Richard Blandford's Hound Blog

The Lost Book Library

2011-12-30T13:02:00.000-08:00

I have a new blog project, called The Lost Book Library. Here is the first post, which explains all about it. Please go and read it. If you really loved me, you would.

'For reasons I am not at liberty to divulge, I currently come into contact with many second-hand books. Most of these are by James Herriot, but every so often, I come across a book which has a certain, shall we say, aura about it. Just by looking at the cover you can somehow tell that not only has this book been out of print for some time, but that very few, if anybody, has thought to read it for nearly as long. The Internet will reveal scant information about these books, other than that someone in Jersey will sell you a copy for a reasonable price.

These books have been lost from cultural history, but I aim to document them and give them a chance to live again. Although I don't have time to read all of them personally, hopefully I will inspire others to track some of them down and give them a chance to come back to life for readers once again. This is the Lost Book Library. Let the cataloguing commence!

(Do you own a book that you feel belongs in the Lost Book Library? All you have to do is send me a jpg of the front cover, the text of the back cover blurb, a random paragraph, and your thoughts on its contents having flicked through it, and I shall put it in!)'

The Constant Gardener

2011-11-15T04:52:00.001-08:00

After watching Fernando Meirelles's film adaptation of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener, a tale of a diplomat's fight to carry on his murdered wife's work revealing drug company misdeeds in Africa, I was anxious to read the novel. I was curious to see how a senior novelist who established himself with tales of Cold War espionage had managed to produce something that seemed, at least from the film, to be so contemporary, featuring young-ish characters involved in a situation that, although fictional, is informed by real events of which many of my generation and younger have very little awareness.

Having read the book, I can now see that the film smoothed over many of the novel's failings. Le Carré's book is very much the following of a paper trail, or more precisely a printed out email-trail, as the main character of Justin Quayle works his way through the contents of his wife's computer. This sometimes creates the sensation of watching someone carry out a moderately engaging task for a long period, with interest and boredom intermingling. The film, however, focusses far more on the scenes where Justin gets on the ground and confronts the work of multinational Three B's head-on.

Also, le Carré's characterisation, at least in this instance, is unsatisfactory. Murdered wife Tess is a stunningly beautiful free spirit who also manages to be a great lawyer who campaigns for the rights of the poor and dispossessed. Everyone who she's not trying to get locked up falls in love with her. After a while, I began to feel quite glad she was dead, as surely no angel such as her should be made to share the same planet as flawed mortals like you and I.

Justin, meanwhile, does such a good line in quiet dignity in the wake of his wife's murder, I began to think he was taking the piss. Multinational boss villain Kenny Curtis is so over-the-top he appears to have wandered in from another novel entirely. I don't know what novel that is, but I hope I never read it.

Many of the characters are part of a quite awful-sounding diplomatic community centred around the British High Commission in Nairobi. Le Carré assumes that it is obvious to the reader as to what sort of person would end up working there, and why, but I struggled to get a grip on the reasons why these public school-types hadn't just gone for an easier life working in the city. One supporting character's back-story is that they were studying drama and dance, but then found themselves sitting the entrance exams for the foreign service. No one in the history of humanity has ever done this.

Ultimately, I was left wishing that le Carré had presented his research as a book, instead of squeezing it into what I felt to be a flawed novel. But then, we wouldn't have the film, which makes it all work. Ah, well.

Cower Before My Wisdom!

2011-11-09T04:17:00.000-08:00

Martin Maloney, The Lecturer, 1997

I'm going to be contributing semi-regularly to the Writers' Workshop blog. In case you don't know, they are a literary consultancy for whom I work, and if you have a manuscript that needs to be battered into shape in order to make it publishable, getting in touch with them might be something to consider. Anyway, I shall be giving my informed opinion on various aspects of the writing process, beginning with 'writing rules and when to break them'. Now pay attention, as there is a written test at the end...

The Good Cook

2011-10-27T05:30:00.000-07:00

I declare these photographs used as the covers for the early 80s Time Life Good Cook series to be works of incredible beauty that I would gladly pay money to see giant-size hanging in Tate Modern. Behold!

Woolly Jumper

2011-09-20T06:38:00.000-07:00

Paul Jones

Fiona Hendley

Lionel Blair

Brandreth.

Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke

2011-09-19T16:34:00.000-07:00

Music biographer Peter Guralnick specialises in books on unknowable men. After his two volumes on the life of Elvis, in Dream Boogie he turns his attention to Sam Cooke, a singer who, like Elvis, through his performance mirrored the emotions of the listener far more than give something that was specific to himself (as opposed to, say, John Lennon, whose work was always primarily all about John Lennon). Because they reflect far more than they transmit, no amount of mere facts can really let you into the inner world of Elvis or Cooke, and Guralnick does not pretend he has cracked the code.

In Dream Boogie, rather, what you get, besides that of an artist, is the story of a businessman - making deals, breaking them, hiring, firing, endless renegotiating. This is how it should be, as besides his recordings, Cooke's legacy is that of a man who fought to make as much money as possible with his dignity intact, at a time when many were determined to strip others of that, because of their race. As for the rest, Cooke used his powerful charm to deflect any attempt to get under his skin. His reasons for getting married twice, for example, are pretty much a mystery: even the women he married never seemed to know for sure. His relationship with God is equally mysterious. As a gospel singer initially, he knew the Bible well, but did not pay much attention to the rules it laid down. Yet making the jump from gospel to pop troubled him far more than it should, if he truly was the shameless opportunist he sometimes appeared to be. He was serious about the struggle for civil rights, and summed up his feelings in the ominous masterpiece, A Change is Gonna Come.

Maybe because he died a few years too soon for Monterey and the like (shot dead by a female motel manager in a strange dispute over a girl, thought by some to be a cover for a political assassination), or maybe because he left behind so few filmed appearances, but even music enthusiasts tend to know his name and a handful of his songs instead of having much of a sense of him as an artist and a cultural figure. He is, however, well worth investigating. Check out his low-key Night Beat album, or of course any decent greatest hits compilation.

