A small affirmation

Today, caught up with Tamara for the first time in a while, and she presented me with a copy of the Zadie Smith volume from the Penguin birthday series. Unfortunately, of course, I already owned it, but I appreciated the thought, not only insofar as it's always nice to receive gifts (it's beside the point that circumstance caused me to spurn this one!) but also because it reminded me of the delicate but sharp happiness and sense of rightness and reassurance that comes of having friends who share my tastes and who, in some contingent-partial-illusory-etc but nonetheless real sense, Understand things. I noticed a while ago that these days I'm pretty well off in that regard (in terms of the company I keep and friends I've kept), but often it's the little crystallisations which resonate most clearly.

Neil Gaiman - Sandman: The Doll's House

A bit weird to be reading this after several of the later volumes (especially The Kindly Ones), but it's at least made me begin to realise how thoroughly all the story-threads will eventually be woven together into a coherent whole. Obviously, it's really good (whee!).

Jorge Luis Borges - The Mirror of Ink

Lately, thoughts of loss and absences have been much on my mind. Feeding into these have been the bits and pieces of Heidegger which have started to sink in, hearing about the Japanese aesthetic concept of 'mono no aware' (expressing the connection between our experiences of beauty, sorrow and transience), the 'Nietzsche and the fragment' presentation in the following week's philo honours seminar, the turning of the seasons, and probably several other things, too, not least general melancholy. In light of that, "The Witness", which appears in this slim collection of seven of Borges' short stories, particularly resonated. It's just a fragment, really, a shard from some strange mirror, and its central idea is this: "Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies may make us stop in wonder - and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested."

These themes, though - loss, absence, spaces, infinites - are woven through all of the stories here. They're often unsettling, probably because they expose the gaps yawning just beneath the contingent sets of constructions which we call the world - the one which I found myself most troubled by was "Blue Tigers", in which stones multiply and divide ceaselessly without any regard to order or pattern, a "dreadful miracle" in which the "monstrousness" of the stones proves that the universe can tolerate disorder. Definitely need to read more Borges (and maybe learn how to pronounce his surname somewhere along the line, too).

Janet Evanovich - One for the Money

Kim recommended this in passing a while back - an unusual one coming from her insofar as Evanovich is a genre writer. But the thing is that her central character and narrator, Stephanie Plum, is a wonderful creation - she's a tough, no nonsense, but all too fallible dame, and immensely likeable. Reminds me a bit of Bridget Jones at times, parallels including:
- a tendency to end up in undignified situations (amongst other things, Plum finds herself crouched under a bush for most of a rainy night, handcuffed naked to her shower rail, and scrabbling around for a set of car keys in a rubbish dumpster)
- a circle of eccentric colleagues, friends and family
- their clipped, somewhat arch tone of narration
- a penchant for exhortations towards self-improvement.

But then again, I seem to have become worryingly fixated upon that latter as a reference point at some point in the last few years, and anyway they're really not very similar - Plum's much less comfortably middle-class and preoccupied by relationship issues than Fielding's creation, and it's difficult to imagine Jones rubbing shoulders with the assorted low-lives, criminals and bottom-feeders who make up Plum's milieu, or tackling the profession of bounty hunting with such stumbling elan...

The writing is crisp and sharp, and often very funny if occasionally just slightly too flip; likewise the dialogue. (From early in the novel: "The clock on the dash told me I was seven minutes late, and the urge to scream told me I was home.") Pace is rapid; pages fly by. A good 'un.

Nina Gordon - Tonight and the Rest of My Life

Glossy, mainstream pop. For some reason, it has a vaguely euro-sounding dance pop sheen, but it's actually something of a singer-songwriter record, all songs written by Gordon herself. Anyhow, I enjoy it for about three or four songs, but then it wears off; maybe the first three or four songs are the best, or (more likely) maybe any three or four songs at any given time is my limit. None of the songs really stand out, though the title track is quite good.

Tonic - Lemon Parade

Ah, late nineties radio rock...how mediocre it was. I mean, what was the point? It didn't move you, emotionally or viscerally - most of the time, the melodies weren't worth a damn and there was no real 'rock' to speak of either (slightly hypocritical though this may seem, coming from one who considered "Lightning Crashes" to be the best song ever for several years there). I remember "If You Could Only See", but I also remember that even at the time the next couple of singles were utterly unmemorable (while I'm chasing commercial radio-based memories, not too much later on, if I have this right, came Fuel and Semisonic, both of whom at least could write some catchy tunes). So anyhow, all the more so now, almost 10 years on, hardly surprising that Lemon Parade isn't much chop.

Lists of film-related people

Some who I like a lot (without necessarily knowing much about them): Jennifer Jason Leigh, Johnny Depp, Tim Burton, Emily Watson, Sofia Coppola, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Wong Kar-Wai, Juliette Binoche.

Plus some who I like a lot, but with an asterisk (ie, I like 'em a lot, but while either (a) also kind of disliking them or (b) generally feeling ambivalent about liking them): David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Baz Luhrmann, George Clooney, Catherine Zeta Jones, Cary Elwes (though probably only because of the recent rewatch of The Princess Bride), Christina Ricci, Gwyneth Paltrow, Audrey Tautou, Tim Roth, Tilda Swinton (sometimes one role, even in a Hollywood blockbuster, is enough), Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Miranda Otto, Steve Buscemi.

And a few who I've liked in the past but seem to've left behind: Winona Ryder, Jennifer Connelly, Janeane Garofalo, Edward Norton (though I still think he's a brilliant actor), Gary Oldman (likewise), Christopher Walken, Lars von Trier.

