...on discovering English folk music

...I chanced upon an intriguing looking L.P. with a deep blue border haloing an antique looking sailor and his young son and the words 'Sea Songs and Sea Shanties' printed on the top. 

...From the first time I heard The Watersons sing 'Plains of Mexico' or A.L. Lloyd sing 'Coast of Peru', I was utterly enthralled. I had no precedent for this music whatsoever, but it seemed to be a direct mainline to certain psychic atmospheres I liked to inhabit that were both romantic and barbaric. ...There was something that smacked of the salt water about these songs. I responded profoundly to the desperate vitality and intuitive salutary gruff of the performances, but had never heard anything like the sandpapery bray of Burt Lloyd singing 'Blood Red Roses' ...or the really fucking peculiar nasal cadences of Mike Waterson's lead vocal on 'Boston Harbour' 

...Imbedded in the fabric of the music, themes, melodies, delivery and language, seemed to be everything I held precious; the eternal call of the lonesome vocalist. The universality of the characters and the death defying situations they are condemned to play out eternally. The songs seemed to act as alchemical agents where you start with the base matter of the language and the very basic scenarios that reflect very basic human concerns (fidelity, obsessive love, death fantasy, incest, infanticide, submitting yourself to something other, abandoning your True Love to go and fight some remote foe across the barbarous blue) and the realisation that transcendence can be achieved by inhabiting the characters and internalising and playing out the predicaments with sincerity with acceptance of the possible fatal consequences. Eternity awaits. The glory chord can be struck and sustained. 

Alex Neilson, sleeve notes to Stepanie Hladowski's The High High Nest 10"

As overly romantic as the effusions he expresses here are, I definitely recognise something of my own deep rooted love of this music in what Alex Neilson is saying here. I might want to add a few categories to the list he gives, which seems to miss something of the social, communal character of much folk music. I'd also add a pragmatic, no-nonsense, popular Christianity to that list. Still, at least he didn't try and claim it for Paganism. Seriously, every time I see a music reviewer trying to assert a clear binary opposition between Christianity (which is clearly present in a number of songs) and a hazily defined 'paganism', I want to shout 'Syncretism!' at them. 'Pagan' elements are - sometimes - maybe - present in some folk songs, but if so, I don't think they can be so clearly separated from the Christian underpinnings which are clearly present in many more songs, including some of the most beautiful and moving. I doubt very much that anyone singing folk songs in the last few centuries would have ever thought of themselves as somehow unChristian. Any elements of paganism would be absorbed into and understood within an overtly Christian understanding of the world, even if that 'popular' Christianity might be somewhat distant from what the Church taught.

Anyway, my own discovery was rather more prosaic. The third folk CD I bought was A Collection, a dozen songs taken from Martin Carthy's first half dozen albums, two apiece. Eliza's Red Rice was the second folk album I bought, so I assumed I'd also like her Dad's stuff too. Sitting in my parent's kitchen, as the first track, 'The Trees They Do Grow High' started to play, my initial reaction was bafflement, worry that I'd spent good money on music that wasn't actually much to my taste. Too astringent, too spare in it's approach.

But then, by the time 'Cold Haily Windy Night' reached it's brutal finish, I'd already warmed to it. And after listening to the whole album a couple more times, I was converted - completely infatuated with Martin Carthy's powerful singing and pared down guitar playing. It was at that point that I think I realised I'd found what I've ever after thought of as my music. This was my musical home, so to speak. While I might continue to listen to other styles, other genres, this music - specifically English folk music, although I know you can't ever keep things so separate as that, and nor would I wish to police borders, musical or otherwise, in any such way - was the music which spoke to me above all others. In fact, I could go further, and reduce it just to Yorkshire, the English county in which I've lived most of my life (if not just at present), also home to the Watersons. Ask me which is my favourite folk music, and it will always come down to that mighty river of song that the Waterson/Carthy families have so generously given us over all these years. That's where I belong. It's my home.

So, thinking again, perhaps my discovery of this music - and what it has come to mean to me - was just as romantic...!

