Work in progress

I have been a rubbish blogger recently.

In my excuse, we’re moving house soon, and because it's finally warm all the little plants I’ve been growing on my windowsills have suddenly taken off, so require lots of care and attention!

Also, I’m sort of cheating on my blog – I’ve started writing reviews and previews for a new free music magazine in the North East – name is currently M:M (North East Music Monthly). So if you like music, watch out for the first edition due out in July. All types of music included (I'm writing on Classical).

Follow them on Twitter @NEMUSICNE if you like that kinda thing.

 

Must improve my blogging though.

See you all soon, curioussloth

Notes from an Exhibition

I borrowed a Patrick Gale from my lovely auntie a few years ago and it passed the test of sticking with me long after I finished it. So when I liberated another one froma charity shop last month I knew I was in for a treat.

Notes from an Exhibition is set not far from St Ives in Cornwall and follows the impact of an extraordinary artist, wife and mother and her manic depression. It is incredibly hard-hitting at times, and intense as you would imagine. Each chapter begins with a picture description – hence the title. Despite sounding perhaps relentless, the novel manages epic and even cheerful thanks to the flashbacks and all the artwork. I know it’s hard to write convincingly in fiction about the “abstract” arts of visual arts and music. Film is similarly challenged by showing skills: how annoying is it on screen when actors “perform” highly complex skills of playing an instrument/sing or are required to draw or hold a paintbrush? But Gale makes it work. Although I would say the picture descriptions at the start of each chapter can be a bit hit or miss, the way Gale describes the drawings Rachel makes as a warm-up to abstract work had me absolutely hooked.

  

Another novel I loved which also achieves the portrayal of artists, in the broadest sense, is Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music – which I devoured for its excellent portrayal of professional chamber music from the perspective of the 2^nd violinist in a quartet. Read it, if you haven’t already!

Coming up next: Stasiland.

Lunch, dinner, tea...

I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently playing in orchestras, it being the end of term and concerts having been in quick succession. One upshot of this has been less time for reading, and I have soooo many books tbr on my shelves. My resolution to post here more regularly has also made sure that I don’t have a pile of books tb(reviewed). My old habit of not updating very often may have been bad for view counts, but it was good in times like this!

It just so happens though that Newcastle has conspired to give me something to write home about: Nudo Sushi Box.

If you haven’t been yet, it’s at the top of Northumberland Street, near Haymarket, and the food is delicious and very reasonable for sushi. Seriously, prices for sushi start about £2.50, range up to about £6 I think.

I’m not trying to advertise for them here, I would just like to give them a shout out as I have enjoyed myself there twice in the last fortnight and I hope they succeed, as it seems a lot of shops around there have been forced to close.

 

They opened I think about 2 weeks ago and the décor is cute – nice colours of lime green and black, with sturdy wooden tables inside. Staff are cheerful, if a little bit flustered it all being new to everyone (!). It’s related to the Nudo down behind The Gate, which also does ace sushi, amongst many other things. And when me and boy went in 10 days ago the sushi box shop was full of flowers from suppliers etc. wishing them well!

So, good luck little sushi box. Please live long and prosper, you are so tasty!

Freud in NYC

The other weekend I went on a charity shop splurge, the results of which were 2 lovely new dresses, 5 new books and an assuaged conscience. I didn’t need the clothes, but they did make me feel good; and after the suitcase full I donated a week later to the same charity shop, I felt better about making space for the “newbies” in my wardrobe.

Now the 5 books are sitting on my shelf, treats waiting to be enjoyed. Amongst them I picked up a Patrick Gail, an author I’ve really enjoyed before, and at last my own copy of Great House, which I so adored a few years ago (Durham library’s copy). And then something I’ve had my eye on for a while (and which the lovely volunteer at BHF said was great!): The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld.



I'd heard of this book, but I don't think I'd read a review, otherwise maybe my expectations would have been lowered. But I speak to soon. Let's start with a bit of an intro and then my own thoughts...
Turn of the century New York, a dramatic murder, and Freud & Jung et al. arrive from Europe. The author makes a lot of effort to describe New York in this period – the construction of buildings, the corruption of officials, the hotels, the bridge:

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, an architectural paroxysm shook New York City. Gigantic towers called skyscrapers soared up one after the other, higher than anything built by the hand of man before. At a ribbon-cutting on Liberty Street in 1908, the top hats applauded as Mayor McClellan declared the forty-seven-story redbrick and bluestone Singer Building the world’ tallest structure. Eighteen months later, the mayor had to repeat the same ceremony at the fifty-story Metropolitan Life tower on Twenty-fourth Street. But even then, they were already breaking ground for Mr Woolworth’s staggering fifty-eight story ziggurat back downtown.

On every block, enormous steel-beam skeletons appeared where empty lots had been the day before. The smash and scream of steam shovels never ceased. The only comparison was with Haussmann’s transformation of Paris a half century earlier, but in New York there was no single vision behind the scenes, no unifying plan, no disciplining authority. Capital and speculation drove everything, releasing fantastic energies, distinctly American and individualistic.

