Our narrator at age 15 falls off his bike. Commenting on the guy who’s teaching him to ride he says :
It was very hard under such circumstances to presOur narrator at age 15 falls off his bike. Commenting on the guy who’s teaching him to ride he says :
It was very hard under such circumstances to preserve the standoffishness befitting the vicar’s nephew with the son of Miss Wolfe’s bailiff
He is an appalling entitled supercilious snob who says stuff like
I did not like to run the risk of being seen with people whom they (his family) would not at all approve of
Or
They went to the grammar school at Haversham and of course I couldn’t possibly have anything to do with them
At one point the local coal merchant brazenly rings the front door bell at the vicarage where he lives. Panic!
My aunt…felt honestly embarrassed that anyone should put himself in such a false position
Because, you see, it was utterly ghastly and unheard of that a coal merchant � a coal merchant � should have the temerity � the barefaced effrontery � to ring the front door bell! What is this, the French Revolution? This grotesque bell-ringing even discombobulates the maid
Emily, who knew who should come to the front door, who should go to the side door, and who to the back
Well he is poking fun at himself and his family, we are glad to realise. Later he says
The reader cannot have failed to observe that I accepted the conventions of my class as if they were the laws of Nature
That said, he is the most worldly gentleman you have met in a long while. He knows everything about everything. He says
When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right
and
he had the peculiar manner of the country doctor, bluff, hearty, and unctuous
because he knows all about young people and country doctors and he knows all young people and country doctors are exactly like that. It is so. Sometimes his observations are not quite to be taken seriously
No one can have moved in the society of politicians without discovering that it requires little mental ability to rule a nation
- A contemptuous bon mot that I think many modern readers would swiftly agree with. (It also implies that he has, but of course, knocked around with many ministers of the government). But what about this one � it almost made me gasp aloud :
We know of course that women are habitually constipated, but to represent them in fiction as being altogether devoid of a back passage seems to me really an excess of chivalry.
Steady on, sir! This is 1930! Are you allowed to say that?
Unfortunately for Cakes and Ale it was one of those many novels that are about novelists, and I was sadly uninformed of this before I started, because I hate novels about novelists, what a tiresome genre. But Somerset Maugham is an almost funny constantly condescending avuncular hifalutin tale teller, and his portrait of a great-grandmother of today’s manic dream pixie girls was engaging. Imagine � a woman in a 1930 novel who enjoys sex with multiple men and doesn’t get punished for it! And is a thoroughly nice person!
This novel was plucked from the vast lucky dip bag of 1001 Books you should Read before Next Thursday. At this rate it will only take me another 135 years to finish the whole list....more
Here’s something : there are film fans who would see that a movie about a housewife mostly doing household chores in real time which lasts 3 hours 20 Here’s something : there are film fans who would see that a movie about a housewife mostly doing household chores in real time which lasts 3 hours 20 minutes called Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is currently considered the best film ever by a bunch of critics and they would say who on earth would want to see a movie like that? And the same film fans would also notice a movie called I Dismember Mama and another one called Orgy of the Blood Parasites and they would say who on earth would want to see those movies?
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*
The gospel according to Ric Meyers :
Even the worst of them were somehow better, and more vindicating, than the hundreds of soulless, pandering, cynical junk-heaps the major studios were grinding out.
The exploitation movies were those totally independent productions that played in drive in theatres or grindhouses. These movies were bottom of the barrel ultra low budget sex ‘n� horror efforts, you know, like
Doctor, Butcher, Medical Deviate Girl on a Chain Gang Shriek of the Mutilated Tower of Screaming Virgins
That kind of thing. Ric is fond of them, and even fonder of the loopy frantic culture they emerged from, and is sad that they don’t exist anymore, and this is because
the entire industry this book was created to celebrate was wiped out by the establishment’s embrace. There was no longer any need for marginalized grade Z movies once blood and boobs were being supplied by grade A powers-that-be.
And this happened because of the unignorable success of the famous slasher movies Halloween (1978) , Friday the 13th (1980) and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
But I’m not so sure that exploitation movies are dead. The euphemistic term people now bandy about is “disturbing movies� and they are with us today, some recent examples
The Human Centipede (parts 1 to 3) Pig Megan is Missing Snuff 102 Murder Set-Pieces The Bunny Game
These are unlikely to be streamed on Netflix any time soon.
Did I really need a few dozen slightly jokey plot summaries of movies I have no intention of watching? Probably not. But Ric did remind me I should see The Corpse Grinders (1971)
What’s this you’re telling me? You’re dead? When did this happen? Was it before or after we got married?
