Tim Newton Anderson's Blog, page 2

The Genius of the Bonzos

I’ve just finished reading Yvonne Innes’ Dip My Brain in Joy – her biography of her husband Neil Innes. It is a beautiful and moving tribute to a music and comedy genius who we lost far too young.

I saw Neil perform several times – twice as part of GRIMMS, once solo at the Edinburgh Festival, and twice in the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s reunion concerts. I have always regretted being too young to see the original incarnation of the Bonzos in their regular performances in South Shields, but have loved their music since my teens and The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse was one of the first LPs I bought.

I’ve also read Ki Longfellow’s lavishly illustrated biography of Viv Stanshall. While both books pay tribute to the genius performers behind the Bonzos, and so many more projects, I love Yvonne Innes’ book more. While I would have been a total fanboy meeting Stanshall, Neil Innes is a person I would have treasured as a friend. Stanshall was always larger than life, but Innes was a person who radiated life as it should be lived. Both partners detail the challenges in living with someone who was driven to create and perform, but Yvonne Innes also gives us an insight into the radiant joy of being married to Neil, from meeting as students in London, to going through life’s challenges and triumphs together with the love of your life.

Neither man got the fortune they deserved. In Stanshall’s case there was a degree of self sabotage, but Neil was ripped off by the music industry and misfortune. Having your songs reattributed by a greedy corporation was finacially damaging, but then having a friend and collaborator (Eric Idle) also prevent Neil getting the full rewards from writing the Rutles music and the songs in Spamalot must have been even worse. However Yvonne says Neil got over both dissapointments and continue to live a life that as the tilte suggests was dipped in joy.

Having lost my amazing wife Jules last year, the sense of loss of a loved partner in the book was hard to read. That sense that they are just around the corner and will walk back in soon is enormously hard and although the love and tributes from friends and the people whose lives they have touched with magic is heartening, it hardly touches the sides of the personal loss.

Dip My Brain in Joy is a brave book and anyone who loves Neil’s music will be left wishing he was still here and missing his wonderful talent and the joy he shared.

More acceptances

I’ve slowed down my production of stories over the last few months, but still managed to get a few stories placed in upcoming anthologies

I have two stories coming out in the final four volumes of David Marcum’s New Sherlock Holmes stories. The Phantom of the Operetta and The Second Strand will be appearing in this brilliant series. It is sad to see it coming to an end, but I will be at Conan Doyle’s former home in May for the launch party/celebration which should be an amazing capstone to the work of David and Steve Emecz at MX Publishing .  

The series has raised a fabulous  amount of money for the special needs school that now operates in Undershaw and another of my stories is in an anthology contributing to the support of street animals in Kolkata in India – Dream House in Haunted Haus  by Culture Cult.

Other collections including work by me should be appearing soon. The Mathematics of Murder is in Typo 10. I have been honoured to have a number of stories appear in Typo and other collections from Black Scat Books and I hope to continue to contribute to works by this wonderful publisher whose catalogue is a cornucopia of delights.

Other stories coming up later in the year are The Goldfish in Creature Features from Hellbound Books, The Book of the Beast in Black Sheep from the Dark Horses stable of anthologies and Death of a Clown in Midnight Menagerie.

Dream House

Dream House

I have just had another story published – Dream House in Culture Cult’s anthology Haunted Haus.

Like most people ( I suspect), the places I visit in dreams are an amalgam of buildings and cities I’ve visited, blended together and transmogrified by the surreal logic of our unconscious. I wondered what we would dream of if our real homes had been a place of nightmare because of domestic abuse. Would the house of our dreams be a refuge?

New Publications

I’m a bit behind in detailing the stories I have in anthologies – I have now placed 60 in various places.

The latest stories to appear are:

Dying of the Light – a story of the stage medium sleuth Beryl Crystal which my late wife Jules and I developed together. This is in Crime Wave by Dragon Soul Press.The Ghost of a Christmas Present – another story of Beryl and her assistant Charles who is haunted by the spirit of his dead partner. Published in A Winter Kiss, also by Dragon Soul Press. A story of Beryl on her own – The Vanishing Customer – is in an anthology by Suffolk Libraries available to download.The Bull Nose Pistol in Alone On The Borderland edited by the wonderful John Linwood Grant and published by Belanger Books.The Georgian Dragon – in the wonderful MX series of anthologies of new Sherlock Holmes Stories  edited by David Marcum. This story is in volume XLVII . I have two further stories accepted by David which will be in the last two volumes in the series.A couple of pieces in the amazing Typo  series produced by Black Scat Press and edited by Norman Conquest. M is for… is in Typo 8 and the Mexico’s Surrealist Angels is in number 5.The Garden in the Glade is in the 2024 edition of Eternal Haunted Summer .  This is the second piece of mine in this splendid series – both set in my imaginary Fenland village of Great Marshway. There is another story set in the same location which has just been accepted for Midnight Menagerie which is coming out next year from Carol Hightshoe at Wolfsinger Publications. They published my earlier Great Marshway story The Witch Bottle in their Borne in the Blood anthology.

