This film was made by the Eameses thirty-one years ago. I thought they made chairs…
Fascinating, and remarkable to think that it’s three decades since it was made. Not sure about the cheesy organ though, even if it is by Elmer Bernstein.
I suppose the way I encountered Charles Lambert’s excellent debut novel Little Monsters is emblematic of how the interweb works these days. I hadn’t read a review, despite my voracious appetite for the book pages of the proper papers, but came across Charles’s engaging blog, which in turn led to some correspondence. The upshot is, I have had the privilege of reading a brilliant novel, and now Charles has very kindly agreed to a kind of long distance Q and A session, which I will be including in the new e-journal I am co-editing at Edge Hill. As we speak, Charles is eating pork pies in Wolverhampton, apparently, but when he returns to his lovely home in Italy, I hope to do the email interview. With luck, that will be available in September via Edge Hill’s web site.
The novel is a study of damaged people, but also touches on the possibilities of human renewal in the face of what used to be called man’s inhumanity to man. The opening sentence has already lodged itself in my consciousness as one of the most startling and arresting I’ve read: “When I was thirteen my father killed my mother.” I still think Burgess’s opening line in Earthly Powers is my favourite, but this is now a high new entry on the chart.
The central character and narrator, Carol, deals with the traumatic events of her childhood, and her exile to the loveless home of her aunt, by reinventing herself. The narrative switches from the memories of an adolescence growing up in the pub owned by her aunt and her Polish refugee husband in the sixties, to the contemporary setting of the camp for asylum seekers in Italy where the present day Carol works. Lambert’s prose is delicate and nuanced, and one of the delights of the novel is seeing how each narrative strand informs the other, through the repetition and variation of images and references. I was particularly struck by the use of what pompous academics would call tropes of flight, used by the author to link the strands and the characters. It is a beautifully realised novel, and one which manages to deal with very big issues on a human scale. I loved it.
Charles writes about it here, and there are reviews by John Self here and Scott Pack here. Oh, and now I know what Pokemon means, so it’s educational too…
I expect that, by now, septuagenarian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen will have his feet up, having completed a remarkable series of gigs in Europe, largely, it seems, to supplement his pension after being ripped off by his accountant. It was quite a coup for the Manchester International Festival to book him for a series of concerts in the intimate surroundings of the City’s Opera House, especially since the festival is due to begin, er, next year. One in the eye for the Scouse capital of kulchur, methinks.
I was there for one of these concerts, with ‘er indoors, who has always been a big Laughing Len fan, courtesy of The Guardian. They advertised a free prize draw, and, extraordinarily, I won- so, two prime £75 tickets on row D were mine.
We went with a friend, Rachel, who was going for the second time. She is a stalwart of the Len discussion forums, and we met up with some of her correspondents at the Deansgate pub beforehand where I learned that tickets were going for £400 on ebay. What a lovely bunch the Cohenites are – a man in a pinstripe suit bought me a drink before scurrying off to the venue, and afterwards, we had a great chat with some fans before they got their bus home.
The concert itself was fabulous, and I won’t go into the detail here – you can read very good accounts at the Leonard Cohen files and at the Guardian. I was hugely impressed at the professionalism and intensity of the presentation. Despite the rather snide reference in the Guardian review, I thought Dino Soldo’s energy and humour added a great deal to the band sound. The youngest people on stage were the sublime (Len’s word) Webb Sisters, who judged their contribution perfectly. They were really impressive, especially when they took over the very moving song If It Be Your Will. A really brilliant multi-instrumentalist band, and some very sensitive singing made this as good a show as it gets- one of the most memorable nights I’ve experienced in my concert-going career.
Playing tunefully away on the right is music by Pantagruel, whose album is available from the estimable Magnatune. They are appearing on simpering Sean Rafferty’s In Tune tonight on Radio 3. I’d love to see them perform.
Update: I’ve taken the link down, because I got fed up with the same tune starting up every time I visited the blog. But it’s still available on Magnatune.
I haven’t read Clare Wigfall’s short stories, but with a bio like this, she just had to become a writer, didn’t she?:
“Wigfall was born in London, but spent the first years of her childhood under the liberal sway of late 1970s California. She returned to England for most of her schooling, but her vital early impressions of travel are reflected in the places she has considered home and put pen to paper – from Morocco to Norwich to Prague. She now lives in Berlin.”
Woody Guthrie was born today, and I suppose it’s kind of appropriate that he shares his birthday with Bastille day.
As a vegetarian, I can enjoy this with unalloyed pleasure. If you are a carnivore – how can you eat this?
If you go, and you should, regularly, to the Clive James website, you’ll now find, in the links on the Cultural Amnesia page, a link to my review. I’m chuffed at that, and so I bring you, by commodious vicus of recirculation back to Topsyturvydom.
Encyclopedia Britannica has made all of its content available to bloggers and other “web publishers”. Which is nice. It means I can link to their “On the Day” feature, which today is about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. There was a certain resonance in this, as nestling in my inbox today was the latest “Stop the Boycott” bulletin. When academic freedom is attacked in the way that some members of the UCU propose, it is salutary to heed the warnings of history.
Update:
So, rather predictably, UCU have decided to keep the boycott as a live possibility, without even having a debate. How marvellously democratic.