The masculinity of it all was undeniable.” (pg. 7)

The fantastical plot explodes in a whirl of sexuality, Oedipal complexes, and dead bodies, all in the setting of an opulent hotel. There is also a rather strange fascination with Hamlet. Oh, and I almost forgot the plethora of pretty women.

The quotation above links nicely into the focus on Freud. The book makes a lot out of the group dynamics of the Freud/Jung party. Our protagonist is a devotee of Freud and a young , privileged psychoanalyst himself, who gets increasingly attached to one of the young heroines.

I don’t want to give too much away because as a thriller this book is intensely plot driven. I was however expecting something different. And I’m not quite sure what led me to think this. On reflection, it may have been the rather excellent first page, which set up a moral question which didn’t seem to be considered much later:

“There is no mystery to happiness.
Unhappy men are all unlike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn – or worse, indifference – cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn’t look ahead. He lives in the present.
But there’s the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning – the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life – a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.” (pg. 5)

I really enjoyed the first chapter, and was expecting more of the same in the rest, including a clever treatment of Freud in America, and perhaps some deprecation of the American obsession with psychoanalysis. This wasn’t forthcoming, much to my disappointment. To my mind the book veers between trashy and wannabe literary fiction – not least because of this very focus on Freud, and the all-consuming thriller plot. For some reason the author felt the need to include far too many strands/themes and they just don’t quite sit together right. Personally, I found the treatment of Freud and Jung ridiculously cliché and skewed somewhat by the epilogue in which the author details all of the factual inaccuracies. After reading through those, I really wondered why he had written the book at all. It would have been more successful running along the lines of Hallucinating Foucault...

Overall verdict: a thrilling page-turner that doesn’t live up to its high intentions. Probably a good holiday read though!

The horror of history

Lore

(Dir. Cate Shortland)

Last week, to celebrate our new jobs, my friend and I went to the Tyneside. We saw Lore, an amazing, powerful film about a confused Germany in the summer of 1945 immediately after Hitler’s suicide. The story of a fatherless Vaterland is told through the journey of the teenage Lore, looking after her 4 brothers and sisters after their parents disappear, wanted for war crimes.

Unsurprisingly this isn’t easy viewing. As the children trek from the Schwarzwald in the southwest to Omi somewhere north of Hamburg they find all around them the destruction of a country in mind and body. Imagery is strong: in starvation they stop at an old widow’s farm where all the clothes on the washing line are dripping black dye, in remembrance of the Führer. When they try to leave, the old lady wants to keep Baby Peter – I could have sworn, so that she could eat him.

The most realistic and perhaps ground-breaking quality of the film though is the beautifully played character of Lore, a teenage Nazi. In the very first scenes she shows her disgust at anyone she considers “an other” so physically. We don’t need to see her worshipping the Führer, her physicality on screen is perfectly pitched to convey the ideology she has been brought up with. The excellent performance by Saskia Rosendahl made the family unit live and breathe. The other children are beautifully directed and it gels so naturally – quite a triumph to keep the children on screen throughout the film in such a believable way.

Something that struck me overwhelmingly about Lore was how it positioned itself in the genre of apocalypse films. I haven’t read the book it is based on, but by the nature of its medium the film calls forth allusions from such classics as 28 Days Later/Dawn of the Dead. I have no doubt this is intentional; the director Cate Shortland certainly knows exactly what she is doing. And interestingly as a non-native she still does an excellent job with the detail, whilst also bringing an outsider’s perspective to this peculiarly unbalanced post-war Germany. (My brain made a lot of comparisons with Günter Grass’s autobiography “Beim Häuten der Zwiebel”/”Peeling the onion” dealing with the same period, but not in such an effective way.) The “end of the world” feeling of the film chimes with the end of childhood innocence and the sexuality of the adolescent Lore – so much has been left behind in the Schwarzwald.

Maybe the view of Lore as a film in the zombie genre might trivialise it for some people, but I think it gives Shortland a language of horror to utilise and a set of conventions to challenge. It increased the impact of it on me. The historical reality of the film doesn’t verge into the period drama cliché (as so many UK films and TV shows now do). Somehow it almost manages instead to feel like science-fiction, except it wasn’t a nuclear disaster that caused Germany’s destruction and the Holocaust.

Returning from a long trip to the Salinas Valley...

East of Eden

John Steinbeck

It’s not often in a realistic novel that you find the author turning up as one of the characters. But in this saga about farming in the Salinas Valley at the turn of the century John Steinbeck is tracing his own family history. The plot focuses on two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons. The poor Hamiltons, on a patch of earth with no water and 6 (I think) children, struggle by somewhat despite the incapability of the father Samuel Hamilton to earn any money. The Trask family, one brother Adam moving out to the Salinas Valley in the course of the novel leaving his hard childhood and scary brother behind, continues with twin boys, Caleb and Aron (biblical reference obvious).

