Richard T Kelly

Gilbert Adair 1944-2011

2011-12-13T05:48:00.000-08:00

So Gilbert Adair is gone, and the fine tributes that have followed already are a splendid expression of his achievements as a writer, as well as the good friends and impressions that he made everywhere.
I first discovered Gilbert Adair for myself as a young reader at a time (the mid 1980s) when he was one of a select band of critical writers whose acute literary-visual sensibilities made cinema feel like a significant 20th-century creative endeavour, and a lustrous aesthetic universe that was well worth exploring. Gilbert wrote widely and with great finesse about film: there was wit and playfulness there, as well as a severe assessing eye. My regard for him only grew as I learned of his accomplishments in literary translation (mainly French, clearly his passion); and then around 1989 he began to publish novels, in which all of his reading and viewing were intensely present but which nonetheless wore their learning lightly and offered all sorts of clever and impish pleasures. Love and Death in Long Island, his sly twist on the classic perverse erotic-obsessive classics of Mann and Nabokov, was a book that had me in stitches (and I think of it still whenever I happen to glance at the teenage pop fan-mag sections of any London newsagent's wares...)
A bit later in life I shared an office at Faber and Faber with Gilbert's editor and friend Walter Donohue, and by these means I was very pleased to make his acquaintance. There was both a careful privacy and a sort of refinedly performative quality about him that indicated you would have to work diligently to know him better. But certainly any meeting with Gilbert would be memorable for the range of glittering subject matters that would be raised and rated in quickfire fashion.
When I put together a playful book of cinephile film lists called Ten Bad Dates with De Niro I was delighted that Gilbert made a contribution: a stunningly varied selection of noteworthy films that had (for an assortment of reasons) rather vanished from the face of the earth. Gilbert stuck up for the so-called lesser works of auteurs, cult efforts that deserved better than extinction, and pictures unfairly denigrated by critical fashion (including, perhaps inevitably, Adrian Lyne's Lolita...) In this small way it was a pleasure to work with Gilbert, and to experience close-up (as in his freely expressed opinion of the book's title and artwork) his exquisite taste.
In the range of his interests and writings, and the prodigious way in which he turned his hand to storytelling of his own, Gilbert was a model of the critic-turned-practitioner. To have adapted his novel The Dreamers into a screenplay filmed by Bertolucci has to be as good as it gets for any true cinephiliac. I remember him well at an early screening of the picture, highly nervous of course, but evidently living something of a dream, and deservedly so. (That's him and the maestro in the picture above.)
Thinking back I realise I first saw and heard Gilbert - having admired him for some time only on the page - when he introduced a BBC screening of some films by Cocteau, and offered a typically brilliant and succinct biographical-artistic portrait of the great man. He referred to Cocteau at one point as a 'crackerjack of all trades'; and I daresay Gilbert himself is deserving of a similar sort of epitaph. Moreover he was a special man with his very own charm and you can see already how much he's missed.

Crusaders, and "proper novels"...

2011-11-25T02:28:00.000-08:00

Amid the broad spectrum of print reviews garnered by my Crusaders back in 2008 (the 'broad' being a huge bonus for a debut-novelist, and the 'spectrum' probably a necessary corollary of his fledgling level of attainment) I seem to remember the Telegraph, both Daily and Sunday, being kind enough to review the novel while finding a fair few things to criticise as well as praise. Fair do's; and for that very reason I was pleasd to see that in his Telegraph round-up of the best fiction of 2011 Keith Miller made a point (in the course of extolling the most recent novel by Philip Hensher) of offering a rather kind comparison:
"Like Richard T Kelly’s Crusaders of 2008, it is a proper, fat, politically and ethically engaged condition-of-England novel..."
Nothing else to say, really, other than 'Cheers Keith'...

Durham Big Debate: A resilience test for the North East

2011-11-01T03:52:00.000-07:00

Last month I had two distinctive engagements at the Durham Book Festival: the first being the furthering of my nefarious plot to re-infect the modern world with Late Victorian Gothic (for a report on which see here); the second the presentation of an essay commissioned from me by the Festival and addressing the prospects for the economy of North East England in the depressed years that lie ahead. That essay was published locally as a pamphlet, and its text is available online here.
I discussed the essay's various arguments in a panel event on Saturday October 22, chaired by the FT’s Chris Tighe, at which I was privileged to sit down and reason alongside Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Central, Paul Woolston (chair of the North East Local Economic Partnership) and Professor John Tomaney from the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at Newcastle University. I found the session very energetic, with some good pointed contributions from the floor, though inevitably more dimensions to the debate were opened up than could be adequately explored within the time-slot.
I spent several months mulling over/interviewing for/writing up the essay, an absorbing experience. Can I summarise my findings? Well, I suppose I came to my brief feeling – as I had when I last addressed the subject for Prospect back in 2008 – that the North East is blessed by its industrious heritage, its natural resources, and its people, with all their rightly legendary qualities of resilience; and yet also beset by its particular and substantive share in Britain’s long twentieth-century decline. Even in 2008, as one sensed the tide going out again, it was easier to feel buoyed by the benefits the region had enjoyed from new kinds of jobs, urban regeneration, better living standards. Today, with UK PLC in such a hole, one has to worry for a region under a government that undervalues its strengths and doesn’t believe in ‘regions’ anyway; a government, moreover, that is offering a ‘growth plan’ not unreasonably described by David Miliband (that’s the MP for South Shields) as ‘risibly, depressingly thin.’
We’ve known for long enough that British business needs to innovate more in profitable new growth sectors and to export more of that innovation to emerging markets. Apparently our main innovation goes in the fields of market research, advertising and branding, management consultancy... Not what my granddad would have called ‘proper work’, though a living, for sure. But if your chief skills are selling hot air and processing bullshit you can’t claim surprise if your former ‘emerging market’ then becomes your master.
The thing people in the South East especially like to forget about the North East is that it still makes stuff and exports it: fine and bulk chemicals and pharmaceuticals; tracks and cast armour for tanks; diggers, and a whole lot of cars at Nissan. The North East’s subsea sector has had global stature for three decades. (The transoceanic fibre-optic cables that enable our keen use of the internet are there thanks to seabed trenching technology originated at the firm of SMD in Wallsend.) Hitachi is readying to turn out bi-mode train carriages in Durham; the blast furnace at the former Corus steelworks in Redcar has re-fired under new ownership.
Lest people be unaware, the North East now does both metal-bashing and key-pushing. (Witness the FTSE-measured success of the Sage software group, an inspiration to the region’s recent rash of digital technology start-ups.) It has several world-class universities capable of translating research into commerce, most impressively in life sciences. In all the North East has notable comparative advantages, skills that aren’t so prevalent in the rest of the world; not to mention indigenous raw materials, gold beneath its feet, an entirely plausible claim to be the hub of any future low carbon/clean energy economy.
True, the region is deficient in financial services (but then lately that sector has stuck us with its own ‘dependency’, and attendant strife.) The North East has rather weightier assets, which could yet make a hefty contribution to ‘rebalancing’ the national economy.
The challenge for North East business is how to be sufficiently nimble and entrepreneurial at a time when a state-dependent outlook appears forlorn. Traditionally the region has viewed entrepreneurs as rather rare birds. Throughout the last century the done thing for North Easterners was to work for someone else, whether the Coal Board or British Steel, ICI or the Department of Work and Pensions. And yet it wasn’t ‘working for someone else’ that begat the North East’s great industrial heritage: the entrepreneurial honour-roll of Armstrong, Palmer, Merz, Reyrolle – inspired engineers who made big things happen out of little, beginning with a wager.
Heavy industry has its own fiery kind of historical romance; yet in the era of The Apprentice we know that business innovation can take lighter but still lucrative forms. Consider the more recent North East success story that is Greggs (est. 1951), which chose not to remain a ‘traditional’ baker, pleasant as that may have seemed – and a good job too, otherwise the big supermarkets would have eaten it alive. Instead it was Greggs that did the consuming, of other smaller companies, and built a new brand as a first-rate seller of takeaway food that still does a fair bit of baking.
Much as I enjoy a sausage roll, I don’t propose that the Greggs business model has universal application. But I do believe Greggs offers a useful model of ethos and drive, of seeking out the best available niche in a market that could do with a bit of entrepreneurial development, ‘a properly-engineered solution.’ Spare capacity in our economy is there to be unleashed within our Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs). But one can’t wag one’s finger at them, demand that they speculate to accumulate, adapt or else die. Innovation is expensive, and rarely yields a fast profit. Hiring and training aren’t cheap either, and in the North East as around the UK the skills employers require are not being readily met by the labour pool.
Right now it would seem only government can provide the impetus to the far-sighted investment in innovation and infrastructure that we know we need. Adam Posen, the American economist on the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, has made eloquent calls for a state investment bank that will bypass our tarnished banking sector and lend directly to businesses. Training (and re-training) schemes in hi-tech engineering, digital and green energy vocations would not be wasted. And renewed claims for infrastructure spending, good old-fashioned ‘capital projects’, have force to them: they will create jobs, and remedy a long national deficiency. From transport links to power lines to superfast broadband... we are going to need these things if we’re to have any sort of future.
A Conservative-led government is always liable to be leery of ‘industrial policy’, with its connotations of Labour, a pre-Thatcher era and a North where it has few friends. But I believe a forward-looking Tory ought to think fully on what the state can do as an engine for economic growth, not merely a dispenser of hardship funds. And as a potential engine room for such growth, the North East is fully stocked with tools and resources.
Then again, the excellent analyst/blogger Chris Dillow has been brave enough to propose that maybe no policy fix is possible, since long-term growth “is determined by factors which governments cannot control, such as entrepreneurial spirit or the rate of monetizable innovation.” But it’s those very ungovernable factors in which one is therefore forced to invest whatever hope one has lying around spare...

NUFC: Demba Ba is a Geordie

2011-10-31T16:19:00.000-07:00

As you's know, it’s mainly Twitter for me these days; and there the other week I was joshing with some Newcastle fan whom I’ve never met about whether we would take Andy Carroll back, in the event that Liverpool thrust him in our direction, nose and eyes averted toward high heaven... Just banter, as I say, because despite big Andy missing something of a sitter the week before he was said to link up well with Suarez in a win at the weekend. In any case, I expect the much-rumoured ‘psychological flaws’/’refuelling problems’ of the young Bensham Beast would now pose a really unsettling problem for the newly world-famous Team Spirit and United Dressing Room of Alan Pardew’s NUFC.
We are 3rd tonight, and some might say we are walking in a Demba wonderland. It’s an outstanding effort from this squad in every department, and respect is due to the manager whom some of us used to pretend was called Curbishley. Moreover these results and this placing are a useful if temporary two fingers up at free-spending bigger clubs, some of whose fans, despite their mob being several points/places behind Newcastle, are still making free with the patronising remarks online about how they’d gladly consider giving Coloccini a run in their side.
I don’t know one Newcastle fan who thinks European qualification is achievable – not unless Mike Ashley gets so drunk on New Year’s Eve that he goes out and buys half-a-dozen high-waged hot-shots with his own money. Even the much-vaunted Sky/Talksport ‘Battle for Fourth’ is hard to get excited about, since to be involved in that is only to waste a lot of quality time having to think about Spurs and Liverpool. And looking up is an impossibility, first among many reasons being quite simply that right now it looks like Man City have bought the title; and bought it in a way that makes what Jack Walker did at Blackburn with Kenny Dalglish seem hardly more substantive than what John Henry et al are now doing at Liverpool with... oh aye, Miserable Kenny. What should be the ambition be, then? To edge 'The Battle for Eighth'? To be 'North East Top Dogs'? It’s all down to the players, isn't it? God knows what they’re on right now, but I’ll have a shot of it whenever you’re ready.
Anyway, past half-way to safety... and the pleasures of this Newcastle run are in the attractive, smart, committed football that the side are playing, and also in points won that, given the low expectations back in August, almost have the sweet feeling of being stolen - or should I say twocked?

Sean Penn et al give it back to Bill Clinton

2011-10-20T01:46:00.000-07:00

Hollywood, politics, and charitable work & donation: they certainly all do mix, whether or not you care for the theory and/or the practice. The Democrats, traditionally, have enjoyed the support of a classier, artier, wittier showbusiness crowd than have the GOP - in public, at least. The artistes who have come out in this video on behalf of ex-President Clinton's Foundation are comedic performers in the main, but there among them is Sean Penn, who has - to be fair - a certain amount of form in the knockabout tradition, and whose JP/HRO organisation for post-earthquake relief and reconstruction in Haiti have been generously assisted by the Foundation's purse. This is a fun 5 minutes, for sure. Those who recall Tony Blair's cameo in a 2007 Catherine Tate TV special may reflect that in the final comic pay-off Clinton exhibits a remarkably similar ease and apparent sense of timing in front of a camera, even alongside a professional and double-Oscar-winning mummer (not, in this instance, Sean...)

FantasyCon2011: The Possessions of Doctor Forrest by Brighton Pier...

2011-09-27T04:24:00.000-07:00

So I’m gazing into the depths of the black mirror of my first ever fantasy-fiction convention... FantasyCon 2011, in Brighton, this Saturday October 1. I’m down to be reading from Doctor Forrest at 1030 in Room 134 of the Royal Albion Hotel. Beyond that, who knows...?
My slot is between Julia Knight and Reggie Oliver, so I’ll have to bring my game and hope that their fanbases might look kindly, if darkly, on my sacrificial offering. Perhaps I’m lucky to finish just before Christopher Paolini, author of Eragon, gets started for a reading/Q&A in the main assembly space at 1100.
The amusing conundrum is the choice of what to read for 20 minutes or so. One gets into a certain pattern after having done a few events with a book, and it’s only in the last few outings that I’ve tried to vary things a little, which can be a pleasant surprise to oneself. Until now I’ve vaguely favoured readings focused on character, theme, mystery, intrigue, mood... But in a crowded programme of experienced thrill-practioners, perhaps I ought to offer the closest I can to the red meat of sensation...? Some selections from the 'Confession', perhaps? Murder by scalpel, radical surgery, taboo seduction, perhaps even ‘the speculum scene’...?
Anyhow, if you’re going to FantasyCon this Saturday or know anybody who is, please do speak of me and speak kindly and let them know where I'll be at 1030 - that's room 134, the Royal Albion! - otherwise, being a stranger by the shore and all that, it’ll likely be a case of in and out and barely time for fish and chips on the pier before I’m back off to London, no doubt with Quadrophenia on my iPod.