July's despair, or, blogging about recent blogging

As I walked out on a bright May morning,
Like a hero in a song,
Looking for a place called England,
Trying to find where I belong.

*

Looking back at the posts I produced over the last month - the first things I've published after yet another inadvertent break from blogging - I'm wondering if there isn't something underlying them all. I've decided that it's probably best described as 'despair'.

Globally, it feels like the world has been undergoing more than it's fair share of outrage and horror over the last few years. Of course, it's not like we've ever lived in a world free from war and terrorism and their consequences, and there's also a very sensible argument that both the internet and a digitally interconnected world have made many of us so much more aware of what's going on around the world in a manner which magnifies a sense of a world going to hell in a handcart, producing a false sense of how awful things actually are. When in actual fact globally, worldwide levels of violence have fallen over the last fifty years.

Still, that's small comfort if it's you that's living in the middle of a war zone, but - rightly or wrongly - from a relatively privileged position lived here in Britain, it still feels as though things are becoming worse. We're living through a moment of history which will have lasting, and unknowable consequences, which includes more than terrorism and war. I'm also thinking of a culmination of the growth in economic equality over the last few decades, the increase in power of a global oligarchic financial elite, an increasingly polarised public discourse around economics and immigration and other things besides. And behind it all, the unfolding ecological catastrophe the human species is now enduring along with all of the natural world. Again, perhaps we're always living though difficult times, but it feels as though it's more obvious now. And of course, here in Britain, we've just gone through an intensification of our own particular local politics, the consequences of which are still unfolding.

I have my own opinions, of course - like many others - but I make no predictions. Frankly, I hardly feel that I'm qualified to do such, although I know that's hardly something which stops many from making their own impassioned pronouncements. Or something which has stopped me in the past! Instead I choose to despair. A luxury no doubt, and perhaps it's the wrong word anyway. As often as I find myself reading something about the current political situation either here or somewhere abroad, I feel the equally strong impulse to look away, to absent myself, to refuse to engage with political events in even the limited, voyeuristic manner of an onlooker that I have ever engaged with them.

*

Perhaps I confuse my categories here, when I refer to this as underlying the arguments I was trying to make in those earlier posts. Aesthetics are not, after all, the same thing as politics, and it can be dangerous to mix the two (to put it mildly!). But on the other hand, politics are a part of our aesthetics, and that is the 'tradition' in which I feel I was trained when I was an undergraduate, and the approach that I feel I instinctively reach for when I choose to write about something on this blog.

How much political argument has made it into this blog? Probably more than I realise, creeping in around the edges of all my assumptions - you don't get outside of politics that easily, after all - but maybe not quite so much as I might currently fear. Perhaps it's different for others, who are surely far more disciplined about their own blogging, but personally I've found it to be a writing process which takes on an instinctively personal cast, whatever my actual intentions, which are generally opposed to making any overly personal revelations in a space like this. I do hope that little I say here has been especially strident.

So I don't seriously think that I'm going to alter much of my approach to what I choose to write about here. It's just that at present, I'm feeling such despair, such disgust and fear about our politics in general, that it's influencing my thoughts about the value of aesthetically political readings in general.

I'm looking for a space which feels uncontaminated with politics. It's inevitable perhaps, given the sort of person I am, that I should want to look for that in books and art.

No doubt these feelings will pass, if they haven't already. I'm well aware that my hoped for refuge doesn't actually exist.

"The old stones were quiet here..."

The old stones were quiet here, polished by the footfalls of the years. Gandhi and Jinnah must have walked up this stretch, founding fathers of two nations; the same basalt flagstones offered a place to rest to beggars and itinerant vendors of fresh lemonade, second-hand textbooks, and handled-looking postcards that showed ten famous views of the city. Walking here, he felt that he walked among the great and insignificant of the past; all, alike, hurried as he did, for in this city even idlers liked to look as though they had somewhere to go smartly. All the clerks and petty officers; in their stream, he imagined his father, hurrying along with a set of proofs in a large envelope; he'd been proud, at one time, to do some printing for the university. It hadn't been a lucrative job, but had seemed to confer a diffuse glow of learning over all his work. A hundred and fifty years earlier this had been the beach, before the land reclamations; perhaps it was the murmur of waves one heard on the busiest days, through the endless talking of peons and passers-by, and the tumble of the red busses, the taxi-horns, the metallic steps of each person hurrying through the Fort.

