They used to put little coins into Christmas puddings because it was such fun to see little children breaking their teeth on a sixpenny bit. Dylan fanThey used to put little coins into Christmas puddings because it was such fun to see little children breaking their teeth on a sixpenny bit. Dylan fans will experience similar sudden moments of distress in this very earnest, very thorough but often silly tour of Bob’s recorded music.
There’s a perfect pic of Bob on the cover performing what seems to be an eyeroll �. I couldn’t agree more.
So�.why do we need any kind of tour guide? Because the number of Dylan albums has become vast. In spite of suffering from a writer’s block that lasted for most of the 1990s he’s still released 40 studio albums; then there’s 21 live albums and all those archive releases of stuff not released at the time � they all come at you in five to ten cd box sets. Anthony Varesi covers the whole waterfront from 1962 to 2020
As an example of the manic quantity of the Bob Dylan archive releases, consider The 1966 Live Recordings. This is a 36 cd box set (price £71) featuring all the available concerts played by Dylan in April and May 1966. He played the same songs at each concert. But hardcore fans will need every one! 36 cds!
[image]
WHAT’S GOOD
Well, this � my favourite line from the book :
there are now almost as many books on the Kennedy assassination as there are on Bob Dylan
Mr Varesi is thorough � he has assessed everything, no matter how obscure, all the Best Ofs, the Original Mono Recordings reissues, the Japan-only issues, the soundtracks that contain only one Dylan song.
A lot of hard work went into this book. And I think his opinions of the various albums are good � Tempest IS full of songs that are way too long; Street Legal IS overlooked; Under the Red Sky is something of a masterpiece�.wait, that’s going too far! No it’s not!
WHAT’S NOT GOOD
Dylan begins (1962) by using melodies from folk songs and adding his own lyrics; then he starts writing completely original songs (1965); then he hits a writers block (1990) and when he finds his inspiration again (1997) he’s back to borrowing melodies (from old blues and tin pan alley songs) and also magpieing bits and bobs of lyrics - from the said blues songs and from diverse literary sources. This is well known.
To take one famous example : on the album Modern Times he steals/quotes from obscure American poet Henry Timrod - he takes 12 lines from 7 poems and puts them into the songs.
Besides Timrod, for instance, Modern Times taps into the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, John, and Luke, among others), Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Kokomo Arnold, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Stanley Brothers, Merle Haggard, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and standards popularized by Jeanette MacDonald, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra, as well as vintage folk songs such as “Wild Mountain Thyme,� “Frankie and Albert,� and “Gentle Nettie Moore.�
(from an article by Robert Polito)
This kind of modernism (like "The Waste Land") or bricolage as swanky types might call it seems to have driven Anthony Varesi slightly insane. He picks up this ball and runs with it like Forrest Gump did. For instance
The Rolling Stones took the title "Paint It Black� from the first verse of "She Belongs to Me"
So....
Bob : She can take the dark out of the nighttime And paint the daytime black
Stones : I look inside myself and see my heart is black I see my red door, I must have it painted black
Really? If anything is getting painted black in 1966 it’s because of Dylan?
The reference to “a brown skin woman� in “Outlaw Blues�, a phrase from Leadbelly’s “Roberta Part 2�
Got to say that about one million old blues songs mention brown skin women.
Dylan’s proclivity for William Blake is present in both “Gates of Eden� and Mr Tambourine Man. In his 1794 Songs of Experience Blake refers to “the ancient trees�: in “Tambourine Man� Dylan uses “ancient empty streets� in verse one and the “haunted, frightened trees� in the final verse
!
Mr Varesi imagines that Dylan’s sly funny “If You Gotta Go Go Now� is a direct spoof of “A Hard Day’s Night� :
Dylan pokes fun at the Beatles� tale of the working man who comes home each night to his appreciative companion by, in “Gotta Go�, turning the evening into a one-night affair. Dylan also borrowed the Ԩou know I� opening from the second verse of “A Hard Day’s Night� for the fourth verse of his song.
Beatles : You know I work all day
Bob : You know I’d have nightmares / And a guilty conscience, too
Seriously? This is all nonsense. There’s a lot more of this kind of thing. Unfortunately.
Dylan’s utilization of the excellent but rarely used word “rake� derives from the old folk ballad “The Unfortunate Rake�
Well maybe could be but then there’s the old folk ballad “Dark Eyed Sailor�
Genteel he was and no rake like you
And the old folk ballad “Reynardine�
She said, Kind sir be civil, my company forsake, For in my own opinion I fear you are a rake.
Not to mention William Hogarth’s famous “A Rake’s Progress”� and a very many restoration comedies.
Talking about the song “Mama You Been on my Mind� :
The impact of the beats begins to appear in Dylan’s writing : Dylan works in the phrase “don’t bother me� from Ginsberg’s poem “America�
Where you been don’t bother me nor bring me down in sorrow
Gotta say “don’t bother me� is quite a common phrase in ordinary ill-tempered conversation. It was even a song title on the Beatles� second album. Maybe Bob was quoting George Harrison.
Okay I feel like I’m shooting fish in a barrel here, but the barrel was made by Anthony and the fish were all supplied by him too. And he gave me the gun.
WELL, THEY'LL STONE YOU AND SAY THAT IT'S THE END.
If you can pick your way through Anthony Varesi’s more outre assertions this is a very solid trek through the ever expanding worlds of Bob. A for Effort but all the radio interference drags it back to 3 stars.
A brilliant five star history book which I only read 150 pages of because, in that very unlovely phrase, I bit off more than I could chew � WAY more. A brilliant five star history book which I only read 150 pages of because, in that very unlovely phrase, I bit off more than I could chew � WAY more. And this is where the rating system breaks down � giving 5 stars to a book I didn’t even read half of seems ridiculous. I skimmed the rest but still.