Financial Crisis Redux: We are all Japanese now

2011-09-20T16:16:00.000-07:00

Very interesting this week to see the sudden, riled, edgy urging of a Plan B For Growth/Contra Recession by a good many financial journalists – this urging upon a Chancellor who clearly has wished to be seen as a Man of Iron, and whose confidence is probably rice-paper-thin right now, as the economic forecasts start to turn over the ballast in everybody’s guts. In these circumstances it’s no wonder that Ed Balls, with his mildly psychotic and probably permanent air of assurance, is unusually happy to be asked to give a lot of sound-bites on the general theme that, since everyone in the world has now stopped spending money, then it’s time for the UK to resume the practice.
I can see that George Osborne hates the thought of humiliation, maybe even more than the rest of us. I hadn’t thought he could bear the idea of calling a slippage on his deficit-reduction programme. But I’m truly curious to see what else he can do now. No amount of small-beer red-tape-cutting or enforced ‘flexibility’ upon the labour market, no greenbelt home-building or income tax tinkering can turn around the grim figures. Some big infrastructure projects – ‘public works!’ – would be the smallest start, and very welcome to my mind – but themselves inconceivable as of a few months ago, and thus a lot for Osborne to swallow. Let’s see if he can face the idea of ‘finding’ money to stuff into the public maw.
My problem with Ed Balls – sorry, one of my problems – is that I don’t believe he’s bothered by the notion of rebalancing the economy, only with slackening the pace of deficit reduction, and what that could mean for him in the eyes of Labour’s usual voters. And I don’t think that’s an adequate showing from an Opposition in these circumstances. Obviously no Opposition would put up costed plans this early in a parliament but, given the State of the Nation and the slough of public disregard that Labour's fallen into, I think they could do themselves a favour by seeming to be chomping at the bit with smart cost-efficient fiscal ideas.
I’ve been intrigued to see the amount of press play given (as here in the New York Times) to Adam S. Posen, the American economist on the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, ‘a leading expert on what is often called Japan’s lost decade’ who sees the US and Europe as repeating ‘the same monetary policy mistakes that left Japan’s once-robust economy stagnant...’ Posen is nakedly advocating ‘more monetary stimulus’, and I admit I don’t see why that’s going to work now rather than before. But I’m more interested in his conviction that ‘the Bank of England and the British Treasury form a government-backed bank to make small-business loans.’
I've just written a long paper about the prospects for the North East England economy, to be discussed at the Durham Book Festival next month. It was largely concerned with urging entrepreneurialism and growth in SMEs. However I fought shy of too many policy prescriptions, just because the paper assumes tight-fisted Tories in power until 2015 at the very least. But then maybe Osborne really is about to un-constrict the spending sphincter, in which case all bets are off. If I were urging positions upon Labour now... well, business-targeted job-creating infrastructure projects, the full gamut of tax breaks for start-up businesses (research, employees, profits), establishment of sector-specific state investment banks, vocational training (also adult re-training) in hi-tech, digital and green energy skilling... yeah, I'd probably be focusing on things like that, in respect of what the state can do as an engine for growth, and not just a dispenser of hardship funds.

The Most Recent Riots of 2011

2011-08-21T15:14:00.000-07:00

Of all the persuasive things I read in July perhaps the one that took up most solid residence among my mental furnishings was a 'tweet' by the excellent PatrickOsgood, Assistant Editor at Oil & Gas Middle East magazine: “We're screwed, right? By ‘we’ I mean flabby westerners in advanced economies...”
To wit: earlier this month I spent a week’s family holiday abroad, a proportion of which was spent watching BBCNews24, aghast, and debating the usefulness of plastic bullets in situations of violent mass public disorder... A friend with whose family we were sharing the holiday watched these bulletins alongside me with a special set of concerns – he being a producer for the BBC 10 O’Clock News, thus a keen-eyed judge of how well ‘the firm’ was doing in its coverage.
For me there was the special unease of goggling from afar at conflagration and mayhem in parts of North London (N17 and N22) where I used to live – contentedly in the main, among good people, if always feeling fairly rueful about the patches of public deprivation/squalor, and very often nervy/annoyed about the unnecessary levels of edginess on the street courtesy of young males whose chief ambition in life seemed to be making themselves look quite nasty. Still, as an impotent riot-watcher I had the consolation that my current manor (N8) was being spared too much shattering of shop windows. Instead it was Tottenham and Wood Green where the workless class of England smashed and grabbed armfuls of branded sportswear made in China and Vietnam.
I must admit, one of my most insistent feelings in watching the reportage and mulling over it was: fings ain’t what they used to be. To be precise, what I was seeing didn’t strike me as having the full-force ramifications of the Thatcher-era riots of 1981 that I remember, in Brixton, Southall, Toxteth, Moss Side et cetera. In 2011 I simply couldn’t see the point of summoning a Lord Scarman to pick over this wreckage: it just wasn’t an impressive sort of uprising. And by the time one heard the first reports of a millionaire’s daughter in court for nicking – it felt like a 'disenfranchised class'-type analysis wasn’t going to stay on its feet for long.
Arriving home again on Wednesday August 10 I found the heat had abated: the cab driver at Stansted presented me with the Sun, its front cover a mosaic of CCTV-busted rioters, the inner pages given over to a chorus of popular revulsion. Sixteen thousand additional police officers appeared to have worked the trick and laid down the law. (I understand David Cameron, unlike his Home Secretary, had been all for wheeling in the army. Good job cooler heads prevailed - I admit I was one who briefly got into a tizzy of what sort of force might be needed to dampen the rioters' ardour.)
That Wednesday night I watched the father of Haroon Jahan on the news, and burst into tears, as I suspect did others. His remarkable dignity and eloquence seemed to sum up a noticeably prevalent message: for shame. Meanwhile online I found (via Norman Geras) that Kenan Malik had said quite quickly most of what I’d been thinking. (I also endorse pretty much all of what’s written here by Will Davies at his Potlatch blog.)
In a mood of dubious nostalgia I did allow myself a glance back the other day at Alexander Cockburn’s long essay ‘The Underclass’, published by the Village Voice in January 1982, subsequently collected in Cockburn’s Corruptions of Empire (Verso), and dominated by an interview with Darcus Howe, who was then billed as ‘editor of Race Today.’ Interestingly Howe spoke witheringly of a Britain ‘saturated with the concept of welfare’, a placebo that black Britain had come to see as ‘no cure for the cancer’ – the cancer being the threat of ‘permanent unemployment.’ Cockburn ended pointedly with this interpretation of events in the Manchester vicinity by Howe: ‘Whites from Withenshawe (sic), blacks from Moss Side, no prearranged plan. They gather. There is a shout, “On to Moss Side police station.’ That gives you some indication. You must have a convergence of interests in order for that to happen...’ The question, of course, is what those interests can be defined as, and what they amount to. But in any case on the occasion of the Riots of August 2011 I’ve yet to hear or read a resolute class analysis akin to Howe’s of 1981 (or rather, yet to hear or read one that wasn’t outstandingly foolish.)
Finally, what to make of Tony Blair’s contribution to the post-mortem (‘Blaming a moral decline for the riots makes good headlines but bad policy’)? Very well made, I’d say, and firmly on the side of ‘decent law-abiding’ people who don’t want their homes and livelihoods wrecked by reprehensible gang-bangers. But this reflective passage is, for me, ‘the money’:
“I would say that today's generation is a) more respectable b) more responsible and c) more hard-working than mine was. The true face of Britain is not the tiny minority that looted, but the large majority that came out afterwards to help clean up. I do think there are major issues underlying the anxieties reflected in disturbances and protests in many nations. One is the growing disparity of incomes not only between poor and rich but between those at the top and the aspiring middle class. Another is the paradigm shift in economic and political influence away from the west...”
Ah yes, the fading of the West, which is where (with Patrick Osgood) we came in.
Oh, and finally (2): Blair is quite right to express irritation at sections of the media given to “a high- faluting wail about a Britain that has lost its way morally.” In particular one of the most irritating things about the (generally Blair-hating) tenor of left-liberal England is where it joins hands with the most reactionary right in heeding the sermons of Peter Oborne, the churchy Sherborne Tory who is very good at sounding morally vexed by everybody living outside his parish. Oborne lacks even that one highly redeeming feature of Toryism: namely its departure from the Spartan Left in seeing Man not as some perfectable socio-political unit in a grand Utopian project but, rather, as a fallen creature of whom we must simply try to make the best that we can. Still, Socialist Worker and Daily Mail meet over drinks in their shared capacity to get disgusted by the slightest traits of their fellow men and women, and that is one party from which I’ll always run a mile.

Norman Geras on the fading of blogs

2011-08-21T07:28:00.000-07:00

Where was I...? Oh yes, Norman Geras. Proprietor of as thoughtful a weblog as you're liable to find, he made these comments last month (on the eighth anniversary of his celebrated site) in respect of some recent "difficulties in blogging":

"Some of the reasons for them are obvious: this particular debate has been had, and one doesn't feel as if there's anything to add; even if there may be, I don't feel like writing about the same thing yet again; just temporarily the 'topics of the day' don't appeal to me; even if I've got something to say, other people are already saying it, saying it a billion times - in the press, on the blogs, on Twitter; and so on. Whatever the case, until very recently I never had trouble finding what to post about; now sometimes I do. Yesterday I came across [a] post by Andrew Sullivan, in which he says that if it isn't updated at least twice daily it ain't a blog; and ideally it should be updated four or five times a day... Anyone who's blogged for any length of time will know why the rate of posting on so many blogs begins to fade, and why those who pack in blogging altogether, which is many many people, do so. And how many former bloggers now prefer Twitter, as being much less demanding of their time..."

Norm has decided to carry on, though. And so, confound it, shall I. We shall see quite what I'm made of in short order, shall we not...? In the meantime you can of course find me on Twitter...

Normblog: Tolstoy, The False Note, and the problem of Evil

2011-07-14T03:04:00.000-07:00

Norman Geras, Professor Emeritus of Government at Manchester University, has since 2003 been fashioning a notable second career for himself as a blogger and tweeter on issues of the day and assorted enthusiasms. A regular feature of the blog is 'Writer's Choice', wherein (as Geras described it for the Guardian) "novelists, poets and other writers have contributed their thoughts on books that have been important to them in one way or another, or books they have simply enjoyed." I am very pleased to say that I am the latest invitee to contribute a screed of this sort to Normblog: my choice was Tolstoy's novella The False Note, also known as The Forged Coupon, and you will find the full essay here. Meantime, a taster:

"I find The False Note an endlessly involving piece, and I feel it ought to be more widely known and celebrated. It is a kind of parable about money (we might better say 'currency') and the problem of evil: how a simple exchange of tainted money introduces a current of malevolence into social relations. Yet it resists a straightforwardly materialist analysis. As the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia read it, Tolstoy exhibits 'a strange conviction that every society creates evil according to some kind of natural secretion, as certain molluscs produce pearls'."

I might have said in the piece - but it was long enough already - that Robert Bresson's masterly 1983 film L'Argent is derived from the first of the two parts of The False Note, the setting transposed to contemporary France. Below, the last movement from L'Argent and the great Bresson in discussion of his work.

Esquire (August 2011) now on stands: I'm Back...

2011-07-08T04:24:00.000-07:00

Well now, there's a familiar form of headline for this blog, albeit one that's been out of action for roughly 18 months... Nonetheless, it's a fact that I have written something in Esquire this month, and I'm very glad about it since a) I've remained a Contributing Editor in the time since my last contribution, even without troubling the scorers, as it were; and b) the magazine has a new editor in the excellent Alex Bilmes, who has a raft of fine ideas and has been putting them vigorously into practice since his appointment earlier this year. (To wit, the Esquire website has had a refurbishment recently and is worth your perusal.)
My essay for the August ish straddles the categories of 'Personal/Humour/Lifestyle', I suppose. It's called 'Fitness First?' and it's the up-and-down story of the 20 or so years that I've spent intermittently belonging to gyms and working out: a pastime that has brought me joy and pain, you may be sure - and for which I now feel the need to make an accounting in my life. Why am I harping on this, you ask? Well, because I'm one of many 40-year-old men who received a new gym membership on said birthday from their better half. And, possibly against the run of the mill, I was very glad to have it - because a small but significant part of my adult life has been spent hefting heavy lumps on metal around padded or reinforced floors. But, but... you do get to an age where the gravity of time sits heavy on your shoulders. As I say in the piece:

"... at this new Health Club of mine the fight I am picking is with Nature. My genes having been tidily downloaded to my kids, I am now expendable: Nature has written me off, reckons it has no further business with me. And Nature might be right. Every ten years a man loses four-to-six pounds of muscle. After 40 his testosterone levels ebb, his body hair shrivels, his spine weakens until he’s nearly as titchy as Tom Cruise.
I don’t presume to reverse that process, merely to ward it off just for a bit. I want to feel my heart racing, but under my control; to feel some vigour again in my limbs; to recapture that natural high of physical exertion – the high that brings no self-hating hangover, leaves one indeed feeling better in the morning. My body remembers all this, however vaguely. Because I have a long, complex relationship with gyms..."

To read on, as I'm sure you're dying to on the basis of that, give yourself a present of the August Esquire, it's £4.25 and there's loads of lovely stuff in it. Wrapped round the exterior and draped across a few pages therein is Abigail Clancy (pictured), who I believe has just enjoyed the loveliest of wedding days and is thus newly married to a professional footballer and accomplished body-popper.

Freud & Jung: The Movie!

2011-07-03T14:07:00.000-07:00

On the subject of psychoanalysis - well, I've never been there, you understand, but I'm an admirer both of Freud and of Jung, and I'm quite sure that I’ve learned many profound things from the writings of both that, taken together, are not exactly complementary. As such I have waited keenly for a film of The Talking Cure, Christopher Hampton’s play about the great Austrian, the great Swiss, and Ms Sabina Spielrein. Now that film is nigh, under the title A Dangerous Method, which references a book by John Kerr that was (as far as I know – I’ve not read it) the first to take seriously the importance of Spielrein to the history of psychoanalysis on the grounds that she was first a patient of Jung’s and subsequently a disciple of Freud’s. As I understand it, what Kerr didn’t know when he wrote A Very Dangerous Method was that Spielrein and Jung had been lovers during his treatment of her.
Hence the special drama of this story, for which Hampton was the ideal dramatist – Freud and Jung as mentor-and-protégé pioneers in the fathoming of the unconscious; Jung becoming the errant son who succumbed to sex with a patient, then proceeded to an occult-spiritual philosophy that alienated him yet further from rational, disapproving ‘father’ Freud; and Spielrein as the woman who first occasioned this intellectual dispute, then went on to make a discerning contribution to it.
The richness of all this is obvious. Is it ‘a movie’ though? I’ll be intrigued to see whether Cronenberg follows Hampton’s play in jumping forward and revealing to the audience at the halfway stage what was Spielrein’s eventual fate. It’s also worth noting that Paul Schrader, an equally fine piece of ‘casting’ for this project, tried to write it as a play for the National Theatre in 1982 at the prompting of Peter Hall, but could never quite finish his script. (‘It’s such a great story’, Schrader told Kevin Jackson for the excellent book Schrader on Schrader, ‘that it took me a long time to realize that it just wasn’t working.’)
For Cronenberg Sabina Spielrein is played by Keira Knightley who also gets top billing over Viggo Mortensen (Freud) and Michael Fassbender (Jung). For me as for many viewers, this is a small matter of concern, but presumably for many other viewers it will be why they turn out for this movie. So, we shall see… Here at any rate is the trailer.

"The Good of the Novel"

2011-07-03T13:25:00.001-07:00

During my adolescence I regularly day-dreamed of growing up to be the sort of fellow who'd be asked to pontificate in print on the current condition of The Contemporary Novel... or I should say that I day-dreamed about this as regularly as I did about winning Wimbledon or taking Susannah Hoffs to the pictures. Still, as of now I have my wish in respect of the first of these, and here you can read my contribution to an online symposium occasioned by the Faber essay collection The Good of the Novel.