Bloc Party - Silent Alarm

Lately I've been wondering if I'm not in the process of experiencing a genuine shift in musical dominant away from indie and alt-rock - whether the Arcade Fire mightn't have been something of the last hurrah as far as that field went for me. If there is such a shift going on, though, I don't know where albums like Silent Alarm will fit in.

I mean, it's really rather good.

I don't mind derivativeness unless it becomes distracting or makes a record boring to listen to, neither of which is the case here. Nor could I care less whether a band or musician is part of a movement or if they've been hyped half to death by NME & co - I don't have any difficulties in dealing with the idea that musical merit isn't the main driver behind whether or not I ever hear of an artist, or how many people like them or buy their records. So, all in all, I've been pretty happy with the current so-called post-punk/new wave revival - even if I've been paying attention only incidentally - and consider it a good result that it's thrown up at least one (though probably only one) band with something of an air of greatness about them in Interpol, as well as a whole lot of fun party anthems (every second Strokes song, "Take Me Out", "House of Jealous Lovers", "Mr Brightside", "Bandages", and plenty of others as heard on the radio).

So I thought that "Banquet" was flippin' excellent - jittery-catchy, groovy-rhythmic, slightly unhinged-exciting, and ends before you want it to, so that you have to listen to it again straight away. But I didn't get enthused about Bloc Party despite all the gushing press writeups of the album and the band (not always the same thing), mainly, I guessed, because of aforementioned shift in my own horizons. Now I come to listen to the album, and find that (a) a lot of it is very banquetesque and (b) it's very good.

Hard to pick highlights, but a few (apart from "Banquet" itself) might be opening double-punch "Like Eating Glass" and "Helicopter", "She's Hearing Voices" (best Joy Division title that never was), and the positively pretty "So Here We Are". When the band get it right, this record flips a lot of the right switches in my head in a way that not many out and out rock bands do these days - PGMG, Interpol, maybe Spoon and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and that's about it - but still I'm not as excited about the album as much as I feel I should be. Whether this is to do with my current musical positioning, or the album itself, is, I suppose, a moot point. Still, if anyone casually backlashes against Bloc Party or Silent Alarm while I'm around, at least without a very cogent defence indeed, just watch my dust as I scathe the backlasher with a suitable amount of derision.

An incomplete list of artists about whom I know almost nothing but whose albums I would probably buy for $10, and certainly for $5

- Hem (and would probably pay considerably more if it had the songs I've heard)
- Saloon
- Slumber Party (already missed one opportunity in the past due to extreme impecuniosity and not properly appreciating their probable brilliance at the time; if opportunity knocks again, will not be found wanting)
- Sam Phillips
- Whistler ("If I Give You A Smile" is still one of the best bittersweet, gently melancholy, end-of-summer sad songs I've ever heard)
- Leona Naess (but only if it had "Charm Attack")
- Julie Miller
- Helium (is one live b-side reason enough? Yes!)
- The Autumns (but would need to have "June in Her Frost and Furs")
- The Fire Show (well, probably - but I'd definitely regret it afterwards if I didn't)
- Gloss (with some trepidation, but I'd still buy it, just in case it had even one other song as good as "Lonely in Paris")

And five brilliant albums which I've bought under precisely those conditions (all $5, I think):
1. Belly - King
2. Gersey - Hope Springs
3. Azure Ray - Hold On Love
4. Eileen Rose - Long Shot Novena
5. The Dearhunters - Red Wine & Blue

Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide (6th ed) edited by Nick Rennison

My high school library had one of those 'rock encyclopedia' type books, a thick, glossy, and at the time exhaustive-seeming tome, which I used to browse through in spare periods in those last couple of years at school, as the Cure, the Smiths, Joy Division, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and various other 'old' bands increasingly imposed themselves on my musical horizons, and pop music itself grew increasingly important to me.

Anyway, I guess that this 'Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide' is kind of a literary equivalent, although with less of a sense of (intended or actual) comprehensiveness. It focuses mostly on 20th century literature (in the broad sense of the term, so that we see Tom Clancy, David Eddings, and others of their cultural-status ilk - though no J K Rowling or Helen Fielding, interestingly) but includes some notable novelists from earlier times - Defoe, Austen, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and plenty of others). Obviously I haven't read it from cover to cover, but it's fab to dip into.

It would be pointless to quibble about the selections and omissions, or to dwell on the values that these reflect - naturally enough, there's a bias towards popular literary authors, both contemporary and relatively recently past (Calvino, Kundera, Atwood, Rushdie, Murdoch, Fowles, etc), but there's also substantial representation for the popular fantasy/sf genres (sf not so surprising - Asimov, Clarke, Gibson - nor some of those at the margins, like Le Guin, but the fantasy entries tend to be blockbuster writers, though I have to say that the compilers have managed to pick all of the best ones, as far as I'm concerned - Eddings, Donaldson, Jordan, Feist...and, in a somewhat different vein, Pratchett...missing only George R R Martin, who at least gets a mention in one of the lists and, again in a slightly different vein, China Miéville). Detective fiction also well represented, which is again not so surprising nowadays.

Also pointless to remark on how many of my favourites are included, though it did make me happy to see a few whose names I wouldn't necessarily have expected to see in a selection as comparatively brief as this one, in Donna Tartt, Kate Atkinson and Haruki Murakami (okay, I know they're not exactly underground, but you still wouldn't confidently bet on them being the ones from the contemporary scene to turn up in a 'good reading guide' - omissions include Franzen, Eugenides, Moody and David Foster Wallace, to name just a few heavy hitters).