My favourite period of English history is 1640-1660 � civil war, revolution, chopping the King’s head off, religious nutjobs all over the place, what’s not to like. The end of it all, after Oliver Cromwell died, is fascinating � how could a fierce antimonarchical republic turn in the space of two years into a collection of supine rascals who could think of no more feeble solution to their politics than to invite the son of Charles I to take his place upon his father’s throne, if it please your Highness, which of course it did.
It's an exciting and bewildering tale which I wanted to think about in detail. But THIS amount of detail was just too much. What was I thinking � a 440 page book about a two year period, yeah, it’s going to be extremely detailed! Detail in the extreme!
Henry Reece inches forward, backtracks, discusses, debates, provides a zillion backstories, and best of all quotes many delicious snippets from the writings of the participants � the wonderful lopsided somewhat drunken picturesque piquant prose of the 17th century. All great, just too much for me.
So this is for specialists not us quailing lightweights. ...more
The James Joyce who wrote this chunk of ghastly autofiction is the same James Joyce who a few years latePORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A GARGANTUAN WETWIPE
The James Joyce who wrote this chunk of ghastly autofiction is the same James Joyce who a few years later wrote the stunning, beautiful masterpiece Ulysses; this is like someone playing you Chug-a-Lug, Ten Little Indians and Farmer’s Daughter by the Beach Boys and telling you that three years later they would make Pet Sounds and Smile. You would frankly think they were off their trolley. Not possible.
Jimmy Joyce must have had one of those odd head traumas that change a person’s personality because between this mournful bucket of sloshing emo and Ulysses he developed a canny sense of humour � about his pretentious younger self, for one thing.
So Portrait of the Artist as an Insufferable Plonker is the story of Stephen Dedalus up to age 17/18 and Ulysses picks up his story a few years later and skewers his previous Portrait self mercilessly :
Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? �. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?
That James Joyce is a funny guy, this Portrait one you would get rats to gnaw your leg off rather than spend a train journey stuck with him in the same compartment.
Well, I am being a little harsh. The first half of this autonovel is not bad at all. There are a couple of strong dramatic scenes, a famous one being a Christmas dinner where a huge political row bursts out between the family’s governess and the loudmouth father. That was great, I was looking forward to more good stuff. But no, then it went south.
SELF-LOVE IN ALL SENSES
Portrait got in big trouble with the censors in 1916 and you can kind of see why because by page 95 young Stephen has discovered the joy of onanism, which is described in the following terms :
He bore cynically with the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to defile with patience whatever image had attracted his eyes. By day and by night he moved among distorted images of the outer world. A figure that had seemed to him by day demure and innocent came towards him by night through the winding darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with brutish joy. Only the morning pained him with its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot, its keen and humiliating sense of transgression.
Well, it isn’t Henry Miller or Letters to Penthouse but you get the idea. Eventually he decides his solitary habit is not enough so he prowls the street (at this point he is 16). His horniness is described like this �
He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration.
Steady on, JJ ! Eventually he discovers the delights of Dublin’s hookers and his experiences are drowned in the same euphuistic, euphemistic flowerpot verbals. After that, he gets religion and things take a dark turn.
At his religious school each year there is a Retreat. This is not something I was familiar with. The boys all have to devote themselves to several days of nothing but religious contemplation and prayer. Cue pages of morose I-am-a-doomed-sinner, followed up by a famous hellfire sermon by a priest who has an Evil Dead 2 view of the afterlife �
In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.
Plus, it smells really bad, there’s no room service and it’s really hot, and devils come and insult you.
All this drives Stephen slightly doolally :
The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.
There are pages of tiresome tedious claptrap like this.
NOT JUST ME
In his short and sharp recommended introduction to Joyce, John Gross puts the boot into Stephen Dedalus as follows �
It is hard not to be repelled, or on occasion to be amused, by his posturing and his moist romanticism. He is utterly self-absorbed; his reveries are rendered in the over-exquisite accents of the House Beautiful…How exactly are we to take all this? If we assume that Joyce completely identifies himself with Stephen the final section of the book becomes an exercise in naïve self-glorification
So he says in trying to get Joyce off the hook many critics read the Portrait ironically � A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Insufferable Jerk
But hold on, Gross says
The portrait of the artist turns out to be the dissection of a second-rate aesthete.
If the Portrait was meant to be read as a hatchet job, why spend 300 pages doing it? The game is not worth the candle. The target is too mere. A short story in Dubliners would have done the job. So this makes us suspect JJ wanted us to take Stephen (=himself) seriously. It’s just not possible.
STRANGEST CAREER IN LITERATURE
He started off with the excellent short stories in Dubliners, following that with this mithering giant bore, then spent 7 years creating the magnificent Ulysses, 20th century’s greatest novel, then poured the rest of his life down the drain by taking seventeen (17) years to write the completely unreadable waste of time called Finnegans Wake. You couldn’t make it up....more
He had written some stories set on Mars and then he read The Grapes of Wrath and the penny dropped � he could write little bridging chapters between tHe had written some stories set on Mars and then he read The Grapes of Wrath and the penny dropped � he could write little bridging chapters between the longer stories, like Steinbeck does, and make “a book of stories pretending to be a novel� as he described it.
ULTRA SHORT HISTORY OF MARS
Giovanni Schiaparelli, Italian astronomer, kicked off the idea of canals on Mars. With his state of the art telescope he discovered a series of crisscross lines on the surface and called them “channels� � mistranslated in English as “canals�. The Victorians ran with the idea � Life on Mars? Yes! Probably! Then came Percival Lowell, American astronomer who amped up the canal concept in 1895 with maps showing waterways and oases which he said could only have been created by intelligent beings. H G Wells wrote The War of the Worlds in the same year � his Martians weren’t very nice at all.
