All this and a cup of hot punch.

Well, you sly dogs…you got me. Anyone you gave a monkey’s will have worked out that since Summer I’ve developed a severe case of glue-on-the-posterior, which has kept me firmly adhered to the sofa with a bottle of wine in my hand, and pondering my lot, in truth pondering not a lot. The ‘Reading from Home’ project has near written an epilogue to its self – A partial success, and one at least that is still encouraging to me to pay more attention to the books I have at home, and less to picking up everything that my excited eyes see – but it is so hard – I work in a library for Saint Jerome’s sake!

To prove my straying here is a quick list of recommended reads, mostly I’ll stress, comics from the splendid choice at Brighton Library (which, sorry boss, puts Worthing in the shade).

Firstly I was rather overjoyed, and I rarely do joy, to see, as it had a Christmas theme, they’ve rush released the latest of Alan Bradley’s ‘Flavia de Luce’ mysteries; “I am Half-Sick of Shadows”. I love these books, and the precocious Flavia de Luce, I’m sure, will go down as one of the great detective ‘characters’ of all time, as Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey have done before. Alan Bradley writes with glee and poison. It’s a simple as that.

The Book of Disquiet

Tuesday morning I was writing all sorts of notes in the margins of Pessoa’s ‘The Book of Disquiet’. Disquiet indeed – this is the first time I’ve wilfully written in a printed book for they always seems sacrosanct, which in turn now seems foolish – A book should not be crafted in the spirit of, nor seen as an oppressive church – They may instil a feeling of ‘prayer’ and meditation, but essentially should act as catalysts (even books of little note will spark up and do this), send thought and feelings colliding in discovery, empathy, memory, eureka! The short passages in Pessoa’s ‘Factless Biography’ resound within me, many sentences echoing feelings I have had on so many occasions, and it seems very often summing up how I see my place in life and my feelings and reactions to it. So accurate these seem as to make this book one it could be so easy to get carried away with these passages that are disconnected from the feeling word, and thus claim each thought as truly your own; a teenage trait. I think, however it will remain a book which while I may never wholly understand all of its philosophical musings, will be important as holding at least a part of me within its pages.

11th March 1978

I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows.

Andy Warhol

The Pleasure of Books

I have been very slack in my ‘blogging’ of late, but I have been reading…

A very timely and fun reminder came through from Unshelved.com today, with a nod and a wink to the mighty Roald Dahl’s Matilda – I think you’ll like….

Wanderings

1808

Since the last entry I’ve killed three hares, the first quadruped in my life.

Stendhal

On beginning Hesses’s Wanderings I found his meditations on a hermit’s life, as he passes various landmarks that spark memories, longings and thoughts on piety and god almost too simple, a little repetitive, too simple? But as I progressed through his charming descriptions and his personal thoughts and struggles about a ‘normal life’ over an ‘artists’, another theme became prevalent, that of his darker moods, depressions, which he guages as carefully as a barometer forecasts squalls of weather…I had to dog-ear two pages, not a splendid act, nor a habitual one, but so…

I will have baked fish, and I will drink Nostrano out of a thick glass and draw slowly on long cigars, and spit into the glowing fireplace, think about my mother, and try to press a few drops of sweetness out of my anxiety and sorrow. Then I will lie down in the inadequate bed aside the thin wall, listen to wind and rain and struggle with the beating of my heart, wish for death, fear death, call out to god. Until it is all over, until doubt wears itself out, until something like sleep and consolation beckons to me. So it was when I was twenty years old, so it is today, and so it will go on and on, until it ends. Always, over and over, I will have to pay for my loved and lovely life with days like these. Always over and over, these days and nights will come, the anxiety, the aversion, the doubt. And I will still live, and I will still love life.

These are themes, leaving out god, that my moods have often fallen into, have forced me to dwell on, and can only be borne as a learning and lifelong experience.

Comic Catch-Up

Well, feh – have cast aside Plummer’s ‘Condemened to Live’ – you can imagine it making a fun radio-play, along the lines of Paul Temple.  I suppose I’m not too fond of the Fifties style of murder/mysteries. What  must have seemed exciting and new then, now often comes across as stylized brashness, and may passages, at least in Plummer’s book seem to shout in italicized “quote marks”.

Seeing as I’m trying to gee myself up for the B.C.C. I’ve picked up Hesse’s ‘Wandering’, which is less a book about walking and more a search for a nomadic lifestyle, but it’s accompanied by charming poems, and B&W reproductions of watercolours (the colour originals sadly being destroyed before the book was re-published).