Anjali Joseph, Saraswati Park 

A long quote, from a novel I read some time early last year. One of many I wanted to write something about, but never got around to. It's far to late now.

If I remember correctly, what I wanted to write about this quote specifically, was how it seems to work as an allusion not to any specific novel or writer, but to that tendency in much Indian fiction in English to focus on the history and politics of post-colonial India in big, maximalist novels. Rushdie, Seth, Mistry, etc. Writing a novel of modern middle-class Mumbai, this is the only time Joseph alludes to India's history, and she is as concerned with noting the presence of 'insignificant' ordinary folk of Mumbai, going about their everyday business, which is explicitly contrasted with the great men of history, who appear only against the mass of present day reality. Where politics enters the narrative elsewhere, it's only as the irritating right wing opinions of an older relative, or else the idealistic environmentalism of a young neighbour. It appears early on in the novel, almost seeming to stand as a sign of what she's not going to do. Instead, her work is concerned with the interpersonal relationships of several characters connected by family and friendship, and with their individual experiences of living in modern Mumbai.

*

Now, admittedly, my earlier post on Satyajit Ray was already long enough. Still, it's interesting to me to see that, in arguing against David Thomson's condescension to Ray, and having noted that an artist should not be expected to focus on the history and politics of their country, I then go on to argue for some of the ways in which Ray's films do actually open up to history, both colonial and post-colonial. I don't think that anything I wrote is wrong exactly - all art has a political dimension of course (the consequences of which is something which I was recently trying to grapple with in my most recent post) - but there is surely much which is easily left out of what the experience of an art work can actually mean when one is producing an explicitly political reading of a work. But if I'd wanted to try and address that there, it would have made an already very long piece even longer!

Now, I have no particular issue with reading art works for their latent political meaning - it can be a very productive way of examining a work and can produce valuable insights, and I find thinking about the social and historical contexts of a novel can be very invigorating, and certainly does;t have to exclude pleasure or enthusiasm - but I'm questioning here my own ingrained leap here to such a way of reading an art work. Is that really the reason why I fell in love with literature in the first place? Is it anyone's?

(In another context, it's also one of the ways in which, in Britain and America, and presumably elsewhere too, writers and filmmakers who come from elsewhere - specifically Asia or Africa - or else emerge from immigrant communities, can be condescended to. The unspoken expectation is that they must comment in some way on the historical and political experience of the countries or communities from which they come - they're expected to explore this for an audience which is implicitly white and British. Certainly I've seen writers expressing dismay at this 'othering' and pursuit of bogus authenticity. Aminatta Forma, in The Guardian, just last year, complaining about the labelling that both fuels and results from this unspoken assumption. Inevitably, the only book of hers I've read is her first book, her memoir of her father and Sierra Leone.)

Anjali Joseph doesn't venture far outside of her own experience in Saraswati Park, writing about the middle class Bombay in which she grew up and presumably knows as an adult from trips back. But her main characters are both men. Actually, the stories of both are hardly particularly novel - a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality, an older man coming to the realisation that he's been taking his wife for granted for years - but it's beautifully written. And as I've tried to articulate above, what's most refreshing is her refusal to overtly tie her story to explicitly political or national concerns. Nothing wrong with that, surely. Equally, it can be just as enthralling to observe the lives and intimate characters of several middle class individuals and their movement through both public and private spaces and the city. It's a novel which contains a lot of travel, of people getting about by foot or by train. Inevitable in a modern city like Mumbai, perhaps, but it's lovely to see it depicted so lovingly here.