[image]
Astronomers finally got better telescopes and rubbished the whole thing in 1925 � no canals, no channels, no atmosphere to speak of, no water, no nothing. Is there life on Mars? NO! Awwww sorry peeps!
Twenty years after that, Bradbury so doesn’t care what the killjoy scientists said. His Mars has canals full of sparkling waters stretching as far as the golden Martian eye can see. Oh yes, sure there are Martians, and Martian towns, bet your ass.
And this is why he was not welcomed into the science fiction community. Gaah! They said. All those dopes reading him! He’s filling their heads with nonsense! You wouldn’t get Heinlein, Asimov and Arthur Clarke writing The Grossly Unscientific Martian Chronicles!
Well, he was writing parables and fables of course, as he always did, using science fictiony bricabrac to do it because people like Mars and time machines and dinosaurs and whatnot. He was right. The people don’t want to know about the real Mars. Move over, Rover, and let Ray Bradbury take over.
And I should say that this Mars is an entirely American affair. Don't look for any Chinese or French. Not even a Canadian. All-American Mars!
SOMETIMES CLAWS
For a parable type of Bradbury story look no further than the slightly jaw dropping story here called “Way in the Middle of the Air�. It’s set in the Jim Crow south, back on Earth, and one day in a Southern town all the black people have packed up and they’re leaving! Streaming out of the town without a goodbye! They’re going to Mars!
Samuel Teece wouldn’t believe it. “Why, hell, where’d they get the transportation? How they goin� to get to Mars?� “Rockets,� said grandpa Quartermain. “All the damn fool things. Where’d they get rockets?� “Saved their money and built them�.seems these [n word] kept it secret, worked on the rockets all by themselves, don’t know where � in Africa, maybe.�
You’d have to agree, a fairly unlikely scenario, even for the year 2003 in which it’s set. Interplanetary travel? It’s easy, you just knock a rocket up in your shed on the weekend. But it’s a great parable � and with a sting in the tail. The lad who works for Samuel Teece has a parting shot : “What you goin� to do nights, Mr Teece?� Takes him a while to realise the kid was referring to house burnings and lynchings.
So Bradbury isn’t all sweet tender nostalgia in space, although he does ladle that on too thick at times, but he has claws too.
When you read these stories you discover quickly that his version of Mars in not consistent � each story slightly or totally reinvents Mars and its Martians. And also, he’s the poet of loneliness and waiting a long time for something. I liked that. I liked the whole thing.
I kinda sorta recommend this for people who want to explore an 80 year old vision of 50 years in the future which by now, of course, is 25 years ago. The future isn’t what it used to be.
His home town is 30 minutes away from here and I often pass the house where he met his wife, it’s a ten minute walk away. His father was a miner, mineHis home town is 30 minutes away from here and I often pass the house where he met his wife, it’s a ten minute walk away. His father was a miner, mine was a pit-top engineer. His mother came from Sneinton in Nottingham, so did I. After all that, the similarities are not so striking�
Lawrence’s reputation has been a roller coaster ride. He was an obscure novelist writing for a tiny elite all the way until Lady Chatterley’s Lover, written two years before he died. That one made a bundle. He knew it wouldn’t get published by a normal company, not with all those rude words in it, so he self published and the word of mouth made him a nice tidy sum, for the first time ever.
Thirty years later : [image]
After he died some critics decided he was a genius after all and his reputation grew & grew and he was regularly considered to be one of the greats of English literature until 1970 when Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics put the boot into DHL so comprehensively that by 2005 John Worthen is writing :
“Something of a national joke� was how one leading British journal recently referred to him, and many university departments of English literature in Britain and the USA have stopped teaching him�.The reasons are simple. A contemporary American writer has declared : “He was a sexist and a racist, is there any argument?� And to that we can add the regularly repeated charges that he was a misogynist, a fascist and a colonialist.
[image]
And I don’t think his reputation has really recovered. I was hoping that this biography would talk about all of that, and exactly what DHL’s philosophy was that enraged people, but Professor Worthen gets overwhelmed by the sheer raging energy of Lawrence, all that writing writing writing and travelling travelling travelling - Lawrence just didn’t stop until TB put a stop to him aged 44. As Jimmie Rodgers sang one year after DHL died
I've been fightin' like a lion, looks like I'm going to lose Cause there ain't nobody ever whipped the TB blues
And it was true, Jimmie died two years after that. (My father’s first wife died of TB too.) DHL wouldn’t have bought Jimmie’s record though, he insisted he just had a bit of bronchitis.
Lawrence is famous for 4 novels, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbore, Women in Love and the said Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He wrote a fistful more but he didn’t stop there, no, no, he wrote every day of his life, plays, short stories, novellas, essays, letters, poems, travel books, books about psychoanalysis and ancient sculpture, just give us all a break DH. We can’t keep up.
Frieda von Richtofen (yes, those von Richtofens), the German wife of a professor, left her marriage within weeks of meeting Lawrence. At that point she had three children, aged 12, 10 and 8. She missed them every day, she frantically and pathetically tried to see them, but her husband totally cut her off in a you-are-dead-to-us kind of way, the divorce settlement actually forbade any contact, and Lawrence himself would go into a rage if she ever mentioned them. Ah, the good old days.
DH and Frieda had the kind of marriage where they constantly argued and fought and insulted each other in front of friends and embarrassed everybody. They lived beyond all notions of embarrassment.
