Come On Up To The House

I’ve just finished rereading The Trial (Douglas Scott’s translation, pretty good), and was struck more than when I read it first (to be fair, a 14 year old won’t get a lot from Kafka). I recognise so much more these days, the endless bureaucracy where deeper and deeper levels of red-tape are included seemingly just for the sake of it. Kafka was pretty prescient - having been inducted, without any desire in that direction, briefly into the world of management and budgets, I sympathise with Josef K - I wonder just how many people in my (or any) workplace have very little idea of what they’re doing most of the time.

I know that’s true for me, stupid finances. My replacement for this temporary bit starts Monday, thank goodness. I can’t take much more of this, my head might explode. Or, I might find myself led off by two kindly, acquiescent ushers… but I spoil.

Next up, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which seems to me like an Umberto Eco for the xkcd generation. Sweet.

It has forgotten art’s lofty mission: instead of raising the crowd to its level, it has lowered itself to the crowd’s.

So says Honoré de Balzac, referring to the populist nature of the Italian music contemporary to the looming titular character in his Gambara. It’s an interesting sentiment, and one which I can well see defining the age-old question: what is art?

I like that it’s referring to music, for a start. This is something I can get my teeth into. And it segues nicely from the preceding Unknown Masterpiece in my edition, apparently Balzac’s desire. Both deal with the private madness and obsession of art, with perspective and opinion as central themes. I love the way that the mission of art is described here, not to dumb itself down to meet the simple tastes of the great unwashed proletariat, but to raise their level of expectation higher, to improve them. Art should make people better, should make them more aware and give them more desire to grow and become better.

Such was Balzac’s opinion, or at least that of Count Andrea Marcosini. And I’m inclined to agree. Art, in all it’s forms, should not be lowest common denominator. Though those in the book conducting this conversation were derided, sometimes I think it’s acceptable to take a subjective, hardline approach to this sort of thing. Music that is made to appeal to as large a demographic as possible is barely music any longer - that’s why X-Factor, American Idol et al, while entertaining, are essentially pointless. Music doesn’t have to be elite: witness deep southern soul, the music of the people (as Joey ‘The Lips’ Fagan would probably have it), but it’s still wracked with emotion, with no edges shorn off to prevent certain subgroups getting upset.

Music shouldn’t be made for an elite, either, that’s just as bad as trying to appeal to any market area. Music should be made for its own sake, never dumbed-down or diluted, it is what it is and you have to make yourself better to appreciate it. I guess in essence that’s why hardcore music fans inevitably narrow their outlook so far that they can dismiss great things because they are more interested in searching out the better and the best, the Platonic ideal in their own chosen sphere. And that’s fine. It’s great. Art was never meant for the morons, the morons were meant to attain to the art, and that’s where the best work succeeds, and why I remain happily committed to slating sell-outs and frauds and Simon Cowell and faceless suits who churn out vacuous sounds for vacuous minds. I’m happy to remain pretentious, aloof and proud of the music I listen to, just like Marcosini, just like Gambara, just like Balzac.

This morning in Russell Park there was a man in a stripey jumper doing some sort of self-motivated circuit training. It involved moving from the (childrens’) still rings to the nearest bench for some push-ups, then slouching to the next bench for some sit-ups, and so on. Mad dogs and Englishman go out on a rainy April morning, it’s said, and even the dogs were staying tucked up today. Who can fathom the mind of the fitness enthusiast?

My Polish lessons have been cancelled. Sigh. On the other hand, this does mean that I now don’t have to choose between learning Polish and watching Nick Cave next week, nor do I now have to miss the Apprentice. Life ain’t all bad.