Three quotes about childhood and our relationship to art

I'm not entirely sure why these three quotes are so easily relating to each other in my mind, so lets see if I can work it out, if only for my own satisfaction.

But it’s not something, really, that anyone needs to watch today. In ten-minute chunks it can be fun enough if you can get over your natural repulsion at the racism, but should certainly not be shown to the children who were its intended audience... 

Andrew Hickey, Batman on Screen: Batman (1943) blogpost, 2014

BRIGER: OK, let's - let's talk about the part that you can't relate to. It seems that H.P. Lovecraft - you know, from his fiction, his poetry, his letters - that he was racist. When did you realize that first? 

LAVALLE: Well, here's the funny thing - so I didn't realize it when I was 10 or 11 reading these stories. And I read pretty much all of them. And in some of them, he's pretty blatant about his particular hatred - particularly of black people. When I was 10 or 11 and I read these stories, I read them only for the wild and outlandish plots and the large cosmic dread sort of thing. And in a way, I was naive and I could overlook what should have been blatant clues about the uglier sides of H.P. Lovecraft's personality and his ideas. ...when I was, like, 10 or 11, I just didn't even see it. I think I just couldn't have processed it. And then when I was about 15 or 16, I started being like what is this dude - what did he just say? And it was the kind of thing that you would say, like - if you were walking down the street and somebody said that, you'd smack them in the mouth. So why did I say that it was OK on the page? And yet by this point, I already loved the stories, so it made for these very conflicted feelings. 

Victor Lavelle, author interview, 2015

Certainly the juxtaposition of the first two makes some kind of obvious sense, I think, since both are clearly concerned with making political reading of particular texts, whether that is the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, or one of the early 1940s Batman film serials. Andrew Hickey's Batman review stuck in my mind from when I first read it a couple of years ago. While I don't doubt that he is quite correct in his judgement that the serial now looks deeply racist with it's yellow face depiction of it's Japanese villains, I also remember watching it as a child during some school holiday, and didn't grow up to be a particularly racist person. Not that I would dream of suggesting that I am somehow incapable of saying or writing something racist, if only inadvertently, but it does make me wonder whether a serial of this sort is really 'dangerous' to a child audience as his remark seems to suggest?

While I would probably easily see it if I were to re-watch it now, as a child I was completely unaware of any of the racism which Hickey points out in his blogpost. Some of this may be down to just how old the serial is. It's style is far removed from anything a child of the eighties was going to be especially familiar with. A more likely explanation is simply the context in which I lived: brought up by Guardian-reading liberal-left parents, with school friends whose families came from India and Pakistan. Some old film serial from the 1940s was unlikely to make much of an impression on whatever I might come to believe about the Japanese or any other national or ethnic group.

But for me this still gets at one of the difficulties with any politicised reading of art or popular culture. While, obviously, the art we encounter as children (and as adults) has some effect on what we then come to believe about both the world and, especially, people from different backgrounds and cultures, it's clearly not the only thing which shapes our beliefs. How 'dangerous' a film serial or book is is surely going to depend very much on the context in which it is encountered.

In my second quote Victor Lavelle describes not just the experience of a child being unaware of the racist subtext to works that child enjoys, but also the conflicted feelings this can generate for the adult -  or, as here, just the slightly older teenager - who has learned to see how the things he or she used to enjoy can also embody some very ugly attitudes and prejudices. It's one of the reasons why going back to beloved childhood favourites can sometimes turn out to be a real disappointment. And I also don't doubt that such feelings are going to be much harder to deal with for someone who belongs to the group which is being stereotyped or subjected to such prejudices in this case. I'm very fortunate really; it's easier for me to overlook racism or sexism or homophobia in a book or a film, to read around such attitudes as it were, because I belong to the groups which are rarely if ever subjected to that kind of prejudice, at least here in Britain.