Bearing Witness

2011-09-03T15:49:00.000-07:00

I have discovered a whole new, previously unobserved literary genre, namely, religious children's books featuring evangelical bears. I like to call it Evangabear Lit. BEHOLD!

Firstly, some books featuring the Berenstain Bears, who started out telling kids not to watch too much TV and to visit the dentist, but one Alpha Course later:

Then there is the 'God Gave Us' series, which looks quite sweet, as long as you can forget that in times of hunger polar bears will eat their young.

The king of Evangabears, however, is surely Teddy Horsley. You'll see why.

And if that's not impressive enough...

Blimey!!

And just to show that other religions can get in on the act...

It's the Ebook Event of the Cenozoic Era!

2011-08-31T03:43:00.000-07:00

Today sees the release of my first novel Hound Dog as an ebook, available for the Kindle and in Epub format! Elvis impersonators! Gangsters! An accurate description of a working canal! Punctuation! Words! This novel's got LITERALLY everything!

Please note ebooks are the environmentally friendly option, as they are made from 100% recycled Yahoo! Geocities pages.

The Children's Book

2011-08-21T10:28:00.000-07:00

The fact that a disproportionate number of Edwardian children's authors own offspring grew up to be particularly unhappy adults (Kenneth Grahame's son, for instance, threw himself in front of a train) is the starting point for A.S. Byatt's gargantuan novel The Children's Book. In it, the family of a renowned female author find their lives intertwined with great moments and movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Arts and Crafts, the Suffragettes, anarchism, the First World War, and so on. There's a story of sorts, but if you want me to tell you what it is, you've got to pay me.

What I will say is that there's a hell of a lot wrong with The Children's Book. The novel's two crucial characters are incoherently drawn, so after over six hundred pages, you're left none the wiser as to why all these Edwardian authors' children might have been growing up to be so miserable. It also has an irritating habit of temporarily forgetting it is a novel at all, with the text morphing into an overwhelming display of research at intervals (do we really need to know how much the 1900 Grande Exposition Universelle cost?), and the characters pretty much sinking into the background information from which they arose before the end. People leap up the class structure with unconvincing ease, while the sheer number of individuals we're expected to follow, some clearly interesting Byatt much more than others, and too few in possession of a distinctive personality to set them apart, means that at times it feels like a particularly convoluted memory game.

Having said that, however, The Children's Book is not without charm. Although the central narrative is fudged, Byatt is oddly far better at writing about craftspeople than authors, and a subplot involving an Eric Gill-like potter and his family begs for its own, less cluttered novel. There are also moments of acute insight, such as the description of a failed attempt by adolescents to repeat a beloved camping holiday a year later. Unfortunately these moments are all about a hundred pages apart.

Some odd, unintentional-seeming repetitions and one howler of a 'find and replace' error suggests that neither Byatt, or anyone else, spent that much time editing this book once she got to the final sentence (although I could be wrong, of course), and in its meandering nature, with peaks and troughs of interest, is reminiscent of the work of John Cowper Powys, a writer who famously never reread anything he wrote.

The Children's Book's ambition and weight was enough to dazzle its way onto the Booker Prize shortlist, but ultimately Byatt's target fails to hit her target. She does, however, manage to hit something just to the left of it which isn't altogether uninteresting.

Old School

2011-07-31T05:17:00.000-07:00

Old school.

I don't know much about the hippin' hoppin', bippin' boppin', tickin' tockin', beepin' bompin' music the young folk like, but I do know that much of the hippin' hoppin', bippin' boppin', tickin' tockin', beepin' bompin' music I was subjected to in my own younger days is now known as 'old school', or 'old skool', or 'ye olde schoole'. But, I wondered, how old does something have to be to be 'old school'? Where is the dividing line between old school and new?

I did some research and was surprised by what I found. Apparently, all music made more than twelve years, seven months, twenty-one days, thirteen hours and forty-nine seconds ago is old school. Anything made after that is considered 'new'. If you attend an 'old school' night at a club, the release dates of all records played are strictly checked by an independent body. If the DJ attempts to play a record from the other side of the boundary, the clubbers are encouraged to rise as one and carry him from the booth, and then crucify him upside-down on the dance-floor. The same is true if an 'old school' record is played on a night dedicated to 'new' music. Amazingly, this is all completely legal.

The exception to the rule is, of course, the music of Tamsin Archer, which can be played at all events without fear of death.

Love on a Branch Line

2011-07-31T04:56:00.000-07:00

Love on a Branch Line is a comic novel by John Hadfield from 1959, which I first became aware of in the mid-90s when David Nobbs adapted it as a TV serial for the BBC. In it, a civil servant named Jasper Pye is sent to close down an outpost in the Suffolk countryside, located in a country house known as Arcady. There, he enters into a very English paradise, populated by a jazz-loving lord and his three characterful daughters.

The book is essentially the mildest of erotic fantasies, with Pye led astray in quite startling ways, seeing as sex in England wouldn't start for another four years, at least according to Philip Larkin, with its gentility disguising a radical plea that sex doesn't have to be taken so seriously. It is also far from perfect. It's one of those novels that is in the first person when it really ought to be in the third, and fan though I am of meandering British comic novels of the 1950s, its lack of forward movement in places tested even my patience.

Having said that, however, it is utterly likable and charming, imbued with a wistful sadness that things can't be perfect, all the time, and stay that way forever.

It's the ebook event of the Millennium!

2011-07-14T06:20:00.000-07:00

Yes, not only is my second, greatly underrated novel Flying Saucer Rock & Roll available for the Kindle, it can also now be downloaded in EPUB format, which I think covers pretty much every other type of ereader, unless you were unlucky enough to get a Betamax one, of course. Get it here!

It's the Ebook Event of the Century!*

2011-06-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, I can now excitingly reveal that my second, generally misunderstood novel, Flying Saucer Rock Roll is now available as a download for the Amazon Kindle! Also, with the range of Kindle apps, you can read it on a range of other devices, such as the Mac'n'tosh, the ipad, the iphone, the Android, the Car-keys, the Washing Machine, and even the Comb! Get it here while stocks last!

* Hyperbole. Not legally binding.

