Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Monday, 8 March 2010
Van Gogh at the Royal Academy - get it while you can
Van Gogh at the Royal Academy: Illuminating and ShockingThis new exhibition of letters, drawings and paintings strips away the myth to reveal what really made Van Gogh special – his art
Adrian Searle
guardian.co.uk
Wednesday 20 January 2010 09.41 GMT
Occasioned by the recent publication of his letters, The Real Van Gogh is bound to be a blockbuster. The artist groans under the weight of scholarship, popular biography and biopics, innumerable cartoons and gags. There have been pop songs and cakes decorated to look like his starry, starry night. Kirk Douglas wrestled manfully to depict him as troubled, over-sensitive artist, the disturbed and self-destructive hero. Retrieving the real Van Gogh – whoever he might be – from his place in the popular imagination becomes a more difficult task the more he is buried beneath the characterisations.
The story of his life is worth retelling. Van Gogh was a late starter, mostly self-taught, uneven, smitten with mental illness, dead at 37. His trajectory as an artist – from sodden Dutch landscapes under heavy skies, toiling peasants and weavers, to the flaring, sometimes hallucinogenic landscapes of Provence, all of which ended after he shot himself one afternoon in a southern French cornfield in 1890, an unfinished letter still in his pocket – is a luminous and shocking arc.
I am much more fascinated and affected by the artist's drawings than his paintings. Drawing and writing are closely allied, and the first leads to the latter in the same way that a cry, a laugh or a groan leads to speech. However Van Gogh painted, the quickness of drawing and writing – pouring things onto the blank page, unmediated – is different to painting. For a start there's all that paraphernalia painting involves: easel, canvas, brushes, painting knives, oil and turps, a palette, tubes of paint. The cost and availability of these materials vexed Van Gogh and became the subject of many of his letters to his brother Theo, some of which are on display in this exhibition. He was at times driven to use tea-towels for canvas, and cheaper paints whose colour was impermanent. Some of the flowers in his still lives have faded almost to white, their pinks and magentas deteriorated, destroying the carefully gauged colour and tonal values he thought and wrote about so much.
You don't need much to draw – though to begin with, when Van Gogh struggling to teach himself the mysteries of perspective drawing, he even set up a small rectangular frame strung with wires to look through. He was also much concerned and delighted by different types of pencils, English handmade papers of various weights and finishes, inks and nibs. He could even rhapsodise about a lump of black chalk. His writing as well as his art shows him as far from impetuous or lacking in control, however compulsively he worked. The poet and theatre director Antonin Artaud called him a 'quiet convulsive' and it's the quiet that counts, the deliberated calm in Van Gogh's purpose. Often the artist drew with a pen that he cut himself from the reeds that grew at the margins of Dutch waterways and roadside ditches in Province. He noted that the reeds in the south were better for drawing. For finer work, he also picked up feathers for the quills he cut to make nibs.
It's more than coincidental that reeds and birds also appear in Van Gogh's drawings. I wonder if he ever used river water to dilute his inks, and for the somewhat less successful watercolours that he made. Even the charcoal he used in his early drawings have a connection to the earth itself. Those pollarded willows that appear in his work time and again also provide the charcoal that he used. Such connectedness would have suited his pantheist view of the world. His early, magnificently blunt sketches of peasants at their labours, make your own back ache just to look at them. The lines are stiff, their curves strain. The figures seem to come out of the mud that sucks at their feet. You imagine the artist bending, too – to his drawing board and his canvas, on those long walks he took, carrying all his gear.
Van Gogh knew when to stop and to let the whiteness of the paper work for him; the same whiteness could be bright sky, a road, the earth, water, a face turned to the sun. And he animated this blankness with a great variety of touches: thin parallel strokes; fatty, thick curlicues and whorls; dashes, impatient scribbles and hatchings; various kinds of dots, both emphatic and tender; radiating lines; a bony and marvellously awkward searching line that could bring tree-trunks and knotty vines to characterful life. For all his heavily laden brushwork, his paintings rely as much on drawing as on painterly modelling, however strong and brusque and bruised the colour. The paintings are drawings made thick. Van Gogh was never an impressionist.
Having various of Van Gogh's letters displayed here is instructive, but their small size makes them hard to look at – let alone read. They too are a kind of drawing. The artist's handwriting is vigorous, economical, urgent, and there are few crossings-out. The words race across the page at an even, quick pace, in Dutch, French and English. His writing gives little hint of a troubled mind, and he writes about his difficulties with surprising objectivity. He was lucid and reflective. You want to know Van Gogh, however obstreperous and difficult companion and he might have been. He pauses mid-flow to sketch the kinds of brushes he wants his brother Theo to send him, and makes drawings of the things he's been hard at work at. Sometimes the drawings in his letters seem more lively and better than the paintings they refer to. They have a casual intensity.
The letters are fragile and intimate scraps. But it is the drawings that do most for me: monumental peasants in black chalk and charcoal, quiet rooftops, country roads and endless fields, fishing boats at sea, writhing cypresses, olive trees and grasses and rock-strewn landscapes that heave with his own inescapable undertow.