Actually, one of the good things about this guide is that it's not limited to author (and 'major work') entries, though they're what I've been referring to in talking about whether given authors were or were not included, and those entries do dominate the book. There are also plenty of 'startpoints' and 'read on a theme' lists (examples of the latter: 'on the edge of sanity', 'dark old houses', 'art for whose sake?', 'good and evil', 'money', etc), and some slightly longer 'pathways' (starting from a particular book - Gormenghast is one, but the paths leading from it, from what I recognised of them, weren't terribly exciting).

Gosh, how nerdy! :)

Cyndi Lauper - At Last

Unfortunately, sometimes a record turns out to be only as good as you expected it'd be likely to be (though you buy or, in this case, borrow it anyway, just on the off chance); this is one such. Thirteen songs' worth of Lauper interpreting pop classics and standards - the ones I was really curious to hear being "Walk On By", "Unchained Melody" and "My Baby Just Cares For Me" - and, well, it's just not particularly good. Quite brave to put her voice right up the front of the mix, with the instruments being mixed down low and relatively sparse in the first place anyway, and there's a bit of a torchy effect going (especially with the piano ballads, which is most of 'em), but, while I don't know what the consensus on her voice is, I find it a bit piercing, especially when she reaches for the high notes (I actually winced during my first listen to her "Walk On By"). A couple of the songs half work, amidst the thickets - but thickets most of it is. Oh well.

Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang

I'd expected that Carey's faithful reproduction of the Jerilderie letter style of prose would make this quite difficult to plow through (not that I'd read the letter before reading True History, but still...), but in fact it's a really easy read - very entertaining and (hoary old cliche this) difficult to put down. It seems most realistic, and the characters are completely believeable and human - and it's pulled forward by a strong narrative thread (informed for us as readers, of course, by our knowledge of how it's going to end - "such is life"). Having finished it, one is left with the thought that perhaps that really is how it all happened - it's convincing!

It's not that Carey appears unaware of postmodern claims regarding history, literature, narrative and so on - indeed, the textuality of the novel is foregrounded in the way that it takes place within the framing device of it being an account, collected in several parcels (with introductory notes written by some future historian), as well as the interspersal of newspaper clippings and various other figurings of the 'textual' trope. But this foregrounding functions to bolster the 'authenticity' of the central textual narrative (perhaps in the way that early novels were often set up as 'collections of papers which have fallen into the author's hands', etc - Robinson Crusoe, for example) rather than to radically throw into question its validity or legitimacy; the questioning of history and partial irony of the 'True' in the title is more a questioning of received history in its dominant form than of the possibility of History itself. And it works really well.

Zadie Smith - Martha and Hanwell

Two stories, "Martha, Martha" and "Hanwell in Hell", both originally published in literary mags (Granta and The New Yorker respectively), and both very English indeed in that 'hanging on in quiet desperation' sort of way. I don't think they quite work - Smith's strength is in polyglot exuberance and energy, not this comparatively joyless, drab, small-moments-of-partial-redemption-and-barely-so-at-that style. But not a dead loss, either, and far be it from me to complain simply because her attempts to stretch herself aren't 100% successful at this stage.

D M Thomas - The White Hotel

Basically read this over again in interests of class paper (delivered yesterday). Got much more out of it this time round, though still am not sure I like it all that much. Class discussion not bad, though didn't deliver me to new heights of insight either (though it would have had I not been thinking about the text reasonably intensively during the hours immediately before class)...I was happy that a fair bit of the discussion was haunted by my hand-waving in the direction of a so-called 'metaphysics of absence', too!

F Scott Fitzgerald - The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

Reasons for picking this one: one part "Calling It Quits" lyric, and three or four parts The Great Gatsby being, well, great.

Response straight after reading it: hmm, it was good, but what was it all about?

Fitzgerald's world is far removed from mine - it's a world of luxury and formality, where the codes are all different - which makes it particularly difficult to make sense of his representation of a world when that representation itself seems already self-consciously encoded. So, I like the story, in its fey satirical depiction of wealth and those who possess it, but don't feel as if I properly understand it - and it's not as human as Gatsby, which diminishes my enjoyment of it.

Dave Eggers - Short Short Stories

OK, OK...these are often rather good - I might need to concede a genuine, if not yet wholehearted, slide in the direction of 'Eggers good' at this point (though I haven't read You Shall Know Our Velocity yet, and it was his other long form, AHWOSG, that most vexed me even as I enjoyed it). They really are short short stories, averaging at about 400 or so words, I reckon. There are the quirky ones, which are the ones I like best ("What the Water Feels Like to the Fishes", or "Of Gretchen and de Gaulle", say). There are the vaguely Carver-esque ones ("Georgia Is Lost" being the most obvious, and one of the weaker entries; "How Long It Took" is another). Overlapping a bit with those, there are the often angry social observation ones ("A Circle Like Some Circles", "You'll Have to Save That for Another Time"). There are the political ones ("Sleep to Dreamier Sleep Be Wed" wears its sentiments a bit on its sleeve, but its heart is in the right place; "It Is Finally Time to Tell the Story" is pure and simple a joy).

For mine, there are two pieces here which rank with the 'letters to captains of industry from Steven, a dog', in the Burned Children of America anthology, as my favourite-to-date Eggers pieces of writing - "What the Water Feels Like to the Fishes" and "Weird Wife". Both are whimsical and light but come off as oddly, almost incidentally profound as well - which is a damn good trick in writing of any form.

Nada Surf - Let Go

Not as good as I'd hoped it might be, but about as good as I expected it to be. On the strength of "The Way You Wear Your Head" and, especially, "Inside of Love", I was willing to risk $10 on this, but I can't say that I'm surprised that they turned out to be the best songs on the album. It's quite emo in places - a genre making increasing inroads into my collection, mostly through the backdoor - and fairly Weezer-esque, too, though for the most part without the facility for tunes of that latter ("Treading Water" reminds me a bit of Cave In, not least in the not having much in the way of a tune).