After they skedaddled from England, they travelled to Germany, Italy, France, Sardinia, Sicily, Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico, Mexico and back to France. He couldn’t keep still.
The most unattractive aspect of DH Lawrence was his tiresome and constant hatred of anything and everything with the sole exception of nature which he loved. Mostly he is like an early version of a Youtube or Instagram ranter who tells you that England Is Finished. Or he is a version of those amusing guys from the 20th century who walked around wearing sandwich boards which said THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH. He sounds like a pain in the neck, but on the other hand, many people really liked him. He did have a sense of fun, always willing to caper about and act the giddy goat.
He once asked me if I had heard the night noises of a tropical jungle, and then instantly emitted a frightening series of yells, squawks, trills, howls and animal “help-murder� shrieks
Then again, many people loathed him. He didn’t care. He was like a coelacanth with an urgent message for the world. He was one of a kind.
I know of no sadder story�. It is, I think, a tragedy, and no more the occasion for retrospective moral judgements than any other bioPeter Guralnick :
I know of no sadder story�. It is, I think, a tragedy, and no more the occasion for retrospective moral judgements than any other biographical canvas should be.
Well, biography is nothing if not a very judgy form of writing � if the author isn’t doing it for sure the reader is.
*
The voice was beautiful, huge, and could glide from a tender whisper to a perfect thrilling high tenor flourish; he was just as big as those big singers of the 50s Al Martino, Guy Mitchell and Frankie Laine, but they, of course, could not rock. And they didn’t look like a juvenile delinquent. Elvis could and did. He was perfect, and he overtook the world of popular music in the late 50s, he had everyone eating from the palm of his hand, and it all went horribly wrong.
I was interested that part � what went wrong so badly and so gracelessly, and for such an impressively long time. Elvis arrives and conquers : 1954 to 1958. Elvis in the army : 1958-60. Elvis does nothing but make awful movies : 1960-68 (nearly a decade, and him at the peak of his powers!). Finally Elvis makes fabulous comeback : 1968-70. But then : Elvis declines and falls: 1971-77.
This is a tale of shoulda woulda coulda. In 1960 Elvis could have picked up where he left off in 1958 but he didn’t. In the 70s Elvis could have had a whole second career of making great music but he didn’t. Instead he died a self inflicted death in 1977 at the age of 42.
So this book does have a sad story to tell but � maybe appropriately � in the end it all became stultifying. Too many parties, too many women, too much money, too many uppers and downers, too many stupid films, too many fans, too much of nothing, too much of everything. First you are King Midas, then you are King Midas in reverse.
*
Ah, those Elvis Presley movies. Maybe you heard of GI Blues, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, but only the dwindling hardcore saw Harum Scarum, Clambake and The Trouble with Girls (not to be confused with Girl Happy or Girls! Girls! Girls!). 29 of them, three per year in the mid-60s. It was Elvis in a coma.
His famous manager Colonel Tom Parker (real name Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk) never tired of telling everyone that they always made money. You start off sympathising with Elvis � well, he was very unsure that he could get his career back after the army (seems ridiculous, but he wasn’t confident at all). So he jumped up on the conveyor belt. But after three or four years, and meanwhile noticing the rock revolution happening without him under his nose, him being hermetically sealed away in Elvisland, you might think he would say hey, enough of this, I’m gonna do a proper album, I’m gonna get all the great songwriters around to give me a song, I refuse to be an old fart at the age of 26. But he didn’t. He politely and most contritely went along with all the trashy music and trashy movies put in front of him.
*
The Colonel and money loom large in this very long book. Your eyes glaze over with all the details � what is this, the Financial Times?
P213
In exchange for what amounted to a one year extension, RCA would raise its guaranteed annual payments to Elvis from $200,000 to $300,000 (there was currently about $1 million owed in back royalties, so the total would come to $2.1 million in guaranteed payments over the next seven years, with $1.1 million left to be recouped).
P248
If Elvis were contracted to MGM for a picture for which he was to receive $750,000 plus 50% of the profits, the Colonel would take his normal 25% management fee on that portion of the deal that represented salary, but on the profits there would be a 50-50 split
P325
He wanted $500,000 for four weeks, one show per night, two on the weekends, with Monday nights off; if Shoofey preferred two weeks, he would give him that for $300,000�.The International definitely wanted four weeks and would pay the $500,000 he was asking if Elvis were to open the hotel; otherwise the salary would be $400,000
The other big topic is Elvis and his various female companions. It’s quite weird � especially as regards Priscilla, who he met in Germany in 1959 when she was 14 and he was 24. They got married 8 years later. Between 1960 and 1966 she lived with Elvis � chaperoned at all times by his grandma, he told her parents. His views on women and marriage were shall we say unreconstructed. And he at all times surrounded himself with a pack of jolly young men who were paid to be his friends, and cavort and play with him and his toys. What a lot of psychology there is to be sure in the story of Elvis.
*
This biography gets nothing but high praise but I found it wearing, vastly repetitive, cramful of quite unnecessary detail, and it wore me down, I was itching like a man on a fuzzy tree. In comparison, Mark Lewisohn’s even more fanatically detailed biography of The Beatles (the first volume is 944 pages long) is never dull, not for a moment. So holy smokes and land sakes alive for me this was a two star headache-inducing reading experience.
