The new Nick Lowe CD - with free deck of Nick Lowe playing cards!
Wednesday, 21 September 2011
50 Years of J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey
Kenneth Slawenski, author of J. D. Salinger: A Life and creator of the website Dead Caulfields, writes on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the book Franny and Zooey
Franny and Zooey was published by Little, Brown and Company on September 14, 1961. The book couples two stories that Salinger had previously published in The New Yorker: the story “Franny,” (January 29, 1955) and the novella, “Zooey” (May 4, 1957). Salinger squeezed another Glass family between these two, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (also in The New Yorker, November 19, 1955), but that wouldn’t appear in book form until 1963 when it was paired with another New Yorker story “Seymour: An Introduction” (June 6, 1959).
No story revealed Salinger’s quest for perfection better than “Zooey.” He worked on it for over a year and half, agonizing over every word and punctuation. But Gus Lobrano, the nurturing New Yorker editor he had begun working with in 1947 in revising “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” died of cancer in March 1956 and Katherine White’s new regime proved unsympathetic to what Salinger was now doing. They found “Zooey” long and meandering, its characters too precious, and they rejected it unanimously. Editor William Maxwell broke the news, trying to spare Salinger’s feelings by citing the magazine’s policy against publishing “sequels.” Who knows what would have happened to “Zooey” had not William Shawn overridden his staff and decided to work with Salinger himself to cut the novella down? And that’s what they did over the next six months. The intensively edited shorter version published in the magazine is identical with the one published in the book.
Franny and Zooey’s publication in book form prompted a cover story in Time and established Salinger as the leading author of his day. It also generated an onslaught of critical scorn. John Updike, Joan Didion, and Mary McCarthy derided the book for the smugness of its religious content and bemoaned Salinger for displaying an unbalanced love for his characters.
Readers, however, disagreed. The book was an instant sensation and quickly rose to the number one spot on the New York Times Best Sellers list, a distinction never achieved even by The Catcher in the Rye. Today, many readers and critics regard Franny and Zooey as Salinger’s masterpiece and it has remained in print since the day it was published.
The book’s first portion, the short story “Franny,” is the tale of a young woman who questions the values around her and seeks a more spiritual path to happiness. Desperate for insight, Franny becomes enthralled by a religious book entitled The Way of a Pilgrim, the story of a wandering Russian peasant who seeks to fulfill the Biblical exhortation to “pray without ceasing.” As the story progresses, Franny slowly becomes a modern day version of the searching pilgrim. She becomes addicted to the book’s Jesus Prayer, a mantra she repeats until it synchronizes with her heartbeat and becomes self-activating. At the story’s end, Franny collapses from exhaustion, her lips involuntarily mumbling the prayer.
“Franny” is largely a dialogue piece containing only two speaking characters and little change of venue. Yet, Salinger’s manipulation of shifting narrative perspective is so well designed as to make it instantly captivating. When “Franny” begins, a third-person narrator helps guide the reader by revealing the motives and inner thoughts of the characters. Yet once the reader becomes comfortable, the narration coyly pulls away, until by the story’s end it merely relays events, delivering the full responsibility of interpretation solely to the reader. As a story, “Franny” delivers no conclusion. But it does ask many questions. Perhaps the great question posed by “Franny” is whether or not it is possible to attain spiritual enlightenment in modern American society.
“Zooey,” Salinger’s longest work after The Catcher in the Rye, picks up where the story of “Franny” left off. Debilitated after her collapse, Franny has returned home to her family’s Manhattan apartment to recuperate from her spiritual crisis. She lays inert on the living room couch, decrying the spiritual insensitivity of those around her.
Franny’s older brother Zooey first appears cornered in the bathtub by their mother, Bessie Glass. Bessie persuades Zooey to try to lift Franny up from her malaise. But Zooey is also suffering from a subtler but no less damaging spiritual crisis. He is consumed by a personal struggle with his own ego and his growth has been stunted by a religious upbringing so advanced that it has bigoted him against all others.
Despite Zooey's shortcomings, he attempts to rescue Franny from her dilemma, but the long intellectual argument he uses, rather than spiritual logic, drives Franny deeper into distress.
Relief for Franny–as well as Zooey–comes at the story’s end, a gentle spiritual revelation that readers feel as powerfully as it is experienced by the characters. Containing Seymour Glass’s now-famous parable of “The Fat Lady,” the climax rivals the intangible epiphany that concludes The Catcher in the Rye.
