Now we are thirty

In celebration of my thirtieth birthday, I've decided to move my blog to WordPress, as blogger is becoming increasingly annoying to use. You'll find my new blog blue stockings here at http://woodscolt.wordpress.com/

I've added the list of books read so far this year to the sidebar on the right. Annoyingly, blogger won't let me do a list of some hyperlinks and some text, so I can't do a list which links to my posts about books as I write them up. Or, I could, but I would have to do all the HTML myself, which i can't be bothered with.

Reading/listening/watching

Reading: having finished L'argent, I've moved swiftly on to Au bonheur des dames.

Listening: it's been a poor week for music.

Watching: for the first time, Rear window, which I really enjoyed. I might try and start to say slightly more meaningful things about the films I watch, actually.

Reading/watching/listening

Reading: still reading Zola's L'argent and Kotz's Russia's path from Gorbachev to Putin. And a collection of surprisingly interesting articles about indexing for school.

Listening: have spent the Easter weekend listening to the Classic FM yearly top 300 classical pieces poll. It's very amusing how they breathlessly give you the stats - who's up, who's down - for a collection of pieces that actually shows very little change from one year to the next.

Watching: Letters from Iwo Jima, which I thought was brilliant: better than Flags of our Fathers, the companion piece showing the battle for Iwo Jima from the American side.

The trouble with libraries

I'm reading a copy of A.S. Byatt's Still life from the library which has been liberally annotated in blue biro with grammatical 'corrections'. Every incidence of the word 'whilst' has been changed to 'while', which is sort of fair enough. Every Oxford comma has been carefully scribbled out. But this reader isn't familiar with the subjunctive, so 'Tony insisted that Frederica come to hear Amis speak' gets modified to 'Tony insisted that Frederica should come'. 'As though this were possible' has been changed to 'as though this was possible'.

Further into the book the self-appointed sub-editor has been carried away with his or her own rightness. 'Last but two' becomes 'antepenultimate'. 'Nature ramble' becomes 'nature walk'. 'I think he might give up on me too' is weirdly changed to 'I think he might give me up too' which is quite a considerable change in meaning, I think. It's very disconcerting reading a book in which the author's language has been so assertively changed by a completely random person.

Reading/listening/watching

Reading: I've started the second of A.S. Byatt's Frederica quartet, Still Life. I'm also really enjoying David Kotz's Russia from Gorbachev to Putin, although I'm going quite slowly with it.

Listening: a lovely concert on Saturday, Brahms and Mendelssohn at the Royal Festival Hall.

Watching: I've been re-watching Series 3 of The Wire and I'd forgotten how many good bits there are in it. Adjourn your asses! Cutty! Bodie! Omar! So great.

We are now beginning our descent - James Meek

This is James Meek's fourth novel, which I thought I'd read as I enjoyed his previous one so much, The people's act of love. 

I actually found this book so depressing that I had to stop reading it temporarily. It starts in Afghanistan, where the central character, Adam Kellas, is reporting on the war, and meets a fellow journalist from the US, Astrid. The novel then follows him back to London, where he has a sort of crise and smashes up the kitchen at a dinner party gathering of wanky London intellectuals. It was this bit that I found so depressing: Kellas's (Meek's?) anger at the self-satisfaction of the liberal journalists reflects some of my own feelings about the smugness of what passes for the liberal press in this country. The contrast between the war going on in Afghanistan and the abstractions of the newspaper editors and writers back in England is jarring and bitter and miserable.

After trashing his hosts' kitchen, Kellas flies to America to find Astrid, and en route loses everything he has - including his enormous book deal advance. But Astrid is as lost and incapable with dealing with the return to the West as he is. I thought this book said a lot about the way that war, even war in a land far away about which we know little, has an impact on the way we operate. The fact that we split these things off from our own lives - we need to, because you can't do anything else - has effects that reach further that we imagine, and the faultlines are particularly clear for anyone who has to move between these two worlds.

Antonia Forest

Laura very kindly lent me a couple of Antonia Forest books I hadn't read: The thuggery affair (one of the stories about the Marlows) and The Thursday kidnapping. These were both reasonably good fun, as Antonia Forest usually is, but not as enjoyable as some of the others because of the appalling snobbery that pervades both stories. This comes up in other Forest novels - the depiction of Marie Dobson in the school novels, for example - but was specially noticeable and unpleasant here.