Whilst I’m reading that, here’s a quick comic catch-up. I’ve had to resort to reading the versions of ‘proper’ literature that have been turned into comic form, as I’ve read all the other comics the library has. ‘Classics’ comics are getting better tho – originally they seemed to be very plain and layman like abridged retellings, but now they are rather coming into their own…

Sadly, the excellent version  of  ‘The Master & Margarita’  by Klimowski/Schejbal has been nicked by some rotter, which is doubly annoying, well, because I  wanted it. It’s not often a comic really does justice to the original, actually what do I know, I’ve not read the original, always mean to, but it’s one of those good intentions the road to hell is paved with, but this is a superb graphic/comic whatsit, and really shows how an artist can collaborate imaginatively with the novelist’s words and create something outstanding in its own right.

Another good effort is Culbard and Edginton’s versio of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. Culbard does great justice to the seediness of underworld characters, and the same justice to the sometimes seedier ‘society’ characters such as the goading and immoral Lord Henry Wooton who is the real villain of the piece, I reckon. Unfortunately however, Culbard has an unfortunate way noses, drawing the base of the nose where it goes into the lip and chin as one continuous too thick line. This often serves, especially in Gray’s case, to make him less than divinely handsome, and more like he has a worm dangling from his nostril…But this is a mere quibble, and the rest of the artwork very much complements Edginton’s telling of Wilde’s cautionary tale,and can be seen, none more so in the contrast of before and after portraits of Gray himself. Also, reassuringly, it sticks to the story of the book, unlike the good looking, but erroneous recent film muck-about effort.

Another notable mention is Mairowitz’s and Korkos’ version of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, whose style and telling is a little, flat, but does a very good job of marking the salient points in Dostoyevsky’s long, but probably most accessible, and certainly most famous novel.

Last and leastly – have also read a not bad at all version of the story of Robin Hood, ‘Outlaw’ which again sticks to a more ‘accurate’ historical version of this legendary figure, and is ably illustrated by Sam Hart.

See you in the funny papers #1

My first caveat, virtually the only things that are not already ensconced in my flat, that I shall allow myself to read as they arrive fresh upon the library shelves, are comics.

Yesterday I spent a fine hour at lunch with the 7th volume of Garth Ennis’ & Derick Robertson’s project, ‘The Boys’ – ‘The Innocent’s’ in the case of this volume.

A supreme poke of fun at the ridiculous antics and tyranny of Super Heroes, who are here at the beck and call of multi-million dollar companies, and certainly do not believe in truth and justice, and more in power, tedium, porn and sexual abuse – and violence of course – if that violence is swept under the carpet, so as not to tarnish the ‘Hero’ image they are seen to project.If people really did have Super Powers, how would they behave? – Probably like this lot, like a right bunch of shite-bags, which is where the ‘Boys’ come in. A bunch of super lethal chaps and one woman, ‘The Woman’ ,with issues  and CIA connections whose main purpose is to fuck with the heroes, and as ever with Ennis much of the scenario’s are totally out of order, over the top, graphically violent, and as funny, funny as only Ennis can be. But the plot over 7 or 8 volumes is far more considered and clever than just adult comic titillation.

A Book at Bedtime

Todays extract from the Assassin’s Cloak is from 1942 (jersey) and by Nan Le Ruez.

“RAF dropped leaflets early this morning. Laurence found one and Joyce found one in our garden near the bee-hive! They were all written in French. They were not addressed specially to Channel Islanders. German Officers were searching the countryside for them but our eyes are sharper than theirs! It is nice to think that our British friends were close to us today. We are not forgotten after all!”

Last night I found myself strangely insympatico with the lead character Caden in the film ‘Synecdoche, New York’  As his mind & nerves break down into tics and seizures I found myself feeling more and more peculiar myself and so fled to bed with ‘Troubles’. Still unsettled I gave up reading and turned to my other caveat in my project. I do like a book at bed time and have been getting more and more fond of books on tape, or on CD. Books at bedtime nearly always are murders and detective novels, and to hand was one by Donna Leon, who writes detective novels based in Venice, and titled ‘Through a glass darkly’.

The inherent problem with listening to a story thru headphones as your bed shuttles off to an adventure in the dark is that one often falls asleep a chapter or two into the disc, and next night you have to fiddle about trying to find out if the knife has yet fallen or if you have missed the first murder or puzzle entirely. The other problem being, if particularly gripped is that you get little sleep at all. However, detective stories in the main are often formulaic, so you can often get the gist of the plot, while missing out many of the intricacies. If the story is an excellent one I’ll often give up the plot in the night, and lay my hands on the actual book, something again I cannot do this year.

I think I must have listened to about one chapter before Morpheus clonked me over the head – I’ll see if I can pick the thrread up tonight.