Fifty years after publication, the mystical allure of Franny and Zooey continues to draw readers. Each generation rediscovers the book and embraces the unfading beauty of its probing spirituality while delighting in Salinger’s undeniable gift for impeccable dialogue.
Also of interest:
Dead Caulfields includes a chronology of events in the life of the Glass family
In 2001 Janet Malcolm wrote an extended appreciation of Franny and Zooey for The New York Review of Books (registration required)
"A. J. Liebling, Jean Stafford, Walker Percy, and the 1962 National Book Award for The Moviegoer" (Franny and Zooey was a contender) – a previous Reader’s Almanac post
Taken from http://blog.loa.org/2011/09/kenneth-slawenski-on-fiftieth.html
deadcaulfields: http://www.deadcaulfields.com/DCHome.html
Buy the book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/J-D-Salinger-Kenneth-Slawenski/dp/1400069513/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316587369&sr=8-1
Tuesday, 20 September 2011
Monday, 19 September 2011
Da singing 'Papa was a Rolling Stone' at the Cumberland Arms, Byker, last night.
Room with a View... The Tyne as seen from the Free Trade Inn.
Happy birthday, Private Eye
It may feature old jokes and Andrew Neil in a vest every week, but its content is so well loved it makes £200,000 a year
Ben Dowell
guardian.co.uk
Sunday 11 September 2011
Mention the phrases "surely shome mistake", "that's enough, ed" and "Ugandan discussions" and you instantly know what territory you're in – the world of Piers Moron and Peter Carter-Fuck and a satirical magazine born almost 50 years ago, on 25 October 1961.
Originally six pages printed on yellow paper, Private Eye is still put together by the editor shuffling copy printouts around a proof page. These scrapbook pages are now electronically subbed using modern software but up to 2000 the Eye used the old-fashioned system of printing out copy, pasting it onto boards and then photographing them.
And the eccentricities don't end there. The Eye, as it likes to be known, still holds its legendary lunches at Soho's Coach and Horses pub, where fish pie or fish and chips is eaten, wine drunk and gossip shared with editor Ian Hislop, his deputy Francis Wheen, Hislop's predecessor Richard Ingrams and other Eye hacks. It's just around the corner from the fortnightly title's Carlisle Street offices, a ramshackle converted townhouse bedecked with dusty old papers and cartoons on the wall, where the identities of its many contributors (between 150 and 200 payments are sent out for each issue) are closely guarded.
The magazine still prints a photo of a lookalike of Hislop in the letters pages whenever he's away on holiday, and it continues to find any excuse to print an old snap of Andrew Neil in a vest at a disco, with a pretty companion half his age. Private Eye's ideas of "new boys" are joke writers Tom Jamieson and Nev Fountain, who have been there a mere 10 years.
There are other traditions, as revealed in Private Eye: The First 50 years, by in-house reporter Adam Macqueen and published next week – such as senior staff falling out with each other and then making up, starting with the firing in 1963 of the first editor, Christopher Booker.
He returned two years later, only to leave again in 1976 after the Eye had been rude about two friends (one of whom was Arianna Stassinopoulos, now Huffington). "On its day [the Eye is] a strong candidate for the most unpleasant thing in British journalism," he wrote in the Spectator shortly afterwards. He wasn't away long.
"Can you imagine a journalist leaving a newspaper, writing that and then returning?" asks Macqueen, who has worked for Lord Gnome for 14 years. "But the Eye is a bit like a family – you can behave terribly and do the most unforgivable things and yet you still get along and meet up at Christmas. It's also a family that is made up mostly of funny uncles."
But what may seem to some an affably quirky and semi-amateur operation (one where Ingrams still refers to the in-house accountants as "box wallahs") is a very successful business which is bucking the trend of the decline of print media.
Subs support
The Eye's first MD, Peter Usborne (who went on to found the flourishing Usborne Publishing in 1973), was one of the first to spot the importance of subscriptions to a magazine business model, and of relying on cover sales and not advertising to increase profits. Subscriptions may get regularly cancelled by irate letter-writers but the current tally of 113,000 subscribers has never been higher and only about 10% of turnover is reliant on advertising.
Circulation overall is at an 18-year high with fortnightly sales around the 206,000 mark ("like John Terry's shorts", Hislop notes, "in the past they may have been down – but now they are firmly up again"). And in recent weeks they've been even better – a special hacking edition in July with a "Gotcha! – Murdoch goes down with all hacks" cover shifted 253,000 copies. Pressdam, which owns Private Eye, made a profit of just over £210,000 in the 12 months to September 2010.