Le Flaneur

I’ve been reading several books which have the concept of the Flaneur at their core.

The concept of the Flaneur – someone wandering through a city and getting artistic inspiration from the small things observed – was developed by Baudelaire. It was then enthusiastically taken up by the Surrealists and works like Aragon’s Paris Peasant and Breton’s Nadja were inspired by it. I have recently read Philippe Soupalt’s Last Nights of Paris shares a similar inspiration, as well as the works of some of the Paris based American expatriate writers.

The other book I read was Vitezslaw Nezval’s A Prague Flaneur. While the first part of the book gets a bit bogged down in his disagreement with his friend Breton’s position on Stalin’s regime in Russia and different definitions of Surrealism, the second half is a beautiful paen to Prague on the eve of the Nazi invasion which Nezval believed would destroy the city he loved.

Both books are essential reading for those who love the Surrealists.

I have also been reading some books of particular maps including Adam Dent’s brilliant Maps of London and Beyond. Dent – a fellow member of the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics – has created a book which is a work of art exploring London and more. His intensely detailed art work shows parts of the capital – especially Spitalfields around his studio – which explore their history and characters. Any of his works are worth exploring, but I particularly love this.

I have also found second hand copies of some other Books including the Atlas of Paranormal places, the Atlas of Literature and Following the Detectives, which maps the locations of classic crime stories including Sherlock Holmes London and Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco. All worth seeking out and worthy additions to my shelves along with the superb Curiocity on London and atlases of other places in fiction.

Julie

As some of you who are friends with me on Facebook (my personal page as Tim Anderson or my writer one as Tim Newton Anderson), my beautiful talented wife Julie died last month. She was the love of my life, my rock and my partner in crime. The floods of comments on Jules original post about her illness and then my announcement of her death proved what I knew but she didn’t always believe, that many many people from all periods of her life saw her energy, love, talent and empathy and she touched many lives deeply, some she had only known for days or hours rather than years.

Even after a couple of weeks – and a couple of horrible months after the femoral artery bypass failed and the doctors could not get the infection that killed her under control – it is hard to believe she is gone. The medical staff at the hospital and those who cared for her when we managed to get her home to die surrounded by the people who loved her were equally shocked by both the fact she was dying and how amazingly well she coped with it. Helping people die a good death, and helping friends and relatives through the process of grief, was one of her passions, and the light she brought into a room up until her final peaceful passing was a testament to that.

Jules always said she was Marmite – you loved her or hated her – and there were those who couldn’t cope with her honesty, enthusiasm, and fierce love. Their lives will be the poorer for it, and those who loved her will miss her with all of their hearts but be consoled by having known the force of nature that was Jules – McLoughlin, Anderson or Maxine to those who knew her as an actress, comedian, singer and independent celebrant.

In one sense it is not hard to carry on. That is what Jules would want us to do, and her sister Donna, our son Phil, Donna’s husband Chris, Reggie the dog, and I will do that – giving and drawing strength and love from each other. But there is an empty space and a gap whenever we look to the chair she sat in, want a loving ear to listen to us and a wise mouth to tell us what to do, and an ache every time we watch, read or do something Jules loved because we are not sharing it with her.

Every day with Jules was an adventure – some bigger than others, like getting caught in a riot on our second date in Paris, or nearly getting arrested twice in Cuba on our honeymoon. After the challenges of running a pub nearly broke us physically and financially we still became stronger as a couple and were able to appreciate the good times we had and the people we met even though it was one of the hardest times of our marriage. It made us evaluate what we really wanted to do so Jules started acting and me writing which led to a one person Edinburgh show and filming Our Town and various projects with Aturn films. For me it meant becoming a published author and I will be working to get more published of Beryl Crystal – the character Jules and I created for her. One story is already published in an anthology Crime Wave by Dragon Soul Press and there is a novel, stage play, murder mystery evening, TV series pilot and outlines for future episodes written ready to go. The tragedy is that the ideal Beryl will not be able to play her.

There is a tribute to Jules on the Our Town Great Yarmouth youtube channel and googling Jules Maxine will show you more of her work and talent. She was so much to so many people but to me she was simply everything.

Publishers of the Damned

I have just been updating the catalogue of my ‘Pataphysics/avant garde related books and found it interesting to see who they were published by.  

Many were published by small firms or university press who produced one book of an author I’m interested in, but no more. However some publishers seem to have a very similar taste to mine.

The largest publisher of books in my collection is Atlas, especially if you include all they published through the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics. I have 41 Atlas titles and just short of 100 books, pamphlets and assorted other things (including DVDs) by the LIP.