I’ve been meaning to tell you� it was before� What’s this you’re telling me? You’re dead? When did this happen? Was it before or after we got married?
I’ve been meaning to tell you� it was before� sorry�.
Well we better get you to one of those cryogenic places fast!
Nah, wait till we get to 1939 and I’ll be fine�
But.. but it’s 1992! See? (Points to a calendar.)
Calendar : Hey buddy, that’ll be 15 cents before you can look.
Well of course it’s 1992, silly, but we’re all going back to 1939.
Winston Churchill : We shall wait for you on the beaches, we shall wait for you in the fields.
What do you mean all of us?
The whole world! We’re all moving back in time! Didn’t you notice that eggs are a lot cheaper and the movies are getting better?
But� but� this makes no sense at all!
Wait, I didn’t tell you the best bit. Because I am a precog I foresaw that this would be one of those annoying spoof reviews so I changed the past� it will now be a glowing 5 star rave!
I’m not even a fan of James Joyce � apart from Ulysses what did he give to the world � a mournful short story collection, an autobiographical novel whI’m not even a fan of James Joyce � apart from Ulysses what did he give to the world � a mournful short story collection, an autobiographical novel which is half great and half terrible, and a vast unreadable tome consisting of the kind of homemade gobbledygook that only an acidhead from 1967 could appreciate. But Ulysses is something else entirely, something weird and magnificent, and I have read too many books about it, I know, but when I see a new one I just have to grab it and read it, it’s an affliction. This one was like all the others, veering from the cringingly ridiculous (“Sgt Joyce’s Lonely Hearts Club Band�) to the cool and delightful (Richard Kearney on Proteus) and all points in between. Ulysses is inclined to drive people mad, it’s quite understandable. ...more
There are around 40,000 children who are being cared for by The State in Britain. Meaning that their parents are either dead or in jail or in some wayThere are around 40,000 children who are being cared for by The State in Britain. Meaning that their parents are either dead or in jail or in some way incapacitated and unable to be fathers and mothers. Jenni Fagan was one of those kids from birth. Her father was long gone and her mother was severely mentally ill.
First she went to foster homes (a lot of those) and finally she was adopted by a couple at age 5 and her adoptive mother seems to have hated her from the get go. It seems like a strange thing to do, to adopt a child and then hate it. Jenni writes :
not one single second of sympathy for seven years
On occasion, as a punishment, she was given dog food to eat. It's Dickensian. Eventually even the gruesome adoptive mother realised it wasn’t working out and at age 12 Jenni went into a care home until she was 16.
Children in care are not like other children because the only people who care for them do so because they are paid to. The kids in care homes, it seems, from very early ages, get hold of all manner of drugs and booze and the staff turn a blind eye, shrug, give up. So from age 12 to 16 Jenni was a major ingester of lsd, ecstasy, coke and the omnipresent weed, and this led her into the company of several very unsavoury men.
This is a very literary misery memoir. That term sounds dismissive, it isn’t intended to be, but if ever there was a misery memoir this is it. I have read a handful of these and that’s it, no more.
Jenni Fagan is a poet and novelist, so the prose often erupts into passages like this
I came from the underworld but would say nothing of went on there; I had notions of immortality; I was a parasite; a bastard and a leech. I was a dark room and a dress being tugged down.
Or this
I am stoned immaculate. I am high like a wild thing. Savage like sin. Wasted to the hilt. I am stoned like moon bait. I’m a cavewoman. I am scratching out drawings of human history on stone. I got stoned like I mean it.
There are so many terrible places in society that we only ever see, and that fleetingly, from the victim’s point of view. The perpetrators won’t talk and if they did we wouldn’t listen, we would turn away. Some of the lives lived (and the deaths died) are beyond our imagination, maybe we catch a glimpse in a news report, a court case where ghastly people get long sentences. Some of the people Jenni encountered as a young teenager were very ghastly and deserved very long sentences.
It’s remarkable Jenni didn’t die � she once came across two kids in school making a bet over whether she would live till her 16th birthday. But she didn’t die.
Do I recommend this one?
At your own risk.
NOTES
Other comparable memoirs:
Educated by Tara Westover Violated by Sarah Wilson Damaged by Cathy Glass
An unflinching book about the UK care system :
Generation F by Winston Smith
And a couple of (brilliant) American perspectives :
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood by David Simon
Random Family Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
The story of a wild child who becomes a manic dream pixie girl who then becomes trapped in a nasty love/hate relationship with a typically sweet-one-mThe story of a wild child who becomes a manic dream pixie girl who then becomes trapped in a nasty love/hate relationship with a typically sweet-one-minute, vicious-the-next man, and then turns into a full-time moper. Frank Sinatra sings “Regrets? I’ve had a few/But then again, too few to mention�. This is not Maggie’s philosophy. After her relationship with Kurt goes bad she does nothing but mention her regrets, there are so many. Oh woe, her misspent life! I sound unkind, I know, I know.