Oh, and it's "making out with people I hardly know or like", not "making out with people I hardly know a lot"; oh well, the sentiment is more or less the same in the context.

Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer & Mark O'Connor - Appalachia Waltz

One of the source albums for Heartland; more quality stuff.

Pocket Penguin: 70 Years / "Well, it pays the bills"

[6/9/17: edited to move this one elsewhere]

Kung Fu Hustle

Everything that one might hope for in a film like this - tops fight scenes, endless face-offs, uniformly clad bad guys who rush in waves to get beaten up, hilarious slapstick, a colourful ensemble of characters, high pathos, villainous villains, unlikely heroes, and even a superlatively incidental but rather sweet romance. Great fun; made me laugh plenty.

Beth Hart - Screamin' For My Supper

Not so much sub- as simply post-Alanis late 90s angsty chick rock (and you know I wouldn't use a phrase like 'chick rock' unless I really wanted to make a point), the comparison being made obvious by some none-too-occasional similarities in vocal style. There are a few good ideas in Hart's mix, but they get lost amidst the blandness of it all.

...which is possibly an overly harsh appraisal, because during the couple of times that I've spun Screamin' For My Supper, I've sometimes had the feeling that there was a bit more going on - that the album was almost breaking into something better. There are albums that I feel might well prove more rewarding if I persevered with them for a bit longer, but the fact of the matter is that life's too short (and there's too much music out there) to invest that much time in all of the records which might, but probably wouldn't, benefit from determined repeat spinning.

Kasey Chambers - Wayward Angel

Looking back, in some ways my liking of Kasey Chambers was an early precursor of the musical waters I've been swimming in over the last 10 or 12 months or so; coming back to her now, via this, her most recent (I think) album, I've realised that she really is very good, even with the perspective that having listened to a lot more of this kind of stuff has brought (in fact, that perspective has allowed me to better appreciate the things that set her apart).

Wayward Angel doesn't have quite the seemingly artless fluency and sweetness of The Captain and Barricades & Brickwalls, but it may well be a better record than either of those. I tend to like the songs with banjo on them ("Bluebird", "Wayward Angel", "Follow You Home"); "Like A River" also v. good. Also, it might just be me, but it seems that Chambers's voice is less distinctive (many would say 'irritating', though I've never been one of those) than I recall - whether that's something else born of this different perspective, or an actual shift in her singing style, I don't know. The singing and songwriting seems so confident - both are pushed right to the front of one's awareness and it's a testament to their strength and warmth that this foregrounding doesn't result in any kind of diminishing.

"A secret I don't even know": The Forgotten Arm, again

Although, as ever, there's plenty of other music floating around me, The Forgotten Arm has been very much the soundtrack to my last few weeks. The achingly pretty heartbrokenness of "Little Bombs" and "That's How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart" has kept them my favourites, but I've grown to love every song - especially, at the moment, the incongruously jaunty "I Can't Get My Head Around It" and the moody "King of the Jailhouse".

This isn't the place to rehash all the reasons why I like Mann's music so much, but one thing which struck me yesterday, walking home after uni and listening to the album, was that the specific lyrical concerns of her songs, and of those on this album in particular, often aren't particularly consonant with my own experiences and life - I mean, what do I know about co-dependent love affairs, or the helplessness of being in love with someone who I know is going to let me down? But, despite that, for me the lyrics play a large part in the brilliance of her music, and really speak to me, and I think that there are two reasons for this.

First, the literacy and evocativeness of many of the lines cause them to stand out and stick in the mind quite irrespective of the words around them ("kicking is hard, but the bottom's harder"; "and though the exit is crude, it saves me coming unglued"; "you pulled up and parked your El Dorado/we said 'hi' and kissed with some bravado"...). And second, and relatedly, Mann's songs are so well constructed that often the most memorably universal lines are placed so that they become central to the musical shape of the piece, being highlighted and repeated at key times (choruses, especially), so that the lyrical and melodic hooks often coincide: "baby, there's something wrong with me"; "that's just not the way you make me feel", "life just kind of empties out", "that's how I knew this story would break my heart"...As a result, the sadness in such lines takes on a universally resonant tone - another element of Mann's wonderful songcraft.

I still think of Bachelor No 2 as the high water mark of Mann's discography, partly because it's indefinably somehow sharper-edged and more clear-sighted, partly because it seems to both soar and ache just a bit more vividly, but mostly, I think, because it was the first of her albums that I heard - but The Forgotten Arm isn't far behind, and it's that latter which is speaking most clearly to me at the moment.

Wilco EP

Hrm. Well, this isn't blindingly good, but it is gentle and thoughtful and interesting and it takes me somewhere nice and makes me happy when I listen to it. And it's free! And available for all to download! And, after all, it's Wilco! Three cheers for Wilco!

24 Hour Party People OST

Still haven't got around to watching this, mainly because it seems likely to be fairly heavily focused on the Happy Mondays (really, I don't have any good reason to dislike them, except that: (a) it's basically drug music; (b) Shaun Ryder seems like an obnoxious twit; and (c) the Black Grape album I've got on tape isn't, to be frank, any good; which, all told, is plenty reason enough). This soundtrack is a good listen, and there's no denying the number of stone cold classics it holds, but I have nearly all of the songs I like on cd already, and don't feel particularly enriched by the early house/Happy Mondays/various others making up the tracklist (though interesting to hear another Durutti Column song). Oh yes, and I could've lived without the live Moby version of "New Dawn Fades" (backed by New Order, John Frusciante and Billy Corgan, sheesh); in fairness, it's not that bad, but really, this song did not need to be covered, least of all by Moby.

