Repressing Colloquial Barbarisms #7

From the Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell 1791

Johnson having argued for some time with a pertinacious gentleman; his opponent, who had talked in a very puzzling manner, happened to say, 'I don't understand you, Sir' upon which Johnson observed, 'Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.'

A foppish physician (probably Sir Lucas Pepys) once reminded Johnson of his having been in company with him on a former occasion. 'I do not remember it, Sir'. The physician still insisted; adding that he that day wore so fine a coat that it must have attracted his notice. 'Sir, (said Johnson,) had you been dipt in Pactolus, I should not have noticed you.'

Britten on music

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love...

- Benjamin Britten

Like Shallow Ghosts

I'm on a good-book hot-streak! Drama City indeed. What a blast. Pelecanos just pisses these stories out. Each one feels different in character and atmosphere and yet each novel is essentially the same premise.

All this after Murakami's delightful Kafka on the Shore. If you described Murakami's books to me a few years ago I would never have a read a single page. Yet they draw you in deep, entwining you in the labyrinthian plot and fantasy worlds with hints, just hints, of the modern world with jazz references. His female characters are stunning and I mean that literally (do I? I think I do...), they take your breath away (I only half mean that literally).

I've now moved on to London Fields. You have to love Amis. So easy to mock and mimic. Here is a site that has a Martin Amis diary: AMIS ON AMIS. It was difficult to read the first few pages of London Fields after reading that diary. I've read Money, Yellow Dog and the wonderful and exhilarating Experience. I certainly won't be reading Koba The Dread.

After dedicating a section of a book depicting Stalin's atrocities to the Hitch, the press justifiably ripped him apart. In his Atlantic Monthly review Hitchens takes time to refute Amis' claims:

I am compelled to say where I think it fails. And by "compelled" I suppose I must mean "obliged," since it appears on the author's own warrant that the book's shortcomings are mostly my fault. In the fall of 1999 Amis attended a meeting in London where I spoke from the platform. The hall was one of those venues where the rafters had once echoed with the rhetoric of the left. I made an allusion to past evenings with old comrades, and the audience responded with what Amis at first generously terms "affectionate laughter." But then he gives way to the self-righteousness and superficiality that let him down.

Why is it? Why is it? If Christopher had referred to his many evenings with many "an old blackshirt," the audience would have ... Well, with such an affiliation in his past, Christopher would not be Christopher, or anyone else of the slightest distinction whatsoever. Is that the difference between the little mustache and the big mustache, between Satan and Beelzebub? One elicits spontaneous fury, and the other elicits spontaneous laughter? And what kind of laughter is it? It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old idea about the perfect society. It is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million. This isn't right:
Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetski. Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerdzhinsky. Everybody knows of the six million of the Holocaust. Nobody knows of the six million of the Terror-Famine.

George Orwell once remarked that certain terrible things in Spain had really happened, and "they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late." Martin Amis can be excused for coming across some of the above names and numbers rather late in life, but he cannot hope to get away with accusing others of keeping these facts and names from him, or from themselves. I have my own, large differences with Deutscher. But nobody who read his Prophet Outcast , which was published more than three decades ago, could possibly be uninstructed about Vorkuta or Yezhov. In other words, having demanded to know "Why is it?" in such an insistent tone, he doesn't stay to answer his own question, instead replacing it with a vaguely peevish and "shocked, shocked" version of "How long has this been going on?" The answer there is, longer than he thinks.

Here, the Hitch writes a wonderful response letter to his dear friend. I can't believe how well written this piece is.

I wince on my own behalf a good deal as I wade through, but I don't forget to wince for you as well. My sympathy is tinged with annoyance, all the same. What did you imagine would happen if you elected to write on such a Himalayan topic, and then pygmified it by addressing so much of it to me? I find myself embarrassed almost every day at the thought of an actual gulag survivor reading this.

You report on how you took the pedantic trouble to ask me - should it be Trotskyist or Trotskyite? And you add that I told you several times that only Stalinists or ignorant people say the latter. And then you go and call the POUM - George Orwell's party - "Trotskyite". By the way, that's a factual error as well as an aesthetic one, and I wish it was the only such.

You demand that people - you prefer the term "intellectuals" - give an account of their attitude to the Stalin terror. Irritatingly phrased though your demand may be, I say without any reservation that you are absolutely right to make it. A huge number of liberals and conservatives and social democrats, as well as communists, made a shabby pact with "Koba", or succumbed to the fascinations of his power. Winston Churchill told Stalin's ambassador to London, before the war, that he had quite warmed to the old bastard after the Moscow Trials, which had at least put down the cosmopolitan revolutionaries who Churchill most hated. TS Eliot returned the manuscript of Animal Farm, well knowing that his refusal might condemn it to non-publication, because he objected to its "Trotskyite" tone. I think we can say fairly that the names of Churchill and Eliot are still highly regarded in conservative political and cultural circles. You have a certain reputation for handling irony and paradox. How could you miss an opportunity like this, and sound off like a Telegraph editorialist instead, hugging the shore and staying with the script?