Ignoring the big publishers like Penguin and Picador the next largest are Dedalus with 16, Wakefield with 11, then Black Scat and Dalkey Archive with 9 each. However the Black Scat number goes well into double figures if you include the electronic versions of Typo and other publications of theirs in which I have a story. It goes without saying that their taste and mine overlap considerably, and their work bringing Alphonse Allais into translation for the Anglophone market is brilliant.

The Dedalus books are mostly (a) novels by LIP member the late Robert Irwin and themed anthologies. However their catalogue contains some great translations and original novels which are worth seeking out.

Wakefield, like Atlas, seems to have taste close to my own. Amongst their recent publications are Boris Vian’s two earliest novels and their catalogue includes a number of other writers associated with ‘Pataphysics or Surrealism.

Dalkey Archive (named, of course, after a novel by the great Flann O’Brien) have been active for a number of years in making foreign (to the US) books available and it would be surprising if you couldn’t find something in their catalogue you liked. They modelled themselves on New Directions Press, of whose catalogue I have four titles.

And speaking of an earlier generation of publishers of the avant garde, I have four titles by John Calder, five by Peter Owen, and five by Methuen. Up and coming publishers with titles worth out in addition to Black Scat and Wakefield include Snuggly (with many decadent and symbolist titles translated by the late Brian Stableford) and the short lived Tam Tam books who made four Vian titles available in translation.

The Lark of the Irish

Many of my favourite writers are Irish. James Joyce, Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, Flann O’Brien, Spike Milligan, Lord Dunsany, and James Stephens. I had hoped that Dara Kavanagh’s Jabberwock would add another to this panoply.

Jabberwock is undoubtedly very clever and often very funny. It references and has absorbed the tradition of many of the writers I love in a complex plot to undermine the English language by false friends and fake news in the early stages of the second world war. Plus lots of references to Lewis Carroll – especially Through the Looking Glass. As well as the plans of Goebbels there is a conspiracy by the mysterious Ouroboros group and secret shenanigans that sometimes resemble one of my other favourite books – The Man Who Was Thursday – and Vian’s romp Trouble in the Swaths. There is also a postmodern examination of the nature of language and signs that resembles Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.

What it doesn’t have to the same extent as my other Hibernian favourites is fun. The jokes elicit smiles rather than guffaws and the plot never really takes off for me, possibly because the protagonist moves through the events without being moved by them.

That doesn’t mean I think it is not worth reading – far from it. Kavanagh writes very well, just not as well as my heroes.

Write or Wrong

I’ve just finished reading Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling, which I would recommend to both writers and those interested in the mind.

Storr uses neuroscience to suggest that the structure of stories is hardwired into our brains and one of the things that gave us an evolutionary advantage. Being able to not just impart information, but ascribe meaning, meant we were able to function more efficiently in tribes.

Those of us who have read Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces and have some familiarity with mind science will recognise a lot of what Storr says. However, the criticism of Campbell for being Euro/anglo centric also applies a bit to Storr. He does differentiate between the western story – based on character and plot arc – and the eastern story – based on the harmony of the theme and form. What he doesn’t do is question what impact (if any) neurodivergence has on reading and writing stories, or explore story in other cultures.

If we accept nurture as well as nature has a role in developing how our minds work in our formative years, then I believe the society we live in has a role in how we relate to stories. As story telling is so fundamental to social interaction, there must be a feedback loop between the structure of story common to a society and the type of story people living in it accept as relevant. The basic structure of our brain, and the interplay of different parts of it in making up our “mind” will play a large part in this, but not the only part and I would have liked some more investigation into different influences.

That does not take away from its success as a fascinating read which writers would do well to heed, if not follow slavishly. It is often fiction which subverts rules that I love the most.

Boris the Writer

My tribute to Boris Vian has now appeared as part of an ultra limited edition publication by https://raphuspress.weebly.com/.

There’s No Way To Escape (https://raphuspress.weebly.com/theres-no-way-to-escape.html) is the latest publication by the wonderful Al Dinez od Raphus Press (https://www.facebook.com/RaphusPress) has writing by Damian Murphy, Rhys Hughes, Maxim Jakubowski, and Jonathan Wood as well as myself.

I deliberately didn’t attempt to emulate Vian’s style – who could – but included some of his passions such as Jazz and the post war St Germain culture including his friendship with the person I named Jean Paul Georges (Ringo to his friends).

I have also recently finished reading Wakefield Press’ latest Via translation Trouble in the Swaths. This surreal romp is Vian’s first novel, although it was not published until 1966 – seven years after his death. It was written for the amusement of family and friends during the occupation of Paris but has all of the typical Vian humour and inventiveness. Terry Bradford has done a splendid job on the translation of an untranslateable author.