The Possessions of Doctor Forrest

2011-07-02T16:01:00.000-07:00

Just to don my crimson-lined Prince of Darkness cape for a short moment: there was a nice review of Doctor Forrest in Scotland on Sunday recently, and before that another very pleasing one from The Scotsman. Scotland is certainly doing me a world of good right now, for I am also (with Kevin MacNeil) the first act on at the 2011 Edinburgh Book Festival. Meantime the Forrest blog continues to be a crypt-like repository for my blackest and gravest thoughts, with recent musings on Hammer Horror, Robert Aickman, Doctor Who and Yukio Mishima...

Sylvain Marveaux is a Geordie. As is Demba Ba.

2011-07-02T15:45:00.000-07:00

In a fortnight NUFC return to action, as they say, with the first pre-season outing at Darlington Arena, followed by a US tour and games against Sporting Kansas City, Orlando City and Columbus Crew. How's the recruitment plan looking then? Alan Curbishley, sorry, Pardew has said "I am really pleased with the way the squad is taking shape." But Al, shouldn't that be more like "Je suis vraiment heureux avec la façon dont l'équipe prend forme."? Because aside from those long-term crocked lads who "will feel like new signings" (and actually this does go for one of them too) we seem to be entirely in the business of adding Frenchmen or French-speakers to the ranks.
No, since you ask, I'm not over L'Affaire Carroll yet. True Faith speaks for me:

"I’d foolishly allowed myself to imagine myself sitting in my SJP pew watching the Bensham Van Basten develop over the next ten years into a bona fide No.9 legend, smashing goals in, leading the line and providing the essential link between team and the terraces he also supported the club from... But the fact is Andy Carroll is not at Newcastle United but £35m of Liverpool’s money is... I didn’t imagine that the big answer to Carroll’s departure would be Demba Ba, on a free with a dodgy knee... and us having had the bum’s rush from No.1 and No.2 targets Gameiro and Gervinho."

The swing to Labour and the margin of error

2011-07-02T15:19:00.000-07:00

It does shame me somewhat that I have so little to say on politics at present, which is why I've not said it. Recently I felt my sense of malaise and stagnation on burning issues of the day was expressed to some extent by this PoliticsHome/YouGov poll on the NHS that found 'while voters largely support reforms in principle, they don’t trust the Conservatives to deliver them in practice.' Which leaves us where exactly? Meanwhile, flinching and flip-flopping seems to have become the Cameron Way, and if he thinks that's the way by which he'll win an outright majority in 2015 then he's a braver man than I thought. The creeping lack of assurance, the tendency to panic would be more dangerous for Cameron in the short term, I'm sure, were it not for the peculiar character of the Leader of the Opposition.
Ed Miliband has quite clearly had a result or two at PMQs lately, and Labour's poll lead looks to me to be six points more often than not. This ought to have the look of a strong position: not least since there is no realistic chance of Ed being ousted from the post, no real money in the Labour current account that hasn't come by way of Ed's avowed admirers in the Movement, and no form in the Labour Party for ditching leaders other than those who have won three general elections. And yet... are Labour behind this leader? Are Labour voters actively keen on him? Are undecided voters persuaded by him? I only ask these questions at this time of night because there's no need to answer them.
The delightful photo above I have borrowed from this Jim Pickard piece in the FT.

Kate Bush: The thrill and the hurting

2011-06-23T15:41:00.000-07:00

Bloomsday this year brought me a very pleasant surprise in Slate magazine’s splendid set of links for celebrating Ulysses online. It also reminded me that in spite of best intentions I’ve yet to get to a record shop and purchase Kate Bush’s The Director’s Cut, with its allegedly ‘warmer’ and ‘more organic’ re-workings of her material circa 1989-1993, including the new ‘Sensual World’ with approved extracts from Joyce. However the great video jukebox that is YouTube has given me a preview and... well, I don’t know. The musical-production fashions and stylings of the 1980s, which seemed old to me by round about 1990, have a fair bit to commend them now, I’d say. And I don’t think that too much of The Sensual World as an album is really improvable (The Red Shoes rather more so...) But, eh bien, I think one generous YouTube commenter puts it best: ‘None of these songs are better than the originals, i don’t think they were meant to be, it’s just good to add them to your collection and enjoy them for what they are...’ That is indeed the spirit.

The Faber Social: It Lives, and Shall Live Again...

2011-06-23T14:24:00.000-07:00

A late word for the inaugural Faber Social which took place on Monday June 6: a really good night, auguring well for many more top-drawer monthly literary-musical evenings ahead. (The proceedings had a nice write-up from Max Liu here). The audience were savvy and engaged, both for myself and David Peace in our discussion of gothic themes, and for Simon Reynolds and Bob Stanley on pop's endless fixation upon recycling. The Social as a venue is both suitably intimate for dialogue and good and lively for the purpose of spinning a few tunes. (Highlight for me having retired to the bar was hearing Simon Reynolds drop John Martyn's 'Big Muff'). But the overall top moment was hearing David Peace's incantatory reading of the 'Battle of Orgreave' chapter from GB84. I must admit that when I headed down the steps into the Social basement for the start of the night's proceedings I was feeling roughly twice my age, yet seeing my face on the promotional posters alongside the DJs was a kind of anti-ageing serum for the soul...

Bloody England in the Summertime

2011-06-23T14:19:00.000-07:00

I'll always remember June of 2006: a new home, our firstborn child just a few months’ old, the drama of Zidane's swansong World Cup on the telly, and – I’m certain of this – a kindling early summer heat that came off the very paving stones beneath one’s feet. Conversely the cold, dreich summer of 2007 I'll always associate with Gordon Brown. (And sometimes I feel like we're still living through it.) As for 2011 – we’ve now had the Solstice, a day I always think of as Great Gatsby Day ("I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it...") and still we’re peering up at drear skies, scouring for patches of blue... Good lord, is this how it will be from now on?

The Possessions of Doctor Forrest: News/Reviews/Events Round-Up

2011-06-06T06:40:00.000-07:00

How've I been keeping? Busy, thank you very much. Here's the current report card on me and my Doctor Forrest:
- A couple of pleasing reviews, from Louise Welsh in the Financial Times ("Richard T Kelly has put his own original stamp on the gothic horror genre") and Ben Felsenberg in Metro ("Richard T Kelly's new novel is a rattlingly good yarn that wears a bloody Gothic heart on its sleeve")
- Last weekend I had the pleasure of writing about The Brothers Karamazov for The Independent's 'Book of a Lifetime' and on Yukio Mishima's The Sea of Fertility for The Guardian's 'Re-Readings'.
- I am interviewed here by Professor Glennis Byron at the University of Stirling's excellent Gothic Imagination website.
- An extract from the opening of the novel is online here at Writers' Hub.
- And I am in conversation tonight with David Peace on matters of the gothic and occult and Northern, at the first 'Faber Social' event in central London. Come ye all, ye be welcome...

Trailer for The Possessions of Doctor Forrest!

2011-05-27T01:53:00.000-07:00

(Connoisseurs of the North London Gothic may care to know that the scenic element of this clip in which I read from and discuss the themes of The Possessions of Dr Forrest was shot in the grounds of Abney Park Cemetary, Stoke Newington.)

Dr Forrest at Stoke Newington LitFest 05.06.2011

2011-05-27T01:44:00.000-07:00

I’m delighted to say I will be appearing at an event as part of the 2nd annual Stoke Newington Literary Festival on Sunday June 5, details of which are now available at the festival website but which I reproduce below. I’ll have the special pleasure of being part of a panel of fine practitioners in fiction and non-fiction, with whom I daresay I have a good few things in common. Doctor Forrest obviously belongs more to the genre of Horror than to Crime but without doubt it partakes of crime/procedural elements that were the product of research on my part, just as Crusaders, ostensibly a social-realist or state-of-the-nation novel, also included criminal acts and their investigation in a drawn-from-life fashion. So I’m looking forward to chipping in to what I hope will be a lively conversation, with the added marquee value of the terrific recent TV adaptation of Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

The Serious Crime Squad
Sunday June 5 @ 6pm
Abney Public Hall, 73a Stoke Newington Church Street, London N16 0AS
Tickets £6. Click here to book online.
Of all genre writing, crime – both true crime and fiction – hold an enduring fascination for millions of readers, male and female, young and old. So much so that crime writing has grown much bigger than ‘genre’ can contain, making considerable inroads into ‘serious’ literature and historical research. Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (recently dramatised on ITV), Kate Colquhon’s Mr Briggs’ Hat: The Sensational Account of the First Railway Murder (set in Hackney), Chris Paling’s Nimrod’s Shadow and Richard T Kelly’s The Possessions of Doctor Forrest, are all stunning examples. Together, this is an astonishing panel of some of crime’s most exciting writers. The Guardian’s Alex Clark chairs.

Doctor Forrest - The Film

2011-05-27T01:40:00.000-07:00

This post is merely to acknowledge that Doctor Forrest is now in development as a motion picture with the excellent Festival Films and their chief producer Ray Marshall. Your humble correspondent is fully ‘attached’ as the project’s screenwriter, and is currently on work on the highly intriguing task of re-tooling his own novel into a viable film script. The Festival site makes a very handsome home for the Forrest jacket, methinks, and I would hope the tag-line on the dedicated page is just the sort of thing to have people racing to book tickets and babysitters once the finished product rolls out at Odeons Everywhere…

When an eminent cosmetic surgeon vanishes mysteriously, his two oldest friends investigate his disappearance – only to discover that Doctor Forrest has unleashed a diabolical evil that could destroy them all…

Yes, as the showmen used to say, we’ll sell you a seat but you’ll only need the edge of it.

Bookhugger column: "Is There Such a Thing as a Male Book?"

2011-05-05T04:43:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to be back onstream in columnist capacity over at Bookhugger, and this month the chaps were kind enough to put in my lap a stimulating brief, namely a response to a fascinating piece on a useful topic written by Molly Flatt (pictured right) over at the affiliated Bookdiva. Said topic is the influence of one's gender upon one's writing and reading choices/preferences. And I daresay we all have a share in that subject. Pictured left, of course, is the late Norman Mailer and his late wife, the last of the six women he married, Norris Church Mailer. And you can imagine that I brought Norman into this discussion, without, I hope, doing anyone a disservice...

NUFC: Limping to the line

2011-05-01T14:42:00.000-07:00

Gettin’ beat 3-0 off Liverpool is a wearyingly familiar experience, as indeed is getting beat 2-0 off Liverpool. Nine years ago one such 3-0 finally robbed the wheels off what had been our very real push to the top-division title under Bobby Robson - wistful to think back on it now, but in that season of 2001-02, with 11 games to play, the title was mathematically in our hands. Seems like dreamland tonight...
Today’s special discomforts: for one it was our owld manager King Kenny in the Liverpool dugout, looking like he’s really enjoying his football, as he never once appeared during his tenure at NUFC (at least not after the day of his coronation and mandatory mobbing by adoring Geordies.) And for two, owld King Kenny reckoned it would be canny just to bring on Andy Carroll for a 20-minute run-out even with the match won. You could have spared us that one, Ken, let it ride for another day... It’s only amazing that Carroll didn’t score, since NUFC alumni nearly always score crucial goals against us, as do the non-Toon-related glamour signings of other clubs, especially when they’ve otherwise been having a lean spell (so back Fernando Torres for a brace at least when we face Chelsea on May 15.)
The corollary to this gloom is that Newcastle rarely ever get to enjoy a reciprocal pleasure in ‘putting one over.’ I remember the hype and the chatter back in 2005 as Michael Owen prepared to face Liverpool for the first time in a black-and-white shirt. What happened that day? That’s right, we’s got beat 2-0, and Owen had the sort of disconsolate just-in-it-for-the-money-pal day that was his stock-in-trade at Newcastle.
The excellent True Faith seemed to me to get it right with this Carroll comment piece before the game. The sad - indeed pathetic - thing is that I dreamed I met Carroll last night – honest – in a crowd amid some kind of post-training canteen chat situation; and he seemed a very nice lad, and told me casually that he reckoned he’d probably be re-signing for Newcastle eventually, after the whole Liverpool thing had gone off the boil... So, alas, I clearly can’t say I’m over this thing yet. Worse, a Liverpool fan of my acquaintance, a good lad generally speaking, seems to have no conception of the pain he causes when he tells me cheerily how much he’s looking forward to having Jose Enrique on the left of defence next season.
In other Toon news the mighty nufc.com kindly transcribes some comments from Kevin Keegan uttered in his capacity as ESPN pundit – another warning that Carroll’s transfer fee will not be spent on new players, and this about our erstwhile #9:

"He (Carroll) was on the fringe when I was there. He was raw. This kid is the best header of the ball I’ve ever seen. That’s his biggest plus point for me... His minus points have always been there. Can he get his head down? Can someone make him realise that all he has to do is train hard, work hard and be a good pro for 10 years and he’ll be a very rich boy? He needs to get rid of the other stuff...”

Ah yes, the other stuff. ‘Very nice lad’? In your dreams, as they say...

'This Must Be The Place': Cannes 2011

2011-04-14T07:11:00.000-07:00

Thankful news emanates from Cannes HQ that Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place has been afforded a competition berth at this year’s edition of the great festival. Sean Penn, as so often, will be competing against himself, as Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life also graces the line-up. I await both movies keenly, and look forward to discussing them with their leading man, for the benefit of the revised Sean Penn: His Life and Times which is due later this year or else early 2012.

'Oh let the sun beat down upon my face...'

2011-04-07T06:19:00.000-07:00

Since I now have multiple blogs going on, and since there is nothing happening in politics at present that I’m feeling especially strident about (other than a plan to resist AV on May 5) – well, in that light there is a certain temptation to convert this blog wholesale into a Led Zeppelin worship site. I won’t, you understand, but there’s a temptation...
It was only six months ago in Dublin that I learned (through a conversation with someone who worked on it) of the existence of the 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud, a recorded symposium and jam-session between Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White, three generations of ‘guitar hero’ if you like. I thought then that I ought to see it immediately: in fact I still haven’t, but the existence of this clip – in which Page instructs the other two in the genesis of the riff for Kashmir – reminds me that I’ve got something to look forward to.

'Doctor Forrest' has risen from the presses...

2011-03-29T06:47:00.000-07:00

Osborne's narrow choices, and ours

2011-03-24T15:15:00.000-07:00

I look at David Cameron and see someone who strikes me as passable. This is mainly – and, I concede, a tad worryingly – on account of his dignified, principled bearing on occasions when he has handled matters related to HM Armed Forces: most strikingly, the findings of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and, last week, the issue of deployment of British forces over Libya to enforce UN 1973.
The Libya question, it’s been widely noted, proposes more strongly than ever that Cameron is the ‘heir to Blair’. – a perilous mantle to hold, but you would count on Cameron not to be fazed by it. Even now one hears familiar critiques of his character – that he is a glib and shallow PR man, an aloof and pampered toff, merely Thatcher’s bastard offspring, i.e. one of the ‘same old Tories’, to use the lumbering terms of Labour’s current and hopeless leader. At times it seems to me that observers might as well resort to the analytical method of Harry and Paul’s old club buffers in this celebrated sketch.