The Thursday kidnapping is about the relationship between the Ramsays, a family of nice, middle class children in Hampstead, and Kathy, the vulgar, lower-middle class girl who lives next door. Kathy is quite similar to Marie Dobson, in fact - she has all her unpleasant habits, sneaking, stealing, lying and sucking up - and is depicted with a level of snobbery which really gives one pause. Her family are sneered at for being an 'advertisement' family - of course the outward perfection shown by their shiny mod cons home is a sham and they all despise each other. They are even too lazy to walk their dog properly. Kathy is a fantasist and a liar, but is instantly reduced to whining and sycophancy when threatened with punishment. And where the depiction of Marie Dobson in the school stories has the redeeming quality of examining the way we feel guilty for disliking other people, even when we have no reason to like them, the Ramsay children are here given no reason to tolerate Kathy: in fact, the events of the day described essentially vindicate their dislike of her.

The thuggery affair is back in the world of the Marlow family, and describes Peter and Lawrie Marlow and Patrick Merrick's efforts to thwart a gang of drug smugglers. Bits of the plot really defy belief: the gang are despatching their dope via carrier pigeon, for example, and they talk in an embarassing made-up slang. Here Antonia Forest does try to moderate the snobbery that runs through the whole book: she gives the chief thug a long passage in which he explains why he went to the bad. But even this passage is compared very unfavourably with Patrick Merrick's stern (priggish?) morals, and the message is clearly that anyone can afford morals; only the weak succumb to criminality. I'm more in agreement with Bertold Brecht: erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.

Reading/listening/watching

Reading: I'm finally emerging from a bit of a reading block, which is good. I've been reading quite a bit of poetry recently and finally finished James Meek's We are now beginning our descent.

Listening: a great concert at the RFH on Sunday, Beethoven's Eroica, Strauss's Four last songs, and some Ravel.

Watching: as part of my project to expand my film knowledge, a recommendation from Niall, Dog day afternoon, which I thought was fantastic.

Betsy Blair

I'm very sad to hear about the death of Betsy Blair (Guardian obituary here), whose autobiography was one of the first books I wrote about on this blog. I first heard of her when she was on Desert Island Discs where she came across as such a warm, intelligent person (and picked such nice music) that I bought her autobiography. (Also because I love Gene Kelly, of course.)

Reading/listening/watching

Reading: skipped my way through a couple of Antonia Forest children's books. Apart from that I've hardly been reading at all: too tired and fed up. And when not fed up, gardening.

Listening: La Somnabula live from the Met on Saturday was really gorgeous.

Watching: The last ever Deadwood. I felt quite bereft. Such a beautiful series. Then, this weekend, Marty in memory of Betsy Blair (such a lovely lovely film), and Sophie Scholl.

Girl in red

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love, I felt that if I could have married her, I should have known perfect bliss - Charles Dickens

I was born to a mother in mourning.

The mood in our house was black
as soft tar at the edges of pevements
I stirred with a stick.

Red was my favourite colour:
scarlet, vermilion, ruby.

At school I painted a red girl in a red wood.

'Trees are green,' the teacher said.
So I painted them green
and she said, 'Red and green clash.'

But I wanted them to clash.
I wanted cymbals, trumpets,
all the noises of rowdy colour
to drown the silence of black.

I got my mother to make me a scarlet dress.
(I didn't care that Grandma said
it made me look like a tart.)

I stole a lipstick -
the sizzling vermilion
that made boys and old men look.

I squeezed into ruby high heels
that on hot days filled with blood.

I drank tumblers of pink gin
and told my sister (sent to spy on me)
it was Cherryade.

I dreamed in red: scarlet, vermilion, ruby.

And now I dream in black.

From The book of blood by Vicki Feaver [15]

Pig

You think of me
as clean and tasty,
don't want to know
about the mud, the tail,
the terrible trotters

don't want to know
about the neat little hats
in my wardrobe, the orchid
collection and the lengths and lengths
of breaststroke, the days and nights
in the Railtrack buffet
and the mad rapture for molluscs.

Jo Shapcott

From: Jo Shapcott: her book. Poems 1988-1998 [14]

Reading/listening/watching

Reading: I've started, somewhat tentatively, on Peter Weiss's The aesthetics of resistance. It's actually going much better so far than it did the last time I had a go at it.

Listening: more Lotte Lenya. I even bought the original Broadway cast album of Cabaret, which has Lenya playing the old landlady. I'd forgotten how many good songs get missed out of the film of Cabaret.

Watching: have finally (thanks, Niall!) started Mad Men which is brilliant fun if a bit self-conscious: they make great play of the political incorrectnesses of the day, which gets a bit much, sometimes. The clothes are amazing.