The achievement of the paintings is harder won: a reaper at sunrise in the surging corn, a corner of the unkempt asylum garden, stoic and sometimes melancholic portraits, those chairs which await their sitters or memorialise their departures. Had Van Gogh lived, what would he have done? His early suicide made the myth as much as completed his art. At times it seems to compete with it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jan/20/van-gogh-royal-academy
http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/
The Van Gogh Letters: http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/
Sunday, 7 March 2010
Saturday, 6 March 2010
Friday, 5 March 2010
The Thunder Shower
A blink of lightning, then
a rumor, a grumble of white rain
growing in volume, rustling over the ground,
drenching the gravel in a wash of sound.
Drops tap like timpani or shine
like quavers on a line.
It rings on exposed tin,
a suite for water, wind and bin,
plinky Poulenc or strongly groaning Brahms’
rain-strings, a whole string section that describes
the very shapes of thought in warm
self-referential vibes
and spreading ripples. Soon
the whispering roar is a recital.
Jostling rain-crowds, clamorous and vital,
struggle in runnels through the afternoon.
The rhythm becomes a regular beat;
steam rises, body heat—
and now there’s city noise,
bits of recorded pop and rock,
the drums, the strident electronic shock,
a vast polyphony, the dense refrain
of wailing siren, truck and train
and incoherent cries.
All human life is there
in the unconfined, continuous crash
whose slow, diffused implosions gather up
car radios and alarms, the honk and beep,
and tiny voices in a crèche
piercing the muggy air.
Squalor and decadence,
the rackety global-franchise rush,
oil wars and water wars, the diatonic
crescendo of a cascading world economy
are audible in the hectic thrash
of this luxurious cadence.
The voice of Baal explodes,
raging and rumbling round the clouds,
frantic to crush the self-sufficient spaces
and re-impose his failed hegemony
in Canaan before moving on
to other simpler places.
At length the twining chords
run thin, a watery sun shines out,
the deluge slowly ceases, the guttural chant
subsides; a thrush sings, and discordant thirds
diminish like an exhausted concert
on the subdominant.
The angry downpour swarms
growling to far-flung fields and farms.
The drains are still alive with trickling water,
a few last drops drip from a broken gutter;
but the storm that created so much fuss
has lost interest in us.
Derek Mahon
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2010/03/08/100308po_poem_mahon
a rumor, a grumble of white rain
growing in volume, rustling over the ground,
drenching the gravel in a wash of sound.
Drops tap like timpani or shine
like quavers on a line.
It rings on exposed tin,
a suite for water, wind and bin,
plinky Poulenc or strongly groaning Brahms’
rain-strings, a whole string section that describes
the very shapes of thought in warm
self-referential vibes
and spreading ripples. Soon
the whispering roar is a recital.
Jostling rain-crowds, clamorous and vital,
struggle in runnels through the afternoon.
The rhythm becomes a regular beat;
steam rises, body heat—
and now there’s city noise,
bits of recorded pop and rock,
the drums, the strident electronic shock,
a vast polyphony, the dense refrain
of wailing siren, truck and train
and incoherent cries.
All human life is there
in the unconfined, continuous crash
whose slow, diffused implosions gather up
car radios and alarms, the honk and beep,
and tiny voices in a crèche
piercing the muggy air.
Squalor and decadence,
the rackety global-franchise rush,
oil wars and water wars, the diatonic
crescendo of a cascading world economy
are audible in the hectic thrash
of this luxurious cadence.
The voice of Baal explodes,
raging and rumbling round the clouds,
frantic to crush the self-sufficient spaces
and re-impose his failed hegemony
in Canaan before moving on
to other simpler places.
At length the twining chords
run thin, a watery sun shines out,
the deluge slowly ceases, the guttural chant
subsides; a thrush sings, and discordant thirds
diminish like an exhausted concert
on the subdominant.
The angry downpour swarms
growling to far-flung fields and farms.
The drains are still alive with trickling water,
a few last drops drip from a broken gutter;
but the storm that created so much fuss
has lost interest in us.
Derek Mahon
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2010/03/08/100308po_poem_mahon
Thursday, 4 March 2010
Lines for the Centenary of the Birth of Samuel Beckett
I
Only now do we see how each crossroads
was bound to throw up not just a cross
but a couple of gadabouts with goads,
a couple of gadabouts at a loss
as to why they were at the beck and call
of some old crock soaring above the culch
of a kitchen midden at evenfall,
some old crock roaring across the gulch
as a hanged man roars out to a hanged man.
Now bucket nods to bucket of the span
of an ash yoke, or something of that ilk…
Now one hanged man kicks at the end of his rope
in another little attack of hope.
Now a frog in one bucket thickens the milk.