The magazine is "very careful about its costs", says finance director Geoff Elwell, with seven staff journalists working on a one week on, one week off basis, alongside eight production staff and five joke writers. "Not even the editor has an expense account," he adds.
The team are also proud that the magazine hasn't increased its £1.50 cover price for five years. Neither would managing director Sheila Molnar countenance going down the route pursued by "some publishers" and selling data on its subscriber base: "We have a loyal readership and we would never make short-term gains that way," she insists. "It's not what Private Eye is about."
What the magazine is about – its identity – is, to a large extent, shaped by Hislop, who insists that the Eye should always strive to be "a bit better than the people you write about".
His tenure has been notable for fewer libels, a greater insistence on accuracy, and getting rid of both sex stories ("they seemed to amuse Richard [Ingrams]," says Macqueen) and what Hislop has dismissed in the past as "social gossip". His Eye sets its sights at genuine corruption or hypocrisy or mendacity, rather than offering tittle-tattle.
With almost no bylines in the magazine besides the likes of Lord Gnome, Glenda Slagg, Dr B Ching, Remote Controller and Lunchtime O'Boulez, Hislop seems content to be its public face, as was shown when he led the charge in fighting Andrew Marr's injunction in April – a point of principle which cost Private Eye six-figure legal bills and produced only a few paragraphs of copy.
Despite almost constant speculation (sometimes from people wounded by Eye stories), Hislop is clearly staying put. "Another 30 years should just about see 'em off, ha ha!," he notes in Macqueen's book. "I have no plans at all to leave." Some staffers suspect that when the time comes to go he may leave it to another young buck (he was 26 when he took over) – someone who, one jokes, could take the Eye "into at least the last century digital-wise".
But does it need to? For many insiders, the title, whose only concession to modernity and digital media seems to be the dissemination of a few Twitter-friendly headlines for each issue, can afford to remain a largely print-only offering. Molnar says possible iPad apps have been examined and "none of the options have proved satisfactory so far". In any case, there's a determination not to give the Eye's content away free. "We can't afford to," says Elwell.
A digital subscription would almost certainly boost overseas revenues, but the Eye's managers are firmly sceptical. "There isn't anything that we have seen that delivers what we want to deliver," says Molnar. "People who have the Eye like screwing it up and taking it out with them or reading it on the loo. Can you imagine people rushing over to someone and showing them this brilliant cartoon on an iPad?"
Cartoonist and joke writer Nick Newman – one of Hislop's oldest friends, and co-writer with him of radio and TV comedies – agrees: "I'm unimpressed with the digital humour media – it lacks the scrapbook feel of the Eye, where the funniest joke of the week rubs shoulders with a piece about eco-farming."
Staff are also doubtful whether Apple would allow them to show some of their more risque material. "Would we be allowed to have a picture of Rebekah Brooks with her top off?" asks Molnar. This was the image of the former News International chief executive mocked up as a Page 3 girl which recently led to a long-time subscriber in a US penitentiary having his copy confiscated on obscenity grounds.
Youth appeal
"Around a quarter of readers are 30 or under and our readers' average age is 43, which is younger than you might think," says Molnar. "I do get letters from 85-year-olds saying they can not read the print any more but a large number of our readers are in their 20s."
But many at Private Eye want more female readers, who make up only 30% of the total. And they agree with Newman that the nation and the magazine need new young cartoonists ("The youngest we publish now is, I think, 41," he says. "Blimey – where are they all? I was sending stuff in when I was 17.")
But staff remain confident that it can continue to hook young readers – and keep them. "So many people have it at home when they are young, they read the cartoons and gravitate to other, perhaps more serious areas as they get older," says Molnar. "I came to the Eye as a student reading Paul Foot and for me it's all about the content."
Macqueen agrees. "The end of the Eye will come when all politicians clean up their acts, when the workings of Whitehall, the media, the justice system and everything in between become entirely transparent, when the British lose their sense of humour and rediscover the deference due to their elders and betters and a herd of Gloucestershire Old Spots fill our airspace. And even then, we'd probably still find some excuse to print a picture of Andrew Neil in a vest."
