This year has seen us reading and rereading for both work and pleasure: often travelling with a few books and the time and headspace just to read.
Among many books, we have enjoyed Patricia Highsmith’s The Glass Cell, although “enjoy” is perhaps an odd word for such a bleak and at times harrowingly brutal and claustrophobic novel. Highsmith worked as a script writer for comics in the '40s and it is easy to see why Alfred Hitchcock was attracted to her first novel Strangers on a Train. Most of her work deals with obsession and is often morally ambiguous: despite being labelled “psychological thrillers” her books are of high literary merit. Without consciously making a plan or deliberate choice in sticking with miserable, dark and disturbing writing we revisited some Angela Carter. Her collection of short fiction, The Bloody Chamber, is based on folk tales and fairy tales and makes an ideal travel companion. Even without a reservation in the quiet coach people tend to avoid pale sickly readers with their eyes bulging out. Most recently, we finally finished Alan Sharp’s A Green Tree in Gedde. The author himself now describes the writing as “baton-twirling prose”, but it is a lively first novel, and in 1965 when it was released, created controversy for its subject matter. Set in Greenock, Glasgow, Manchester and Paris and examining the lives of four young people, including incestuous siblings, the book bristles with stylistic experimentation, Joycean passages and street philosophy yet manages to be emotional, poetic and convey gentle wisdom.
Strangely, and completely coincidentally, Alan Sharp also wrote the script for a film we have enjoyed re-watching, called The Hired Hand. A trippy, acid western: Peter Fonda’s almost languorous direction contrasts with the stark, brutality of the story itself. This could be disconcerting and occasionally is but the blissed-out soundtrack and hallucinatory overlaying of images combine to create a striking and unusual film.
On its own the soundtrack to The Hired Hand is beautiful, a short piece composed by Bruce Langhorne, ideal for creating an isolated mood.
A similar hypnotic atmosphere can be achieved by listening to Jungle Joy by Keijo a CDr on the outa label (the CDr sampler outa001 is also wonderful) - real instruments with electronics creating melodic experimental music.
For working, instrumental music makes sense. Not so that we feel we’re in an elevator or to create an ambience; that would be funny: it’s just that music somehow helps focus and lyrics are an obvious distraction to thinking or writing. So lots of jazz, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Sun Ra and also idiosyncratic composers like Moondog, Erik Satie, The Fall or Ennio Morricone.
We do listen to songs, and lyrics, particularly to wind down or to build a bridge between work time and relaxation time. Sometimes the weirder the music the better: Jess Conrad’s "Why Am I Living?"
But also classic stuff like Black Monk Time by The Monks, or more obscure singer-songwriters like David Ackles or Val Stoecklein.
The Chet Baker album Let’s Get Lost is hauntingly beautiful, and the Bruce Weber film makes for interesting viewing. Even for people not interested in jazz or Chet Baker’s life the biography: Deep in a Dream The Long Night of Chet Baker by James Gavin is an extremely powerful and disquieting piece of writing.
Graphic novels we’ve both read this year include Le Petit Bleu de la Cote Ouest by Tardi and Manchette (we are glad to see Tardi’s work available at last in English), Daniel Clowes’ Wilson, which isn’t really a graphic novel. Rather, the character is brought to life through single pages in different styles and although Wilson as a character is a little stiff and a little dislikeable, the formal experimentation (at times the cartooning recalls Ivan Brunetti) makes for a powerful and entertaining book. Chris Ware’s Lint is similarly bleak and distasteful, but it is, after all, satirising a bleak and distasteful world. There’s a lot going on, on each page spread, and in the layout, so the book rewards careful rereading. We are often asked to recommend graphic novels of literary worth but are equally happy tuning people into humorous strips like Sam Henderson’s The Magic Whistle, semi-autobiographical comics like Keith Knight’s The K Chronicles, social commentary from Ted Rall or Tom Tomorrow or classic strips such as Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts.
Metaphrog are a Franco-Scottish cartooning duo comprised of writer, John Chalmers, and artist, Sandra Marrs. They have created the surreal drama Strange Weather Lately and the ongoing adventures of Louis. This year saw the release of a remastered version of the first Louis story: Red Letter Day.
0 comments:
Post a Comment