Of course, Cameron is patently not a politician who could have been slotted (even by time machine) into one of Thatcher’s 1980s cabinets; and while he is undoubtedly several leagues more posh than me he looks (from my myopia-ridden remove) to be one who mixes well and without condescension (other than in his ripostes to the aforementioned Hopeless Labour Leader, who doesn’t even ‘speak human’ on what I’ve heard, for all that his fan club boasted otherwise those 7 long months ago.)
What does Cameron believe in? To quote from Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka, I think ‘he believes in himself.’ That, too, can be dangerous, a vulnerably Blair-esque distinction. But it certainly suggests someone who will not run into any of the nervous-wreck hazards of leadership, i.e. unlike the excruciating personal style of the now-invisible man whom Cameron replaced.
Approving Cameron to that degree, I find it easier to speak of all the things that are disagreeable about George Osborne, whom I doubt mixes well at all and, worse (as Martin Kettle argues here) seems to be trapped in some hellish mirror-image homage to the wiles of Gordon Brown. John Rentoul did no messing in describing Osborne's Budget speech of yesterday as “the most appallingly crafted, third-rate peroration of any parliamentary set piece I have had the misfortune to witness.”
You can probably trust the view of a Tory who trashes the first routinely scheduled Budget of a Conservative chancellor in 14 years: thus Fraser Nelson, today poring over the Office for Budget Responsibility's report, seeing no authentic pro-growth measures, only creeping inflation, steadily ahead of wages, until possibly mid-2013. (“Result: real wage falls, real drop in living standards and real misery.”) Nelson is avowedly a hardcore tax-cutter and deficit-slasher, believing too that the former aids the latter, and he criticises Osborne for insufficient zeal on the controversial issue of The Cuts (“In 2011-12, the estimated bill for debt interest will be £48.6 billion — a staggering £4.7 billion more than the estimate in the November forecast.”) This may be in part why John Rentoul, however scornful of Osborne's presentation, concludes that “overall, the Cameron-Osborne judgement on public finances seems more right than the Miliband-Balls one, so far as that can be defined.” Or as Martin Wolf puts it in the FT, "The UK is caught between a chancellor who insists his policies are perfect now and a shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, who insists that policy was perfect under Labour" - or, at least, Labour under the glorious leadership of Balls' padrone, Brown.
This week Rentoul quoted with permission a plaintive letter he'd had from one Darren Canning, a Labour member and campaigner:
“I keep hearing how a new generation is in charge of Labour now and keep wondering if there is any place left in it for me... All we have had to say is ‘Vote for us, we’re not Tories.’ It isn’t enough to get excited about... I am pulling out of active campaigning and am seriously thinking of leaving the party altogether. At least then I will be free to defend the last 13 years without constantly being accused of being ‘disloyal’. I am writing to you asking for counsel, is there a place for those who still value the New Labour project in this new Labour party or is it time to take a break?”
On one level you have to say, tough-mindedly, that there is no point whining about where Labour's internal convulsions have taken it, because it's hardly unprecedented, and there's hardly anywhere else to go. But to sound a tad less brusque - I do approve the Canning analysis.

Forrest/Finds: Comparative blogging...

2011-03-23T10:07:00.000-07:00

This rather feels like some weird form of autogenesis, but I'd like to point readers to some recent posts on My Other Two Blogs... Over at Faber Finds I've been especially enthused in relation to William Sansom and James Baldwin, and at the Doctor Forrest platform I've had a few things to say about Egon Schiele, William Hjortsberg, Bela Bartok, Alice Krige (pictured) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (What a dinner party that would be, no...?)

Stylist endorses Doctor Forrest...

2011-03-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

In case it ever be mooted that I invented the show of support given me by Stylist, of which I blogged a little while ago - well, here is the proof. 'The Chilling Read of the Year', mate. Black and white. I'm pleased to say there have been some other subsequent votes of confidence in the book, and I look forward to taking the wraps off these shortly...

True Faith: Inside Mike Ashley's Mind...

2011-03-17T17:08:00.000-07:00

I simply have to quote the following from the latest editorial at the staunch and pawky True Faith site:
"I’ve often wondered what Ashley gets from owning Newcastle United. Quite apart from why he bought the bloody thing in the first place. I don’t believe he makes money from United, he has hardly gilded his business reputation and if it’s a 50,000 new mates he was after when he walked into SJP in May 2007, then he has been sorely disappointed. Ashley has at rough estimate £900m+ available to him. If he never struck another bat in his life he would never want for anything and neither would his grandchildren or their grandchildren. I think I could think of a few things I’d rather be doing with my weekends than sitting in the best seat in a football stadium at the other end of the country on match day watching a team I aspire to be average go through the motions, surrounded by thousands of people who would love to see me fall down the steps and burst my face open..."

Mary Shelley@NT: Claire Tomalin, Daisy Hay (and me)

2011-03-13T06:04:00.000-07:00

It's happening this Tuesday March 15 2011, at 6:00 pm, and forms part of the National Theatre's 'Beyond Frankenstein' series of platforms in support of the current Nick Dear/Danny Boyle production. The session title is Frankenstein's Creator: Mary Shelley and it's billed as "a glimpse into the life of Mary Shelley with Claire Tomalin, biographer of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, and Daisy Hay, author of Young Romantics, celebrating the idealistic circle who were there when Shelley first told the tale of a monster." It will be chaired by me, is due to last 45 minutes, and will be followed by a booksigning with these two fine literary historians. Tickets £3.50 (£2.50 concessions). See you there then...?
Oh, and - girls? - the quite fabulous image to my left is actually available to wear on a babydoll tee-shirt courtesy of ThinkGeek here...

The Possessions of Doctor Forrest - the blog

2011-03-06T15:17:00.000-08:00

I've been claiming the existence of this for so long without substance, you would think I believed in ghosts or something... However I'm pleased to say the official blog companion to the novel - www.doctorforrest.co.uk - is now online, and in early dispatches you can read my deathless views on Bram Stoker's Dracula and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, with much, much more to come...

The ecstasies of Faber Finds...

2011-03-06T14:59:00.000-08:00

It's increasingly easy for me to wax evangelical about Faber Finds, also to think of myself as occupying the happiest little job in publishing, when my editorship of the list allows me - indeed requires me - to be continually sourcing and reading brilliant if neglected books. Over on the Finds blog I've had a few things to say lately - such as this about the counter-insurgency theories of General Frank Kitson, and this on the fiction, long and short, of William Sansom. Sansom (pictured) would be a poster-boy for what I'm saying here - just a fantastic writer, a phenomenal crafter of sentences, and a highly deft storyteller. He is truly worth getting to know on the page. And this biographical sketch is worth a look too.

David Peace, Mike Hodges, Newcastle, & Me

2011-03-01T01:57:00.000-08:00

The Story Engine is an annual forum (founded by filmmaker Ian Fenton in collaboration with New Writing North) where British screenwriters and filmmakers convene in Newcastle to discuss their work and working methods. This year’s focus is on crime fiction – genre’s conventions, creative choices within those, adaptation from book to film. Story Engine: Scene Of The Crime takes place at the Tyneside Cinema on Friday 11th and Saturday 12th of March. Scheduled for the Saturday at 11am is a session entitled THE BLOODY NORTH, where the brochure promises that Mike Hodges and David Peace will “explore the importance of place within the genre and discuss the problems of mixing fact and fiction.” (It further proposes that Peace’s celebrated Red Riding Quartet “lies squarely in the shadow of Hodges’ Get Carter.”)
I tell you all this because I’ll be the chairperson of this Peace-Hodges symposium, which will be a considerable pleasure for me as well as an interesting listen, I expect. There’s little I need say myself about Get Carter (though I do always like to remind people that it marked the memorable screen debut of the Pelaw Hussars Juvenile Jazz Band.) But I can’t wait to hear what Mike Hodges will say of it, looking back nearly 40 years to his masterpiece. I’m extremely keen to know what David Peace will think of it too. And then what will Hodges make of the TV version of Peace’s Red Riding, which was widely felt to be as strong a piece of British ‘cinema’ as these shores have produced in years? (I remember Nicolas Roeg marvelling to me about the James Marsh-directed 1980 episode in particular, wondering also why we’re not allowed to be so stylistically bold in movies anymore. I remember Paddy Considine enthusing to me, not long after 1980 was in the can, about the joyous experience he’d had on the production. I drop these names really because Considine and Roeg are, I think, the last two people I interviewed on stage, in November 2008 and August 2009 respectively. I used to do more of this stuff, actually, but I’m always happy to turn my hand to it, and am also available for children’s parties.
Two clips: Red Riding in US trailer form because it shows just how forcefully this package was assembled from a modern genre perspective. And the ageless , glorious beginning of Get Carter – because that’ll be me in a week’s time, see – on the train from London to Newcastle, the finest of all journeys, and one to which I paid homage in the opening chapter of Crusaders...

"A serious house on serious earth"

2011-02-28T17:04:00.000-08:00

I recommend Bruges (where Darling Wife & I just passed a very happy weekend) to anyone. Lovely hotels, fine museums and architecture, a pretty canal, great food and drink, and not one melancholy Irish assassin to be seen. To itemise the highlights? Well, I might speak of the Church of Our Lady (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk) with its glorious marble Madonna and Child by Michelangelo, its rococo pulpit by Jan Antoon Garemijn, its bronze tomb sculpture of Mary of Burgundy, and the boxed-up stained-glass of George and the dragon (beside which an old geezer poses above…) But then whenever I wander round a really great old church, as was our pleasure in Bruges, I do always find myself wondering what finer thoughts Alan Bennett would be having were he in my shoes...

Richard Thompson: Holy Blues

2011-02-28T16:45:00.000-08:00

I have been reading, with much interest, the estimable Greil Marcus’s Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010. On the cover is a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle – ‘Why read anyone else’s work on Dylan?’ Well, you would do so given the fact that such a figure as Dylan is liable at any time to inspire more than just one worthy interpreter; furthermore, because for every one sentence of Marcus’s that you might agree with, there’s liable to be another that will have you dropping your bacon sandwich. To take just one from the latter subset: Marcus’s Village Voice dismissal of Oh Mercy (1989) as ‘shapely and airless’, characterising Dylan as an actor who was merely hitting marks chalked by producer Daniel Lanois. Well... apart from any dissenting listeners’ views, Dylan’s Chronicles would seem to suggest otherwise.
I must digress, though, because really I want to say something about Richard Thompson. Bear with me...
The scholar-journalist/filmmaker/bon viveur Kevin Jackson is, among his many claims on artistry, the authorised biographer of writer-director Paul Schrader, and it was in this capacity that in 1991 he filed a set report from New York for Sight & Sound concerning Schrader’s movie Light Sleeper. One of the many fascinating cineaste-matters discussed between the two therein was Schrader’s quest to score his movie with a sequence of songs that would have both an authorial connection and a linking, pervading soulfulness to them. Schrader first called upon his friend Bob Dylan, for whom he’d once directed a promo clip. The hope was that Dylan would license a number of songs, chiefly from Oh Mercy. But Dylan wasn’t having it. Thus a short-order head-scratcher for Schrader, on which Jackson tried to be of some assistance in proposing alternatives. Who could deputise for Bob Dylan? Van Morrison? ‘Too Irish’ was Schrader’s understandable opinion. Richard Thompson? ‘Maybe too English’ was, if I remember right, the final Schrader ruling...
But just as it’s no shame for George Eliot to be compared with Tolstoy even she’s adjudged to suffer slightly by the match-up – it’s quite true that in Richard Thompson England has a musical treasure/songsmith-guitar hero to set by the finest the world might offer. Somehow I managed to miss that he was lately made an OBE. The Old Kit Bag is my favourite of his recent albums, 'Gethsemane' (below) my favourite song thereupon. Thompson is of course a practising Muslim, and his faith has never inflected his work quite as thoroughly as Dylan’s did his c. 1979-1981. But the cadences of the preacher are present always, nonetheless.

NUFC: Bugger-All Money

2011-02-28T16:29:00.000-08:00

How are things in black and white then? 36 points on the board as February ends, right enough – a decent place to be. Personally I would want 43 for safekeeping, remembering what happened not so long ago to West Ham... But the main point is that this Newcastle team have shown plenty spirit in adversity. It’s not been a bad season yet, on balance, and that is quite something, given the sum of what’s been inflicted on supporters, again as before and always, by its repulsive present ownership.
Andy Carroll is gone and I must live with that, as must all black-and-white-eyed supporters, including those who actually believe that a shred of the £35 million we got for Carroll will be re-invested in the team. For the prosecution, though, I call Kevin Keegan, who talked to Gabby Logan at the BBC for a spot transmitted tonight and who cited his own thoughts when recently he heard Alan Pardew telling the press about his hopes for what he’d do with the Carroll money: “Alan – you ain’t gonna get any of that...”

Elaine May: Largely Unsung, Yet So Sing-able

2011-02-17T01:52:00.000-08:00

Back in the mid-1990s I worked a while at the British Film Institute on a number of documentaries about great filmmakers, and there I got to know many very talented and knowledgeable people, among them Mary Albert, a trained film editor who was also engaged part-time in a doctoral thesis on slow motion. So she and I used to have plenty of good chats about finessing matters of cinema, but I don’t think anything quite topped the day when we realised we were both avid fans of Elaine May’s Ishtar and – in the course of our animated conversation, and much to the consternation of the rest of the office – began to sing aloud snatches of the movie’s many musical numbers – ‘Telling the Truth Can Be Dangerous Business’, ‘The Lawnmower Song’, ‘Hot Fudge Love (Cherry Ripple Kisses)’ etc etc.
This is how we the anointed feel about Ishtar in particular, and May’s stuff in general. It would be more socio-culturally acceptable to say one were mainly a fan of the classic Nichols/May material c. 1950s/60s and, of course, The Heartbreak Kid (1972), which is probably rated as her greatest cinematic success. But for me you have to start out by defending the work that clearly served to terminate May’s directorial career, and not just on account of its commercial failure. If you read Peter Biskind’s recent biography of Warren Beatty you will be treated to the view – advanced chiefly by Ishtar’s genius production designer Richard Sylbert, but supported by significant others – that May ‘can’t direct.’ That's funny, and may be true on some level, but there really aren't that many movies I love more than Ishtar. I wrote the following in Ten Bad Dates with De Niro:

I like to imagine a parallel universe wherein May’s comedy is considered an endlessly quotable classic, hailed by the worthier critics for its accurate reflection of US foreign policy in the Middle East, MP3 files of its adeptly terrible songbook keenly swapped. None of that is ever going to happen on this planet; but such are the virtues discussed on rare occasions when two or more Ishtar fans are gathered. The rest of the world believes that May wasted Columbia’s money on some imbecile script allowing Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty to insult the audience as klutzy New York songwriters who dream of being Simon and Garfunkel. The duo wind up in Morocco, buffeted between leftist guerrilla Isabelle Adjani and CIA man Charles Grodin. This colossal commercial failure, funnily enough, is a heartening comedy about failure. Watch Beatty trying earnestly to talk Hoffman out of a suicide jump: ‘It takes a lotta nerve to have nothing at your age… Most guys would be ashamed. But you've got the guts to just say, ‘To hell with it.’ You say you’d rather have nothing than settle for less.’ The stricken look of dawning love on Hoffman’s face upon hearing this is worth your money alone.