Aside from hair raising scraps from Jamaica Kincaid and Bessie Head and hilarious cynicism from Margaret Atwood this is a collection of gnomic pebblesAside from hair raising scraps from Jamaica Kincaid and Bessie Head and hilarious cynicism from Margaret Atwood this is a collection of gnomic pebbles from a distant clogged beach. I am a short story fan but these very short stories are jokes without punchlines and strange directions without a map. There’s a reason songs are three minutes long. The shortest song to get to number one was Stay by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs � 1:38. ...more
This short very welcome sprightly biography has to move really fast to keep up with the crazy energy of Agnes Varda who finally died in 2019 aged 90 aThis short very welcome sprightly biography has to move really fast to keep up with the crazy energy of Agnes Varda who finally died in 2019 aged 90 and still working. She had three careers, at least. The main one was film making - 44 movies including 21 features.
[image]
She made movies about the Black Panthers, hippies, Cuba, feminism, architecture, fishermen, homeless people, dumpster divers, her cat, herself. She was the last word in do it yourself indie film making. Occasionally she took a couple of years off and would then go and photograph some distant country.
She was happily married to Jacques Demy who was also a director. Whilst she was making all these little movies about odd subjects with zero budgets he was making big box office hits like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, but they lived together in perfect harmony for decades until in his 50s he realised he was gay and went off to live with a man. But they didn’t fall out about it.
When she made her first film she had only seen around ten movies. It seems she just thought well, I’m a photographer, movies are just photographs that move, so I can do that.
Along with the masterpieces like Cleo from 5 to 7 and Le Bonheur she made a few clunkers and Carrie Rickey is not afraid to say so :
The Creatures opened in September 1966 and was generally greeted by the sound of audiences scratching their heads.
Although tiny she was kind of forceful and mostly she made exactly the movies she wanted to.
A NOTE ON WHY A DIRECTOR NEEDS A PRODUCER IN CASE YOU EVER WONDERED
If you ever see the credit “Produced and Directed by� here’s what it means � it’s
comparable to a fashion designer raising the sheep, shearing it, carding and spinning the wool, then weaving her own fabric before designing and making a dress
Not so much warts and all, after the halfway point this is nothing but warts. It’s the ups ups ups and downs downs downs � mostly downs it seems � of Not so much warts and all, after the halfway point this is nothing but warts. It’s the ups ups ups and downs downs downs � mostly downs it seems � of the life of Mary Coughlan, great Irish singer, as recounted by herself. She has a funny skewering style which is perfect for the Pre-Fame part of her life (I Was A Major Hippy it could be called) but then after 1985 (first wonderful album � they call it jazz, but it’s really not, it can’t be because I like it) the story changes into I Was a Major Alcoholic and that is too serious, mostly, to be funny about.
Mary, like Keith Richards (80) and Brian Wilson (82) and several other famous cases, is another example of just how much drink & drugs some human bodies can take and still be alive. (“I went out, drank a half-bottle of vodka � down the hatch in three gulps � and I came back to do the gig”�. A few pages later, no surprise to read : “Because my liver, my kidneys and all my organs were in such a state from alcohol poisoning, I developed a condition called metabolic acidosis…I was put in the intensive care ward�).
Alcoholism dominates this story. It’s sad. Actually it’s horrible. Mary says that being sexually abused by her grandfather and her uncle led directly to her feelings of self-loathing and shame that she was only able to get rid of temporarily by drinking. The abuse happened when she was 7,8 and 9.
Ah well, back in those days it was probably quite common, surely. But when was those days? Any time since the dawn of the human race up to, say, the year 2000 when everybody realised it was going on? And in all countries?
The picture of the large chaotic family, with so many sisters, brothers, half-sisters and brothers, cousins and uncles, all scrambled up together is vivid and sounds like tons of fun. Here she is remembering the families she grew up with :
The Sullivans had thirteen, the McDonoughs had fourteen, the Connollys had seventeen, the Connollys next door to these Connollys had twenty-one. Mrs Reed had twenty-five children, the Wynnes had ten, the Nallys had eight. There were some families who only had two kids, but they were few and far between.
I think this is a clue � where better to hide child abuse than inamongst this jolly turmoil. How can the parents have a clue what’s going on? And the crime is beyond their imagination anyway. It’s a perfect crime, the victim is terrified to tell anyone. They think no one will believe them. Eventually Mary grew up and in her 20s told her mother and her mother didn’t believe her and said she would never speak to her again if she repeated what she’d said. So it goes.
Regarding a later domestic disaster Mary says :
But that’s what happened to people at the time, I suppose. There were no social workers, there were no nice counsellors; there were no therapists. There were just fucked-up people trying to cope as best they knew with things they had no understanding of.
This was written in 2009. I guess that in the last 15 years there have been yet more dramas but as of now Mary is 68 and still going strong.
Melville’s style : Go to war against the reader, make every sentence an obstacle course, make it rebarbative, crabbed, recursive, stogged and clogged.Melville’s style : Go to war against the reader, make every sentence an obstacle course, make it rebarbative, crabbed, recursive, stogged and clogged. Make it like this (Melville describes some parts of Billy Budd) :
The ear, small and shapely, the arch of the foot, the curve in mouth and nostril, even the indurated hand dyed to the orange-tawny of the toucan's bill, a hand telling alike of the halyards and tar-bucket; but, above all, something in the mobile expression, and every chance attitude and movement, something suggestive of a mother eminently favored by Love and the Graces; all this strangely indicated a lineage in direct contradiction to his lot.
And here, one of the sailors decides to embellish some innocent gossip about Billy Budd to please his boss :
From his Chief's employing him as an implicit tool in laying little traps for the worriment of the Foretopman---for it was from the Master-at-arms that the petty persecutions heretofore adverted to had proceeded--the Corporal having naturally enough concluded that his master could have no love for the sailor, made it his business, faithful understrapper that he was, to foment the ill blood by perverting to his Chief certain innocent frolics of the goodnatured Foretopman, besides inventing for his mouth sundry contumelious epithets he claimed to have overheard him let fall.