II
Now a frog in one bucket thickens the milk
as it tries out for the sublime
from chime to birch-wood chime,
a frog thrown in with no more thought as to whilk
way he was geen
from the hussy turned resourceful housewife
than she gave to where in Ayreshire or Fife
her beloved spalpeen
might fetch up as a tatie-hoker,
a tatie-hoker revealing a lining of red tatted silk
to his sack-cloth, so to speak,
just as it’s revealed our stockbroker
is creaming off five hundred a week
while the frog in one bucket thickens the milk.
III
Now a frog in one bucket thickens the milk
as a heart might quicken behind its stave
at the thought of a thief who bilked
us of our life savings himself being saved.
Only now do we see… How spasm and lull
are mirrored somewhat by lull and spasm
when the nitwit roars out to the numbskull
thinking he might yet narrow the chasm
between his own cask and the other’s keg,
thinking he might take the other down a peg
if not leave him completely in the lurch…
Leave him to ponder if it’s less an ash
yoke tipped by his bucket of balderdash,
less an ash yoke than a cross-bar of birch.
IV
Less an ash yoke than a cross-bar of birch
from the single birch that insinuated itself into the grove
of oaks sacred to Jove
and took him in as from his perch
the nincompoop who’s churning our account
took in the other knucklehead
with the proposal that our aversion to being bled
is pretty much tantamount
to the old crock being averse to paying his ransom,
the bucket where you would search
for the significance of a frog taking the plunge
proving to be less cask than keg, the transom
from which the old crock offered his vinegar-sponge
less an ask yoke than a cross-bar of birch.
V
Less an ash yoke than a cross-bar of birch
and a birch-wood bucket where a frog breasts
the very milk we feared it would besmirch.
Only now do we see we’re at the behest
not of some old crock kicking the beam
but ourselves. We balk at the idea, balk
at the idea of a frog no sooner opening a seam
in milk than it’s… Surely not caulked?
Only now do we see how it’s ourselves who skim
determinedly through the dim
of evenfall with no more regard for our load
as we glance up through the sky-hoop
than the ninny who roars back to the nincompoop,
“Only now do we see how each crossroads…”
Paul Muldoon
http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue%202/Paul%20Muldoon%202.html
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Tonight's set list
At The Habit, York
Roll Another Number (For The Road)
Birds
Flying On The Ground Is Wrong
Long May You Run
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Roll Another Number (For The Road)
Birds
Flying On The Ground Is Wrong
Long May You Run
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Whining While Dining Oot
am a propa Geordie, me
aa write propa poetry
aa used to be a Trot
but now am not
they said me pomes was rot
and that aa waz a bot
neebody reads iz
and it sorely greives iz
am a propa Geordie, aa iz
aa git funding off the coonsil
for blaain oot me toonsils
ama propa Geordie me
aa gan ti matches wen aa can
an wetch the team gan doon the pan
ama propa Geordie, man
aa write propa stuff
not like them posh puffs
that southern tart
that come up here to write aboot
her stinkin farts
ama propa Geordie, me
smell the authenticity
aa served some time in Durham
(university)
got a discharge with a PhD
(Pissheed Degree)
aboot a propa Geordie, me
not like that clump’n slug from Hull
who gets prized for being dull
aa get slavvad oot me skull
ama propa Geordie, me
if aa am a wee bit posh
add neva use a word like gosh
when I write me jangling tosh
cos ama propa Geordie, me
aa hoyed up with the common folk
but still they think aa am a joke
aa can neva gerra poke
ama propa Geordie, me.
Tom Pickard
Michael Foot RIP
In a statement, Gordon Brown said: "Michael Foot was a man of deep principle and passionate idealism and one of the most eloquent speakers Britain has ever heard.
"He was an indomitable figure who always stood up for his beliefs and whether people agreed with him or not they admired his character and his steadfastness."
More at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/03/michael-foot-dies
From Lighter Music
1 The Sound of Sunday Afternoon
Greensleeves.
Quality ices -
Mind that child.
2 Coincidence
The fridge shudders to a stop,
air from the extractor fan
brushing the back of my neck.
3 Jarrow Elvis in the Doorway of the Ben Lomond
Sucking on a tab,
feet set apart,
he takes one step forward
and one step back,
blowing out the smoke.
4 Mark
The vaccination mark
on my mother’s upper arm:
an uneven circle
of indented skin,
paler than the rest.
A careless mark
from a careless time
before I was born,
staring back at me
like a half-closed eye.
5 The Toad
Hooded, blistered,
the toad retreats
under granda’s footpath
in 1961.
We both bend to see
where the toad has gone,
but it’s too dark to see anything
but the shapes of stone.
6 Benediction
The box within the box within the box
contains the Sacred Heart, curative
silver and gold inscribed doors turning inward
like angels’ wings during Benediction.
7 Empty Deckchair
Wind catches the canvas,
punching out loud stripes.
Things gone wrong clothe the summer.
Listen: the unfinished music
of children’s voices
worn down on the blue air.
Terry Kelly
Greensleeves.
Quality ices -
Mind that child.
2 Coincidence
The fridge shudders to a stop,
air from the extractor fan
brushing the back of my neck.