*

Parenthood changed the way I view characters. And the way I view humanity. I would’ve thought that you have a lot more input into raising a child, into how they turn out, than you actually do. The best you can do is sort of help them realize who they are, and not dissuade them. It’s not as interesting in a way to be a writer when you come to grips with that. You want to believe characters are controlled by the events in their lives, but that happens so much less than you’d think.

Dan Clowes, author interview, 2016

Aside from Ghost World, I've not read much of Dan Clowes' work. The description of Patience, however, makes it sound like something I'd really like to check out.

Anyway, that aside, it's less obvious just how much this quote has in common with the other two. It comes back to that issue of childhood, and the extent to which we are influenced by the culture around us. One shouldn't overstate this of course. I rather imagine that, as a successful cartoonist with several films made out of his work, Dan Clowes has been able to provide his son with a relative level of comfort and security which has ensured his child has avoided some of the more obvious traumas which can easily result from a less privileged childhood. But I suspect that's not quite what he's addressing here in any case. He's not, after all, denying that the 'events of our lives' leave their marks upon us, but merely suggesting that their impact is rather more complicated than might easily be supposed. In any case, how any of us respond to a traumatic event or experience is to some extent going to be dictated by the person we already are.

And from the point of view of a writer of fiction, I would imagine that a relatively clear sense of cause and effect (however nuanced this may be in practice) is, to some extent at least, necessary if your fiction is to be coherent. Real people are always much more complicated than fictional characters, after all, hence part of the reason why modernism became so complex with its attempt to represent human character in all of it's complexity.

Unlike the first two quotes, Clowes isn't concerned here directly with a child's relationship with and understanding of art, but it surely chimes with what I've been trying to explore in this short blogpost? If even the 'events of our lives' - and surely, we might think, this refers to something of far greater import than the art we encounter? - can leave less of a mark than we might suppose, what hope for the books we read, or the films we see?

*

None of the above is intended as in any way to constitute a definitive judgement. There are a number of conclusions which I could draw from what I've written here which I don't agree with. I don't, for example, believe that we shouldn't be concerned about the books which children are reading, or the films and television they are watching. Nor do I think that the ideological content of a work somehow doesn't matter, and that we shouldn't criticise works which we find to be sexist or racist or homophobic. The whole point of didactic works of art, after all, of whatever political stripe, is that they are an attempt to change the hearts and minds of the people who encounter them. And they do, surely, in some way. But how? It seems to me that it's very hard to define precisely how any of us are effected by the things we read or watch, beyond whatever personal, visceral reactions we may each experience.

...for Brexit

Song on the End of the World

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through fields under their umbrellas
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet,
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world there will be,
No other end of the world there will be.

Czeslaw Milosz

Gene Wolfe quote

Inspired by the sense of theatre I have often been forced to cultivate, I raised my arms, spread my hands, and gave them my blessing, telling them to be kind to one another and as happy as they could. That is really all the blessing we godlings can ever give, though no doubt the Increate can do much more. 

Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

The Golden Age of Children's Literature (7)

So, first of all, lets take a quick look at the cover, illustrated by one Janina Ede, an artist with whom I am otherwise unfamiliar:

I really don't have very much to say, other than, isn't it just gorgeous? The sort of neo-romantic illustration that feels very tied to its period. Or so it seems to me, at least. Also the sort of illustrative tradition which has been largely replaced by computer generated imagery. It's gorgeousness is added to for me by the fact of my copy being such a beaten up second hand volume. It's very materiality redolent of an older period of publishing children's literature.

*

Unlike some of Penelope Farmer's other books, Charlotte Sometimes is still in print, if only because of the song it inspired by Robert Smith. It's actually the second of two sequels to the earlier The Summer Birds, although chronologically the second of the sequence. I'm fairly sure I may have encountered her work in my first year of secondary school; a later novel, Thicker Than Water, sounds familiar from it's description. Unlike Tom's Midnight Garden, with which it has features in common, this is not a book I even tried to read as a child, but certainly it's one that I wish I'd read.