A prominent member of the Elaine May Defence League is my pal Ryan Gilbey, first-rate film critic at the New Statesman. A few weeks ago I posted some YouTube clips of May on Facebook, just in a whimsical late-night spirit, but happily these prompted Ryan to devote an entire blog column to his May-love, which you can read here. One of Ryan’s specialist subjects is the ‘golden age’ of American moviemaking between, roughly speaking, Bonnie and Clyde and Raging Bull, and he places May adroitly in that moment, praising her ‘prickly sensibility’ as ‘consistent with the kind of downbeat, morally penetrating US cinema that was prevalent in the 1970s.’
If you don’t know her work, you’re wondering by now – is she actually funny? Decide for yourself. I shouldn’t say this but on YouTube you can watch the entirety of her wonderful A New Leaf (1971), which she not only directed but also shines in as a performer, playing – as Ryan thumbnails it – ‘a wealthy botanist earmarked for marriage and murder by a penniless former socialite (Walter Matthau).’
I also respectfully offer the following evidence. On the page, let’s start with her Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire circa 2009. Turning to YouTube, let's have her tribute to Mike Nichols at an AFI Lifetime Achievement gala, one of the bits that got Ryan writing; her in her beautiful youth, cracking up the Emmys with Nichols in 1959; and some choice cuts from the opening reel of Ishtar.

Frankenstein's Remains...

2011-02-13T04:40:00.000-08:00

I wrote a long piece for the Guardian that ran yesterday, on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, its context and legacy, and the new stage version at the National Theatre adapted by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle.
The essay took up a healthy double-page spread in the paper, but obviously even with 2000 words to spare you end up cutting out a fair when you’re discussing a subject with this much, ahem, life in it.
In respect of what message(s) Frankenstein carries for the wisdom and ethics of scientific/medical exploration – naturally I would have liked to say a few words about Mary Shelley’s framing device of Robert Walton, the polar adventurer-navigator leading a full ship’s crew in search of the Northern Passage when, his way obstructed by ice, he alights upon a frostbitten man chasing a half-glimpsed giant across the arctic terrain...
Walton is seeking paradise, he dreams of conferring ‘inestimable benefit...on all mankind to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole...or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet’. Of course he is also endangering his crew. As such Victor Frankenstein is a man he ought to meet. They are two masculine loners, obsessed by their own brilliance and taken by surprise when their great trespasses redound upon them. Frankenstein has enough dearly-bought wisdom to tell Walton to learn from his example, to see ‘how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge’, how wrong-headed is ‘he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.’
And yet at the death Frankenstein is back in dangerous self-delusion, excoriating Walton’s crew as they turn mutinous: ‘You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species… And now, behold, with the first… mighty and terrific trial of your courage, you shrink away…’
Then his dying words: ‘I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.’
So Frankenstein is seen to be in two minds as to how far and boldly a man should go in the spirit of discovery – and as I say in the piece I think Mary Shelley felt the same.
In his adaptation Nick Dear gets rid of Walton and starts proceedings fifty pages into Shelley. As he told me, he was very keen on the Walton material but found that it ‘didn’t get us swiftly into something that was meaty and bold.’ And the latter is how a play ought to be. Dear certainly does frame the debate for the audience through Victor’s refrain throughout the play: ‘We can only go forward. We can never go back.’ The ironies are there for us to mull over.
Nick Dear also offered some very interesting thoughts on the special challenge of adapting iconic often-done material: ‘I don’t really want to know what anyone else has done, ever’, he told me, saying that he hadn’t read any of the previous Frankenstein play-scripts. Danny Boyle was equally mindful of the cinematic heritage. According to Dear he first wrote his opening scene with ‘the creature lying horizontally on a slab, as in the movies. And one of Danny’s first notes was, ‘No, I want to have him upright on a frame, so it looks different...’
In respect of the movies: of course there is not a great deal of Mary Shelley in the famous Hollywood version of 1931, in which Boris Karloff – gaunt, hulking, square of skull, bolted at the neck but resolutely mute – sealed the iconography of Frankenstein (see below #1). Kenneth Branagh dug a ditch for himself by directing and starring in the 1994 movie entitled Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though his honourable try (even retaining the Walton figure) was gratuitously maligned, and had at least the virtue of a characteristically noble performance by Robert De Niro as the Creature (see below #2). Christopher Isherwood was bold enough to entitle his 1973 2-part television adaptation Frankenstein: The True Story, an amusing conceit given that Isherwood turns the tale into one of super-aesthetic homo-eroticism. I must say, though, that I’m a huge fan of Isherwood’s version, in which Michael Sarrazin is both movingly pitiable and ghoulishly malevolent (see below #3).
On that note, a last word from Nick Dear on one of his key departures from Shelley, namely the Creature’s realising of his chilling threat to be with Victor on his wedding night:
“... I thought, in a Victorian sense, [the creature] wreaking revenge on Victor Frankenstein by terrifying everybody and showing up and looking horrible might have been sufficient. But I suppose I was looking for ‘What’s the worst thing he can do to Victor, the really worst thing...?’

The ABBA songbook

2011-02-09T14:07:00.000-08:00

In recent weeks my elder girl’s Favourite Film pick has become the ‘ABBA musical’ Mamma Mia, which I’ve now watched about 36 times, more times than I’ve seen Au Hasard Balthazar, The Conformist or Viridiana (put together...) So, yeah, I know Mamma Mia pretty well now, and can even admire its vigour, its dramatic construction and canny appeal towards every imaginable audience demographic (except maybe Males between 28-34.) It’s no easy feat to be that popular, though the storytelling choices are just a bit easier in the genre of the wish-fulfilment Musical than they are in your standard Drama. (I was interested recently to read a hymn of praise on some creative/script-writing site to the supposedly exemplary narrative design of The Sound of Music, my elder girl’s Former Favourite Film. Yes, all very well, it moves along nicely, but I would say that when it comes to handing out the big plaudits and anointing the role models it’s not solely about how a story was told but why it was told, and with what ambition...) Sticking with what’s problematic about the creeping cultural dominance of the mass-popular form, I’ve been reading David Mamet’s Theatre, and had to laugh at his terse lament for the way all theatre on Broadway must now be tailored to the taste of the spectacle-&-star-loving Tourist: “No adult resident in London”, says Mamet, “would go to see the Crown Jewels, and no adult resident in New York went to see Mamma Mia, for to do so would have been culturally repugnant, branding him as a tourist, or dufus...”
Anyway, so, in a few weeks I’m due to go with the kids to see Mamma Mia in the West End...
Moving on – obviously I now have ABBA songs in my head morning, noon and night, which leads me to wonder: exactly how good were they? Better than Lady Gaga, whose ‘I Like It Rough’ has been ringing between my ears for the last 24 hours after one chance hearing? I suspect ABBA do deserve a fair bit of respect, especially for how their song-writing grew from foot-tapping pop tunes about falling in love to rather more wistfully melodic songs about getting divorced – which, of course, the two singer/songwriter couples that comprised the group famously did, in the late 1970s-early 1980s.
Of course there is in pop-musical appreciation this funny business of ‘credibility’ but then ABBA pretty much had that even when I was a lad. I seem to remember Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys hymning the ‘Bergman-esque’ period of the Divorcing Songs, which is maybe not so surprising, but better yet I recall the moody Ian McCulloch of Echo & The Bunnymen picking ‘The Winner Takes It All’ as one of his Top Ten Tunes on a Radio 1 show of the mid-1980s. The presenter asked him rather sarkily to say why, and he said in heavy and resolute Scouse, ‘It’s just a great song’...
My favourite, though, is this ‘un.

Gordon Burn on Gordon Brown

2011-02-03T02:43:00.000-08:00

The other day I had occasion to revisit the original transcript of the long interview I did with Gordon Burn and David Peace back in April 2008, set up by and written up for Esquire. Gordon died 18 months ago, not long before my younger daughter was born, and he's still very much missed, but I believe there are plans in the works to make a considered tribute/memorial to him later this year. Meantime, reading again his fascinating reflections on his work, in particular those grimly essential studies of murderers, I was relieved to be reminded of some simpler musings he had to offer on the then-Prime Minister, which to me show once again his great adeptness at seeing the story behind 'The Story':

"[Brown's] ineptitude in terms of being naïve about how the real world works is amazing, really. I think his lack of adeptness with the media and 'spin' - all the stuff he was supposed to stand for, and which for three or four months looked like a good thing - has just become an embarrassment. It indicates his lack of connection with the world, with people. He’s been living in Westminster since 1983, even before then when he was living in the manse and into student politics, he just seems like a total f***-up as a person. When he says he likes the Arctic Monkeys or his favourite programme is Strictly Come Dancing... you know it’s utter crap."

L'Affaire 'Andy' Carroll...

2011-02-02T16:11:00.000-08:00

... et les cons 'Gros Mike' Ashley et 'Degsy Llambias'... Eh bien, plus ca change... mais l'homme le plus sage est M. Keegan...
The 'disco' in the clip below, BTW, is at 02:15: 'Mike Ashley doesn't know anything about football... Derek Llambias knows even less.' But to be fair, Mike knows a lot about fizzy lager and can sell you a cheap pair of elasticated shorts, while Degsy is just the man for you if you happen to own a casino and are seeking some insufferable little big-mouth to run it.

Stylist: Dr Forrest 'The Chilling Read of 2011'!

2011-01-27T04:18:00.000-08:00

Commuting into town regularly again for the first time in a few years, I've only just begun to notice the free magazine Stylist, but I'll be paying it keen attention from now on because in a feature last week on books to look out for in 2011 it picked out The Possessions of Doctor Forrest as 'The Chilling Read of the Year.' This is really gratifying, so thanks to 'em. 'Chilling' is obviously the desired effect of this piece, so I was doubly pleased yesterday when one early reader of the proofs told me she'd been getting through it in the evenings, and had finally had to close all the windows and turn on all the lights round her house in order to steel herself for the end...

Bookhugger column: On Jonathan Powell's 'New Machiavelli'

2011-01-27T04:10:00.000-08:00

My second Bookhugger column of the month is now posted here, and with that out of the way I hope to read no more studies of British government between 1997-2007, at least not before my dotage... I should say I wrote and filed said column before the resignation of Alan Johnson and the appointment of Ed Balls, so... well, you can imagine my mood.

On Being a Whisky-Drinker

2011-01-27T03:43:00.000-08:00

My last birthday was a Big One and so I did rather well for gifts, not least in that I was presented with several very fine bottles of malt whisky over which I crowed for days to anyone who’d listen. In fact more than one friend was moved to remark that he ‘hadn’t known I was such a whisky drinker...’ Well, a bloody good thing too, pal, for if it were more widely known that I favour the amber then I daresay I’d receive a lot more of it on gift-giving occasions (since apparently I’m reckoned to be ‘a bit hard to buy for...’) And if there were racks upon racks of first-rate whisky just lying round my house all the time...? Aw boy, I’d be in trouble then.
Let me say quickly that out of all the malts I choose the Glenlivet, which is certainly not a connoisseur’s pick but one that you could put your house on. I won’t try to describe its complexity on the tongue and in the throat, sadly I’m not that accomplished a writer. I’ll just say that I began drinking it (as I began doing many things) on account of something I read by Norman Mailer – in this case, the early pages of Harlot’s Ghost where retired CIA man Harry Hubbard receives a nocturnal visit from his old spook associate Reed Rosen, offers him a dram and, while pouring, is annoyed to hear Rosen ‘go on about its merits.’ The main point is that Hubbard pours it neat – and ‘screw him if after all that praise he secretly wanted ice...’
The finest, most discerning piece of writing I know about whisky and its ways is Don Paterson’s poem 'A Private Bottling' from the 1997 collection God’s Gift to Women. If you don’t have it, do yourself a favour. The following stave offers only the barest flavour of a poem that concludes magificently with a glass raised in toast 'not to love, or life, or real feeling,/but to their sentimental residue;/to your sweet memory, but not to you...' But just as a passing evocation of the taste of the ambers - it's unimprovable.

O whiskies of Long Island and Provence!
This little number catches at the throat
but is all sweetness in the finish: my tongue trips
first through burning brake-fluid, then nicotine,
pastis, Diorissimo and wet grass;
another is silk sleeves and lip-service
with a kick like a smacked puss in a train-station;
another, the light charge and the trace of zinc
tap-water picks up at the moon’s eclipse.
You will know the time I mean by this...

Against AV

2011-01-25T13:56:00.000-08:00

This blog has had little to say on politics of late, possibly because this blog is increasingly Old, while politics has allegedly got New (while nonetheless looking to me about as sprightly as ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth.’) Consider this recent gobbet as quoted in the Independent:
‘A Labour source said: "Those opposing reform are from the old generation, rather than what some have called Generation Ed. Ed [Miliband] is prepared to work with Nick Clegg in the interest of something he believes in. This is what we mean when we talk about new politics..."’
Urgh. Still, it seems worth offering my tuppence on electoral reform, since everybody else is. I’m against AV, emphatically – there are no circumstances under which I’d welcome it, end of, even when first-past-the-post has been referred to by the Younger Generation as ‘an analogue system in a digital age’ that is due ‘an upgrade’... (Urgh 2.)
A chap called Mark Fuller spoke for me and others, I’m sure, on Twitter the other week: ‘I'll be voting No in May because I see nothing wrong in whoever gets the most votes winning...’ The most keenly-stated riposte to this position that I’ve heard is: ‘But under First Past the Post being popular just means having one more vote than the next guy.’ But it doesn’t ‘just’ mean that. Surely if it means one thing alone then that would be ‘popular as in none of the other ‘guys’ got more votes than you...’
The argument over the vote seems to be getting more fractious as we slouch toward polling day, and a good few advocates of AV have begun to wax irritable over the seeming non-comprehension by those of us agin. Let me at least try to nail down the planks of my position, in no particular order.
1. I’ve heard it said that AV reduces the need for tactical voting. I know that it didn’t manage to do so in the election for Labour leader last September. I know of several David Miliband supporters who, knowing DM would ‘get the most votes’ and yet was vulnerable still to defeat, voted for Ed Balls #1 and DM #2, solely because they rightly figured Balls would be the last of the also-rans to be eliminated. The ruse didn’t work on this occasion, but I daresay that particular electorate may know better next time. The point is that tactical voting will be alive and well under AV.
2. I’ve further heard it said AV ‘requires every MP to get the support of at least half their constituents.’ No it doesn’t require this. What if none of the voters, or a negligible share of them, chose to state more than one preference? This scenario is not so massively unlikely. And AV is bad, in any case, at measuring what we call 'support' in the proper, active sense.
3. This is the pro-AV line that makes my skin crawl – that it ‘categorically ensures that no candidate can be elected who is actively opposed by a majority of voters.’ No it doesn’t, per #2 above. Moreover, I find the notion of this spoiler/veto principle, to be wielded by the Mass of the Unpopular against S/he Who Got The Most Votes, pretty repellent. I’m sure most of its upholders would say they live in fervent abhorrence of the BNP (even though the polite name given to the menace in public seems to be ‘divisive candidates’, a category into which the aforementioned and perfectly mild David Miliband fell last September.) Well, I’d say first-past-the-post is doing well enough at reflecting and appropriately rewarding the BNP’s level of support in the country, which is negligible.
4. AV-ers have said that their desired reform will eradicate the supposedly moribund, corrupt (cf. expenses) business of ‘safe seats.’ Well, here we approach a crux. I do believe that most of us live where we live for good and/or salient socio/cultural-economic reasons, and that We the People then define the character of that given area, also the shade of political representation that area broadly endorses. By which measure, there ought always to be relatively ‘safe’ seats. The idea that the character of an area is something we think ought to be in continual flux from election to election seems to me queer, undesirable, worrisome.
5. I have to take this seriously as it is stated by the estimable John Rentoul:
‘[B]eing able to rank candidates in order of preference gives more voters more of a chance of a say in the outcome... and reduces wasted votes.’
Well, if you really feel you need such a 'say', that the right to vote is in itself just not enough, then I humbly defer to you. I speak as one who, in 22 years of voting, has not once had the pleasure of voting for a candidate who went on to win. But I can’t complain about any of those results that I failed to influence, and I accepted that my neighbours had spoken, their will had been done. If I had needed so badly to feel warm and fuzzy about my voting preference then I would have taken steps to up sticks and move elsewhere. But the area where you live needs to send one representative to parliament, and I believe it should be the person who comes out on top after the ‘Likes’ have been totted up – not the one who slips over the line once all the ‘Dislikes’ or ‘Don’t Minds/Not Bothereds’ have been brushed up into the dust-pan and dumped all over the count.
So, yes, I hope AV is voted down, but its supporters can take some small heart from my long and indefatigable record of having failed to endorse a winning candidate. For what it’s worth, the point I have found most incisive in all of this was made by the Independent’s Andy McSmith:
"What the FPTP does is give an unfair advantage to parties whose votes are geographically concentrated at the expense of those whose support is spread widely but thinly. In England, that is a bias in favour of both Labour and the Conservatives at the expense of all the others... The coalition government has passed legislation which simultaneously promised a referendum on the FPTP voting system and imposed a redrawing of constituency boundaries. The referendum may or may not reduce the bias in favour of the two big parties. Redrawing the boundaries will certainly benefit the Conservatives at the expense of Labour."