Music from the motion picture Magnolia

Have actually listened to this record before, but a few years ago, before I completely fell in love with Aimee Mann. Coming back to it now, I find that I already know a lot of the songs (whether via their subsequent inclusion on Bachelor No 2 or through other channels), and have been prompted to wonder if maybe "Wise Up", and not "Save Me", is her best song (both are on this album); also, "Driving Sideways" is better than I'd recalled. (Oh yeah, and I don't know anything about Supertramp, having always had the impression that they were sort of bland middle of the road 70s pop-ites, but the two songs of theirs that are on this soundtrack are pretty good.)

I also enjoyed reading P.T. Anderson's liner notes about the relationship between Mann's music and the film; it begins, "I sat down to write an adaptation of Aimee Mann songs. Like one would adapt a book for the screen, I had the concept of adapting Aimee's songs into a screenplay". Makes me want to watch Magnolia again, yo, having had mixed feelings about it the first time around (which was before I was familiar with Mann's music at all).

Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

I struggled a bit with the complexity and mysticism of this one. It starts promisingly, introducing a quartet of grotesque, almost Peakean antique/secondhand book dealers and the cast of misfits and nasties whose demi-monde they inhabit, but then gets very confusing as it spins off two more major storylines, one set in early to mid nineteenth century London and tracing out a Jack the Ripper theory, many of the outlines of which were broadly familiar to me thanks to From Hell, the other following a pair of peculiar investigators in contemporary times who are trying to unravel the mystery of those Whitechapel murders. I must confess that I didn't really 'get' it. The secondary source in the subject reader made things clearer, and I'll probably return to this book at some stage (if most likely not this semester) to give it a more attentive, committed reading.

"Can't hear it on the radio": Wilco - A Ghost Is Born

A Ghost Is Born is a good album, but I'm not sure yet just how good. Sometimes I think it's right up there with Summerteeth as a truly great album, but at other times I'm more ambivalent, reckoning it to miss as often as it hits. To start with the definite hits: the opening five cuts are all really good, especially the "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" - "Muzzle of Bees" - "Hummingbird" sequence. The moody, midtempo rock atmospherics are delicately, perfectly balanced from the slow piano beginning and the sliding yet careful guitar line which cuts in at about 2 minutes in through the elegant rockisms of the rest of the album's opening run (I particularly like "Spiders (Kidsmoke)"). But I'm not so sure about the record's second half-and-a-bit, which doesn't make me feel in the same way and sometimes feels like a regression to the blandness of YHF and the one or two less distinguished moments on Summerteeth; whereas the first few tracks derive their glory from their subtlety and understatedness, these last ones can drag a bit and seem just plain uninteresting. Good to see that the band haven't lost their facility for silvery jingles - as evident in "The Late Greats" - and, to a lesser extent, "Hummingbirds", too.

Maybe this is one that needs to be lived with over an extended period of time in order to fully unfurl itself, because it does seem to take on a different hue and complexion with each listen - and especially its second half...besides, Wilco albums always grow on me gradually, to greater or lesser extents.

The Princess Bride

Noticed that this was screening at the Astor the day before (Friday for Saturday) and finally got my act together to see it on the big screen. Still a joy!

Jeanette Winterson - Sexing the Cherry

Winterson is definitely a key figure in my development as a reader. She may have been the first 'literary' writer whose work I really loved, and she was definitely my very favourite author for a few years there. I'm a bit vague on the timing, but I think it must've been lateish high school or very early uni that I discovered her - maybe even in that mythical summer between school and uni. I remember giving Kim a copy of one of her books (Art & Lies, maybe), only to discover that she already knew and loved Winterson's work. I remember drifting off to sleep, ideas and images dancing before my eyes, re-reading The Passion one drowsy summer afternoon in the Alexandra gardens, under the dappled shade of a gigantic tree. I remember writing an extended appreciation of Written On The Body for my 4000 word final paper in "Reading Sexuality", even though Winterson's work didn't appear on the course at all. And I was still enough of a fan to give Daniel R a Winterson book (Gut Symmetries, I think) at some point in the gathering twilight of our doomed acquaintance...which brings us at least up to, say, mid-2002.

Somewhere along the line, though, I moved on. It was in the period before or around the time that The.Powerbook came out; I remember being utterly unexcited by the prospect of reading it, and only got round to doing so a couple of years after its initial release. At that time, I wasn't reading very much at all outside of uni-related reading (and not all that much of that, either - a real extended grey winter of discontent which stretched for a couple of years or so and still isn't hasn't properly departed), and somehow when I emerged from the non-reading period, I'd gotten over Winterson. I no longer found her work particularly profound: what had seemed such glimmering, beautiful, poetic prose now looked merely self-consciously precious; what I'd found so insightful and meaningful had come to appear distressingly trite and insubstantial. It's not that I'd actually read any of her stuff recently at that stage - but just that I'd reevaluated my impressions of old reading (always a tricky thing to do).

A few further years on now, though, and things look slightly different again. Although when I did eventually read The.Powerbook, and Lighthousekeeping too, neither inspired me, I began to wonder if perhaps the violence of my swing away from her was more due to the exaggeration caused by disillusionment in relation to something I'd rated so highly than to an honest, 'objective' appraisal of how good she is or was (a telling ambiguity).

So anyhow, I've just re-read Sexing the Cherry for this "Contemporary Historical Fictions" subject, and y'know, it isn't too bad after all. These days, I'm far better versed in the sorts of ideas to do with perception, representation, reality, being (and time), identity, gender, writing, language, and so on (though not at all regarding love, the other big one in this book and throughout her oeuvre) which are Winterson's stock in trade than I was last time round, and so I can more clearly see the derivativeness in her writing...but I can also, having pushed through that initial disillusioning realisation that her ideas weren't particularly new after all, appreciate the deftness with which she synthesises and plays with the fluidity of these concepts...and after all, even if she wasn't the first to think these things, in many cases it was Winterson who introduced me to them, opening my mind and imagination in so many ways. (It's also made me realise how heavily my own writing of that time - 2001-2002ish - was marked by Winterson's style.)