The Mock Exam

Well, I had already forgotten my first ‘rule’, that I said I should read the books I have on loan from the library first, so Richard Mabey will have to wait a little longer, still on display, with the fallen Christmas cards, next to the broken gramophone.

Under the touch-lamp, also broken now after a young, voluptuous lady decided to play jazz drum solos upon it’s shade, are the shrinking pile of library books and I choose to read next J.G Farrell’s ‘Troubles’ which is a winner of the Lost Booker Prize.

I had to read Farrel’s ‘The Siege of Krishnapur’ at school for O-level, and had great trouble appreciating it, especially in the in the classroom environment where even books you may love are dragged into hard and fast revision tactics and spoil all their charm. In the mock exam for ‘Siege’ I had a brain freeze on the first question something about the main character, the Collectors’ , well character I think. I squeezed out one line, reiterating the question in the answer, and seized up. I got 1% in the results. Without my teacher, and later friend and mentor, Robert Bush, sticking his educational oar in, I would have never sat my O-level, landed a ‘B’ and would never have elevated myself to where I am today as a 43 year old unqualified library assistant. Heady times.

I re-read ‘Krishnapur’ and it is indeed the fantastic novel we were led to believe, a splendid, moving novel and far more humorous in it’s potrayal of the British Empire all-at-sea during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Farrell plays havoc with the class systems strcutures here, rigid as they are, as a whalebone corset.

Farrell does seem to use historic skirmishes and upheavals as his stock-in-plot – ‘Troubles‘  is set against a background of the struggle for Irish Indpendence in 1919. It is the third of the novels in Farrell’s British Empire trilogy, and I almost hope I don’t enjoy it too much, as it means I won’t be able to back into the series and follow up with ‘The Singapore Grip’ – as I have no copy of it at home.

‘Krishapur’ certainly shows it is worth revisiting the books that were crammed into you as a youth, until any sense of enjoyment and fun were scraped from the page until you were just left with dank cardboard covers, and I thank Mr Bush for introducing Farrell’s work to me (even tho he had to) , and for giving me another shot at the English Lit ‘O’ at de Stafford School way back when.

This entry was delayed from last night, and hence there is no quote from the Assassin’s Cloak from 4th Jan – it was a good one too. Instead two of my friends made fishfinger sandwiches, poured me whiskey and wine, in lieu of my missing of New Years Eve, being laid up with a sleeping pill and a bad lurgy, and lastly sacrificied an After Eight chocolate Santa by smashing it open with an empty Cava bottle to mark the end of Christmas. We are now surely cursed, and on the ‘naughty list’ for a decade.

J.G. Farrell

The end of the Empress of Ireland

Todays quote from the diarists collection ‘The Assassin’s Cloak’ is a short but lovely entry from Alma Mahler-Werfel, from 1902.

“Bliss and Rapture.”

Last night, and the early hours of this morning I finished Christopher Robbins biography of veteran film director Brian Desmond Hurst, “The Empress of Ireland”.

It’s an incredibly entertaining book about a man who is a born raconteur and invented himself to almost mythic proportions, and it’s possibly only on two occassions that his friend, and later biographer, Robbins sat him down with a tape recorder and documented the truth on two very moving chapters in his life which up until then he had either reinvented or glossed over; his childhood and his experiences during WW1 at Gallipoli.

Even so, the book in general is a boozy romp that brings in aristocrats, film legends, spies and a dinner party waited on by almost prescient dwarves.

Hurst ended up, at his death, an almost forgotten figure despite a patchy but very successful and larger than life film directing career, directing such classics as ‘Scrooge’ with Alistair Sim, and ‘The Playboy of the Western World’.

Robbins’ book starts with this imposing white haired figure carefully carrying one orange over the threshold of the Turk’s Head in Belgravia at 11am  to a resounding chorus of ‘Fucking old queen’ from a bunch of muddy labourers drinking a morning Guiness at the bar. Hurst carefully carries his orange to the bar and passes it to the landlord who precedes to halve it and squeeze one half into a chamagne glass, in preparation of Hurst’s breakfast; his first Buck’s Fizz of the morning. Upon recieving his draught, he offers the labourers fresh drinks, and they relucltantly accept, knowing this makes them beholden to his generosity and complicit to his behaviour.

“Your very good health,” says Brian raising his glass in a toast. ” And by the way gentlemen, I am not an old queen, I am…The Empress of Ireland!“

The whole book is a paean to Hurst’s wit and storytelling, far more hilarious than the funniest ‘comic’ novel, and while I can certainly do it little justice, I recommend heartily as one of the best books I read in 2010. 

For more information on the most prolific Irish film director see the official legacy website http://www.briandesmondhurst.org/home2.html