3 Jarrow Elvis in the Doorway of the Ben Lomond
Sucking on a tab,
feet set apart,
he takes one step forward
and one step back,
blowing out the smoke.
4 Mark
The vaccination mark
on my mother’s upper arm:
an uneven circle
of indented skin,
paler than the rest.
A careless mark
from a careless time
before I was born,
staring back at me
like a half-closed eye.
5 The Toad
Hooded, blistered,
the toad retreats
under granda’s footpath
in 1961.
We both bend to see
where the toad has gone,
but it’s too dark to see anything
but the shapes of stone.
6 Benediction
The box within the box within the box
contains the Sacred Heart, curative
silver and gold inscribed doors turning inward
like angels’ wings during Benediction.
7 Empty Deckchair
Wind catches the canvas,
punching out loud stripes.
Things gone wrong clothe the summer.
Listen: the unfinished music
of children’s voices
worn down on the blue air.
Terry Kelly
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
Bob Dylan at the Odeon, Newcastle
Sadly, the Odeon no longer functions as a cinema or a music venue and is currently one of several run-down eyesores that make Pilgrim Street a terrible thoroughfare to welcome visitors to Newcastle. Various - probably not concrete - plans to redevelop it came to nothing. Unfortunately, the owners of this once grand art deco cinema gutted the place in 2001, removing many of the features that qualified it for its then listed status; ironically, the 'brutalist' T. Dan Smith-era building on stilts next to it has been reprieved thanks to Freddie Shepherd, no doubt in search of a new toy after the mess he allegedly made of St James' Park.
The Odeon a couple of years before it closed - the street had seen better daysFormer Odeon cinema due to be flattened
Jan 28 2010 by Adrian Pearson
Evening Chronicle
SILVER screen dreams are shattered as demolition crews prepare to flatten Newcastle’s former Odeon cinema.
City Council leader Coun John Shipley said he wants to see for himself if there is anything worth saving in the American-style cinema on Pilgrim Street.
He has said there is little chance of stopping demolition work linked to council plans to redevelop land around East Pilgrim Street.
But the council boss wants opponents of the demolition to know for sure if there is anything worth saving inside.
His promise to inspect the site comes after the Government ended a four-year wait and ruled out any chance of once again listing the cinema.
When the building lost its listed status in 2001 the then owners stripped it of many of its interior fitting which were vital to regaining its privileged position.
Mr Shipley said: “I want to go and look for myself to see what some people might want saving.
“It is my understanding there is little the council can do to oppose this unless the building is listed or in a conservation area, but I think people should be given the chance to see what state it is in.”
Many of the original fixtures and fittings were removed in 2003, with some going to the nearby Tyneside Cinema.
Critics have branded the Government’s four-year wait to reveal the buildings future as ridiculous.
John Burns, director of Newcastle architects Mackellar, said the prospect of re-listing “became less likely after the trashing of the interior”.
But he added: “The cinema building is still culturally important and is one of the best surviving examples even in its present condition.”
John Matthews, spokesman for the Northumberland and Newcastle Society, said: “The way this has been handled has been atrocious and inexcusable.”
A Department of Culture, Media and Sport spokesman said: “After careful consideration the Secretary of State has decided not to add the building to the statutory list.
“The Secretary of State has considered the building’s architectural interest, but considers the extent of the changes made to the interior to allow for the division of the original auditorium has altered the building to the point where listing is inappropriate.”
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-evening-chronicle/2010/01/28/former-odeon-cinema-due-to-be-flattened-72703-25705691/
Monday, 1 March 2010
Michael Chabon - Manhood for Amateurs
Autobiographical ssays from Manhood for Amateurs in the weekend glossies:
What do you tell your kids when they ask about your past?
Drugs, sex, what the Beatles really meant… the only response to those awkward questions your kids will ask is honesty, says Michael Chabon
"THE FIRST PERSON I ever saw smoking pot was my mother, some time around 1977 or so, sitting in the front seat of her friend Kathy's car, passing a little metal pipe back and forth before we went in to see a movie at the Westview in Catonsville, Maryland. I have a dim sense that at 14 I neither disapproved of nor felt any surprise at this behaviour, leading me to conclude that my mother already must have told me, prepared me with the information, that she was "experimenting" with pot (because that was all it ever amounted to for her – a brief reagent test conducted within the beaker of her new status as a single woman in the great wild laboratory of the 1970s)... "
More at http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/feb/28/talking-to-kids-drugs-sex-michael-chabon
An ideal father
It was love at first sight for Michael Chabon and his father-in-law. So what would become of their relationship once his marriage started to crumble?
"I did like her, as it turned out. She had an eye for furniture and flowers, a rich history of weird sex, weird jobs and weird scenes. Most important for me, she had expectations of how a man ought to act and speak and shoulder his obligations, and in the three years of our marriage I learned how to be a husband. But she was often miserable – sometimes justifiably, usually for no reason at all – and in a short period of time I found that I was miserable, too. There were operatic arguments, all-night ransackings of the contents of our souls, grim grey bitter mornings. We travelled, and moved, and bought a house and acquired animals, and engaged in all the standard ploys and dodges, short of having children (thank God), employed by couples trying to outrun the shadow of that first enduring mistake..."