In the middle of this love hate psychodrama the gigantic real life tragedy of the Scandinavian Star is dropped into this short novel like a big rock into a small pool. This happened on 7 April 1990, a terrible fire on board a car and passenger ferry which killed 159 people. It was probably an insurance scam gone dreadfully wrong. No one was ever convicted except one person who died in the fire.
So there is a connection between this miserable pair Maggie and Kurt and this disaster. It’s hinted at but that’s all.
Modern authors like to write novels exploring real life crimes � recently I read Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, about the opioid epidemic, and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (about the Magdalen Laundries scandal in Ireland). So this is one of those, kind of.
I know this is part one of a series of seven novels which will add up to a great modern epic, but this opening instalment did not leave me eagerly awaiting the next part. Asta Olivia Nordenhof skips about the story of Maggie and Kurt like a speedfreak grasshopper. And she has a tendency to quasimystical abstraction :
Maggie gets the sense it’s all supposed to suggest something, but she doesn’t know what it is. A sense that meanings are doubled, with a message that is closed off to her. She wants to lift the dreams out of the room and into herself
Other readers will like this a whole lot more than I did. ...more
Old Vladek Spiegelman is such a great character. He’s so annoying, cantankerous, irascible � he’s completely impossible! The ideaA TALE OF TWO VLADEKS
Old Vladek Spiegelman is such a great character. He’s so annoying, cantankerous, irascible � he’s completely impossible! The idea of living with the old man practically causes his son Art to have a nervous breakdown. His second wife leaves him, and by the end of this second Maus we totally understand why. Just as a small example, his extreme miserliness. He asks Art if he wants a cup of tea and says he has a teabag from breakfast he can use again, it’s dried up on the draining board but it will still be good; and he keeps a gas ring on the cooker in the holiday apartment on at all times because it will save him having to buy matches (the gas is already paid for in the apartment rent). And he tries to return unused groceries to the grocery store including a half box of cereal. On and on it goes. And his opinions can be contradictory. On page 56 he is commenting on how to survive in Auschwitz : “Don’t worry about friends. Believe me, they don’t worry about you. They just worry about getting a bigger share of your food!� Six pages later, he says “If you want to live, it’s good to be friendly.�
But young Vladek Spiegelman is a different great character. He’s so smart, so capable. He knows how to get by even in the worst circumstances. Here are three very important things to remember next time you find yourself in a concentration camp � one : know four languages; and two : turn your hand to anything; be a tinsmith when they need tinsmiths, be a cobbler when they need boots mending. What do you know about tinsmithing and cobbling? Not so much, so be a very fast learner. And three : notice everything�
One time a day they gave a soup from turnips. To stand near the first of the line was no good. You got only water. Near the end was better � solid things to the bottom floated. But too far to the end it was also no good because many times it could be no soup anymore.
As well as being his father’s survival story, this is the story of Art’s difficult relationship with his father. He recorded all these memories in the early 70s and I would myself say that the late 60s and early 70s were the time of the greatest generation gap there has ever been. The generation that went through the war and experienced the cataclysmic horrors that bland phrase elides got married and had kids in the late 40s and early 50s; these kids grew up and turned into dope smoking hippies. The parents turned on the tv and watched Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire and John and Yoko having a bed-in for peace. Art was a typical rebellious longhaired young guy. It’s amazing he finally realised that his great project should be to record all his father’s memories and make them into this beautiful moving book.
Answer : no, but there are things that happen that could convince a person that there was.
Like this�
In 1959 Question : IS THERE SUCH A THING AS FATE?
Answer : no, but there are things that happen that could convince a person that there was.
Like this�
In 1959 two guys doing short stretches in Lansing (aka Kansas State Penitentiary) are sharing a cell and like all cons they talk about their lives and maybe cook up a plan or two for some future malfeasance. This one guy, Floyd, is telling Dick, the cellmate, about maybe the best job he ever had, which was working on a big old wheat farm in Kansas for a real rich farmer. He particularly remembers this farmer because he was such a kindly employer. Farm was way out in the middle of nowhere. Oh says Dick, rich? Oh yeah, maybe every week they did ten thousand dollars of business. Hey, says Dick, did you happen to see a safe in that farm house ever? Well, says Floyd, I kind of sort of remember there was something. All right, says Dick, I will rob this farmer, and I will shoot all the witnesses. Well, in jail, everybody brags on the great deeds they will do, what else is there to yap about. Floyd discounted this big talk.