Private Eye: The First 50 years, an A-Z by Adam Macqueen, is published on 20 September by Private Eye Productions. The Private Eye Display at the V&A runs from 18 October to 8 January. Entry is free.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/11/private-eye-50?INTCMP=SRCH
Sunday, 18 September 2011
Terence Davies on Kind Hearts and Coronets
This is one of the finest comedies ever – and it's all thanks to the man who plays its well-bred villain
Terence Davies
guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 13 September 2011
There are four great voiceovers in cinema: William Holden in Sunset Boulevard; Joanne Woodward in The Age of Innocence; Joan Fontaine in Letter from an Unknown Woman; and, to my mind the greatest of them all, Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets. It's utterly perfect; there isn't a flaw in it. The way Price delivers it is quite extraordinary. The truth is, without Dennis Price there wouldn't be a film. He holds it all together with the most elegant diction. It's quite wonderful, even just to listen to.
The starting point of Kind Hearts and Coronets is a 1907 novel called Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman. It was originally a somewhat laboured Edwardian satire on antisemitism; I tried to read it, and frankly it's impossible to get through. Robert Hamer, the director and co-writer with John Dighton, took the basic idea but quite rightly changed everything else. What they've done is transform it into one of the greatest comedies of British and indeed world cinema. I think it says something that, though it was released in 1949, this is the only black-and-white film I always remember in colour.
Price has a wonderful role: Louis Mazzini, the son of a disinherited ducal daughter who, after he is not allowed to bury his mother's body in the family seat, decides to exact revenge by killing everyone who stands between him and the title. Thus the film becomes an odyssey in well-bred murder. We empathise with Louis because natural justice has been denied him, so his murderous quest has our wholehearted support, for he is not only a victim, he is a charming one with an exquisite sense of irony. We also share his disgust at the well-heeled classes whose privileges have never been earned and who believe their right to rule is automatic and God-given.
And Price is absolutely brilliant. If you study his gestures in the film, you soon realise how beautiful they are. They even transmit themselves to the actor playing the prison governor: in the opening scene, when they are speaking together in Louis's cell, Price grips the edge of his desk, and the governor daintily touches the desk with a single finger. It's gorgeous. You can't direct that, it just happens.
Later on, Louis has some lovely scenes with his mother where he makes his voice very, very light, like a young man. You believe it. It's a lovely placement of the voice. Interestingly, what prompts the murders is his love for her, the fact she has been so hurt and so dismissed. It's such a wonderfully controlled hatred.
Similarly, there's a tremendous economy about the direction. I love the scene with Louis's father singing to his mother the first time they meet. Price (who plays the father, too) is wearing the most preposterous moustache and never appears to breathe. The whole story is told in a single shot. Look at the way his mother drops her eyes when he looks at his father. You know immediately she's in love with him. That's cinema.
The film's sense of comedy arises from the subversion of the hierarchy, which is restrictive and comforting at the same time. So Louis replaces it with an exquisite war of personal attrition that is never random but aimed entirely at what he calls "the D'Ascoyne's monstrous pride". It is Louis's poise that is wonderful. It is seen as exceptionally important to be on polite terms with the people you intend to kill. It is both vulgar and unthinkable that revenge should ever interfere with good manners. "Revenge is a dish best tasted cold," says Louis.
And Louis is as good as his word. For when guarding one's personal honour one has to be meticulous while observing the social fabric with equal scrupulousness.
At one time, the whole country shared that belief. Guarding personal and public honour through collective moral shame was axiomatic, accepted but unspoken. But that was a Britain of long, long ago. Look at the ruling class now, and weep.
• Kind Hearts and Coronets is in cinemas now, and rereleased on DVD and BluRay.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/sep/13/terence-davis-kind-hearts-coronets?INTCMP=SRCH
Saturday, 17 September 2011
Friday, 16 September 2011
A FNB in Corfu
Thursday, 15 September 2011
50 years ago today...
The following year, dressed in their Pendleton shirts (Dennis obscured by Brian on both occasions):
Last night's set list
At The Habit, York: -
Love Song
Is It Only The Moonlight?
I'm Just A Loser
There Stands The Glass
Don't Let It Bring You Down
A very busy night with lots of players and punters. Great sets from Mark Wynn, Chris Helme and Daniel Lucas.
Love Song
Is It Only The Moonlight?
I'm Just A Loser
There Stands The Glass
Don't Let It Bring You Down
A very busy night with lots of players and punters. Great sets from Mark Wynn, Chris Helme and Daniel Lucas.
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
Banned in the USA (well, some of it, anyhow...)
Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" comic has been pulled from the Chicago Tribune this week because, according to the newspaper's editorial staff, its content, excerpted from Joe McGinniss's Sarah Palin biography, violates their standards of fairness....
For more details see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/chicago-tribune-pulls-doo_n_958931.html
Fortunately, we have no such scruples...