Book Review Orgy

2011-06-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

I haven't been placing any book reviews on here for a while, as I wanted people to concentrate their minds, energies and souls on my short story project The Shuffle, so here is a brief overview of some of what I have been reading over the past few months.

3,096 Days is the autobiography of Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian girl who was kidnapped age ten, and made to live as a prisoner in the basement and house of disturbed loner Wolfgang Priklopil before her escape eight years later. Kampusch survived with sanity intact, it seems, because she was a natural-born existentialist, able to hang on to an impermeable sense of self despite years of attempted brainwashing by her kidnapper. What is also of interest is that the story is as much to do with her relationship with the media as it is that of her and Priklopil. After years with only the television and radio for company, she had a media strategy worked out before she even escaped, bizarrely going on to host her own talk show in the years afterwards. The book is perhaps more disjointed than you would want from one with two co-writers, but is nevertheless fascinating, detailing the inner life of a most unusual person.

Beloved by Toni Morrison has already achieved classic status despite being less than twenty-five years old, but I didn't dig it all that much. It's an early example of the type of book that does so well in book groups these days, with a mainstream genre story (in this case, horror), interwoven with more highbrow 'literary' material. Telling the tale of an ex-slave in the American South whose deceased daughter, Beloved, comes back to haunt her, there is much about the pre-Civil War era that is rich and engaging. The ghost story aspect, however, sits uncomfortably, and feels like an intrusion into a perfectly fine piece of historical fiction. I could see the book being given a once-over by Stephen King to make it scarier, and not coming to any harm. The process by which the nature of Beloved's death is revealed is pedantic and waring, meanwhile, and a pale echo of a similar method employed by William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury. A book that gives the feeling of quality, without quite possessing it.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, on the hand, is as good as it's meant to be. It's about the Joad family from Oklahoma who travel to California during the Depression in seek of work, only to find exploitation and further hardship, but you probably know that already. Infused with the peculiarly American brand of soft, 'good neighbourly' socialism, it depicts a country on the verge of profound change as the poor edge towards breaking point. Little did Steinbeck know that WWII would shortly be taking the USA down a very different route.

I have been revisiting some books that were read to us in school. Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner dates from 1929, and is about a schoolboy's visit to Berlin and his efforts to recover a bank note stolen from him by a man on the train, with the help of the local boys he meets there. Not as engaging as it was when I was nine, to be honest. The plan to recover the money pretty much involves a lot of watching someone leave a hotel, while some kid called Tuesday receives endless praise just for sitting by a phone for a long time. There's a quite trippy dream sequence though. Looking back, the book seemed so entertaining at least partly because our teacher that year was very good at reading stories. This almost, but not quite, made up for the fact he was a psychological sadist who seemed to delight in humiliating the undiagnosed autistic boy in front of the whole class (not me, the other one).

Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers (daughter of the great musical composer Richard Rodgers) is the story of a teenage girl who swaps bodies with her mother. It's very seventies, with some odd psychoanalytical dialogue popping up and making itself unwelcome, but Rodgers captures an authentic teenage voice that leaves much of what was else around for kids at the time looking archaic. The book was made into a Disney film (twice) and followed by a less successful sequel, Freakier Friday, in which a teenage girl swaps bodies with her father.

The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy by Penelope Lively is a curious piece of kid's folk-horror from 1971 that predates The Wicker Man, but draws on similar pre-Christian traditions taking place in an English village to unnerving effect. It's held back, however, by some very standard characterisation involving the usual sullen children who populate kid's fantasy novels from this period. I wanted to care more than I did.

More sullen children can be found in Alan Garner's Elidor, in which four siblings chance upon a portal to another world in a derelict Manchester church. The mystical dimension of Elidor is described as intensely by Garner as I remember it from childhood. Indeed, it's so vivid it's positively oppressive. This wouldn't matter so much if the scenes in the real world weren't similarly heavy. The kids don't seem to like each other much, and an atmosphere of festering resentment clings to their every interaction. Indeed, they find the whole business of going to a party and actually meeting other children a total bore. Although obviously an imaginative and impressive book, its lack of light and shade doesn't make it a particularly likable one.

Legion is William Peter Blatty's sequel to The Exorcist (so possibly not a children's book), and moves supporting character Detective Kinderman to centre-stage as he fights the Gemini Killer, a serial murderer who has been inconveniently dead for some years. Like its predecessor, Legion barely reads like commercial fiction, with multiple allusions to some quite obscure cultural reference points peppering the text. It's more a meditation on the age-old question of why a loving God allows bad things to happen than a horror story, although attempts to tie it to the original story drag it down to a pulpy level it is too good for. Also, the deux ex machina ending is weak, and when Blatty made the story into the film The Exorcist Part III, the studio demanded a more explicitly exorcisty ending, and rightly so in my view.

Medea by dead Greek guy Euripides is a cracking tale of a woman going mad because her husband has married someone else and killing her own children and a few other people besides. My only criticism is that the big group of women who followed her about could have been a bit more proactive when it came to actually trying to stop her.

Finally, after arguing persuasively in favour of nurture over nature in They F*** You Up, psychologist Oliver James cashes in with his baby-rearing guide How Not to F*** Them Up. As a new parent, I was very interested in this, and cashed out top-whack for the hardback, only to find declared socialist James explicitly state that the book isn't aimed at people on my income level, as we are statistically unlikely to read a parenting manual. Instead, he preaches to the middle classes who have a full range of child-rearing options available to them thanks to economic status, and leaves the working classes to go hang, all the while criticising the Sure Start programme of the previous administration that provided parenting assistance to the disadvantaged. The fact that the low-income users of this are begging for it to be saved now that the ConDems have decided to scrap it suggests he is talking out of his arse on this point. The book is padded out heavily with case histories, many involving awful-sounding career mums so terrified of forming any emotional attachment to their children you wonder why they bothered having them. What insight there is seems sound, but could have been fitted onto a flimsy pamphlet, perhaps to be pushed through the doors of underprivileged parents who can't afford this feeble dribble of a book.

As I appear to have shot my load in a fit of anger, I shall now leave the Book Review Orgy.

Informative Books

2011-05-30T03:59:00.000-07:00

There's nothing I like more than eating a giant offal ball in gravy.