My head! My head! My kingdom for an aspirin! Then there’s the ridiculous melodramatic ultravictorian moustache-twirling verbiage he comes out with when something actually happens (only four things actually happen in this novelette) :
He stood like one impaled and gagged. Meanwhile the accuser's eyes removing not as yet from the blue dilated ones, underwent a phenomenal change, their wonted rich violet color blurring into a muddy purple. Those lights of human intelligence losing human expression, gelidly protruding like the alien eyes of certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep.
Is this the Melville of Moby Dick which I read years and years ago and loved thoroughly? I can’t believe it.
The logic of the story of Billy Budd is tragic and perfect. The way it’s told is excruciating. Melville took a sad song and made it bitter....more
This is an often hilarious book which has a terrible title (should have been called In the Middle of Nowhere with the Notorious Loony D H Lawrence) anThis is an often hilarious book which has a terrible title (should have been called In the Middle of Nowhere with the Notorious Loony D H Lawrence) and has never been reprinted since it first came out in 1938. I can see why � it’s libelous and there’s a lot of loose talk which clangs horribly on the modern ear.
Here’s the set up (it sounds like a sitcom) : rich art obsessed much married New York socialite Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan decides to set up an arts colony in far flung tiny Taos, New Mexico, in 1917, right next to some Native American lands. In 1922 she manages to lure world famous author DH Lawrence and his wife to this tiny place by offering free accommodation. It’s the biggest catch she ever made. Shortly after the Lawrences arrive two Danish painters, Merrild and Gotzsche, rock up in Taos, and quite swiftly, in their practical, endearing, self effacing way, they became friends with Mr and Mrs Lawrence. This book, published 15 years later, and after DHL’s death, is about the five months they were together in New Mexico and California.
The first thing they find out is that DH hates everything, beginning with Mabel and her Native American chauffeur (aka companion) who she later married. DH tells the Danes he’s
tired of her, the bully, with that bullying, evil, destructive, dominating will of hers. � Oh, these awful cultured Americans, how they lack natural aristocracy. �..Even when we go to the hot springs, she has to drag him along, too, and have him bathe with us. Why don’t people know their places? I hate having servants around me, they poison the air. Not that I hate Tony, he is all right in his own way, but I want to choose my own company.
Later (p65) he has another go at Mabel :
I loathe the sight of her. How unspeakably repulsive she is to me ! How I despise her ! I feel like a man whom the snake-worshipping savages have thrown into one of their snake-pits. They are all snakes, and if I touch a single one of them, it will bite me. But they shall not bite me. God in Heaven, no, they shall not bite me. Snakes that they are � and the world is a snake-pit into which one is thrown. But as sure as God is God, they shall not bite me. I will crush their heads, rather.
I should mention that when this book was published poor Mabel was still around, and indeed had another 24 years to live. So it could be that it was never reprinted because her lawyers got in touch with George Routledge and Sons Ltd. Later in the book DHL says that really, human beings are so awful, he should be prepared to kill a few of them. Who would you start with? Asks Merrild (I would have asked that too). The answer, instantly : Mabel! How would you do it? Shoot her? Oh no, guns are nasty machines and Lawrence hates all machines, they will be the ruin of us all. No, he will cut her throat.
Another instance of borderline self-parody by the all time cloud-shouting barmy old geezer (who at this point was 37 years old) - here is DHL reading his morning post :
As Lawrence rapidly went through each letter, he crumpled the envelope in the palm of his hand and threw it on the fire. He read them with a sort of loathing, one after the other, piling them up on his left for Frieda to read. He made remarks on each one, mostly sarcastic. He found them materialistic, empty and meaningless, dull as dishwater, and of no use to anybody. By the time he had done, he wished that every mail boat would go down that was bringing any letter to him.
So anyway, what does the white boho art community do for entertainment, stuck out here in Taos? Well, one thing is, they are all absolutely obsessed with what they call “Indian dances� � they can’t get enough of them. They pay the local Native Americans to dance for them and then they get excited and dance along with them � even DH Lawrence! Oh noooo!
I can still see us, making a silly attempt to copy the difficult rhythmic steps of the Indians� we laughed, and the Indians laughed � oh, such an indulgent laugh � at the British lady, the Turkish writer, the German baroness, the English poet, the Danish painters, and the American society women. “Ain’t we got fun ! � How ridiculous it was! I looked at Lawrence. He was prancing and stepping, yelling and waving around, out of time and out of step, like the rest of us, not catching on to the rhythm at all.
Another thing about DH Lawrence � he was a world class Know It All. Well of course. There wasn’t a subject he didn’t think he was an expert on. It’s winter and they need to chop down a tree and saw it up for firewood � he’s clumsy and the Danes know what they’re doing but
the saw wouldn’t run smoothly, and it was our fault. “Don’t push � do as I do � can’t you see � and so on. It amused us that he thought himself so clever, when it was he who was at fault. So I said to him: “It would be interesting to know why it is that when Gotzsche and I saw together, it runs smoothly all the time; but when either of us saws with you, we get stuck every time�. He looked at me and smiled in acknowledgement, but he said: “It’s because you are both doing it wrong.�
Nevertheless Merrild and Gotzsche like him a lot � actually they are quite starstruck to begin with. And Merrild heaps praise upon him �
He had no social, moral or intellectual affectations and was free from any kind of snobbery.