Richard Hamilton RIP
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Richard Hamilton, a British painter and printmaker whose sly, trenchant take on consumer culture and advertising made him a pioneering figure in Pop Art, and who designed the cover of the Beatles’ “White Album,” died on Tuesday at his home near Oxford. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by the Gagosian Gallery, which represents his work.
In the grim, rationed Britain of the early 1950s, Mr. Hamilton joined a circle of fellow artists, critics and architects at the Institute of Contemporary Arts to discuss the place of new technology, advertising and mass culture in modern art.
When the Independent Group, as it was known, organized the groundbreaking exhibition “This Is Tomorrow” at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, Mr. Hamilton contributed a 10-inch-by-9-inch collage, “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” It became his most famous work, often referred to as the first example of Pop Art.
Using images cut from mass-circulation magazines, the collage depicted a nude bodybuilder and a nude woman, posing alluringly on a sofa with a lampshade on her head, in a living room stocked with the goods and emblems of the postwar good life, American-style. A canned ham sits on an end table. A cover of Young Romance magazine is framed on the wall. The man holds a giant Tootsie Pop, with the word “Pop” occupying the center of the collage at eye level.
“Such was the success of this tiny and painstaking collocation that many people are still stuck with the idea of Hamilton as the man who single-handedly laid down the terms within which Pop Art was to operate,” the critic John Russell wrote in the catalog for a 1973 Hamilton retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Notable among these were “Hommage à Chrysler Corp.,” in which the seductive curves of a car bumper and headlights blend with the ghostly image of a red-lipsticked Venus, and “She,” in which a toaster, vacuum cleaner, refrigerator and breasts float in a consumer dreamspace that Mr. Hamilton regarded with a certain ambivalence.
“It looks as though the painting is a sardonic comment on our society,” Mr. Hamilton wrote of “She” in Architectural Design. “But I would like to think of my purpose as a search for what is epic in everyday objects and attitudes.”
Richard William Hamilton was born on Feb. 24, 1922, in London. After studying painting at Westminster Technical College and St. Martin’s School of Art, he went to work for the advertising department of a commercial studio. During World War II he worked as a jig and tool designer.
After the war he returned to the Royal Academy, where he had studied briefly before the war, but he was expelled for “not profiting by instruction” and was drafted into the British Army. On completing his military service, he studied for three years at the Slade School of Art.
Mr. Hamilton initially made his living by making models and designing art exhibitions. Later he taught design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and the University of Durham in Newcastle-on-Tyne.
An exhibition he organized at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1955, “Man, Machine and Motion,” signaled his fascination with modern technology and mass-produced images, toward which he adopted a critical but receptive stance.
“If the artist is not to lose much of his ancient purpose, he may have to plunder the popular arts to recover the imagery which is his rightful inheritance,” he wrote in 1961.
Unusually for a Pop artist, Mr. Hamilton made an overtly political statement with “Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland” (1964), merging a photograph of Claude Rains as the Phantom of the Opera with a newspaper photograph of Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, who, when the work was begun, had refused to support nuclear disarmament.
He also produced a series of political paintings in the 1980s inspired by the troubles in Northern Ireland and the hunger strike of Bobby Sands.
His dealer in the 1960s, the ultrahip Robert Fraser (also known as Groovy Bob), drew him into the vortex of the British pop-music world, reflected in the silkscreen-on-canvas series “Swingeing London,” depicting Mick Jagger and Mr. Fraser being driven away by the police after their 1967 drug arrest.
“To avoid the issue of competing with the lavish design treatments of most jackets, I suggested a plain white cover so pure and reticent that it would seem to place it in the context of the most esoteric art publications,” Mr. Hamilton told Rolling Stone in 1991.
To reinforce the idea of a small-press production, he embossed “The Beatles” in one corner almost haphazardly and numbered each copy in a style that suggested a hand-numbering machine. Inside, he included a collage poster of private Beatles photos.
In an interview with The Observer of London last year, he recalled that he had been paid 200 pounds for the assignment, adding, “I thought that was a bit mean.”
Mr. Hamilton, who was the subject of retrospectives at the Tate Gallery in 1970 and 1992, worked intermittently for more than 50 years on a series of illustrations for James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” They were exhibited at the British Museum in 2002.
At his death he was helping to organize a traveling exhibition of his work, which is scheduled to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in June 2013.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/arts/design/richard-hamilton-british-painter-and-a-creator-of-pop-art-dies-at-89.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
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