Sometimes, however, I get the gravy on the smock I'm wearing, which is especially upsetting as I made it myself.

And there's nothing for it but to cheer myself up with a slice of knitted cake.

Does Anybody Know This Man?

2011-05-03T06:57:00.000-07:00

Not a man. This is a sandwich.

I have a memory of a Southern regional news item, probably dating from the late 1990s or maybe slightly later. It was about a sandwich seller, who would go round the offices in Southampton, or Littlehampton, or somewhere. He was also a poet. Once inside an office with his sandwiches, he would ask the names of the women he was selling to, and read them a poem addressing a woman with that name. He would do this on on his knees, employing what seemed to be a heavy Brooklyn accent (not his own). The concept behind it all was that he was in love with one particular woman, and each poem was an explanation as to why, although the woman he was addressing was adorable, he could not marry her as his heart belonged to someone else. I believe the poem he was reading in the report was about someone called 'Eunice'. The woman he was reading it to wasn't called Eunice, but it was as close as he could get.

I have often wondered about what happened after the news report was filmed. It featured an office manager saying to camera that it was nice to have something a bit different with their sandwiches, but she did not sound like she believed it that much. I should imagine that after a while it would get somewhat wearing. Did he eventually give up of his own volition, or did each office politely have to ask him to stop? Were there offices that could not bring themselves to do it? Is it still going on today?

Who is this man? Does anybody know?

Spotify Tennis

2011-05-02T04:44:00.000-07:00

A visual representation of a game of Spotify Tennis.

Who fancies a game of Spotify Tennis? This is a game that I have invented. What happens is that two people make a playlist together, each adding a song in response to a song the other has added. So one person chooses a track, then the other person another, and then the first person picks something, back and forth like in tennis. Or badminton. Or Air Hockey. Fun, eh?

All you need to play Spotify Tennis is a Spotify account of some sort of another. Once you have an account, the first thing you need to do is add me (or whoever you intend to play with) to your 'people' list. You can find me by typing in 'spotify:user:rblandford' into the Spotify search box. Then, drag a song to my name on your people list and press 'send'. This will appear in my inbox. I will send you a song back, and so on, until we have reached the required number of songs. (My version of Spotify Tennis consists of six rounds, and so there will be twelve songs, but the number can be varied to taste.) I will then compile the songs into a playlist and make it available for the public to hear.

No one wins a game of Spotify Tennis. Rather, it is a harmonious game in which two musical tastes (or more, as the game could expand to include any number) are meshed. It's very Zen. Or, if you prefer, it's like the wussy non-competitive games they play at liberal school sports days.

So who's first? Come on, let's be 'avin' yer.

The Shuffle on Shuffle

2011-05-02T04:14:00.000-07:00

My online short story project, The Shuffle is now complete. But wait! Have you experienced The Shuffle on 'shuffle'? If not, best go here. You won't regret it. Or maybe you will. That's the thrill of it, really.

Ella Marie Blandford

2011-03-27T10:25:00.000-07:00

Born 26/3/2011

Why Christmas?

2011-01-03T11:55:00.000-08:00

Phil Spector hides a shotgun in his beard.

It took me a while to get into the Christmas spirit this year. In fact, I didn't start feeling properly Christmassy until about Dec. 27th. On that day, however, having dusted off and played my copy of Phil Spector's A Christmas Gift For You album, as I do every year, I suddenly found myself asking a question that got me feeling very Christmassy indeed: why do Christmas songs exist?

Obviously, they exist because you can sell them and make some easy cash, but what I was specifically interested in was from where and when did the songs that Spector reworked on his 1963 classic album originate? It had never occurred to me to ask this before. Christmas songs are one of those things that are just there, without explanation, like Cilla Black or annual human sacrifice. Of course, everything that 'just is' turns out not to be when investigated. All the songs, I found, bar the original Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home' and the carol Silent Night, were numbers from pop music's pre-rock 'n' roll past, and some of them, according to truth-telling website Wikipedia, have interesting histories.

The album opens with White Christmas, an Irving Berlin number recorded by Bing Crosby as a duet with Marjorie Reynolds (although her voice was actually dubbed by Martha Mears) for the film Holiday Inn in 1942. Originally, however, the song was intended to be sung only by Reynolds (or at least, Mears via Reynolds). Would the song have become a classic without Crosby's tones? Who knows?

Second track Frosty the Snowman was originally recorded by Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy in 1950, as a follow-up to his earlier hit, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (more on which later). As befits a song sung by a singing cowboy, Autry's original is carried by a clip-clop rhythm reminiscent of children hitting coconut shells together while performing Little Donkey. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Autry, however, was that in 1935 he starred in a 12-part movie serial called The Phantom Empire, in which the Singing Cowboy combats a futuristic robot from the underground city of Murania. And sings. Whilst also being a cowboy.

The Bells of St. Mary's (also known as that one song off the Phil Spector Christmas Album no one likes much) originates from the UK. The St. Mary's in question is St. Mary's Church in Southampton, visited by lyricist Douglas Furber (who also wrote the words to The Lambeth Walk) in 1914. Rumours that he rounded off his day by popping into Weasel's Records and buying a Cure bootleg on cassette cannot be confirmed at this time.

Santa Claus is Coming to Town was first performed live on the radio by saucer-eyed comedian Eddie Cantor in 1934, after being turned down for being too childish by other performers. The recording still survives.

The song Sleigh Ride started off as instrumental orchestral piece, written by Leroy Anderson, and begun during a heat-wave in July, 1946, while It's a Marshmallow World was another Christmas hit for Crosby in 1950.

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus was originally sung by 13 year-old Jimmy Boyd in 1952. The song was issued with a ban by the Roman Catholic Church in Boston. Only when the young teenager met with the Archbishop and explained how the song was actually entirely innocent was the ban lifted.

The character of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer was created to feature in a promotional colouring book for the Montgomery Ward department store chain in 1939. The book contained the story of Rudolph in poem form, written by Robert L. May. The story was adapted into a song, and recorded by futuristic robot-fighting singing cowboy Gene Autry in 1949.