*

It's another timeslip tale from post-war England. It gives me the sense I might be on to something in my earlier post when I tried to suggest that the past - or in the case of Tom's Midnight Garden, specifically the Victorian past - must still have felt 'close' to many people in the period in which this type of story appears to have been so popular. In the sense at least that so much more of the material fabric of the Victorian period must have remained visible than it does now after so much redevelopment of British cities. It was in the post-war period that saw the large scale destruction of much of this materiality through redevelopment, in addition to the scar that bombing during the war had already left on many of our cities.

Penelope Farmer's beautiful, subtle novel doesn't go back quite as far as that, but the transportation of it's heroine to the end of the First World War literalises this sense of the nearness of the past through it's means of timeslip. Charlotte only needs to sleep in a particular bed in her boarding school dormitory in order to switch places with Clare, another young girl at school in 1918, towards the end of the War, and whom she physically resembles. Each night the two girls find they switch places. Consequently each of them has to navigate a social environment which is subtly unfamiliar, highlighting the changes between the past of 1918, and the present of the late 60s that Charlotte longs to return to once she finds herself trapped in the past. Since the novel is told entirely from Charlotte's perspective, we only hear Claire's voice through the entries in her diary which she leaves for her replacement, but while the social world and rituals of a school enables them to survive, both girls clearly struggle to adapt to the unfamiliar time in which they find themselves.

Looked at over literally it feels just a little unlikely that a bed would really survive four decades of use and still be residing in the same room, but that enables the book to achieve the little narrative suspense it has. Whilst the room in which the bed resides is a dormitory in Charlotte's time, in 1918, Claire and her younger sister Emily are sleeping in a sick room, before they move to the stern foster home they were supposed to be have been billeted with initially. It's this move which traps Charlotte and Clare in the wrong time periods, necessitating Charlotte breaking into the school, which she still attends as a day girl, in order to sleep in the bed and be returned to her own time.

The sister of one of the girls, Emily quickly realises that her sister is being replaced every other day. One of the things which is most fascinating about the novel is the sense in which much of our identity is socially created through the pressures and expectations of the people surrounding us. The author has apparently related this uncertainty of identity to her own experience of being a twin, but it doesn't feel nearly so specific as that. Surely most of us run up against this at some point in childhood, the realisation that you are expected by family and friends to behave in certain ways, and hold particular interests, because that's what they've always expected from you. It's an almost existential moment, the realisation of just how hard it can be to change oneself in the face of others' expectations.

The choice of 1918, towards the end of the war (victory is announced late on in the narrative), that Charlotte travels to, also feels unusual. When depicted in fiction, or at least this is my sense, the home front of the First World War is usually seen from the point of view of the returning soldier on leave, unable to make those he's returning to understand precisely what he is experiencing in the horror of the war. Inevitably perhaps, if the focus of most fiction of the war is concerned with the experience of the soldiers. Here, we see something very different, the experience of all those ordinary civilians left behind, making do in a depleted world, ground down by years of a conflict which is taking place elsewhere. The closest the narrative comes to the experience of the soldiers is a long line of returned injured men derailing from a hospital train, beautifully illustrated by one Chris Connor.

In this, the illustrations are a fair match to a narrative which is concerned with small moments of individual perception and ordinary life, and with a sense of a lived past, which is still, just, even without the magic of a time-slip, able to be glimpsed in the world of the late 60s. Right at the end, a passage illuminates this feeling beautifully:

The bus went by modern, noisy roads. But when it came to the river and crossed over the bridge into the town, just for a moment, looking down the river, Charlotte could almost have believed it was the past, 1918, again. The pigeons and ducks and gulls there looked no different, nor did the faded, once elegant buildings with their elaborate cornices. The stucco was cracked, the gardens full of weeds, just as they had been then, after four years of war.

It's hard to imagine that you could make such a comparison these days. The houses would all have been restored, the gardens no doubt better maintained in preparation for some national gardening competition, the village likely a dormitory town for the city of London. The school might not even be a school any more, but perhaps converted in to some other use. The village would look 'old', but remain only a simulacrum of a past that we might imagine could once still be fully experienced.