More at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/feb/27/michael-chabon-father-manhood-amateurs
New Salinger biography
JD Salinger: A Life Raised High by Kenneth Slawenski
The Sunday Times review by Peter Kemp
Kenneth Slawenski’s choice of subtitle for his biography of JD Salinger — A Life Raised High — is a surprise. For his subject famously spent almost 60 years of his life lying low. Not long after publishing his first book, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), he quit New York for a remote village in New Hampshire where he secluded himself in a spartan cottage amid 90 acres of land. For the next half century or so, he lived there as if under siege, increasingly fortifying barriers between himself and the outside world. When the local newspaper printed an interview he’d supplied for a schoolgirl’s class project, he immediately erected a high fence around his property and withdrew behind it. Later, he built a subterranean tunnel to his garage. So thoroughgoing was his self-effacement that, when he died last month, just weeks after his 91st birthday, it was like the finale of a vanishing act.
Slawenski, a Salinger devotee who had just sent his biography of the celebrity recluse to his publisher, found himself urgently called upon to update it. Accelerated into print with swift additions, it has limitations. The writing can be awkward, and claims about Salinger’s work are often on the large side (“Today, Franny and Zooey is universally regarded as a masterpiece”). Slawenski’s industrious probings haven’t penetrated all of Fortress Salinger. The last 50 years of the writer’s life get just a handful of pages. Despite this, the book offers a welcome trove of information. Partly through exhaustive biographical research (especially into the early years) and partly through porings over almost unknown, uncollected stories, Slawenski enthrallingly illuminates what turned Salinger into an extraordinary literary phenomenon: an author who shunned not only publicity but publication.
His secrecy, it’s suggested, may have come from his “intensely private” parents. Their guardedness was reinforced by the anti-semitism of the period. A New York Jewish importer of cheeses and meat, Salinger’s father was sufficiently prosperous to install the family in a plush Park Avenue apartment. But when he wanted to enrol his son in Valley Forge Military Academy, he sent his Gentile wife along to the entrance interview, lest his own Jewish looks jeopardise the boy’s chances of acceptance.
As The Catcher in the Rye (where it features as Pencey Prep) derisively testifies, Valley Forge didn’t prove acceptable to Salinger. Nor did subsequent colleges. Former classmates regularly recall his sarcastic aloofness. How much this was a defence against anti-Jewish prejudice and how much part of his personality is hard to determine. But, either way, a taste for concealment persisted. Appropriately, when conscripted after Pearl Harbor, Salinger was steered towards counter-intelligence. Not that this meant he escaped combat. From Devon (where he set most of For Esmé — with Love and Squalor, his affecting story about war trauma), he took part in the D-Day landings. Carried with him through the bullets and bombardments of Utah beach was the manuscript of his work in progress, The Catcher in the Rye. It accompanied him during months of nightmarish fighting on the German border, and was with him when he witnessed the horrors of Dachau. After recuperating
from the nervous breakdown this brought on, he made a first, disastrous attempt to return to normal life. Marrying a German woman (for whom he obtained a forged French passport in order to evade military regulations), he took her back to New York where the marriage, which had lasted only eight months, collapsed.
Before the war, Salinger had frequented a Scott Fitzgerald-like milieu of nightclubs and glamorous socialites, about which he wrote Fitzgerald-like stories for the “slicks” (magazines such as Esquire and Collier’s Weekly). But his real goal was The New Yorker. His first piece to be accepted by it featured a mutinous adolescent, Holden Caulfield. Other stories about him followed, and eventually were worked together into The Catcher in the Rye, a triumphant tour de force because of Salinger’s inspired decision to combine a lively, vernacular voice (indebted to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn) with Fitzgerald-ish locations.
By the 1960s, the novel had achieved cult status as a classic of teenage alienation. Well before that, Salinger’s own alienation had removed him from the literary scene. Increasingly immersed in Zen Buddhism and Hindu mysticism (women he dated were surprised to be plied with volumes of oriental philosophy so he could “gauge their spirituality”), he began to withdraw from public gaze. Appalled publishers had already run into his intransigent resistance to promotion of his books. Editors encountered furious reactions to the slightest altering of his text (there was “hell to pay” over a comma inserted into one of his stories). Having come to regard writing as the equivalent of a religious exercise, he saw his works as almost literally holy writ (rave reviews of The Catcher in the Rye disgusted him because they responded to the book intellectually, not spiritually). A corresponding Zen notion that he should deploy his talent but not profit from it led to his resolve after 1965 to abstain from publication.