The song Winter Wonderland contains a reference to a 'Parson Brown' (actually a snowman, because... well, it's a long story) who asks a young couple if they're married. This is actually a nod to the tradition of protestant ministers who would travel around rural communities, marrying those who did not have a minister of their denomination living nearby. These lyrics are often now replaced, with Parson Brown becoming a 'circus clown'. Spector's version, however, features both lyrics.

The march number Parade of the Wooden Soldiers began life as the instrumental music for a Betty Boop cartoon of the same name from 1933, which also features a toy King Kong. The film King Kong had only just been released that year.

Finally, Here Comes Santa Claus is another Christmas hit for underground futuristic city of Muriana-dominating singing cowboy Gene Autry, this time from 1947.

I hope you have enjoyed our journey through the music of Christmas. Next year I shall be dissecting Bob Dylan's Christmas in the Heart with the same degree of pedantic detail.

Listen to Phil Spector's A Christmas Gift For You on Spotify.

Listen to my playlist of original or early version of the songs, also on Spotify.

Return of The Shuffle

2011-01-02T07:39:00.000-08:00

My short story project, The Shuffle, is back: this time with its own blog. Go here to find a new short story every week, as well as all the previous ones from last summer. If you like weird things, pathos, humour and occasional sexiness, then these stories are for you. If you don't like these things, then you should read them anyway, just to make sure. And if you do like them, please share with others using the social media buttons provided. Thank you.

Let The Great World Spin

2010-12-26T11:32:00.000-08:00

I don't often write about contemporary fiction on this blog. This is mainly because I am well aware of my influence, and a critical remark from me could destroy an author's career. It is also, I suppose, because I don't actually read that much contemporary fiction as there's so much old stuff to read and quite a lot of things on telly.

I picked up a copy of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin at a book-swap event I attended, however, attracted by its high-concept idea of exploring the lives of witnesses of the high-wire walk by Philippe Petit between the Twin Towers in 1974 (as documented in the film Man on the Wire), and feel that as McCann has sold some film rights and is well established enough to get his short stories published, he'll probably just about survive anything I might say about his work.

The novel follows a trend I've noticed in recent fiction, despite the fact that I'm not paying much attention. It's what you could call 'kaleidoscopic'. What I mean by this is that it differs from most novels in that it doesn't have a plot that can easily be viewed as following a line, which is what most novels have, or at least they did. You used to be able to summarise virtually any novel's plot in terms of a series of events that happen to a protagonist, that get them from Starting Point A to Finishing Point Z. Even non-linear narratives could be seen to do this; it was just that all the points in-between A and Z were in the wrong order. Sometimes A and Z weren't even where they should have been; nevertheless, save for the odd experimental novel written by a crazy person, they could be located and a line could be drawn.

In recent years, however, this model has begun to break down. Now, there are more and more novels where a spectrum of characters and events circle around a central point: hence, they are 'kaleidoscopic'. (David Mitchell is perhaps the most well-known 'kaleidoscopic' novelist. I think. I haven't read any of his books. Don De Lillo's another. Probably.) Indeed, Thomas Pynchon's recent mammoth novel, Against the Day was so 'kaleidoscopic' that it ended up resembling a Magic Eye picture, which, if you found the right way of looking at it, would just about resemble a worthwhile use of your time.

The kaleidoscopic novel can be seen as a reaction to the digital age, with information from all around the world instantly available all the time. After all, why write from one person's perspective, when reality is filtered more and more through multiple viewpoints?

Kaleidoscopic novels are often Important. You can tell they're Important because they actually get reviewed in newspapers and they usually have pictures of the New York skyline on the cover and, if at all possible, the Twin Towers. This means they're responding to 9/11, which is obviously a Very Important thing for a novel to be doing.

The Twin Towers don't feature on the cover of my copy of Let the Great World Spin, which is quite surprising considering they're actually in it. You do get the New York skyline however, so hopefully Importance will be conveyed.

Yet it's with the overwhelming sense of Importance that comes part and parcel with the kaleidoscopic style that the problem lies for Let the Great World Spin. It's a good book, by and large. You get some interesting characters, some fascinating situations. There's stuff about the early days of computer hacking, and a support group of mothers who have lost sons in Vietnam that's very strong for instance.

But it's all too clearly reaching for greatness and falling well short. McCann can't imbue all his characters with the same level of believability. There's a section narrated through the voice of a prostitute, who says very little you wouldn't naturally expect a prostitute to say. She's given an unlikely interest in Arabic poetry, but it feels like it's just there to paper over the flimsiness. In the end I couldn't help left thinking of the stage actor in The Fast Show who 'transforms' himself by sticking on some glasses and croaking 'I'm a very old man'.

Elsewhere, plot twists were clunky rather than surprising. Two characters are wiped out in a car accident. As always with accidents in fiction, rather than capturing the randomness of real life, it merely reveals the hand of the author as he mechanically moves the story onto the track he wants it to go down.

The recurring motif of the book, of the world spinning, and life carrying on, sounds quite meaningful, but is actually just a statement of the extremely obvious if you stop to think about it. You probably knew that before you started reading.

And this is why Let the Great World Spin, for all its charms, ultimately fails. It's a collection of little stories of little lives, woven together as if all the small pieces will magically add up to something big. Yet they don't. Inside this failed big, Important book, there are probably several little, great books trying to get out. Maybe it's time for authors to start thinking small again.

The Gangs of New York

2010-12-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

About a decade ago, upon viewing the Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York, set in the milieu of the pre-Mafia 19th Century world of criminal turf wars in said city, I found myself fascinated by the period detail, while finding the story a bit predictable and off-the-shelf. I made a note, therefore, to read the non-fiction book by journalist Herbert Asbury from 1928 on which it was based.

You'll be pleased to know, then, that I have now done so. And, having done so, I have come to a number of conclusions. Firstly, I've decided that living in New York in the 19th Century must have been fucking rubbish, and I'm glad that I don't. Barely a day seemed to go by without an insane riot breaking out and law and order completely breaking down, which doesn't sound much fun at all, unless you're a sociopathic loon.