* * *

On a different note, it was interesting to read this book, with which I'm very familiar, through the particular prism of 'contemporary historical fictions' - it definitely brings different aspects of the text into the foreground. I'd had a similar experience while reading V. The seminar discussion regarding that latter was good - I enjoyed it, thought that we covered a lot of the most important aspects of Pynchon's novel, and was forced to think through and struggle to articulate some of my more intuitive and deeper responses to it. Not sure how the seminar on Sexing the Cherry will go, as I think many of its aspects will be flattened out by the focus on its historical/historiographical nature, but it should be interesting nonetheless.

Tujiko Noriko @ the Corner Hotel, Thursday 11 August

Well, in a sense I've been anticipating this gig since the last time sweet Noriko toured (February of last year @ Ding Dong, her first time in Australia), but despite the subliminal build-up of expectation it was anything but a disappointment; in fact, a couple of hours on, I'm still floating a little bit on how good it was.

This was a concert which I was always half-inclined to attend on my own, and in the end, that's what happened (mentioned it to a few people, but they were unable to make it because of, variously, ballet, impecuniosity, and a mother's birthday); as it turned out, though, a guy from my Heidegger subject - one Adam - was there, having heard one of her songs on the radio earlier this week and decided to roll up on spec, so I had company between the sets (Lachlan was also around with some friends)...as to which, I only caught the tail end of one of the support acts, and enjoyed the seemingly at least semi-improv, somewhat Mogwai-esque post-rock/noise-type act which followed.

But obviously this was all just so much fluff to be waited on until the main event. As expected, it was just Tujiko standing up the front with her laptop and singing (simple black knit and plain dark grey skirt - a contrast to the bright pink movie star dress she was in last time); quite a short set in the end - 45 minutes, maybe? - and mostly comprised of new songs. The cute factor was high, of course, from the regular smiles, to the charmingly fumbling English as she hunted around on her laptop for the file to accompany an encore, to the basic sweetness of her singing over the top of these glitch-heavy electroscapes. But it couldn't be mainly about anything but the music, as to which: the new tracks sounded good (especially one with some more organic instrumentation and a big hip hop beat in the midsection), but the clear highlight was "White Film" - it was a joyful moment when its opening strains floated out of the sound-weave and the whole song was a delight (especially the point when the layers all dropped away to leave the simple chiming tones which ring in the album version and Tujiko gave the crowd a gorgeous smile to accompany it).

I always think of her albums as very much headphone experiences, preferably to be enjoyed at home with space and silence all around. But listening to the music loud, distorting a bit through the speakers, mixing with the background noise, and generally seeming more cacophonous, and with that too-charming singing coming directly towards through, is, while different, an equally great experience. Saw it from a good spot - right in the middle, 7 or 8 metres away if that - and thought that it was all just too wonderful for words.

Toni Morrison - Beloved

Vivid and affecting, Beloved left me with a clench in my throat and the feeling that I'd just read something real. The depiction of the violence being done to black people, slaves and otherwise, in mid-to-late-19th century America caught at me and wrenched - the first time for as long as I can remember that a novel has made me feel angry and upset. I suppose that it's a tribute to Morrison's craft and technical ability that I responded so strongly to a story which is, at least on the surface, far removed from my own experience - although the period setting and dialogue could easily have acted as a distancing factor, the prose in which the novel's written is so transparent, and its characters and situations ring so true, that I was immersed in the book's universe rather than ever being pulled up short by a sense of dislocation or unfamiliarity.

I'm finding it hard to look at this book critically so soon after having finished it, so just a few thoughts:
- It achieves a good balance between the individual story and the more universal aspects...I mean that the way in which it addresses the big picture never distracts from the details of the representation of the particular narrative of Sethe, Denver, Beloved, Halle, Paul D and the rest - somehow, the broader 'themes' are necessarily present and implicit in the way that the story is told.
- Relatedly, the novel strikes me as deeply moral without being moralising.
- White people are far from demonised - see Amy, the Garners, the Bodwins...
- There's cruelty and horror, but nearly all of it takes place 'off stage', as it were, in the rememberings of various characters.
- Also, I'm not even sure that Beloved is primarily concerned with the 'African-American experience', though that's obviously central...mind you, I'm not sure what else could be said to be its 'primary' concern - the continuing effect of history in the present, perhaps, or maybe just the ties that bind more generally.
- Again, the theme of hauntedness is made literal.
- The imagery can be a little obvious - Sethe's immense urination as a second breaking of waters when Beloved returns, the naturalistic spaces which Denver and Baby Suggs make their own, the three shadows holding hands (although that last functions quite interestingly in the end) - but, perhaps because of the clarity of Morrison's vision, it works effectively nonetheless.
- The technique of anticipating subsequent elaborations on the characters' historical narratives leaves me in two minds; it's obviously deliberate, but I can't quite work out what purpose it serves...perhaps that 'past operating in the present' idea again.

A pretty substantial blow to my theory that I increasingly only enjoy novels/films with which I can personally identify!

Marianne Faithfull - Before the Poison

Only so-so, which is disappointing. Most of the ten songs on this record were written or co-written with Faithfull by PJ Harvey or Nick Cave (there's also one by Damon Albarn, and one co-write with Aimee Mann collaborator Jon Brion), which ought to've been a fruitful series of collaborations. But, with the exception of a couple of Nick Cave ballads - "Crazy Love" and "There Is A Ghost" - and the Albarn track, "Last Song", the results don't do it for me; the music is ominous and churning and all that jazz, but it lacks the dark, cinematic lushness of a song like "Who Will Take My Dreams Away?", always the starting point for Marianne and I.