Kevin Macdonald's Life in One Day

2011-01-20T02:02:00.000-08:00

A conversation I had with the outstanding Scottish film director Kevin Macdonald for The List magazine, in respect of Macdonald's new movie Life in One Day, is now online here.
One of the glories of Macdonald's work is that he can tell compelling stories that reach out to wide audiences without compromising the discerning, questing intelligence that informs his choices of what he does. For instance, he's not only an Oscar-winning documentary maker but also co-editor of a definitive source-book on documentary history, Imagining Reality. And though Life in One Day would seem as up-to-the-second and box-fresh as a documentary could be due to its association with and use of all the speed and facility that digital cameras and YouTube have to hand... still, Macdonald can speak easily of drawing inspiration from Humphrey Jennings' Listen to Britain and Nikita Mikhalkov's Anna From 6 to 18.
And then you look aside from the intimate marvels of Life in One Day to the mud and muscle and glorious scale of Macdonald's upcoming feature film The Eagle... This is quite some career in cinema taking shape, you'd have to say.

Possessions of Doctor Forrest: A cover! And a comradely mention

2011-01-18T06:26:00.000-08:00

Over at Amazon my new novel is now properly attired for its upcoming debut on June 2 2011. Meanwhile the excellent Australian novelist and critic James Bradley, author of The Resurrectionist and a co-oarsman of mine on the Faber fiction list, was kind enough to mention Doctor Forrest in his picks from the prospects for 2011 (and also to cite Crusaders as 'one of the more striking debuts of 2008').

Return of the Bookhugger!

2011-01-18T05:40:00.000-08:00

My so-called 'regular column' is back, as trailered, and another one will follow hard upon at some point this month, inspired by Jonathan Powell's excellent The New Machiavelli.
Just to elaborate on a point left hanging in the column, to do with batting technique. If my admiration for Kim Hughes and his style at the crease had carried over analogously to the England First XI of the time c. late 1970s-early 1980s, then my hero ought to have been David Gower, similarly blond of curl and insouciantly ready to show off his range of shots. And yet Gower always looked a bit too enamoured of himself, not even terribly bothered when dismissed. He seemed to think he was taken care of in this world, and sure enough he was proven right.
No, the man for me was Nottinghamshire's Derek Randall, whose international career was as supported by his fielding brilliance just as Mike Brearley's was by his captaining skills. Randall was a batsman of fidgety and erratic brilliance, a cheerful/'daft' fellow by repute (as in the photo, doffing his cap to Dennis Lillee after a bouncer - a trick Kim Hughes might have tried.) But Randall was also somewhat neurotic in habits and superstitions, always likely to drive his fans into anxieties of their own. He seemed to play entirely on instinct and confidence. When these were there, runs flowed. When absent... well, his feet could be leaden at the crease, and he was out leg-before without score probably more often than any other England batsman in history.
I'll remember and cherish him always, though, as below:

Hammered at the tills, from dawn to dusk

2011-01-18T04:35:00.000-08:00

Having lately moved my fiction into the realm of the supernatural I suppose I ought to be more comfortable abiding in a place of darkness and desolation... And yet a shadow looms that I fear may engulf me - good God, all of us! And that is the rise in the general level of prices of goods and services, and the consequent erosion in the purchasing power of our money. Yes, inflation.
FT Alphaville brought me the grim, grim news today:
According to the Office for National Statistics, air transport, rising petrol, diesel, gas and food prices were the most significant drivers to the increase in annual inflation between November and December.
Transport: prices, overall, rose by 3.6 per cent, the largest ever monthly increase on record... fuels and lubricants where prices rose by 2.8 per cent, the largest increase for a November to December period since 1996...
Housing and household services: prices, overall, rose by 1.4 per cent, the largest ever increase for a November to December period. The largest upward effect came from gas where average bills rose due to some of the major energy suppliers increasing their tariffs in December 2010...
Food and non-alcoholic beverages: prices, overall, rose by 1.6 per cent, the largest rise for a November to December period on record. The upward effects within this category were widespread with the most significant coming from fruit and vegetables...
Obviously the trick is not to panic - stay under your own roof (if said roof you can afford), eat less healthy stuff and try to cook it with a naked flame, while drinking strong lager, which remains reassuringly inexpensive. Sleep with the candle lit, and maybe that will keep the wolf from the door...
Iain Martin of the WSJ, as often, frames it well: "The politics of this are thus highly dangerous for ministers. They are trapped, between an independent central bank that focused too much on narrow inflation targeting in the boom years and now says it doesn’t matter because higher inflation is just a blip, overextended debt-laden consumers who want interest rates low to keep their show on the road, and hard-pressed savers (many of them older, and likely to vote) who are being fleeced..."

'No tears in baseball!'

2011-01-11T14:04:00.000-08:00

My monthly Bookhugger column will resume next week after a short and unplanned winter break, and I’ll be writing about a fascinating biography of the former Australian cricket captain Kim Hughes: a dashing batsman in his day but, sadly, remembered more for the tears he shed at the press conference where he resigned the captaincy after his team took a pasting off the invincible West Indies side of 1984.
Boys don’t cry, as they say generally, and I guess Australian boys in particular are made to fear reprisals and eternal scorn should they succumb, not least when the matter in hand is sport. It’s a mite more acceptable/manly, I think, to shed a small tear in victory than in defeat – even to let go with the full waterworks, like Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins after the 1982 world snooker final. Or if, say, some staunch veteran colleague is hanging up his boots or hearing his last hurrah – in which case a fella on the field or in the stands could be permitted to look a little dewy round the eyes. But the idea that as a brawny sort of a sportsman you might be really and truly upset about something bad that’s happened... Jesus mate, you might as well walk yourself round to the Ladies’ Room for a session with the powder-puff, before your comrades or the team’s supporters drive you there with burning torches.
One alleged exception to this rule is Paul Gascoigne, whose desperate, blinking, red-eyed blubbing following his yellow card in the semi-final of Italia 1990 was widely felt to speak for the feelings of England fans as they contemplated a quite colossal disappointment.
For me the most utterly wrenching instance of a sportsman’s visible distress is without doubt Pete Sampras’s wracked effort to play the fifth set of his 1995 Australian Open quarter-final against Jim Courier, the tears streaming down his face even as he prepared to serve. His coach Tim Gullikson had been diagnosed with four separate brain tumours that week, and Sampras had been running daily between the tournament venue and the hospital. In the match, having gone two sets down he fought back to level, whereupon some airhead in the crowd thought it a considerate exhortation to yell, ‘Come on Pete, do it for your coach...’
The story is told in the documentary excerpt below, and watching Sampras wrestle with it , even now, is highly affecting. The highest level of individual sport is a lonely, intense, super-concentrated universe with scarcely an inch of space for error of weakness. I had though Sampras overpoweringly dull, if brilliant, as a player, and so hardly thought of him as a person, but post-1995 I became his keenest fan, the revelation of his deep feeling helping me belatedly to see him as the supreme athlete and competitor he undoubtedly was.

Our Best-Loved Authors... and Prospects for Books in 2011, Mine Included...

2011-01-04T16:38:00.000-08:00

If all proceeds according to plan then I will have two books published into stores during 2011. My novel The Possessions of Doctor Forrest, now in bound proofs, is set fairly squarely for June, and the revised/updated edition of my Sean Penn: His Life and Times will follow in the autumn, subject to Mr Penn’s movements about the globe and also, I suspect, the international release schedule of Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place. By any measure this double publication is a pleasing prospect for a writer, albeit with attendant/irreducible anxieties. A book is like a small child in some respects, you push it out into the world and hope that a goodly few people – someone, at least! – will take a shine to it. But I’m very thankful for what I’ve got, be assured. The making of books contains its own profound satisfactions, so long as one feels content that the final text represents what one actually intended to write. (I will never forget sitting with my then editor in 1998 as he and I turned admiringly in our hands the first copy off the presses of what was my first book, Alan Clarke. ‘Better than a PhD, eh Richard?’ he said to me with a grin. And there was no doubt in my mind.)
Of course, the high privileged gleam one might see across the surface of one’s own published endeavours can easily lose its sheen in the event of a sluggish take-up from book-buyers, or a disparaging review that people actually read. All the more reason why one must first make sure to please oneself: you never can be certain anyone else will show to your party, so you may as well enjoy a quiet moment to yourself.
In terms of making the reading public aware of these forthcoming publications: the Penn book will likely be linked, as I say, to whatever Sean is doing this year, and I expect to be running a long exclusive interview with the great man in the Telegraph newspaper come late summer/autumn. With Doctor Forrest we will just have to see what the readers of those early proofs think to it, though already I've been encouraged by the outcomes of submissions made for film/television rights and to foreign language publishers – news to follow as it’s all confirmed. But before this month is out I expect to be launching a new blog devoted solely to the novel, www.drforrest.co.uk: what I hope will be a sort of grand Gothic concordance celebrating the sort of literary/filmic/mythological darkness that informed the novel.
In such ways and by such means one tries to deliver one’s letters... The future of the book as a physical object/commodity is of course a much debated matter now, e-reader sales being tracked with particular zeal this Christmas. The user-friendliness of the new touch-screen systems has made a dent, it seems to me, in the formerly staunch cadres of readers who insisted they would never give up on printed books (or at least never fall in love with squinting at words on a screen.) The future does seem to work, though, and one might say that a text is a text, its merits integral however it is consumed. But I intend to treasure every minute of my stuff being printed and bound between covers for as long as that process is viable.
There’s a very commonsensical reason why reports of the book’s demise continue to be exaggerated, and that is the gift impulse that Christmas elevates to fever pitch. As a friend of mine opined recently, if there were no more physical books what on earth would you give as a present to those friends of yours who don’t do fragrance? There has to be something chunky and wrappable to be put into hands on the special occasion. Hence, it seems, the regrettable failure of the Rubberbandits to withstand the X-Factor’s drive to #1 in Ireland over Christmas: evidently the Bandits sold a stack more downloads than Simon Cowell’s lackey, but their CD single just wasn’t in enough stores, whereas Whatsisface’s was everywhere, and with a picture on the sleeve.
However, as the dogs in the street know, the success of the Book-as-Gift is near-wholly dependent upon that picture on the jacket, and whom it depicts: hence, as the Bookseller reported today, “Jamie Oliver scored the final number one of [2010] with Jamie's 30-minute Meals easily outselling the second-placed title Michael McIntyre's Life and Laughing… Both McIntyre and Stephen Fry received sales boosts in the final week…”
I haven’t ‘read’ (or, rather, cooked from) one of Jamie’s books in some years, partly because his TV shows have declined in interest sharply of late. (I hazarded upon his 2010 Xmas Special, saw him sitting down in matey fashion with Jonathan Ross, and dived for the remote.) By contrast, to speak of another bestseller, Nigella Lawson keeps doing the same voodoo, sashaying fetchingly around a soft-focus West London as if she were not actually married to Charles Saatchi, whipping up yummy dinner-party-grade stuff in her kitchen with a requisite number of slatternly from-a-tin shortcuts. I won’t gripe, though, since her How To Eat, given again to my wife this Xmas after our last copy got pinched, is really excellent. And even as I was tutting over a repeat of her telly show one Saturday morning before Christmas, I was suddenly gripped to watch her whip up a blinding-hot green chilli salsa that she claimed to favour for cocktail hour round her place (or what, round mine, is the kids-abed moment when I crack a beer...)
So it’s no mystery to me why these authors have readers – though to these eyes Michael McIntyre’s stupefying success still has the feel of witchcraft or sorcery about it. But, in the manner of Dr Faustus and of Dr Forrest, I shall be practising hard at spells of my own in 2011.

Did the movies get tired or was it me?

2011-01-03T16:47:00.000-08:00

In my memory Christmas used to be quite definitively a time for exciting movie premieres on the telly: for checking the seasonal Radio Times keenly to see who was showing what and when. That all seems an aeon ago. Still, if you don’t see that many new films (and last year I think I saw about six) then you do get to catch up a bit over the holidays, for better or (usually) worse. From last year I remember the ghastly experience of catching the Miami Vice feature film – incredible high-end po-faced rubbish, its low point (or alleged romantic high-spot) the risible sequence of Colin Farrell and Li Gong power-boating over to Cuba so as to consummate their ‘passion’. This year’s flabbergasting post-prandial watch was the last Indiana Jones movie on the BBC. Are you actually telling me that Steven Spielberg directed that? And David Koepp wrote it, and Cate Blanchett wanted to be in it...?
Of course, you might riposte that I really ought to have been watching a film that was intended for grown-ups; and you would be right. Yet out of the half-dozen new movies I saw last year, probably the two I liked best were Sherlock Holmes and The Wolf Man – a grim return, not least for a supposed cinephile who belongs to a private society of Robert Bresson votaries. Still, these days one feels more and more worn out come nightfall... This Christmas I even sat through Terminator: Salvation on foreign-subtitled cable, just waiting and waiting for one good crunchy fight between Man and Robot. I had to wait the entire picture, and when it came it was the exact same fight as in Terminator, or Terminator 2, or the two of ‘em spot-welded together. Needless to say the irony of this discovery was entirely at my expense.
To speak of higher things, franchise-wise, The Godfather Part III was on Film Four tonight. When I edited the Ten Bad Dates with De Niro book a few years back quite a few contributors took a pop at this movie, including the Coen Bros, who claimed ("let’s not kid ourselves") that it was "not so hot." True, the things that are wrong with it are very obvious. But the things that are right are very right.