Secondly, I've found that I'm not that overly excited by the gruesome details of crimes. Although I can imagine Quentin Tarantino chuckling his head off as he thumbs this book (and possibly wanking), I was very quickly overwhelmed by the relentless maiming and murdering, as I couldn't help remembering these are things people really did to other people. All life then seemed empty of purpose, and I found myself climbing up to the highest possible location, before talking myself down again with a loud-hailer.

Thirdly, I've also discovered that despite what I've just said, the opposite is also true, as certain details stayed with me, so awestruck was I that they actually ever happened. A landlady who ripped off the ears of her adversaries with her teeth and kept them in a jar. A mob in a race riot beating to death a lone black child who'd been left behind in an otherwise evacuated orphanage. Men lining up to shake the hands of gangsters about to be publicly hung. And most random, a man who picked up a passer-by and broke his back over his knee in several places, just to win a bet that he could.

Overall, I'd say that this is a book better for flicking through rather than reading intently (unless you're overly fascinated by the ins and outs of 19th Century gang turf wars), but it's best not to skim too much, or you'll miss some of the stuff that will simply make your jaw drop.

(The 'forward' by Borges featured in some editions is, in fact, not that interesting. It's just a brief description of the book lifted from A Universal History of Infamy. So, nothing to get excited about.)

Baffling Book Covers

2010-12-26T06:34:00.000-08:00

In a quiet moment, I sometimes like to imagine what it would be like to read some of these books. And then I untangle a ball of fluff and forget about it.

Inconvenient Music Club: Frank Sinatra Sings For Only the Lonely

2010-11-20T07:11:00.000-08:00

Normally at Inconvenient Music Club, we investigate albums too awkward to win widespread public acceptance. In the case of 'Sings For Only the Lonely', however, the inconvenience isn't that people didn't warm to it, but that they did.

The album, after all, is unremittingly bleak; a pre-rock precursor to such despairing works as Neil Young's Tonight's the Night, Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers and John Cale's Music For a New Society. Like most of Sinatra's '50s long-playing output, it's a concept album. Previously, he had explored swinging (in the 50s sense), melancholy and international travel. This time, the theme was post-break-up loneliness. Together with arranger Nelson Riddle, Sinatra pushed this concept right over the edge into something beyond this, however. The album sounds clinically depressed, as if Sinatra has gone over the same thoughts over and over to the point he's stuck in a cycle he can't escape from. (Many presume that he's drawing on the rich vein of emotion that was his break-up with Ava Gardner, but perhaps more significantly, Riddle was recovering from the deaths of his mother and daughter. Indeed, the arrangements have a chilling quality, like a skeleton that mocks the characters Sinatra inhabits as they meander through an urban landscape of bars and crowds, pursued by the invisible foe of their own despair.)

Albums like this generally destroy an artist's fan-base. Sings For Only the Lonely, however, released just in time for Christmas in 1958, got to no. 1, and was on the charts until 1961. The '50s must have been a very different place.

Specially written title track, 'Only the Lonely', sets the scene, but it's the following 'Angel Eyes' that really lets us know what we're in for. Here, Sinatra sits in a bar, as the fact that his girl is no longer his and, at least in his mind, now belongs to another, slowly sinks in. There's a five note phrase, played on what my Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra informs me is a bassoon, that somehow manages to perfectly capture the moment when the lingering dread that the worst has happened transforms into the certain knowledge that it has.

In 'What's New?', Sinatra, a man with a scarcely believable ego (and possibly the most talented man ever to be suspected of requesting a Mafia hit on his behalf), is stripped of his dignity, as he desperately begs for the attention of a former lover.

'It's a Lonesome Old Town' contains a truly unsettling string arrangement by Riddle, with a sickly shimmering effect that Scott Walker would later employ at various points throughout his career to signify torture, death camps and general human nastiness. Here, it gives a physical presence to Sinatra's alienation from all around him, as he stares into the void.

For seven more tracks, standards and lesser known numbers from the big band era are stretched in ways their composers could never have imagined, as Sinatra finds subtle nuances in the most throwaway of lyrics. Riddle, meanwhile, gives the arrangements the weight of 19th Century Romantic compositions. The fact he wrote all of them in a week makes this feat all the more remarkable.

The album closes with the now iconic 'One For My Baby', in which Sinatra again adopts the role of the saloon drunk, propping up the bar as he lays out his tales of woe. He's carried by the piano accompaniment of Bill Miller, as he tells himself he's going to drown 'the torch he's found', and looks out to the long road to recovery he knows he must walk down. Whether he does or not is something the listener must decide for themselves as the album closes and fades into a well-earned silence (now scandalously broken by bonus tracks).

Sings For Only the Lonely is proof that many of the developments in the album field that the '60s rock generation claimed for themselves had already been achieved by Sinatra some ten years previously. Rather than merely being a collection of songs, it's a fully-realised, coherent work in itself. It also contains more insight into the human condition than all but a handful of albums recorded since. Simply, it's an inconvenient masterpiece.

Listen to Frank Sinatra Sings For Only the Lonely on Spotify.

Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Radio: The Elephantine Compendium

2010-11-15T06:21:00.000-08:00

For about a year, I compiled a weekly, then monthly Spotify playlist of music that was of interest to me, called Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Radio. It was immensely popular, sometimes drawing figures of six or more people. As I have now decided that eclecticism is overrated, and just listen to the same Tamsin Archer album over and over again, that project has come to an end, at least for the time being.

I have, however, compiled all the playlists into one very long one, which will take you over a day to listen to in its entirety. Whether you choose to do so without stopping, or break it up into little chunks like a sane person, is entirely up to you. Why, if you don't like a song, you can even skip it, and go on to the next one. Obviously, this reeks of half-heartedness and defeatism, but it's a free country. (Also, some tracks have since been withdrawn from Spotify by the label or artist. Yes, Paul McCartney, you monumental fuck, I'm looking at you. Thanks for ruining EVERYTHING.)

So anyway, here it is, the (nearly) complete Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Radio. Please listen. Or I'll kill myself.*

* Not a legally binding commitment.

Books, I've read a few...

2010-11-07T10:42:00.000-08:00

Precisely three of late, and that's just enough for me to mention.