"They're All Above Me" & "CD2004"

Two cds from David. The first is a mix cd proper; the second is a copy of David's annual compilation of music he got into over the preceding year (presumably made for his own purposes some time ago).

"They're All Above Me" is ten songs by 'David' bands and artists of various stripes...I don't think I know anyone else who's really into any one of Queens of the Stone Age, Gomez or Supergrass (though common sense and record sales tell me there must be thousands in Melbourne alone). It's neat, anyway. The common theme seems to be a kind of 'alternative mainstream' mindset and a certain jitteriness or nervous energy; how that fits with the Bosch cover is anyone's guess. I like the Sigur Ros and Beck songs ("Untitled" and "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime" respectively); Supergrass's "Going Out" also good; "My Doorbell"'s not all that I recalled, but still pretty good (likewise "Generator" - but then I always preferred the Color and the Shape singles more anyway); "Low" and "Burn The Witch" are, well, a Coldplay song and a QOTSA one; I already knew "Specialist" and "78 Stone Shuffle"; and David Byrne's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" is suitably Byrne-esque and so both straight and ironic, but more 'straight', I think.


I already knew most of the songs on "CD2004", many through the good offices of David himself. It's a good listen, though - mostly modern rock, all catchy. Multiple songs from Low, Antics, the Walkmen, Phantom Planet, theredsunband and Kings of Leon. My five favourite songs on the cd, in order:
1. "The Rat" - The Walkmen (I'm not entirely sold on the Walkmen, but this song is flat out great)
2. "Sound and Vision" - David Bowie (the best 'pop' song on Low)
3. "Knowitall" - Phantom Planet (a real beast of an anthem)
4. "Revolution Blues" - Neil Young (probably the best song on On The Beach)
5. "Misery Is A Butterfly" - Blonde Redhead (shimmery chilly art-pop)

Neil Young - Greatest Hits

Neil Young is one of those artists who, when I'm not actually listening to his stuff, I tend to think is fairly boring and uninspiring, but whenever I do put one of his records on (I only have Harvest and On The Beach), I really, really enjoy it. (I'm particularly thinking of an end of summer melancholy evening walking down St Kilda Road, feeling really broken down and tired, listening to On The Beach and completely digging it.) And the same thing has come into play in listening to this greatest hits, much of which is new to me; the disc really hammers home how frickin great the man is. It's fiery and ragged and delicate and real - really quite incandescent.

The extended jams are great - I especially like "Cowgirl in the Sand" and "Like A Hurricane" - but the more tender moments are also wonderful (I'm gradually coming round to believing that Young's original version of "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" may be better than the Saint Etienne cover, which is iconic in its own right as far as I'm concerned...well, they're très different, obviously)...not that extendedness and tenderness are necessarily mutually exclusive, in principle or here in fact. Also, hearing the Harvest cuts in this context has made me reevaluate them a bit, and positively at that, realising that they're not quite so blandly middle of the road after all (finding myself singing along to "Old Man" and then - the kicker - "Heart of Gold" - was a bit of a giveaway...I already knew that "The Needle and the Damage Done" was something else).

I don't know if all great music necessarily ages well; for mine, greatness doesn't have to be 'for the ages', and greatness in the moment is greatness nonetheless. But, in any case, the music on this disc speaks pretty clearly to me.

Nelly Furtado - Folklore

From time to time, I take a mainstream pop single to heart, and "I'm Like A Bird" was one such when it hit the charts a while back; having dug out the cd single, I see that it was back in 2000...hard to believe that it was so long ago. Anyhow, Folklore was her follow up album - I haven't listened to the first - and veers quite strongly towards the 'global pop' side of things (in that respect, it recalls Arular), but isn't all that interesting. It starts off quite brightly, with banjo and mandolin tinkling away in the first couple of songs and some pleasant sung-chanted tunes, but the album doesn't really take off at any point, and the production is maybe a bit too 'top 40', giving it a glossy, homogeneous feel that doesn't do justice to Furtado's attempts to genre-hop and synthesise.

Profile II: The Best of Emmylou Harris

Another compilation, gathering recordings from 1979 to 1984. I don't know how this works, but somehow it always takes a couple of listens for me to get past Harris's voice and/or singing style in order to enjoy her music, after which that same voice and singing becomes the best part of the record (on this cd, the effect is particularly pronounced with the traditional number "Wayfaring Stranger", which has, of course, been recorded by countless others, each providing a comparison point for this version). Anyhow, I haven't really taken any of the songs on this cd to heart, but it's all eminently listenable with that voice pealing away.

Marianne Faithfull - This Little Bird

A collection of songs released by Faithfull in the sixties. Used as I am to her gravel-voiced, lower octave latter-day work, this is something of a eye-opener, recalling no one so much as Francoise Hardy, though perhaps slightly less twee and sentimental, and sometimes a bit of early Joni. While I'm not tremendously impressed, these songs do have a certain simple, twinkling charm, just touched by a little shadow - corresponding nicely with my picture of those times.

Lisa Miller - Pushover EP

Both less and more than a standard ep - less in the sense that it comes across as something like an extended single, including an album cut, an alternate take, a few live tracks and only one wholly new song, but more in the sense that it runs for some 40 minutes, and so outdistancing plenty of alleged long players. What material there is, though, falls into that vast category of 'pleasant but not exceptional'. The title track's alright, but not one of Miller's stronger singles, while the alternate version is overlong and sub-Beth Orton in style; the live cuts are uniformly solid; the cover of Gram Parson's "Hickory Wind" works, preserving the wispy melancholy of the original.