In fact there was no safe at all, there was no cash kept in the farmhouse. Floyd got that part wrong, what a shame. So when Dick and his good friend Perry crept into the said farmhouse a few months later, all they found was thirty bucks. But they’d already agreed there would be no witnesses left, whatever happened, so they shot all four members of the Clutter family that night and left. And they were careful and there were no clues.
Imagine Floyd’s surprise when a couple of days later, him being still in the jail, he hears on the radio about this terrible crime. He about jumped out of his skin. Dick and his pal actually did it! At this point he realised that aside from the criminals he was the only person in the world who knew who’d done it. What to do? As every con knows, snitches get stiches. But on the other hand, there was a thousand dollar reward for information. Hmmm.
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WAITING IMPATIENTLY FOR THE HANGMAN
Truman Capote did more than interview the two killers once they were caught. He visited them dozens of times, spent many hours with them, particularly liked Perry Smith, sent them the maximum allowed letters and gifts of books and candy. The book was finished by 1963 � all except for the last chapter, when the death penalty would be finally applied.
He could not finish his book until he had an ending, but neither could he put it aside and go on with something else. …His frustration was made worse by his knowledge that, lying in front of him, missing only thirty or forty pages, was the best-seller that would alter his life irrevocably, that would make him rich� the success of In Cold Blood was as predictable as the future movements of the planets.
Imagine the bizarre mixture of hopeful anticipation and agonised disappointment as Perry and Hickock went through appeal after appeal, their damned busy lawyers petitioned for a new trial � this nearly gave TC a heart attack � he liked these miserable malformed murderers but why didn’t they just go ahead and hang them so he could get his book done and become rich and famous as was his destiny? Why are they torturing me like this with their endless appeals and delays? I’m only human!
A MASTERPIECE
This is a great but strange book, a non fiction novel, I can see where that odd phrase came from, it veers between reportage and entirely novelistic recreations of some scenes with dialogue and characters and all, in this way it’s the exact literary version of the “re-enactments� they do on some true crime shows � I hate those, but in Truman’s hands it never comes across as tacky.
Not everyone was attentive; one juror, as though poisoned by the numerous spring-fever yawns weighting the air, sat with drugged eyes and jaws so utterly ajar bees could have buzzed in and out.
So good is TC in this book that it becomes a real shame that this book made him and destroyed him at the same time. He spent the next 20 years dithering, writing bits and pieces, but there was never another novel or much of anything after this one. Then he died.
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IN COLDER BLOOD
Three movies :
In Cold Blood (1966) � the film of the book, really excellent
Capote (2005) Infamous (2006)
Both these biopics concentrate on TC’s weird relationship with Perry Smith, both are worth it
And Gerald Clarke’s biography of TC is really excellent....more
A week ago it was the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the great and the goodly hearted were there to pay their respects, as they sA week ago it was the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the great and the goodly hearted were there to pay their respects, as they should have been, but in my mind there was a terrific disconnection between those plump dignitaries and the terminal awfulness of why they were all there. And there were a few survivors, they must have been liberated when they were little children. The whole event struck a discordant note.
Last year the Oscar for the best international feature film went to The Zone of Interest, which is about Auschwitz, from the point of view of Rudolf Hoss, the camp commandant, and his well-heeled family. It was a pretty good film, very chilling. You don’t get to see what goes on in the camp itself, it’s screened off by a high garden wall. But you hear the occasional gunshot and some wailing. It was based on a novel by none other than Martin Amis. Maybe I should read it.
Then there are painful memoirs of survivors like Ida Fink, Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, Eli Wiesel and many others, and there are the daunting histories, 6 or 700 pages long, by Leni Yahil, Martin Gilbert, Nikolaus Wachsmann and a zillion others.
Something is missing in all of these approaches to Auschwitz. They’re all too huge, too painful, their terrible weight might easily squash you. And this is why Maus is so brilliant. With Art, we find our way gradually into this labyrinth of horror, step by step. Art Spiegelman finally gets round to sitting down with his 72 year old father, a classic cranky irritable must have things done his way annoying old buffer. Art’s there to download his life story.