That kind of thing � in spite of DHL already having said how he doesn’t like Mabel’s chauffeur hanging around and having the temerity to hot tub with them. Well, he was a man of contradictions, I think everyone mentions this. Also he was a man of pure fatuous twaddle too. Here’s a few examples Merrild quotes � he apparently thinks there’s some Profound Truth in it -
There is something curious about real blue-eyed people. They are never quite human, in the good classic sense, human as brown-eyed people are human : the human of the living humus. About a real blue-eyed person there is usually something abstract, elemental. Brown-eyed people are, as it were, like the earth, which is tissue of bygone life, organic, compound. In blue eyes there is sun and rain and abstract, uncreate element, water, ice, air, space, but not humanity.
Or this �
When you are actually in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful disintegrating influence upon the White psyche. It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the White men like some Eumenides, until the White men give up their absolute whiteness. America is tense with latent violence and resistance.
What the heck grinning unappeased aboriginal demons are I would not care to guess. Try this �
When the flow is sympathetic, or love, then the weak, the woman, the masses, assume the positivity. But the balance even is only kept by stem authority, the unflinching obstinacy of the return-force, of power. When the flow is power, might, majesty, glory, then it is a culminating flow towards one individual, through circles of aristocracy towards one grand centre.
It is like a mystic word soup, to pour down someone’s throat and watch their eyes glaze over.
The only thing one can stick to is one’s isolate being and the God in whom it is rooted. And the only thing to look to is the God who fulfils one from the dark. And the only thing to wait for is for men to find their aloneness and their God in the darkness.
He endlessly gurgles this out like something that gurgles endlessly :
In America nobody does anything from the blood. Always from the nerves, if not from the mind. The blood is chemically reduced by the nerves, in American activity. Americans, when they are doing things, never seem really to be doing them.
I will end these quotes with one final zinger:
I told him I had never read any of his books. His only reply was, “Why should you? I don’t want people to read my books.�
Well not too many people have read this odd memoir, but there is a mountain of stuff on DHL so it’s probably no great loss. I enjoyed it a lot. Merrild and Gotzsche were great company. But if I see that DH Lawrence coming, I’m going to duck out the back door....more
12 stories that orbit like a solar system round a centre of horror in the form of an Australian serial killer. I remember someone once summarised the 12 stories that orbit like a solar system round a centre of horror in the form of an Australian serial killer. I remember someone once summarised the movie Rosemary’s Baby by saying “you don’t get to see it� and in Highway Thirteen you don’t get anywhere near the crimes or the criminal himself. Instead you get the feelings of a comedian turned actor who’s playing the murderer in a movie, a transcript of a podcast about the case, a woman who lived across the street from the murderer being interviewed by the author of the book about the case on the day the house is finally torn down, you get the idea. Ripples in a pond. The only one that misfired for me was called “Democracy Sausage� and is one of those kind-of-single-ultralong-sentences that last ten pages, writers like to do that sometimes. It gave me a severe flashback to the time I tried to read Ducks Newburyport by Lucy Ellman. Oh the pain, the pain. Make it stop.
Aside from that a very tasty very sinister collection. ...more
As I turned to the last page of this novel I emitted a groan. That was it?! Noooo�. Mr Portis, where’s the next 100 pages? It’s so short�.I was havingAs I turned to the last page of this novel I emitted a groan. That was it?! Noooo�. Mr Portis, where’s the next 100 pages? It’s so short�.I was having so much fun, what happened? Did you get kidnapped half way through? So this is a terrific deadpan tale of how Norwood Pratt, a man who knows all about car engines and their problems in great detail, tries and fails and stumbles and recovers and woozily lunges through a brief section of his life that involves hot cars, an intelligent chicken, an elegant person of restricted stature, a garrulous eccentric, an uncouth brother in law and an unceasing flow of wry comedy about low level American life in the late 50s, mostly rural but with an unhappy spell in New York.
Charles Portis is famous for True Grit which is a masterpiece and not so famous for his other four novels. So this is the third I have read, the other one being The Dog of the South, which is also great and also a road trip story featuring a man who knows about car engines and their problems in great detail, a garrulous eccentric�. Wait ! I now realise Charles Portis rewrote the same novel multiple times, like how Neil Young rewrites the same song a jillion times. But it’s okay, so long as the novel you keep rewriting is this funny and sweet and pure.
Recommended…but heck, it’s out of print. Amazon is only selling a French translation at the moment. But you can find it in the Library of America’s collected works volume, which is where I had to find it....more
In two or three paragraphs William Trevor (my new favourite writer) effortlessly absorbs you into the situation of another small group of people (a 36In two or three paragraphs William Trevor (my new favourite writer) effortlessly absorbs you into the situation of another small group of people (a 36 year old woman in rural Ireland realises it’s time she stopped going to weekly dances at the ludicrously named Ballroom of Romance; a woman is stood up at a party by her husband and becomes possessed by the idea that he’s going to turn up with his new girlfriend and ask for a divorce) until you begin to feel that the average novel is a lumbering hippo (no offence, you hippos, but you do lumber) and the short story as written by a William Trevor is a fleet-footed gazelle, 30 or 40 pages only required.
A number of these stories are about the crumbling mental health of women living with perfectly ordinary men. He is great on showing the true appalling nature of the perfectly ordinary....more
I am gloomy as I write this review because I appreciate the effort, high spirits and enthusiasm that created such a grand looking volume. The whole thI am gloomy as I write this review because I appreciate the effort, high spirits and enthusiasm that created such a grand looking volume. The whole thing took a year and was cooked up by CriminOlly, the ever affable Booktuber (in the UK), and author & Booktuber Troy Tradup (in the USA I think). I don’t wanna trash their trash! I really wanted to love this.
But.
Announcing that your book is trash is kind of like saying that your book is an unfunny comedy. Hmmm, why, then, would I read it? Well it must be that the Awesome Trash in this big anthology of 34 all-new stories is the fun, excellent, gobsmacking kind of trash that some bottom-feeding readers would hurtle towards with expressions of murderous glee.