Firstly, as some light holiday reading, I worked my way through a collection of Stephen King's early short stories, Night Shift. My reason for doing this is that when I was in my early teens, I thought King was an amazing author. I'd devour decent-sized tomes like The Shining and Misery in no time at all. Soon, however, I would discover George Orwell and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and came to be of the opinion that King was probably not that much of a serious author, and was more suited to be read by the servant classes, shop girls, and those whose breeding led them to naturally work with their hands.

As time went on, I realised that things that were meant to be serious and possess depth (such as the works of Patrick Marber) were often as shallow as a saucer, while that which was presumed to be completely throwaway (for instance, the later works of Abba) could often be fantastically profound (or, as Pete Townshend put it, 'The simple things, you see, are all complicated'). It was time, therefore, to go back and ask the question, just how good is Stephen King?

From the evidence of Night Shift, the answer is, not that great. I'd presumed that if nothing else, King would always come up with a page-turner. I was surprised, then, by just how boring Night Shift often was. Presented more or less chronologically, the early stories are quite dull retreads of ideas already explored a lot better by H.P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. As they go on, the style gets lighter and more engaging, but some good ideas are often derailed by a need to give a typical horror 'shock' ending, regardless of whether the story's asking for one or not. 'Children of the Corn' is going along just fine with some religion-crazed murdering children, only for a supernatural evil to turn up as well. King doesn't seem to understand that the children's mania is the horror.

Characterisation, too, is often weak. In one story, a woman is kidnapped and made to stand on an electrified floor, but ultimately doesn't mind because it helps her husband quit smoking.

Just as I was beginning to despair, the stories abruptly began to get better. 'The Man Who Loved Flowers' is a genuine shocker with a perfect twist, while the non-horror 'The Last Rung on the Ladder' is startlingly mature. By the looks of it, King was just mastering his art at the point this collection ends. So how good is Stephen King? I still don't know.

Next up is Scheisshaus Luck by Pierre Berg (and assisted by Brian Brock), a recently-published Auschwitz memoir by a French gentile inmate, long relocated to the US. As well as containing much historical detail that can only make you shake your head with wonder at anybody's ability to survive such an experience, the book is notable also for Berg's style, which is as cynical and biting as any hard-boiled crime author. This is Primo Levi, as filtered through the mind of Ed McBain. Berg himself, although putting his survival primarily down to luck, is clearly resourceful, resilient and hard as nails. Tarantino and Spielberg should be fighting to outbid each other for the rights to this. Highly recommended.

Finally, as part of a non-randomised subjection of my otherwise randomised project to achieve a level of well-readness before my death at age ninety, I read three short novels contained in one volume, two by Mary Wollstonecraft, and one by her daughter Mary Shelley. So far, I had charted the growth of the English novel in the Eighteenth Century by reading Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Lawrence Sterne. I had fallen into the trap, of course, of reading only the work of Dead White Males. To counterbalance this, I needed to explore the female author's contribution to the medium.

Unfortunately, most works by female authors of the Eighteenth Century were destroyed by F.R. Leavis and his students in a macho orgy of hegemony-establishment, book-burning and bum-fun at some point in the 1950s, leaving only the two novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, and Maria.

Mary is a very short novel. So short, in fact, that on publication it must have resembled a rather fat pamphlet. It tells the story of a young girl forced into an arranged marriage, only for her to find true love with a convalescent on a trip to the Continent with a sickly friend. In its favour, it offers a rare feminist critique of the system of marriage amongst the upper classes that is the subject of many novels of the period. On the negative side, Wollstonecraft couldn't write fiction for toffee. The book feels more like a sketch for a novel than the finished article, with much summary and a narrating voice that's intrusive even by Eighteenth Century standards. The protagonist is hilariously highly-strung, doling out unasked-for acts of charity and then vexed by the recipient's apparent lack of gratitude. The kindest thing you could say is that it's a novel with it's skin off, with the clearly autobiographical elements and philosophical underpinning that would normally be disguised by artifice glaringly exposed.

Wollstonecraft's second novel Maria also feels unfinished, but that's because it is. What is there, however, is more interesting, with an intriguing premise of a seemingly sane woman imprisoned in a mental asylum for mysterious reasons. Again, the protagonist is slightly ridiculous, carrying out a legal defense at the drop of a hat despite not having any experience or training. There are some genuinely good bits of writing here, with supporting characters' back-stories quite thrillingly presented. The title character's back-story, when ultimately revealed, is, however, tedious, and takes up much of what was finished before the author's death.

Matilda by Mary Shelley is based on a fragment by her mother, but is thankfully considerably better written than it would be if Mary Sr. had finished it. The story is of a girl who is subjected to an admission of incestuous love from her father, and who flees into a state of solitude and madness. Perhaps understandably, Mary's publisher, who was also her dad, declined to print it, and it didn't see the light of day until 1959.

The novel is psychologically astute, although very gloomy. This is accentuated by Shelley's tendency to write five paragraphs when one will do, so the overall effect is of wading through thick, incest-flavoured soup. Still, it takes you to a dark place with an authenticity that most writers would surrender in favour of melodrama. Utimately, Mary, Maria and Matilda are curios rather than great, lost literature, but should be of interest to those who are curious about literary curios.

The Monster Club

2010-10-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have seen the semi-classic British portmanteau horror film The Monster Club, directed by the recently deceased Roy Ward Baker and featuring Vincent Price, in which various monstrous types gather in their own club and tell scary stories, punctuated by musical numbers performed by bands such as the Pretty Things, clearly in need of some quick cash. I suspect far less of you have read the book of the same name on which it is based, written by Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes.

Well, I have, so there. And furthermore, I think it's pretty good. The stories lean towards the comedic rather than the horrific, but a few, such as one in which a man finds himself stranded in an inescapable village populated entirely by ghouls, are quite scary.

What's interesting though, is that Chetwynd-Hayes, does not just tell stories about traditional monsters, such as vampires and werewolves. Rather, he imagines them a whole society, and a system for what occurs when they interbreed (a vampire and a werewolf pairing will result in a werevamp, while a werevamp who mates with the offspring of a werewolf and ghoul, a weregoo, will be the parent of a shaddy). Although it's done in a hammy, British seventies horror kind of way, it is rather ahead of it's time in the way that it ponders on the matter of what goes on in a monster's life when it's not out killing people. It's not totally unlike Buffy and True Blood in this respect.

