world for the next three decades. It doesn't matter. We have Paint It Black.
The subtitle of this heavenly concoction is: A celebration of American pop culture at its most joyfully outrageous.
This is not so much a book as an as...moreThe subtitle of this heavenly concoction is: A celebration of American pop culture at its most joyfully outrageous.
This is not so much a book as an aspirin to banish gloom. Of course, America marches on and this book needs a major update to include such modern phenomena as Celebrity Rehab and Autobiographies by People who Aren't 25 Yet - still, it's a wonderful panorama of some truly ghastly shit. For instance
Aerosol cheese Boudoir photography (That special present for that special someone) Breasts, enormous (Can't mock Americans for that, we have this fetish over here too, but I liked that there was a page called "Breasts, enormous") Death cars Fingernail extremism ( I see that creeping in here - now there are entire salons springing up just for nails with slogans like "rake his back and make him howl with these razorsharp bejewelled babies" - no, I made that up. But nearly) Liberace (So many facelifts he couldn't shut his mouth) Meat snack foods
"Modern Americans buy meat snack food in shrink-fit plastic packages at the convenience store. They call the snacks Slim Jim, Chubby Sausage, the Big Jerk — manufacturers' words for sorbitol, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, monosodium glutamate, corn syrup, and lactic acid starter culture combined with chunked, ground, and formed beef and mechanically deboned poultry. The term "meat snack," like "cheese food" and "creme filling," is food-industry poetry, used to evoke thoughts of meat (or cheese or cream) about products that contain little or none of the substance in question."
- this quote should be written into the Constitution or something like that. Genius!
Mood rings Perky nuns Pet clothing Reclining chairs Waltzing waters Tammy Faye Bakker (Didja ever see a documentary called "The Eyes of Tammy Faye Bakker"? It's a bug-eyed must-see. The stuff that poor woman went through.) Baton twirling Children's names (Which have got immeasurably worse since this book came out - my daughter went to school with Bracken, Angel and DeQuayne) Cool Whip Dinosaur Parks Lawn ornaments Panty-hose Crafts Shag Rugs Sno-Globes (yes!) Unicorns and rainbows Velvet paintings White lipstick
Big disappointment. This is all about an Ethiopian refugee who's now been in Washington DC for 17 years and runs a grocery store in a poor neighbourho...moreBig disappointment. This is all about an Ethiopian refugee who's now been in Washington DC for 17 years and runs a grocery store in a poor neighbourhood. Now the author must know whereof he speaks, but I could hardly believe the picture he painted. In 17 years, we are to understand that Sepha, our immigrant, has made precisely two friends. And these two friends have only made two friends - each other. And none of these three immigrant friends have got married or had any long term relationships. Really? Their lives have been lived in a state of suspended animation otherwise known as mild coma, life as it is lived when you can't find the remote control. I may be as far as it is possible from being an Ethiopian immigrant, but I could not believe this stuff. The other thing is that this novel is relentlessly downbeat. You scour the pages for an echo of an upbeat - oh, was that one? Nah. Everything goes from bad to worse. If a little sprig of hope grows up (as in the lovely friendship between Sepha and his neighbour's daughter) you can be sure it will be squashed without mercy a few pages down the line. Eventually - well, actually quite quickly - this novel wears out its welcome. Sepha is such a refined, Dostoievsky-munching languid deadbeat. He can't be arsed to open up his shop most of the time. He lets everything fall into graceless decay, and that's okay by him because - well, because of the ghastly trauma suffered back in Addis Ababa when his father was shot as an imperialist lackey. That's bad all right, and it might be enough to paralyse the son's life. So okay, make this guy a minor character in some other Ethiopian immigrant's story, instead of making us wade through 228 pages of moping about.(less)
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