London Fields should be great though. In his Atlantic review, Hitchens starts with a summary of Amis' work:

In his superb memoir, Experience, Martin Amis almost casually expends a terrific line in a minor footnote. Batting away a critic he describes as "humorless," he adds, "And by calling him humorless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo ." A book in which such an observation can occur in passing is a very rich and dense one. Amis has won and held the attention of an audience eager for something very like this in reverse a synthesis of astonishing wit and moral assiduity. Even the farcical episodes of his fiction are set on the bristling frontiers of love and death and sex. With his other hand, so to speak, he has raised the standard of essayistic reviewing, mounting guard over our muscular but vulnerable English language and registering fastidious pain whenever it is hurt or insulted.

Talking of a good-book hot-streak reminds me of recent Nick Hornby article, How To Read. So prescient and so damn right, he advises to never persevere with a book you can't get in to. Just put it down. You will never get through all of life's books. Life is short. Enjoy reading. Don't make it a chore:

One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good. I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography. They were struggling. Both of these people are parents and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the early years of a 20th-century world figure.
At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he'd put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he'd dared hope. He then realised that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.)

In my dissertation on Radiohead, I used a Hornby quote that I strongly disagreed with and still do (something about the way Radiohead had betrayed their fans with Kid A/Amnesiac as no one wants to listen to difficult music when they've had a hard day at work). I really do think there's a place for him. I really enjoyed 31 Songs. His plain love for simple, straight-to-the-heart consumption of literature / music is infectious and eloquent.

As is Geoff Dyer's. He seems to be everywhere at the moment. He spreads himself so widely (not thinly however) , that most of the admiration for him seems to arise from a respect for his refusal to be typecast. He has written on an array of subjects including photography, travel, literature and has also written his own novels. One book T has told me about is But Beautiful. Dan Hill of City of Sound discusses it here:

Quite simply, But Beautiful is one of the most astonishing books I've ever read. An impressionistic, semi-fictionalised series of portraits of early jazz legends, it's also one of the great books about popular music, period. Dyer's starting points are first-hand accounts of these great musicians' lives, memoirs and liner notes, and particularly photographs - his destinations are gloriously creative evocations of a time and a sound, of the immense spirit of these extraordinary players, and the cities with which their lives and music became entwined.

He then goes on to quote the book at length. I can't wait to read it...it jumps off the page (screen) at you.

Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream

I write this at 7.15am on Sunday morning. I'm not usually awake at this time but the thumping bass of a MOR radio station is descending from the flat above me. Fine. Doesn't matter. I have things to do anyway.

I have one of the finest pieces of music produced in my earphones: Sufjan Stevens - Come on Feel The Illinoise. I've written about him before. His music is at once contemporary and timeless. The scope of his work is huge. Minimalist and maximalist all at the same time. For those unaware, he is attempting to write an album dedicated to each (United) state (of America). Michigan was superb but Illinois is something else entirely. A new confidence can be heard, as if he has accepted his place in the pantheon, his role as interpreter of the history of the US almost. The song titles are literary and add to the sense of timelessness ('A Conjunction of Drones Simulating the Way in Which Sufjan Stevens Has an Existential Crisis in the GREAT GODFREY MAZE'). I wrote this in a post around a year ago:

They represent all that is great about American music. It feels like it could have been recorded at any time since the 1800s. And yet its fresh and progressive. Astonishing.

Anyway, I'm just reading this article in today's Observer. The Who are back. I can't say I'm a huge fan, although I've never checked them out in any substantial way. Rusted Willy has always pestered me to listen to them. Anyway, I found Pete Townshend's blog which fascinates. A truly gifted writer, a voracious interpreter of his past, his mistakes, his achievments, his own canon and the issues surrounding music. I was surprised but any research of the man tells me such a reaction was foolish. The only album I've heard (and I'm starting to get into at last) is Tommy.

Here he depicts his songwriting process, quoting Brecht, Gainsbourg and Weil and his thoughts about the internet. Here, he eloquently annihilates Harold Pinter's frothing-at-the-mouth bile and explains his decision to not let Michael Moore use his song Won't Get Fooled Again in Farenheit 911. Here he describes the decline in his hearing, something that we talk about a lot at the studio and have since resorted to using earplugs. And here he writes about his, yes, you guessed it, charity work. It's an honest account and that goes for all his statements. You sometimes get too much, but it's better than what you get from most artists his age.

His partner is Rachel Fuller. She produces these TV shows from backstage with The Who called In The Attic. The shows have featured acoustic performances and interviews with The Flaming Lips and Eels. Fuller and Townshend both promote online communication and online communities. Her blog reveals all the minutiae of a rock star's life. I couldn't believe that he/they would want that information 'out there' but it's a great mix of shopping/lunches with famous friends, holiday homes in South France, walking the dog etc...Today's article fascinates equally.

(Is it me or do I sound like I read Hello and all I'm interested in is the lives of the rich and famous????? And why have I started quoting my own blog?! What an ego...)