Now I read Steinbeck’s most depressing work The Grapes of Wrath a few years ago, and really enjoyed the vision and the detail, but it is such a terrible, horrible novel about humans and greed. In contrast East of Eden has it’s horrible moments, but it is much more rounded. There is young love and exploitation, the severity of the land and the beginnings of accepting multiculturalism. Some people find a problem with Steinbeck’s preaching narrator; personally, I like it when the author lays out their cards as honestly as he does – you know just whose side he is on and don’t have to guess!

The language can also be perfect:

“It was a deluge of a winter in the Salinas Valley, wet and wonderful. The rains fell gently and soaked in and did not freshet. The feed was deep in January, and in February the hills were fat with grass and the coats of the cattle looked tight and sleek. In March the soft rain continued, and each storm waited courteously until its predecessor sank beneath the ground. Then warmth flooded the valley and the earth burst into bloom – yellow and blue and gold.”

(Opening of chapter 25)

One of the reasons I wanted to review East of Eden on here was to have the chance to revel in it a bit further. It’s only when I typed out that passage that I noticed all the subtleties of Steinbeck’s syntax. It can be so easy to describe something in prose in a way that means nothing because you’ve invested too many descriptors and no feeling for how a reader will read your sentences. For me, this passage is the opposite because it doesn’t look like it tries hard, but then you find such beauties as “each storm waited courteously until its predecessor sank beneath the ground”.

Because it is a family saga, the plot spirals around somewhat and sometimes could be accused of being overtly sensational. I won’t go into too many details here, with the hope that some of you might still read it, but the focus on the brothels in the second half of the book definitely descends down that path. That’s not to say Steinbeck does a bad job at it – I wonder if he were writing today whether he would have learnt his craft as a script writer on Eastenders or telenovellas? The character of Cathy/Kate is fascinating though, and well developed during the course of the novel. She clearly holds a great deal of power over John Steinbeck:

“I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one’s fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishments for concealed sins.

And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?"

(Opening of chapter 8)

This prose may feel outdated, but the theme is still prevalent today. How can seemingly ordinary people act in ways completely alien to the majority of society? Is it genetic or is it learnt? What are they lacking? Steinbeck clearly comes down here on the side of genetical malformation – i.e. it is nobody’s fault. But it’s a thin line between that and the nature/nurture debate.

I hope I’ve given you a taste of what is so enjoyable about East of Eden. Admittedly it doesn’t have my favourite chapter in Steinbeck in it, the description of the tortoise on the side of the highway from The Grapes of Wrath, but the characters are its unforgettable part. I wouldn’t know which to name as my favourites; they are all so three dimensional – Sam Hamilton, Adam Trask, Tom Hamilton, Aron Trask, Caleb Trask, Charles Trask, Lee, Cathy/Kate.

I have been enjoying recently… Podcasts

Now that my technology has caught up with this decade, and I’m walking to work, I have been discovering the excellent world of podcasts. I thought I’d list some favourites on here - partly because I still haven’t finished Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and partly as something to keep me occupied on a slow Monday afternoon.

I’ve been enjoying the variety of the Weekend Woman’s Hour podcast. I find it’s nice to have the edited highlights of the daily shows together with feedback from the listeners. This is a good one for the walk to work in the mornings as it’s not always too taxing on the brain and yet they maintain a good range of guests and topics to keep it interesting. I particularly liked the interviews with the young girls that were in a flagship mentoring scheme 4 years ago and have all now gained so much self-confidence and “can-do” spirit. There was also a great discussion a few weeks ago with a proponent of “soft” feminism and one for “active” feminism which had me screaming at the podcast! At an hour in length, this generally keeps me busy for a few days in my travels around the city, and I’ve found it great for long train journeys too.

One of the best things about the internet/technology age is the ability to learn about any topic at the click of a button. I find this particularly true with the Freakonomics podcast, which introduces novices like me to some of the basic principles of economics. Each episode tackles a concept or a problem using modern day (or even medieval Chinese!) examples in an entertaining journalistic way. So far some of my favourite episodes have focussed on the problem of providing incentives (The Cobra Effect) and the strange nature of “consultants”. This last one made me even more glad I never intend to apply for a grad. scheme with a consultancy firm! 

I revelled in the wonderful Jane Austen feature on the BBC World Book Club last month. The discussion was just great, featuring writer P.D.James, who recently wrote a sequel to Pride and Prejudice called Death comes to Pemberley. The best thing, somewhat unsurprisingly, about World Book Club is that the questions come from all over the globe. I really got an amazing feeling of how universally these books are appreciated.

I’m not quite sure why I downloaded the first Philosophy Bites podcast, given that I recoiled quite strongly from most philosophy at uni; but I was pleasantly surprised, and felt very cultured walking to orchestra listening to a lecture on freedom. The high point though was a wonderful talk about Gandhi’s philosophy, which educated and informed me about a topic I have been meaning to look up for quite some time…

I hope some of you reading this, if you don’t already, will consider investigating the world of the podcast and exploring all the knowledge out there!