Goodnight Pete Postlethwaite

2011-01-03T15:46:00.000-08:00

This was the first one I saw him in - saw it at Cannes in 1988, in fact: one of those screenings you don't forget. 'Will you have a drink with me, Dad...?' Good as Postlethwaite was, I'm not sure he was ever better.

My brother took this too... Magic! Happy Xmas, see you in 2011

2010-12-23T15:56:00.000-08:00

The Rubberbandits: #1 in our hearts, no messin'...

2010-12-23T15:27:00.000-08:00

This blog is a longstanding subscriber to Viz comic, believes that a little coarseness in humour can go a long way - can even be morally necessary - and so it has keenly supported the efforts of Limerick's Rubberbandits to beat the victorious X-Factor candidate to Christmas #1 in Ireland, courtesy of their quite delightful 'Horse Outside' record. Alas, today's Irish Independent brought grim news:
"It was always going to be a David and Goliath struggle and it seems the dark horses have lost. With this year's Christmas Number One to be announced tomorrow, it looks as if 'X Factor' winner Matt Cardle will take the top spot ahead of Limerick Youtube stars Rubberbandits. Latest figures reveal that Cardle has sold 33,281 copies of his debut single 'When We Collide' ahead of Rubberbandits' 'Horse Outside' with 13,533 purchases, both physical and download. Last night the gap of almost 20,000 units was described as "insurmountable" by one industry expert, but a spokesman for Rubberbandits claimed there was still everything to play for until shops closed this evening..."
It looks bad. But sure the battle's not done 'til it's done, right fellas? Or how else would the Irish Republic have been won...?

The elusive essence of 'Conradian'

2010-12-17T09:09:00.000-08:00

Over there on Faber Finds I've written a post on Joseph Conrad, whose marvellous A Personal Record (1912) Finds has made available between covers. I didn't mention Conrad's political disposition, which I usually never fail to point out in a writer, whether or not I care. (But Conrad was, of course, a pillar of reaction, with a bleak view of general humanity. Still, to his great credit he didn't - much - let that get in the way of his stories or deface his characters.)
I do say that there aren't any good film versions of his novels, and I daresay that remains the case: I never saw Mark Peploe's Victory despite wishing to, but then the whole venture was widely reckoned to be waterlogged from an early stage. Anyway, it's better, I think, that great novelists be undefiled by hopeless films; and Conrad's artful, atmospheric prose has often left admirers with cameras quite at sea over how to replicate that quality in images. Even one so gifted as Christopher Hampton, who has spent a fair bit of time engaged with this very difficulty, hasn't been able to crack it, as you may surmise from the trailer for his version of The Secret Agent (below).

Momus: This charming man...

2010-12-12T15:37:00.000-08:00

1988 probably isn’t rated a banner year in the history of culture but I don’t think I’ve ever since read as many challenging books, seen as many slightly risque foreign-language movies, listened to as many Central European string quartets as I did over those twelve months. It was all to do with being 17, and the early stirrings of avidity for all things arty, the slight vertigo you get in starting to understand the real depth and breadth of what’s already out there in the world.

When you’re that age, though, you need encouragement, someone to give you a lead to follow. In this way I’m reminded of Nicholas Currie, the Scottish-born singer-songwriter who has for 25 years now written and recorded and engaged in all manner of superior cultural production under the name of Momus. In 1988 I discovered his early albums Circus Maximus, The Poison Boyfriend and Tender Pervert; and for a boy who was studying Ancient History, imagining what Japan was really like, and beginning to alphabetise his Penguin Modern Classics... well, it was a revelation to discover a songwriter who knew how to mix high culture, esoterica/erotica and intimate personal confession with such well-turned scurrility.

I wrote Currie a number of fan letters to an address printed on the back-sleeve of Tender Pervert, all of which he replied to very patiently and amiably, and the effect of all my gauche questions for him was that he pointed me in the direction of an awful lot of good reading and looking and listening that was hitherto alien to me. Certainly it was at his suggestion that I read Gide and Bataille, looked at Picabia and Dix, heard Schoenberg and Jacques Brel and The Threepenny Opera.

In the summer of 1990 I made a pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Festival to see a rare production of one of Mishima’s modern Noh plays, directed, if I remember rightly, by the great Yukio Ninagawa. I remember how not particularly surprised – though very pleased – I was when I clocked that Momus was sitting in the row in front of me. (Even in the dark his profile was very distinctive.) I went up to him afterwards and said hello – something of a miracle, as all through my adolescence you could hardly get a word out of me without using pliers – and he was very pleasant, as you want people to be when you’ve admired them from afar.
Momus has kept on writing and recording and getting up to all sorts. He blogs at iMomus. In this interview on YouTube he gives an interesting account of his career against the shifting backdrop of independent music labels over the last three decades. The promo clip below is a rather Neil Tennant-ish number that was probably the closest Momus came to a hit record in the UK.

NUFC: Loveless Marriage, Divorce Too Expensive

2010-12-12T15:07:00.000-08:00

Admirable professionalism from the Newcastle United team this weekend, carefully worded responses to media from Captain Nolan, and exactly the right response from the fans at the game – all the way to the final whistle and the segueing effortlessly from cheers for a top performance/three points to renewed jeers for that minty pair of toe-rags still squatting in the board-room of this club. The Match of the Day cameras kept looking for Ashley’s pie-eater grins, but the microphones must have been pointing the wrong way, i.e. not at the Leazes End. Memo to Ashley & Llambias: we wish most earnestly and urgently that you could live your dream, get shot of us and go catch your effing taxi. Yet you persist (like morons, really) in going quite the wrong way about making NUFC appear an attractive saleable entity. Thankfully there are some footballers at this club, many of them improved immeasurably under the management of Chris Hughton, and yesterday it was clear they were still playing for him. Moreover we were lucky it was Liverpool visiting: a club clearly in an awful lot of bother. Had it been Blackpool or Blackburn or Wigan, strangely enough, I expect we’d have lost. The next four games are looking tough, though, with Spurs and Citeh in the middle of the sandwich. Over to you then, Alan Pardew. Or ‘Sort it out, Curbishley’, as I believe some comic genius sat near the NUFC dug-out addressed the new ‘gaffer’ on Saturday...

Dovegreyreader, too, tips Doctor Forrest...

2010-12-08T14:27:00.000-08:00

The estimable dovegreyreader wrote a very kind and considered notice on my Crusaders back in February 2008, and I'm pleased to (belatedly) catch up with the news that she's keeping the faith in my stuff, by way of her preview of a few 2011 fiction lists (amusingly headlined 'Reasons to be Cheerful about Publishing'...) in which she highlights The Possessions of Doctor Forrest (scroll down) amid the Faber schedule.
Picture above is, of course, of a forest - or a dark wood - or selva oscura, if you will...

High Passions at the Place for Lost Books...

2010-12-05T14:13:00.000-08:00

I've been serially unfaithful to this blog over the last few weeks: it's the charm of novelty, I regret to say. The thing with Twitter has been cheap and easy and, in my defence, everybody's doing it... But closer to the Things We Do for Love has been my developing commitment to The Place for Lost Books, the Faber Finds blog. It's certainly more than a one-time thing as far as I'm concerned. That's why I've posted lately on subjects as varied as Tolstoy's eminence, Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood', the eerie appeal of J.Sheridan Le Fanu, and F.R. Leavis's place amid the intellectual feuds of Cambridge English. I consider all this to be meaningful labour, moreover it's an outright pleasure to have a remit to write about such subjects, with the Faber Finds list offering all the riches it does. And I could affirm all of this by appending a picture of George Eliot, say, to this post - bearing in mind that Eliot is one of the few English novelists who might be compared to Tolstoy, and that Leavis wrote with particular distinction on Middlemarch. But instead, I'm going with this pic (above) of the recently deceased and sadly missed Ingrid Pitt, one of whose finest hours came in an otherwise disreputable Hammer Films version of Le Fanu's 'Carmilla', of which more in the Le Fanu post above. I'm all for the high road, you understand, but sometimes the low one also gets you there, or thereabouts...

My brother took this...

2010-12-05T13:17:00.000-08:00

Splendid, isn't it? Feels like it could be Moscow or Helsinki or Stockholm, right? In fact it's the Market Road estate in Holloway, London. Full story here.

Bookmunch tips Doctor Forrest...

2010-11-30T03:14:00.000-08:00

My morning is made, because the Bookmunch site has given a generous nod to The Possessions of Doctor Forrest in its politely-titled '50 Books You Might Want To Read in 2011':

"After blowing us all away a couple of years back with his David Peace-esque political novel, Crusaders, Richard T Kelly is changing his game with The Possessions of Dr Forrest which promises to be a spine-tingling modern Gothic fable that mashes up two of our favourite doctors, Jekyll and Faustus. Am giddy about this one…"

Thanks very much, I'm giddy and all, not least on getting a mention in the company of Foster Wallace, Mistry and others.

(The image herewith is Egon Schiele's Semi-Nude Girl, Reclining, a print of which hangs on the wall of Dr. Forrest's octagonal bedchamber... It's that sort of novel...)

Blair/Hitchens & 'the heart of a heartless world...'

2010-11-27T16:03:00.000-08:00

The public debate staged in Toronto last night between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens on the issue of whether religion is 'a force for good in the world' appears to have been won quite decisively by Hitchens. The New Statesman kindly offers a transcript in 3 parts. I consider these to be The Best Bits:
BLAIR:
- "What I say to you is at least, look, what we shouldn't do is end up in a situation where we say, we've got six hospices here, one suicide bomber there - how does it all equalise out? That's not a very productive way of arguing this..."
- [On what is 'the point' of religion] "Stimulating the impulse to do good, disciplining the propensity to be selfish and bad."
- "...if you are a person of faith, it's part of your character, it defines you in many ways as a human being. It doesn't do the policy answers, I am afraid. So as I used to say to people, you don't go into church and look heavenward and say to God, 'Right, next year, the minimum wage, is it £6.50 or £7...?' Unfortunately, he doesn't tell you the answer. And even on the major decisions that are to do with war and peace that I've taken, they were decisions based on policy, and so they should be, and you may disagree with those decisions, but they were taken because I genuinely believed them to be right."
HITCHENS
- "Religion forces nice people to do unkind things, and also makes intelligent people say stupid things."
- "The cure for poverty has a name, in fact. It's called the empowerment of women…Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has."
- "...there's a sense of pleasure to be had in helping your fellow creature. I think that should be enough, thank you."
And gentlemen, thank you.

Faber Finds: Robert Aickman

2010-11-24T15:29:00.000-08:00

In my new day-job as overseer at the print-on-demand/ebook reviver of 'lost'/classic books known as Faber Finds, I've begun blogging on some of the treasures Finds has been restoring to readers, and today I addressed an author who's dear to me: Robert Aickman. If you don't know his work, and you're ready to be greatly unnerved, then all I can say is that a luxurious darkness awaits you...

Eurozone: "Struggling a bit, aren't they...?"

2010-11-23T07:32:00.000-08:00

The two-handed satire of John Clarke and Bryan Dawe is new to me, but on this evidence - a skit on Eurozone debt in the style of Mastermind - I'll be looking out for it from now. (The Oz accents, I admit, add greatly to the pawkiness of the humour.)

The other Lost Leader...

2010-11-21T16:27:00.000-08:00

With Labour seemingly mired in one of its periodic phases of being led by windbags, hypocrites and small-scale connivers (it’s been that way for several years now...) it’s hard to think about ‘moving forward’, not with so much rebarbative recent history still to be digested… David Laws’ recent sour remarks about Ed Miliband (amid his hasty reminiscence of the ConDem shotgun wedding) should be set in context of Laws’ obvious Toryism and attendant hatred for Labourism. But the Mail's serialisation of Brown at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge made for more disconcerting reading. Let’s set aside the risible spectacle of the Mail arrogating to itself the right to determine, Socialist Worker -style, exactly who is a traitor to the cause of Labour. The rest of us just need to read between the lines and marvel anew at how such a sanctimonious and scarily self-obsessed pair as Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman wound up at the very pinnacle of the Labour Party, prior to blessing Ed Miliband as their rightful inheritor.

John Rentoul’s revival of 'AJ4PM' is tongue-in-cheek, surely, for the moment has passed, just as so many other promising Labour ‘moments’ have crashed into the rocks over recent years. I haven’t been wowed by Johnson’s despatch box performances as shadow chancellor. But, rare in a politician, he remains a recognisible human being, one with just the right mix of frankness and canniness, and unlike his Leader he's not about to bang on about the defeatingly populist notion that people ought forever to hand back more than half their income once they've made their way to £150K.

Johnson's recent tribute to his Leader has a nicely minimal feel: 'Everyone’s got their views about how we get back into government and there’s a variety of views in the Shadow Cabinet… … we have to discuss those differences of opinion like mature people which is really a mindset that I think Ed has brought into the party that is I think commendable...'

No, I don't wish to re-run redundant quarrels so even I balked a little at Rentoul's observations in his print column today: "There were disloyal whispers at Westminster last week. Anonymous speculation about Brownites organising for Yvette Cooper to succeed [EdMili]. Sarcasm about when he was going to start in his new job. Grumbles about his breaking his paternity leave on Friday to provide a soundbite for TV news on Lord Young's resignation – a Tory bad news story that needed no help from him – instead of to surprise us with his plans, say, to be tough on immigration..."

But, y'know, if the cap fits... Or as the bracingly rude Daily Mash satirises it, 'Despite assurances from David Miliband that there would no repeat of the Blair-Brown 'soap opera', his supporters said that would be f**king right...'

Plant/Page: Wanton...

2010-11-18T14:58:00.000-08:00

I fully approved of the Plant/Page 'unplugged' revival c. 1994-5, in particular the strange, compelling Arabic/Celtic strains loaned to versions of 'Gallows Pole', 'Kashmir', 'No Quarter' and 'Nobody's Fault But Mine.' Still - and as I tweeted in response to Chris Rodley's excellent Plant doc for the BBC a fortnight back - whatever musical highways Plant or Page have honourably gone hitching down post-Zeppelin, there's unlikely to be anything there that could wholly compare to the glory of Gettin' the Led out. To wit: I missed the Plant/Page revival of 1998 and so was hugely tickled by the Rodley doc's digging out of their Later rendition of The Wanton Song off Physical Graffiti. Fifty-something geezers here, remember. Kids, you might want to duck...

Singing live, for your vote, Robert Allen Zimmerman...