Anyway, track down the book if you're that way inclined. In the meantime, enjoy this song:

Hound Dog Relocation No. 1

2010-10-03T08:50:00.000-07:00

A while back I introduced the Hound Dog Relocation Project. Simply, I would send a signed copy of my first novel to anyone who would relocate it in an interesting manner once they had finished it, and provide photographic evidence of what they had done.

A number of parties were interested, and so I dutifully sent off the books, and waited. And waited. And waited. No photographs, however, came my way. I had sent a gift of love out to the universe and received none back. My faith in human nature naturally plummeted. All joy turned to ashes and dust in my mouth. I began to see the world as it truly was: in the words of Werner Herzog, a place characterised by 'hostility, chaos and murder'.

But then, just as nihilism colonised the final chamber of my soul, I received these pictures, courtesy of Phil Beeken. Here we can clearly see the book being passed on to renowned actor David Spinx, most famous for his role as Keith Miller in television play 'The East Enders'.

Now once again, happiness has returned to my life. The sound of children playing in the street is no longer a hollow echo of the clanging of the funeral bell. But I fear it cannot last. Only the receipt of further photographs for the Hound Dog Relocation Project can maintain my gleeful mood. So send them in, or we may as well just crawl into the grave and be done with it.

From the Hound Blog archives: 'Something in the Air'

2010-09-12T09:52:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about that Thunderclap Newman song, Something In the Air. “Call out the instigator”, it goes, “‘Cos there’s something in the air. We’ve got to get it together sooner or later, because the revolution’s here.” But surely if he was the instigator he’d be calling everybody else out? As instigators go, this one’s fucking rubbish. “Yeah, I was going to be doing a spot of instigating this morning, ‘cos the revolution’s here and stuff, but uh, I overslept, so one of the people I was meant to instigate had to do it for me. Well, I mean, I know we’ve got to get it together sooner or later, but with me on the job, better make it later, yeah?”

From the Hound Blog archives: Barbers

2010-09-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

Allen Ginsberg in his haircutting days.

Why is it when you go to the barbers or the hairdressers, they always ask you what you’ve got planned for the rest of the day? Why do they want to know? What do they do with the information? Maybe its a secret means of mass observation. As soon as you leave, they write down what you’re going to be up to in a notebook, and then this is typed up and filed at a secret research centre, before it will ultimately be presented in a report, entitled, “What People Have Got Planned For The Rest Of The Day: Findings and Analysis”.

Or is it part of the erosion of our civil liberties? Maybe its MI5, hoping that in answer to the question, “What have you got planned for the rest of the day?”, somebody’s going to say, “I’m going to plan a poison gas attack on the Houses of Parliament.” Who knows how many lives the barbers and hairdressers of Britain have already saved in this way?

So if you suspect someone of being a terrorist, tell them their hair is looking a bit scraggly. It might just be the most important thing you do.

From the Hound Blog archives: Dr Who's Political Leanings

2010-09-12T09:44:00.000-07:00

The Doctor in his special voting outfit.

I have been pondering on how the various incarnations of Doctor Who would vote in a general election, were they British citizens. Here is what I think might be the case:

First Doctor (William Hartnell): Conservative
Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton): Labour
Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee): Conservative
Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker): Labour
Fifth Doctor (Peter Davidson): Liberal Democrat
Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker): UK Independence Party
Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy): Labour
Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann): Green Party
Ninth Doctor (Christopher Ecclestone): Liberal Democrat, but as a protest vote against New Labour
Tenth Doctor (David Tennant): Would stand as an independent candidate

Vault of Lovely no. 2: Last Summer

2010-09-05T07:42:00.000-07:00

What is it: 1969 film based on a novel by Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), in which a group of teenagers at a summer seaside resort for the affluent descend into brutality, led by Barbara Hershey. Directed by Frank Perry.

Why I like it: At the very moment that the youth of America were being touted as the embodiment of hope for the future, this film presented adolescence as a breeding ground for cruelty and evil (see also, Flying Saucer Rock & Roll, by me). The film was released the same year as the Manson Murders took place. (Interestingly, while filming a scene in which she domesticates a seagull, Barbara Hershey accidentally killed the bird in question. For several years, she insisted on being known as Barbara Seagull in order to atone for this act.)

Where is it: Last Summer has never been released on DVD anywhere. VHS copies are scarce, and it hasn't been on British TV for years. It's probably on the Internet though, somewhere, if you look for it.

Vault of Lovely no. 1: Linen

2010-08-30T11:53:00.000-07:00

First in an occasional series in which I present various cultural things that I'm particularly fond of, and briefly explain why.

What is it?: Linen, a painting by Russian artist Natalia Goncharova, from 1912.

Why do I like it?: The positivity with which it embraces the modern, mechanised world, showing various laundry-based activities all clicking together in ragtime syncopation. Look, it says, ironing is fun! Of course, ironing isn't remotely fun, but in this painting it seems part of a beautiful dream of the future. This dream would be blown to smithereens just a couple of years later by the First World War, and the inescapable global realisation that ironing is boring.

Where is it?: Tate Modern

Hound Blog has moved

2010-08-09T03:07:00.000-07:00

This is the new location of Hound Blog. Here is a link to the old location. It has moved because Wordpress and myself had grown apart, and I felt that while we'd had some good times, it was just holding me back. No hard feelings, Wordpress, but I have to be honest with myself and other people, especially you. I've come to hate you. There, I've said it. It might not be fair, or what you want to hear, but it's true. You see those mail/facebook/twitter options immediately below this post? That's the love you couldn't provide me with, Wordpress. That's the kind of care and consideration I needed. But when it mattered, you weren't there for me. I'm sorry, but that's how I feel. Actually, I'm not sorry. Why should I feel sorry for the way you make me feel with your actions? I've broken a plate. You see, that's what you do, Wordpress. You push people. You push people so far that they end up doing things they wouldn't normally - now look. I've broken a plate and I've broken a glass. Because of you, and your mind games. I hope you're proud of yourself. Now get out.