I finally finished the epic Foucault’s Pendulum. Even compared to The Name Of The Rose, this is a huge, headrush of a book - to try and take it all in in one reading would be equivalent to trying to read everything that’s there in the Bible or the Koran, or as Diotallevi would have it, to rewriting the Torah. Umberto Eco’s a big fan of intertextuality, the concept that all texts, writings and literary works have an influence and effect on each other. That’s patently true in Foucault’s Pendulum, which itself references a number of texts (as a novel based mostly in a publishing house should), but is also heavily influenced by many writings and ideas and concepts. It’s the way Eco draws these things together into an accessible whole which is the really impressive thing to me - like Four Tet does with electronica, or Mogwai do with post-rock, Eco takes an inherently complicated and overwrought subject matter and distils it with art, dexterity and on top of it all, a really great sense of what makes a thriller thrilling.

Next up: The Wasp Factory. I’ve managed to not read any Iain Banks up til now, for some reason. We’ll see if that’s justified. So far, it’s a little bit like the end of And The Ass Saw The Angel, but that might just be the animals on sticks.

Also new: I finally got around to visiting Fashionable Wood Green’s newest attraction, a gin-u-wine nice, independent bookshop. In Wood Green! Pretty exciting. And it’s great, which is a relief. The Big Green Bookshop is, well, not exactly big, and it’s a bit green, but it’s definitely a bookshop, and a good one at that. It has the following things which rate it highly in my book:

• a coffee machine
• A goodly selection of literature (interestingly classics and poetry and everything mixed in with fiction, which is unusual…)
• An ace ‘multicultural’ section - it gives the shop a real local feel in general
• Recommended read cards, handwritten
• Book of the month/reading group-esque promotions
• Paper bags with an actual inkstamp on (this I like)
• Finally, my lovely new collection of Dostoevsky short stories which I may well tackle after I’ve broken my head getting through Foucault’s Pendulum.

These all make a nice addition to Wood Green, and makes me all the happier to be living in this part of town. You may look down on us, but now we have a bookshop and two (count ‘em) cinemas! It beats huge swathes of South London, that’s for certain.

Modern culture contains curious proportionalities and unexpected corrolations. The incidence of reading Dave Eggers novels is directly proportional to the wordiness and/or purgative, soliloquative nature of one’s blogging. Also related, listening to Morrissey’s Bona Drag is directly proportional to the once-impossible desire to actually return to the likes of Sheerness-on-sea. Who could have imagined such a thing?

Eggers’ self-confessional, inner-monologue style really threw me when reading A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius - it’s autobiographical, right? Or is it? I think some sort of bizarre mixture of fact and fiction, carefully treading a line between wistful, genuine beauty and family-alienating, ugly truth. You Shall Know Our Velocity is entirely fictional, but the protagonist’s internal wranglings have a real ring of authenticity about them, in the same way as, say, Nick Hornby’s oft-lovelorn, mostly scarily recognisable prose.

It lends itself well to blogging, this gushing, pouring, near stream-of-consciousness approach.

My day so far seems to have been dominated by Christmas pudding. The one on my desk, as discussed yesterday, left from a Christmas hamper, was consumed by myself and my colleague this morning - no spoons, no custard, no cream, but it wasn’t not worth it.

That came after spending my commute delving into Peter Carey’s Oscar And Lucinda. It’s a richly written book, so far, and I’m looking forward to it. It’s based around the concepts put forward in Edmund Gosse’s Father & Son, which I read a while ago and thoroughly enjoyed: both writers have a sound grasp of the written language and a distinct knack with a well-turned phrase. The book so far revolves around a similarly Devonian childhood gripped with religion and botany, so the similarities are plain, but this can only be expected to diverge from here on in.

As my desk is now tidy of both pudding and paté, my attention turns to actually doing some work, in this case VLE-based fun with Moodle. This’ll mean something to the pitiable fools in my line of work, but thankfully to noone else. I say work, what I actually mean is I’ll be rehearsing some basic Polish in advance of my course starting in April. So all together now: Czy Pan mówi po angielsku?