Neil Gaiman - Sandman: Brief Lives

Volume 7, in which Delirium and Dream go in search of Destruction, who is revealed to be an all-round nice guy (the nicest of the seven, it seems - there's such warmth in his interactions with others, especially Barnabas). It's quite a straightforward, linear story, but the devil - and much of the joy - is in the details.

Here is a list of the reasons why I like Dream:
* He's rake-thin
* And tormented
* And self-absorbed
* And rapier-sharp
* And mysterious
* And aloof
* And somewhat frightening
* And very, very powerful
* And only vaguely accountable to others
* But, underneath it, he's really rather nice
* And when he falls in love, he falls hard
* And he has a very strong sense of responsibility
* And is driven by inner compulsions and principles
* All of which eventually dooms him.

Ah, so that's why...

Kings of Leon - Youth & Young Manhood

There's always a pretty strong predisposition towards liking cds which have been gifts - the principle also operates with books, though to a lesser extent, maybe (perhaps it's just that people are more likely to give books on the basis that they've heard that it's good rather than because they've read and enjoyed it themselves) - so I approached Kings of Leon with an open mind after being given the album by Penny (in part because she's been enjoying it lately, and in part because she thought the album's title appropriate to its occasion, that being my lately passed birthday), despite not having been grabbed by the bits and pieces of their stuff that I'd heard before.

That notwithstanding, though, I still think that this is a band which is entirely solid without ever threatening to be particularly good, and all the southernisms can be a bit irritating over the course of a whole album. They're probably actually better than I think, for I've never been particularly into bluesy, four to the floor rock and roll (a brief dalliance with Led Zep in late high school excepted) - it's just not my style, and especially not now, with sweet sad tuneful stuff continuing to be what it's all about). But still, the only song on Youth & Young Manhood which particularly does it for me is "Joe's Head", which is, admittedly, pretty darn good.

Thomas Pynchon - V

Still great. (Doing a class paper on it this Tuesday.)

"My Room Is White"

A rather mournful, distinctly after-dark mix cd from trang. Old, sad-eyed favourites from the Dirty Three ("I Really Should've Gone Out Last Night"), Bic Runga ("Without You"), Coldplay ("The Scientist"), and others; the late-night crooning of Nina Simone, Marianne Faithfull, Madeleine Peyroux and Nick Cave (PJ Harvey's "Horses in my Head" also fits well with these); a scattering of melancholy songs by girls with sweet voices; and others in a similar vein. Definitely a cd only for particular moods, but very much right for those moods.

Neil Gaiman - Death: The High Cost of Living

On the subject of likability and characters who could've been written specifically to appeal, I was thinking that one of the things about Morpheus is that everyone reading these comics is (I reckon) going to see at least a bit of themselves in him (or, possibly, vice versa). And Death, then, is like the older sister or best girl friend that everyone wants - cool, quirky, cute, a bit...well...dreamy, but with her feet firmly on the ground.

This one's sort of sweet.

Bill Willingham - The Sandman Presents: Taller Tales

These ones weren't written by Gaiman himself, but I picked up the book anyway because it features, Thessaly, who's one of my favourite characters at this point (because she's a cutie, and bookish, and also because she's an incredibly powerful, thousands-of-years-old witch who kills everything that gets in her way - and, in this story, she carries a teddy bear around with her everywhere...honestly, some of these characters could have been written specifically to appeal to me...). As Willingham promises, each of the three stories (the Mervyn as secret agent one, the 'Danny Nod, heroic library assistant' one and the 'Thessaliad') is itself about stories, and they're all three of them good (the throwaway sequences at the end - 'Everything you always wanted to know about dreams...but were afraid to ask' - are also fun).

Neil Gaiman - Sandman: A Game of You & Fables and Reflections

Two more from the Sandman series proper (these are volumes 5 and 6; I've resigned myself to reading them all out of sequence). I really like A Game of You - am surprised again by how immediately likable these characters are. All of the figures in A Game of You are new to me except Thessaly (who becomes Larissa by the time of The Kindly Ones) and the Sandman himself (plus brief appearances by Nuala, Matthew and Lucien), but it takes no time at all for Gaiman to get us rooting for them, and feeling that there's an interesting back story behind the words and images actually on the page. The 'dream' characters are endearing, naturally, while also having a sort of gravitas, and the ones from the 'real' world are eminently sympathetic (and believable). And the whole 'Barbie' concept is great - y'know, like I said last time, clever.

I'd actually read Fables & Reflections before, in a library somewhere, some time. It didn't particularly impress me then, but now, having been introduced to the figures who fleetingly pass through the major storylines of these nine self-contained shorts, I appreciated the book much more, whereas large chunks of it made no sense when I didn't have the necessary context. That said, I still didn't enjoy it as much as the other Sandman I've read lately.

Kate Grenville - The Secret River

While I quite enjoyed this book, reading it has reminded me of why I've never particularly been into historical fiction as a genre (which does, now that I come to think about it, render my choice of the subject "Contemporary Historical Fictions" slightly odd, at least when looked at from that angle). I mean, it was easy to read, there was a suitable sense of place and time, etc, etc, but still it didn't engage me on any deep level - there was no sense of 'ah' to it. I should say, though, that I didn't predict the direction that it took in the closing stanzas, and that the choices made by Genville seemed, in retrospect, to be the right ones, giving the story a sense of honesty and imbuing it with more of an allegorical character (which is, in this case, a good thing in that it's not distracting). So yeah, this is good, but I suppose I'm just a philistine, or looking for different things in literature, or both, because it doesn't excite me.