(Vladek speaks in a fractured English - “Again to the hairdresser? Only a week ago you went.”�..”But I didn’t feel safe here, it was too many ways somebody could find us out. I wanted to go better to Hungary� � “but I must finish quick to tell you the rest because we will come soon over to the bank�)
This so personal history must have been hanging over Art’s head like a raincloud his whole life. Visit after visit, he gets Vladek to tell the whole awful story, keeps the chronology on track (old guys, they ramble) and turns it into �. What�.a cartoon? No, a graphic novel. Well, a graphic memoir, in which the Jews are portrayed as mice, the Poles as pigs and the Germans as cats. That might be seen to be somewhat controversial, but it works well. The mice aren’t all hiding in fear from the cats, before the Nazis gradually cut them off from civilisation and hope they were stylish mice wearing nice clothes and buying new curtains and everything, just like normal people.
So we are drawn into Art’s spiky relationship with his old dad, his dad’s quarrelsome relationship with his wife, and finally, Vladek’s hair raising story of life in Poland in the 1930s. This first book takes us through the appearance of the Gestapo, the corralling of the Jews in ghettos and the transportation of Jews “for resettlement�, all the way up to the gates of Auschwitz. The second book is called And Here my Troubles Began....more
Finally, a very solid enjoyable biography of one of the greats. I could have done without the pages of complete lyrics quotes, including all the repeaFinally, a very solid enjoyable biography of one of the greats. I could have done without the pages of complete lyrics quotes, including all the repeated lines � didn’t see the need for that; and the amount of endless praise that showers down on Randy on every other page, and his unbroken run of brilliant successes, does possibly get a little grating by the time Toy Story 3 comes into view � but heck, he deserves it! Robert Hilburn only allows that he made one bad record, Born Again, and really, the record wasn’t that bad, it was the cover, which was Randy in KISS makeup with dollar signs, a little heavyhanded maybe, and apparently no one got the joke so didn’t buy the record.
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Aside from that it’s all good � no, wonderful.
Fans might complain about the ten or twelve years Randy spent doing movie soundtracks and not albums, but when you consider that, as we read here, every album was like pulling teeth and all the soundtracks were strictly professional assignments to be turned in on time and no dillydallying and getting paid one cool million dollars or thereabouts per soundtrack, then you can see Randy’s reasoning.
Randy had to steer a unique path between other kinds of singer-songwriter types � he wasn’t like Bob Dylan, had no folk roots, had no blues roots; he wasn’t like Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen � I can only see two songs you could call autobiographical in all his stuff � I Miss You (addressed to his first wife, I guess he must have got clearance from his second wife) and Memo to my Son, all about how aggravating little kids are but you still love them. All his other songs are written in character, which allows him to include a lot of horrible stuff in his songs other more romantic types wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. And of course he wasn’t a rocker like Neil Young. And he wasn’t Elton John or Billy Joel neither. He was more of a rebooted Cole Porter type but not really, didn’t go in for fancy rhyme schemes. He was different. Maybe the only comparison is with another guy who deals in songs sung by characters, Tom Waits.
SOME LISTS
THE SIX NASTIEST CHARACTERS IN RANDY NEWMAN SONGS
The pyromaniac in Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield The stalker in Suzanne The slavemaster in Sail Away The Southern racist in Rednecks The child killer in In Germany Before the War The street thug in Mr Sheep
THE SIX MOST BEAUTIFUL SONGS
Louisiana 1927 Marie Texas Girl at the Funeral of her Father In Germany Before the War I’ll be Home When She Loved Me
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MY SIX FAVOURITES
Birmingham Baltimore Jolly Coppers on Parade Old Man on the Farm Same Girl Shame (I love the moment when he turns round to the backup singers who are chanting "Shame shame shame" and yells SHUDDUP!)
A FEW TIMES WHEN HE PICKED TOO OBVIOUS TARGETS
God’s Song (everyone praises this but Randy is shooting fish in a barrel here, too easy) Yellow Man (the criticism of racism can get too oblique at times) Old Kentucky Home Political Science (Let’s drop the big one) � closest he came to Tom Lehrer (“Who’s Next?�)
SOME EARLY RANDY NEWMAN SONGS MADE THE CHARTS!
I’ve Been Wrong Before by Cilla Black (this former Cavern cloakroom attendant friend of the Beatles who turned into one of Britain’s most beloved family entertainers freakishly got the first Randy Newman song into the charts � we suspect George Martin picked it for her) Just One Smile by Gene Pitney Nobody Needs your Love by Gene Pitney Simon Smith and his Amazing Dancing Bear by Alan Price The Biggest Night of her Life by the Nashville Teens
IN CONCLUSION
This is a shoo-in for all you Randy Newman fans....more
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