I thought I’d end the week in generous mood, so here’s mp3s of a couple of things I’ve been listening to this week. Although, at the moment I can’t tell you what they sound like because I’m a little distracted by Oscar Cash’s Casio-demonstration-button styled cover of the Klaxons’ Golden Skans courtesy of Dalston Oxfam Shop’s Durrr podcast. Very odd. Coming up in a mo, Foals, who I’m now more inclined to be kind towards given Yannis Whatsisface’s respectable turn on Never Mind The Buzzcocks last night. It takes some doing, so I’ll be kind. I may even have a review by the end of this post.

Dropkick Murphys - For Boston

Low - (That’s How You Sing) Amazing Grace

What I was going to talk about was finishing Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood last night. I like all I’ve read of his, which is admittedly quite little, but this is generally recognised as his most accessible, most successful novel. This is true. It’s a linear and realistic story, set in late ’60’s Japan but which could exist in any place, at any time, a story of humanity and to me, a far more accurate retelling of being a late-teenage male than Catcher In The Rye will ever be.

The thing which put me off, to some extent, at the beginning was the word ‘elegiac’ on the blurb. Now, I know I’m prone to using this word, but it’s one of those which is far overused in the media world. Like ‘ethereal’ for anything musical which is vaguely shimmery, ‘elegiac’ is supposed to commute some sense of the supernatural or divine akin to listening to, say a Tavener requiem or a Gesualdo motet. It should stand for an emotionally-dense, inextricable beauty, a harmony of things which add up to greater than their worth. It represents the grief and the eulogy of a requiem, and all the setting that that invokes.

It’s usually used these days to describe post-rock, which is sadly limiting. I’ve been guilty, but I’ll certainly try and cut out its use except in the most deserving of circumstances, same with ‘ethereal’, ‘awesome’ and the like. These are words whose meanings are not changing so much as being diluted. Some would say it echoes the homogenisation and dilution of true beauty and culture into shock art and lowest-common-denominator imitation. Me, I’m not so fancy.

Sadly for my argument, Norwegian Wood actually meets pretty much all the prerequisites, which is why I ended up spending half the night finishing it off. But this is rare example - press, I’m watching you.

I’m now on Altered Images on the podcast - I can gratefully report that Foals was ok, but not all that. A spiky, angular, etc. etc. take on the standard Talking Heads, minimal ethic. Not moved to buy.

Photo by [kantor]

“I woke up in the half-light, still later than I would have wished. The knot in my stomach from the night before had strangely vanished, but by the time I made my move to get out of bed, it had returned. And then I saw her: the dame at the end of my bed. She was bad news, I could tell: packing a revolver, hat firmly pulled down, looking every bit the femme fatale. Then I know it: today wasn’t going to be an ordinary day.”

I’ve often been tempted to have a go at writing the great British novel. It’s very unlikely to be the above weak attempt at noir pulp, but what route it would take I have no idea. I’ve discussed this just recently with a pal of mine, and it seems a good combination to have both the tête-à-tête breakdown and the lonely life of the work-bound blogger to put one’s head into some sort of order in a situation.

My thoughts were always that: if I were to write a novel, the book would have to have a start, a middle and an end; it would have a moral; possibly it would be a giant metaphor, analogy or parable; it would be properly written, like a book is supposed to be. Not that I’m some sort of diehard traditionalist, but the things I’ve appreciated in life are those who take a genre or a style and work within it’s basic tenets, but twist it, and make it unique and their own. I’m thinking of Four Tet, or Mogwai, you get me.

But lately I’ve been reading books that have made me think twice about that. It started with Marukami, who was the first to convince that a magic-realist, non-linear, apparently nonsensical style can actually be very fitting indeed. Then I read Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which is written with no thoughts ahead past the premise and the end of the page. A bold move that, and an interesting one: as his own introduction narrates, you can really trace the bitterness which affected his own life between starting and completing the novel. Most recently, I’ve just finished Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. This, while technically having a structured beginning, middle and end and potentially being a parable in nature (although goodness knows a parable of what), was written in the space of two months in Bolinas, CA, 1964 and has a flow of thought, a gentle tone, and a meandering structure taking into account all sorts of details and history, often in place of action in the story.