His stories revolving around Seymour Glass, a nudgingly named seer enjoying his third earthly incarnation in 20th-century America, had already given notice of this shift. But serene detachment proved hard to attain. Salinger’s second marriage, to a woman 15 years his junior, deteriorated into sour recrimination. Irked by her proximity, he constructed a bunker inside which he wrote, in the lotus position, for 16 or more hours a day. After their divorce, there were ill-fated affairs — most notoriously with the 35 years younger Joyce Maynard, who later belaboured him in an aggrieved memoir. Only a third marriage, to a woman 40 years his junior, seems to have brought him tranquillity.
Among rumours trickling out about Salinger (that he drank his urine and sat in an “orgone box” to boost his energies), the most attention-seizing is that he has left a cache of manuscripts in a safe or “a great vault”, or buried somewhere on his property. The race will now be on to unearth it. On the showing of this fascinated and fascinating biography, Slawenski should be to the forefront of the treasure hunt.
JD Salinger by Kenneth Slawenski
Pomona £20 pp480
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article7039540.ece
The Sunday Times review by Peter Kemp
Kenneth Slawenski’s choice of subtitle for his biography of JD Salinger — A Life Raised High — is a surprise. For his subject famously spent almost 60 years of his life lying low. Not long after publishing his first book, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), he quit New York for a remote village in New Hampshire where he secluded himself in a spartan cottage amid 90 acres of land. For the next half century or so, he lived there as if under siege, increasingly fortifying barriers between himself and the outside world. When the local newspaper printed an interview he’d supplied for a schoolgirl’s class project, he immediately erected a high fence around his property and withdrew behind it. Later, he built a subterranean tunnel to his garage. So thoroughgoing was his self-effacement that, when he died last month, just weeks after his 91st birthday, it was like the finale of a vanishing act.
Slawenski, a Salinger devotee who had just sent his biography of the celebrity recluse to his publisher, found himself urgently called upon to update it. Accelerated into print with swift additions, it has limitations. The writing can be awkward, and claims about Salinger’s work are often on the large side (“Today, Franny and Zooey is universally regarded as a masterpiece”). Slawenski’s industrious probings haven’t penetrated all of Fortress Salinger. The last 50 years of the writer’s life get just a handful of pages. Despite this, the book offers a welcome trove of information. Partly through exhaustive biographical research (especially into the early years) and partly through porings over almost unknown, uncollected stories, Slawenski enthrallingly illuminates what turned Salinger into an extraordinary literary phenomenon: an author who shunned not only publicity but publication.
His secrecy, it’s suggested, may have come from his “intensely private” parents. Their guardedness was reinforced by the anti-semitism of the period. A New York Jewish importer of cheeses and meat, Salinger’s father was sufficiently prosperous to install the family in a plush Park Avenue apartment. But when he wanted to enrol his son in Valley Forge Military Academy, he sent his Gentile wife along to the entrance interview, lest his own Jewish looks jeopardise the boy’s chances of acceptance.
As The Catcher in the Rye (where it features as Pencey Prep) derisively testifies, Valley Forge didn’t prove acceptable to Salinger. Nor did subsequent colleges. Former classmates regularly recall his sarcastic aloofness. How much this was a defence against anti-Jewish prejudice and how much part of his personality is hard to determine. But, either way, a taste for concealment persisted. Appropriately, when conscripted after Pearl Harbor, Salinger was steered towards counter-intelligence. Not that this meant he escaped combat. From Devon (where he set most of For Esmé — with Love and Squalor, his affecting story about war trauma), he took part in the D-Day landings. Carried with him through the bullets and bombardments of Utah beach was the manuscript of his work in progress, The Catcher in the Rye. It accompanied him during months of nightmarish fighting on the German border, and was with him when he witnessed the horrors of Dachau. After recuperating
from the nervous breakdown this brought on, he made a first, disastrous attempt to return to normal life. Marrying a German woman (for whom he obtained a forged French passport in order to evade military regulations), he took her back to New York where the marriage, which had lasted only eight months, collapsed.
Before the war, Salinger had frequented a Scott Fitzgerald-like milieu of nightclubs and glamorous socialites, about which he wrote Fitzgerald-like stories for the “slicks” (magazines such as Esquire and Collier’s Weekly). But his real goal was The New Yorker. His first piece to be accepted by it featured a mutinous adolescent, Holden Caulfield. Other stories about him followed, and eventually were worked together into The Catcher in the Rye, a triumphant tour de force because of Salinger’s inspired decision to combine a lively, vernacular voice (indebted to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn) with Fitzgerald-ish locations.
By the 1960s, the novel had achieved cult status as a classic of teenage alienation. Well before that, Salinger’s own alienation had removed him from the literary scene. Increasingly immersed in Zen Buddhism and Hindu mysticism (women he dated were surprised to be plied with volumes of oriental philosophy so he could “gauge their spirituality”), he began to withdraw from public gaze. Appalled publishers had already run into his intransigent resistance to promotion of his books. Editors encountered furious reactions to the slightest altering of his text (there was “hell to pay” over a comma inserted into one of his stories). Having come to regard writing as the equivalent of a religious exercise, he saw his works as almost literally holy writ (rave reviews of The Catcher in the Rye disgusted him because they responded to the book intellectually, not spiritually). A corresponding Zen notion that he should deploy his talent but not profit from it led to his resolve after 1965 to abstain from publication.