Unfortunately as I read up to page 145 and then stopped, the glee kept draining away along with my will to live. I had to conclude, very sadly, that this trash was not awesome. It was trash. That part of the description is accurate. I think the phrase so-bad-it's-good might be used here, but no, they weren't.
One after another, these brief, rabidly overwritten tales deal in the gruesome fates of horrible people, random supernatural outbursts, violence that ends ironically, and I thought � I am getting a case of déjà vu here. And not in a good way. And it came to me :
[image]
Yes, all this stuff used to turn up in the Pan Book of Horror Stories, a series that damaged my psychology as a weedy adolescent. Now The Pan Books started really well, for ten years they were truly trashily awesome, but then they then went down down downhill faster than a slalom skiier, and even though they were slender volumes, the editor appeared to be collecting many barrels to scrape for the stories he allowed into print. Garbology is just like stories from the last ten years of the Pan Books.
So� I would like to give 5 stars for the whole enterprise, from booktubing to creating a handsome physical whopping anthology, it’s a great thing to have done.
Two stars for the content though, and I am being generous....more
Huh, who could be calling at this time ? Oh it’s one of my besties from work. “Hey, what’s up?� “Hey, something happened. I wonder if you could help.� Ԩ Huh, who could be calling at this time ? Oh it’s one of my besties from work. “Hey, what’s up?� “Hey, something happened. I wonder if you could help.� Ԩeah, what happened?� “I just strangled my husband.� “What, dead? Like�. Dead?� “Well yeah � silly! I wouldn’t call you up and say I just strangled my husband but he’s still alive!� “Well okay, no need to get tetchy.� “So I was just thinking maybe, you know, us being such good friends and all, you could get rid of the body for me.� “Oh sure. I’ll be right over.�
At the moment there is a block on all new ratings & reviews of Hillbilly Elegy because of what GR has decided is "suspicious activity" - allegedly a "At the moment there is a block on all new ratings & reviews of Hillbilly Elegy because of what GR has decided is "suspicious activity" - allegedly a "review bomb" where people are organised to submit hundreds of one or five star reviews, depending, because of something the author did or said. But there isn't a block on this combined book, so here's my Hillbilly Elegy review. (This is what's known as a work-around.)
****
HILLBILLY ELEGY by JD VANCE
1) When JD Vance was chosen as Trump’s Veep I thought � wait, where have I heard that name, didn’t this guy write a book, which was some kind of famous? Well yes, he did, so I thought now I have to read it.
2) It’s the story about how occasionally one unusual hillbilly can become upwardly mobile and go to college and then Yale and make something of himself and have a stable marriage and stable kids and just live the American Dream whereas 99% of his childhood pals will be strung out on opioids with three illegitimate kids from three different mothers � you know the cliches. They’re in a thousand tv shows and movies. I thought : this book is not well written, his voice is flat, he generalises, even in the midst of the overdoses and incarcerations; but he was only 30 when he wrote it, so give the guy a break.
3) If there’s one thing this book is about, it’s the hillbillies dreadful self-destructiveness. According to JD, every day they live in a war zone of their own making, each family hates each other and all their neighbours with gusto, venom and a loony recklessness that takes no heed of any consequences, they were all born with one layer of skin missing, they all have hair-trigger volcanic tempers, they are really scary. Especially Mamaw, the grandmother. This leads to continual chaos in their lives, revolving doors of bad boyfriends, absent fathers, blah blah. There is probably nothing in this book about hillbillies that will surprise you. Except this :
4) In the middle of the Bible Belt, active church attendance is actually quite low. He says all the polls are wrong � hillbillies will always say they go to church regularly, but they are not telling the truth. And although they all fervently say they are Christians what they mean by that is some weird hodgepodge of bits and pieces which they add to and discard at will. This is what Roger Olson is talking about when he says that in parts of the USA Christianity is becoming a “folk religion�.
5) Can anything be done about this nightmare life-destroying culture? JD Vance says : no. The only thing you can possibly do is have a great supporting fierce Mamaw like he did and leave your hometown as soon as possible. He says
I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.
(But my guess is from here until November JD will be telling everyone who will listen that all America’s problems can be blamed on that disastrous worst president ever Joe Biden and his veep. )
6) When he gets to Yale Law School it becomes oppressively self-congratulatory and very dull. When I think today about my life and how genuinely incredible it is � a gorgeous, kind, brilliant life partner; the financial security that I dreamed about as a child; great friends and exciting new experiences � I feel overwhelming appreciation for these United States.
7) Online articles like one from Politico have gleefully dug up all JD’s past Trump-hating comments, like :
“I’m a Never Trump guy,� Vance said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2016, a clip used in both the new ads. “I never liked him.�
Since then, things have changed. We can imagine him ducking into a phone box and re-emerging as an Always Trump guy. He’s apologised. Heck, we all of us say silly things now and then.
8) The theory goes like this : Trump wins in November � in 2028 vice president JD Vance becomes the Republican nominee; he picks Donald Trump Jr as his VP; he wins the elections in 2028 and 2032; in 2036 Donald Trump Jr becomes the Republican nominee and wins the next two elections. Many a truth is spoken in jest!
Rating : 2.5 stars - a pretty interesting read but also a pretty repetetetititive one.
FURTHER READING (AND ALL LOADS BETTER THAN JD VANCE)
Educated : Tara Westover American Rust : Philipp Meyer A Childhood : Harry Crews Mostly Redneck : Rusty Barnes Trash : Dorothy Allison Knockemstiff : Donald Ray Pollock American Death Songs : Jordan Harper Demon Copperhead : Barbara Kingsolver...more
Loading...