They’re all fascinating ways to approach writing that I maybe wouldn’t have considered until recently. So you may yet see the published ohsimone.

On a related note, today I did listen to No More Shall We Part on the way in: it was quite apt.

I’ve considered the convergence between music and literature before. Sometimes, the convergence of the two is quite extraordinarily apt. Sometimes, noticeably quite the opposite. Today I was continuing with the quaint surrealism of Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar, and its soundtrack was Nick Cave’s Let Love In.

Had I chosen the more recent Lyre Of Orpheus, then the sunny, gentle disposition of tracks such as Breathless might have made the perfect accompaniment to the hazy and unreal watermelon landscapes that Brautigan depicts.

Had I had available to me No More Shall We Part, its intricate, winding songs engendering a deep tenderness of feeling, then the adventures of the unnamed protagonist might have swum more clearly into view. The Celtic scales of Hallelujah, the gentle half-satire of God Is In The House, or the dolorous, wistful Love Letter might have fitted very nicely indeed.

As it was, the nerve-jangling abrasion of Jangling Jack remains scored into my memory; the booming Do You Love Me? repeats on me. Far from the undulating landscapes of Brautigan’s thought-plane, these jarring moments really put the frighteners on. Here is Nick Cave when his muse was fully in Blixa Bargeld. The erstwhile Bad Seed and Einstürzende Neubauten terrorist runs his rampant guitar over all of Cave’s work from this era - surprising given the singularity of the man himself is the neccessity to have others around him. Even post-Bargeld, the Bad Seeds look increasingly to Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis for inspiration, and his emotional, searing violin strokes have provided the soundtrack for Cave’s shift in style from art-noise monster to respected, gothic balladeer.

Perhaps it’s not surprising though. If you take a look at the lyrics, and even take a listen to Cave’s strained baritone, you’ll notice that here is a man who is searching for something, uncomfortable in the world he finds himself a part of; insecure. Take the title track to No More Shall We Part. The title phrase is sung at the very limits of Nick Cave’s emotional and physical register, a strained, pained, emotive phrase. Take the whole of The Boatman’s Call, a break-up album every bit as essential as Blood On The Tracks. Nick Cave has always coddled himself with a band, even when the albums are as stark as No More… He’s clearly insecure about love and happiness, maybe his drugs have scarred him, maybe he’s more scared of his the religion he’s so fascinated with than he lets on.

Either way, he’s a fascinating individual himself, and consistently brings the goods. So I like to listen to Nick Cave, even when it doesn’t fit the book.

Nick Cave - Love Letter (from No More Shall We Part)

This is my last entry before my Christmas holidays, which is just ace. I won’t have internet access for ooh, about a week. It’s quite liberating. For someone as internetally-dependent as myself, to wean myself off like this is great. Next step, I’ll chuck my phone in a mug of coffee.

So my duties at work today include:

• tidying my desk
• distributing fairly the contents of a hamper from Thames Leisure (includes foie gras!)
• drinking coffee

Sweet. This will be followed by a trip to Clarke’s for Christmas lunch (I still don’t think it’ll match Maze for poshness, but it looks pretty ace to me). After this, I’m a free man until January, sick.

In other news, the fine fellows from the forthcoming Wood Green Bookshop left a comment inviting me to coffee and badges at the forthcoming bookshop. Sterling idea, I say. It’s an unusual thing indeed to see an independent bookshop opening in Wood Green, of all the places, in these days of mass homogenisation and corporate blah. I very much hope that the Big Green Bookshop will live up to its promise: judging by the musings of its proprietors, it definitely should. I’ll be in there to support when it opens, especially if this coffee materialises. Mmm, coffee…

I wondered if the correspondence address on their website was going to be the shop’s actual location. I thought great! Noel Park is my manor, that’s like next door to Akbar. I could do that in five minutes. I guess it’s unlikely, all things considered, that’s hardly the best place for passing trade. But! It’s still some local fun, so I wholeheartedly approve.