His stories revolving around Seymour Glass, a nudgingly named seer enjoying his third earthly incarnation in 20th-century America, had already given notice of this shift. But serene detachment proved hard to attain. Salinger’s second marriage, to a woman 15 years his junior, deteriorated into sour recrimination. Irked by her proximity, he constructed a bunker inside which he wrote, in the lotus position, for 16 or more hours a day. After their divorce, there were ill-fated affairs — most notoriously with the 35 years younger Joyce Maynard, who later belaboured him in an aggrieved memoir. Only a third marriage, to a woman 40 years his junior, seems to have brought him tranquillity.
Among rumours trickling out about Salinger (that he drank his urine and sat in an “orgone box” to boost his energies), the most attention-seizing is that he has left a cache of manuscripts in a safe or “a great vault”, or buried somewhere on his property. The race will now be on to unearth it. On the showing of this fascinated and fascinating biography, Slawenski should be to the forefront of the treasure hunt.
JD Salinger by Kenneth Slawenski
Pomona £20 pp480
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article7039540.ece
John Prine in the Chicago Tribune
February 26, 2010
John Prine: The bard of Old Town returns
Grg Kot
From his home in Nashville, Prine reminisced about how his Chicago years shaped him as songwriter. An excerpt of our interview follows.
John Prine is flat-out one of the best songwriters of the last 40 years, a voice so distinctive that even Bob Dylan is a fan. “Prine's stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree,” Dylan said last year.
“Proustian existentialism?” Prine says with a wry chuckle. “I can’t even pronounce that. But it’s great to hear that from him. I don’t go bowling with Bob Dylan, but I run into him every 10 years here or there. From the first album, I knew he liked the songs. After all this time to get a quote out of him is pretty flattering.”
Prine, 63, has been living in Nashville since 1980, but he forged his style in Chicago. While delivering mail in suburban Maywood, he became a key member of the Old Town School of Folk Music scene that spawned Steve Goodman, Bonnie Koloc and dozens more in the ‘60s and ‘70s. So it’s only fitting that he should return March 6 to the Old Town venue to perform a benefit concert.
From his home in Nashville, Prine reminisced about how his Chicago years shaped him as songwriter. An excerpt of our interview follows.
Q: You go way back with the Old Town School of Folk Music.
A: It’s a great place for people to learn how to play a stringed instrument. It’s a daunting thing for a lot of people to take music lessons. They want to teach you to read music first, and I‘m sure I never would have learned to play if I had to go that route. My older brother Dave told me about the school. Dave attended in the late ‘50s and got pretty good on guitar. I saw him play one evening and it amazed me. He taught me three chords and a couple of Carter Family songs, and he took me down to the school in 1961 when I was about 14. He took me to Ray Tate’s class; Ray was teaching a lot of bluegrass licks, and they put me in advanced beginners. I was way behind the guys in Ray’s class, but I was hooked. I probably had ADD considering how I did in regular school. I couldn’t concentrate on anything besides daydreaming. My brother saw this in me, and he saw music as a way of getting through to me. He was teaching himself violin and he needed a rhythm guitar player who could stand all the squeaking and squawking as he was learning how to play. He learned how to play pretty well and I learned how to keep time playing with my brother.
Q: It never occurred to you that this could be a career?
A: I was learning to play at Old Town, but none of my friends knew. I found it easier to make up a song, rather than learn and play my favorites, cause it never sounded as good as the original. I got into Rambling Jack, then Dylan. That closed the book, this guy writing all of his own stuff. But I never thought I could make a living out of it. I went into the Army and was posted in Germany. I had my dad mail my guitar to me. One other guy in the barracks had a guitar, a guy from Wyoming who sang Lefty Frizzell songs. We’d be up at 3 in the morning after everyone came home from a night on the town drinking German beer and we’d sing every song we knew. After the Army, I was delivering mail in Maywood during the day and hanging out at the Old Town school, which was now on Armitage, at night. The Fifth Peg opened across the road where Ray Tate and all the teachers and students would go afterward. What happened there after school was as important as what happened in the school. At the Fifth Peg they had an open stage once a week. Regardless of how good you were you could get up there and sing.
Q: And you wrote songs while you were delivering the mail?
A: I wrote “Sam Stone” and “Hello in There” on the route. When you’re a mailman on the same route for a couple weeks there is nothing to do, you just try to drop the right mail at the right house and make sure you’re on the right street. Once I delivered the right addresses to the wrong street and I had to come back at dinner time and knock on everyone’s door and ask for the mail back. I likened the mail route to being in a library without any books. You just had time to be quiet and think and that’s where I would come up with a lot of songs. If the song was any good I could remember it later and write it down. I might’ve had the melody for “Hello in There” before I wrote it, but otherwise the words to me had music to them, the métier of the lines had an arrow pointing which way to go with the music.