Women and children first - Craig and Cadogan

This was another fun cultural survey by the women who wrote the marvellous You're a brick, Angela! (which I wrote about very briefly a couple of years ago). This time they were looking at literature written for women and children about war, starting with the first World War up to the contemporary literature (well, seventies) about the second World War. This was interesting and funny (not as funny as YABA but the material doesn't have such a wonderfully camp ghastliness about it).

The difference between the overt jingoism of the first world war and the contemporary books about the horror of war is very interesting, as is the way the second world war is approached at the time: there's far more jolly whimsical stuff about blackouts and Home Guard japes than there is serious stuff about people actually in the war on the continent. The Holocaust barely seems to feature as a subject for fiction until the 1960s.

They miss out a good example of WW1 jingoism, though - Rilla of Ingleside (the chronological last of the Anne of Green Gables books) is really fascinating, especially given that it's set in Canada. The deeply unpleasant characterisation of the 'pacifist' of the village is particularly interesting for what it says about the attitudes of the time. [12]

Interior of the Grote Kerke at Haarlem - Pieter Saenredam

Tariq Ali

I LOVE Tariq Ali. He is one of the people on my new list of people to write to and tell them how great they are before they die and I regret not telling them. (Susan Sontag, Stephen Jay Gould and Linda Smith all died before I could do this, hence this project).

Tariq Ali was on Private Passions the other week which inspired me to read his autobiography Streetfighting years. It's good fun and much less self-regarding than a lot of autobiographers, especially considering some of the amazing things he's done (including being mistakenly arrested in Bolivia when someone took him for one of Che Guevara's companions). It's also very funny in places. I like that Tariq Ali takes some things very seriously but seems to having a pleasing disregard for the way he is portrayed in the press.

The other thing I really loved about this was the introduction, which is a long discursive essay about the changes to the political climate since the sixties, interspersed with beautiful, loving tributes to Derek Jarman, Paul Foot, and Edward Said. I thought it was a wonderful summary of the way the sixties movements in politics and culture have influenced so much since then. [9]

Anyway, that sent me on to one of Tariq Ali's novels, Shadows of the pomegranate tree which is set in Moorish Spain during the Inquisition, when the Arabs in Spains were being persecuted by Catholic fanatics. It's a lovely book - I love all the detail about the cooking and the habits of the Arab characters (the bathing and sleeping arrangements - even recipes!) and draws such an alluring, beautiful picture of life in Moorish Spain. It also works much better as a novel, I thought, than the only other novel of Ali's I've read*. The story is about a family living near Granada who have been there for generations, and now have to choose between conversion to Catholicism or exile from their homeland. It goes into the family history

It's impossible not to draw comparisons between the Arabs in Spain and the pre-1948 Palestinians - both groups pinning their hopes on assurances of fair play from the ruling governments, but in the end having to make the decision between conforming to the ideologies of others, or retreating to another part of the Arab world, where they will share a religion, but not really a way of life. This is particularly poignant when it comes to the story of the eldest son of the family, who decides that he must resist along with a small group of his friends. They are all killed.

The last thing I liked about this was that it was an interesting look at a bit of Islamic history I don't really know much about (well, I don't know anything about Islamic history, but you know what I mean). You hear about other bits of Islam, and it was interesting to read about the way Spanish Muslims lived alongside Catholics, and the way Islam was interpreted in a fairly laid back sort of way, in sharp contrast to the Inquisitorial side of Catholicism. [10]

* Fear of mirrors, which I really enjoyed, but which hangs together quite clunkily as a novel. I like all the detail about left-wing politics throughout the twentieth century, and the cameo appearances by people like Kim Philby, and the message of the book is wonderful.

Reading/listening/watching

Reading: having raced through my two books by Tariq Ali, I'm now reading Elizabeth Ewing's book about Twentieth Century fashion, which is very interesting.

Listening: still not much, really.

Watching: I watched the Edith Piaf biopic, La vie en rose/La môme and sort of saw more what the chopped up narrative was trying to achieve, but I still don't think it worked.

Reading/listening/watching

Reading: am racing through my women's group book, The myth of Mars and Venus by Deborah Cameron.

Listening: I bought a CD of the 1930 recording of Die Dreigroschenoper, which is excellent (also has Marlene Dietrich doing some of her early songs).

Watching: haven't really been watching much recently. I have a pile of DVDs waiting for me to get around to them.

What I bought with my book tokens