Q: How did you develop the courage to go public with those songs?
A: Too many beers [laughs]. None of my buddies back in Maywood or Melrose Park knew I played guitar or wrote songs. I didn’t have a sounding board, so I had no idea if what I was writing was any good or not. But one night [in 1969] at the Fifth Peg I was sitting with some students watching the open-mike performers, and I made a remark about the people that were getting up to sing: “This is awful.” So the people I was sitting with said, “You get up and try.” And I did. I remember playing “Sam Stone” and the crowd just sat there and looked at me when I was done and I thought, “Uh-oh, I’m in trouble,” but it was like they were stunned, and then they applauded. Later that night the owner of the Fifth Peg asked if I could come back and play a couple of shows a week. I didn’t have many songs, but I started writing like crazy. I got paid 50 cents a person and about 12 people showed up the first night. Almost all of them came back for the next show, and half brought a friend or two with them. Then Roger Ebert wrote about me in the paper and that busted things wide open. I had people waiting outside in line on Armitage, and I’d do two or three shows a night.
Q: But you really weren’t thinking about this as a career?
A: I didn’t think the people who did this with their records in stores were anything like me. I didn’t think it was possible for people where I came from to make a record in New York City and go to Hollywood. I thought you had to be from France or have money to get into the entertainment business.
Q: When did you start thinking you could make records?
A: Bob Koester from Delmark asked if we could get together for lunch -- my first show-biz lunch. We went for a burger somewhere, around the corner from the Jazz Record Mart on Grand. He offered me a one-album deal, said I could sing Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers covers, “Sam Stone” and “Hello in There” and three or four of mine. I wouldn’t have to tie up all my own stuff. Then he took me to the basement of the record store. “I’ll show you what the record business is about,” he says. There was a desk and a closet. In the closet, he had about 1000 cardboard covers for a Muddy Waters album with a picture of Muddy standing next to a cyclone fence. It looked great, except Muddy has his fly open. They didn’t discover his fly was open in the picture till they printed 1000 of them. They had to retake the picture -- guess they didn’t have air brushes back then. And Bob says, “And that, John, is what the record business is about.” And he was right!
Q: And yet you turned down Delmark?
A: I ended up turning him down. I knew Delmark was a great label that had great people on it, and here I had chance to be on that roster. So by me saying no, that’s when it clicked: I must have something in mind that I’m not telling myself.
Q: And that led to your signing with Atlantic [which released his first few albums]?
A: Till I had the deal with Atlantic and I was traveling the country, I didn’t realize how much artists go through to get a record deal. They’d done everything but twirl a baton. That’s show business! I had that fortunate evening when Kris Kristofferson came down to see me sing [at the Earl of Old Town in 1971], and I got signed right away. It was in the stars or something for me.
Q: And then they made you sit on a bale of bay for your first album cover.
A: I had never seen a bale of hay in my life! I tried to explain that to Jim Marshall when he took the picture in his studio in San Francisco. We were making small talk when a pickup truck arrives with three bales of hay. He said, “I’m gonna do a head shot of you and the straw will make an interesting background.” Next thing I know it’s about five days before the album comes out and I’m at the record company in New York and I saw the cover photo, and there I am sitting on a bale of hay. And I pipe up that while I like country music, this looks like “Hee-Haw.” But it was too late to change it, and I’ve been making up for it ever since.
Q: Your last album, “Fair & Square,” came out in 2005. Any plans to put out another one?
A: I’m writing very slowly for the next record. They used to come so fast, but I’ll do anything to get out of writing these days. It used to be my hobby, my way of getting away from world. I always like to have patience with songwriting. I don’t like to put a record together unless I have songs that are staying with me. Once I get 10, I’ll go into the studio.
Q: Having a family does tend to change your priorities.
A: Kids change everything about your whole lifestyle. I’ve got two [teenage sons with his wife, Fiona]. I used to be a total nighthawk. I used to stay up till the sun went down. Now I need to be more structured. I’ll set aside next Tuesday so I can write, and when Tuesday rolls around and if I don’t feel like it, I don’t force it. I got enough craft to sit down and write a song if that’s what I said I’d do that day, but if it’s not inspired by anything, it won’t stay with you.
Q: Has living in Nashville changed your approach at all?
A: In Nashville it’s hard to avoid co-songwriting. If you have a beer with someone, the next thing you know they’re calling you up to cowrite. Some have turned out good. Any of the songs I’ve ever written that were country hits [“I Just Want to Dance With You,” “Love is on a Roll,” “Unwed Fathers”] are songs I couldn’t have written myself. You have to have a certain structure, and the Nashville guys I cowrite with know it’s gonna be barking up a wrong tree to pitch six-minute song to a producer looking for a single. If you can write a really good song in three minutes, get to the point, it’s pretty neat. By myself, if I stumbled across a “hit,” I don’t think I’d know it.
http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2010/02/john-prine-the-bard-of-old-town-returns.html
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