2010-11-15T10:10:00.000-08:00

This year’s X Factor competition? I'm wishing success on the young black woman with the Liverpool accent, who has a very good voice – but more importantly because a fortnight back, if I heard rightly, she sang a Dylan song. It’s possible she knew it by way of its more popular covers, but I’d rather believe she was displaying a spark of musical intelligence and feeling hitherto unseen among X Factor wannabes and their ludicrous panel of 'mentors'/'judges'.
Granted, it’s a ridiculous notion, Bob-does-The-X. If by some magic the young Greenwich Village Dylan were a candidate for the c. 2010 show he’d be ridiculed and kicked out at audition - partly for the voice, which Larkin (who liked it!) thought ‘cawing’ and ‘derisive’, but mainly for writing his own songs, being an artist, his own man, etc etc...
Still, I’ve begun to amuse myself by imagining an entire X-evening devoted to Bob’s songs… just as I understand there have been tributes to such heavyweights as Elton, Queen, Take That, George Michael… Most likely the biggest scrap among contestants would be had over ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’, with the winner probably deciding to knock off the Guns N’ Roses version – whereupon one can picture Simon Cowell doing 'that pause' and pulling 'that face' (by which he tries to pretend that he is thinking impossibly complicated thoughts, thoughts for which language, even by his high standards, is inadequate) before saying that the performance was quite unprecedented in its brilliance and the X Factor just so great because it’s so much more than karaoke, blah blah etc.
It could be done, though: a whole night of X-Goes-Bob. One of the older contestants would do ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with a choir and get those arms a-waving in the crowd. One of the young lads could sing a new sort of number for the laydeez - maybe ‘Visions of Johanna’, or a quirkier choice, ‘Sweetheart Like You’ off Infidels? I’d expect one of the ‘girls’ who specialize in that vibrato thing they all do these days could bring a new stretched-out-ness to one of the ballads of the Christian phase – ‘I Believe in You’ perhaps. And there’d be a special prize for the claiming by any candidate who took on ‘Idiot Wind’ and strolled boldly right up to the judges’ table, spitting each syllable into their awful freeze-dried life-denying faces:
‘Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth,
Blowing down the backroads headin' south.
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth,
You're an idiot, babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe…’

666: The realm of nasty numbers

2010-11-14T15:42:00.000-08:00

At one point in his recent (rather interesting, distinctly personal) documentary study of horror films for the BBC Mark Gatiss sat down with David Seltzer, author of The Omen (hit novel and film), and put to him the big question: does he believe in the Devil? Seltzer wryly replied to the effect that if he did, then he wouldn’t for one moment have messed about writing books that presumed to speak of Him and His powers.

That’s funny, and fair enough. As Gatiss noted, Satan was a hot thing in 1970s Hollywood after the success of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. And Seltzer had a good nose for how to do something new and commercial with the Evil One. Of course there have been repeated and not wholly unfounded attempts to argue that various cast/crew members on The Exorcist were afflicted by a sort of curse in subsequent years. But it doesn’t seem that David Seltzer’s had to worry – has suffered no freak impalements or decapitations, rather, enjoyed the fruits of his labour, his imagination.
The Omen was on telly again the other night and I made the mistake of watching bits of it. God but it’s a thoroughly professional, expertly-managed, big-budget piece of depressing nastiness. (Seltzer was quick to tell Gatiss he felt Gregory Peck loaned a weight to the project that Charles Bronson - the original casting as the US Ambassador to the Court of St James - couldn’t have.) Actually I remember the film’s network TV premiere on ITV at some point in the very early 1980s. I’m sure I wasn’t allowed to watch it all but I saw enough to be feel a kind of outrage over a picture in which the baddies were so clearly being allowed to win.
Still, I must admire the gruesome effectiveness in places, and the power of the imaginative concept. I was talking to a filmmaker friend the other day about the Gothic-supernatural-steampunk trends in film, and apropos Guy Richie’s Sherlock Holmes (which we both admired hugely) he mentioned how much he prefers the sort of 'mystery & imagination' movie wherein events of a seemingly supernatural origin are later revealed to be in fact the cunning/fiendish works of man. With The Omen, you could choose to look at the narrative from a remote vantage and say that all those killings are just a chain of freak accidents and fatal misunderstandings, wrapped around a fat-cheeked piggy-eyed little 5-year-old boy... (That said, in the yet more laboriously nasty sequels Damian and The Final Conflict the maturing Anti-Christ took an active hand in murder, using sorcery to do so, so the game was up by then.) Still, such room for ambiguity may explain why the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once put his name to a paper entitled ‘The Exorcist and The Omen, or Modern and Postmodern Limits to Knowledge.’
Movies speak of their times and The Omen is unmistakeably the drear England of the mid-1970s, the sort of place where Satan might well seek admission to the affairs of men. (Just as The Exorcist is well located amid OPEC crisis/Watergate-era Georgetown.) Having stage-trained Brits such as Billie Whitelaw and David Warner and Patrick Troughton in the cast gives The Omen the faint air of a BBC 'Play for Today' or some gritty Royal Court production, though here the smart actors are employed only in order to be killed off in horrible ways. (The 2006 remake of The Omen was also on telly last week, and I couldn’t face it, assuming it was done purely to cast younger leads and find more hi-tech ways to kill smart actors – Pete Postlethwaite, David Thewlis etc – horribly.)
In fairness to The Omen, it bravely makes no effort to endow Satan and Satanism with any sort of perverse allure, any suggestion of luxurious darkness or forbidden pleasure in the act of pledging one’s soul to Satan. You just have to take in on trust that Billie Whitelaw’s Mrs Baylock is committed to the Anti-Christ just as some people are to Labour or the Tories. She wants a strong leader in charge and she’s grimly prepared to roll up her sleeves and do the dirty job of getting him there, shoving people out of windows if needs be, though it’s hard to see what will be her personal reward for same. In Damian, sequel #1, Lee Grant is burned to death shortly after murdering her husband in a misguided show of loyalty to Satan’s son. In The Final Conflict, as I recall, a whole network/cabal of suburban English salarymen and housewives were revealed to be in joyless thrall to the Deceiver. And that's a powerful dramatic idea, one that allows a dramatist to reveal any character as being, quite suddenly and without apparent motivation, capable of the most appalling/malevolent act. Nasty, as I say...

#9: The number of the Beast

2010-11-08T16:24:00.000-08:00

Is it only 18 months since I sat there most weekends worrying whether Andy Carroll had adequate goals and technique in him for the 'top flight', rather being just another of those Academy nearly boys...? It's the Rooney/Walcott syndrome, 'they need to show they've got it before their 18th birthday' etc. Well, as of today the Bensham Battering Ram looks set for a first England cap. Not that I care, indeed I'd rather he kept clear of all that muck, but then there are distinguished precedents for the national team being spearheaded by pure Geordie instinct for goal... As long as Big Andy comes back from his little holidays safe and well and ready to do it all again for NUFC...

Mind you, Carroll does give the air of being impregnable as well as often unplayable. 'He's a beast', said a West Ham mate of mine during the Boleyn game of a fortnight back - said so not quite admiringly neither. And Carroll's off-the-pitch manners are a big matter for concern, no question. But as Arsene Wenger put it in his programme notes on Sunday, 'Andy Carroll has stature, charisma and quality...' Over 90 minutes on the park, in other words, he is exactly What The Boys Want.

Photograph: Stephen Pond/EMmpics Sport

"Kelly made editor at Faber Finds"

2010-11-04T16:19:00.000-07:00

Ah-ha. This is the second time in a fortnight I've had the good fortune of my activities being reported upon by the Bookseller's Charlotte Williams. (This news was also lead item today on the industry subscription site Bookbrunch, if only for a day, but still...) This is how the Bookseller wrote it up:
"Faber has appointed author Richard T Kelly as editor of its print on demand imprint, Faber Finds. Kelly succeeds John Seaton who had headed up the imprint since its launch in June 2008. Kelly's first novel Crusaders was published by Faber in 2008, with his second, The Possessions of Doctor Forrest, to appear in June 2011. He has also written and presented television documentaries, and has contributed to a number of national newspapers as well as being a notable blogger (http://richard-t-kelly.blogspot.com).

Richard T Kelly said: "Like a great many writers and readers I was in love at first sight with the concept of Faber Finds as an expanding library of literary treasure, and so I'm very excited now by this opportunity to build on John Seaton's work, to keep on restoring brilliant books to their natural readerships, and also to ensure that Finds establishes an online presence that draws all interested readers and writers into a passionate discussion of our literary culture."

Stephen Page, Faber c.e.o. and publisher, said: "Faber Finds has always been about offering a service to authors, a way to make the wealth of their backlist titles available and to keep them available in good company. As Faber Finds builds on its early success and fast growth, it is wonderful to have an acclaimed writer with publishing experience at the helm."

Faber Finds has so far brought about 750 books back into print, with 250 more schedule through 2012. Recent successes include reissues of John Julius Norwich's Norman histories and Michael Foot's Aneurin Bevan."

Bookhugger column #8: What Our Kids 'Should' Read

2010-11-03T16:54:00.000-07:00

My October Bookhugger column went up last week, so this is a belated nod, but in a sense I was distracted somewhat by it having elicited one or two comments, which are, after all, what we live for... The nub of the piece is: how do we get 14-year-olds to sit still and read Great Expectations, since this would be so damn good for them? (And I don't mean the version by Kathy Acker, laudable as that was in its own way.) My answer, I suppose, is 'Teach Dickens together with Dostoyevsky...' But then thankfully when I go to work tomorrow it won't be in order to stand up before a sullen group of 14-year-olds and ask them what they think the author really meant... In any case, this question must come from within, not without.

Ferdinando Scarfiotti 1941-1994: Excursions into style

2010-11-02T16:11:00.000-07:00

One of the many incidental pleasures of my recent sit-downs with Sean Penn - in Dublin for an update of His Life and Times, then in New York for an upcoming magazine profile, both times on the set of This Must Be The Place - was the customary occasional discussion of films and filmmakers. For instance, in NYC we fell to chatting about Paul Schrader, his scripts for Taxi Driver and the far less luminous Rolling Thunder, also his directorial gift for designing title sequences (cf. Blue Collar and American Gigolo.) Mention of Gigolo, though, got me thinking back to that film's pristine design by the late, great Ferdinando Scarfiotti, longtime collaborator of Bertolucci (The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor) and Visconti (Death in Venice plus numerous operas.) When I was a research student at the British Film Institute in the mid-1990s I wrote a thesis on Scarfiotti and his work, to which Bertolucci and Schrader, inter alia, kindly contributed in loving memory of their friend and colleague. It seemed to me then that said thesis, however 'provisional' in its interview-derived biographical data, was the only substantive work on Scarfiotti in any language, albeit available only via the BFI library and in a truncated version courtesy of the scholarly journal Critical Quarterly. Happily, however, that has changed: Zecchini Editore of Italy have newly published a biography/tribute called Nando Forever: what looks to be a very handsome tome, with a DVD attached, compiled by Luciano Gregoretti and Maria Teresa Copelli. And by the sounds of it this is just the commemorative/celebratory volume that this brilliant and unsung film artist has long deserved. The following trailer for The Conformist shouldn't really be listened to (dubbing!), enjoyed rather for the parade of imagery for which Scarfiotti gifted Bertolucci such a rich foundation through his exquisite design choices.

Twitter: I spoke and someone hearkened...

2010-11-01T04:47:00.000-07:00

I'm about 4-5 days into the whole what-kept-you-old-man? experience of 'Being on Twitter' and after going through the only-to-be-expected initial oddness of it (also realising that I'm not build to be any sort of regular/compulsive Tweeter...) I've now had what feels to me a Real Result in response to one Tweet, which is that John Rentoul considers me 'Excellent'... Oh boy, that makes it all worthwhile, I tell you - and in the wake of previous kind words from Hopi Sen, I'm feeling pretty buoyed by this whole business of electronic hand-shaking with the writers one most admires. So, I must now formally renounce all former cynicism as the Devil's work, and profess, in the manner of Stevie Wonder, that Blogging and Tweeting have made my life sweeter than ever. (Still struggling a tad with Facebook, though...)

My beef with Andy Carroll

2010-10-31T02:47:00.000-07:00

Jason Mellor writes amusingly for the Independent on the court-decreed arrangement whereby Andy Carroll must currently lodge with his club captain Kevin Nolan, under strict curfew. (The PA picture shows them together at the Old Firm match the other weekend - Nolan presumably cheering for the Hoops, I wonder what side Carroll was on?) Nolan comes over as a decent fellow: his kids are around the same ages as mine, and I identify with his description of the domestic regimen. Obviously I'm not paid seven figures to pull on a black and white shirt, nor do I own an X-Box, but other than that I'm encouraged to think me and the skipper might get along. The towering issue on which we agree is Carroll's barnet: "I keep telling him his hair is absolutely shocking. I've been trying to get him to cut it for ages..." But, tell you what, if the lad can do the business in today's not-insignificant 1.30pm kick-off then I promise to quit my carping for good.

Gimme Shelter

2010-10-30T07:12:00.000-07:00

I’m no right-winger, you understand… (Uh-oh, you might think, there’s a pretty ominous start to a post.) But nor did I consider the ideas of the Right to be axiomatically the Devil’s work. Following the lead of my literary hero Norman Mailer, who famously reckoned himself a ‘left conservative’ I try to use both sides of my head in an argument, and to resist the sanctimony by which some on the Left persuade themselves that all human history is class struggle, one in which they are – axiomatically – on the side of the poor and oppressed, whether or not required to match word by deed.
I can’t say exactly how hard we should be cutting in the light of this grim shortfall between tax revenues and public spending, but – since it seems likely that the cost of housing benefit for people of working age has risen by £5 billion over the past five years, i.e. roughly mapping the hopeless reign of Gordon Brown – then I’m quite sure that reform of housing benefit entitlements along the lines of what the ConDems have proposed is commonsensical and overdue, with a necessary cap on accommodation provided in the private rental market, as opposed to publicly-owned housing. As such, I now seem to be of the party of Max Hastings and the Daily Mail. Eh bien.
I’m quite certain the public purse has to assist key workers to live near their place of work. And people who are put out of work need to be given a hand with their rent for a reasonable period. I’m not some Chinese martinet seeking to cap families at exactly 1 Child. But I absolutely think people should act on their estimate of how many kids ‘they can afford decently to rear’ (cf. Hastings - 'decent' is a favourite Mail word, used as if they invented decency, but there's no reason we should let them own it.) Where six-figure sums have been paid annually to families of 6-8 kids, this was extravagant before and cannot continue. I don’t make light of the fear of mass evictions from Central London: one expects this cut to bite. But however harsh the ‘correction’, I understand there will be an emergency fund for true hardship cases. Otherwise, as Hastings puts it, ‘most of us take for granted the necessity to move home if our circumstances change.’ Indeed we do.
I can’t tell how Ed Miliband’s riposte to Cameron played in the chamber but to me, and to many others, I expect, he sounded just as John Rentoul puts it, conveying “the wrong message to the country, which simply cannot understand why so many billions of taxpayers’ money is poured into such a badly-designed benefit that undermines work incentives, profits landlords and keeps property prices higher than they would otherwise be.”
In other news, I am happily of the same mind as Hastings in respect of Polly Toynbee’s worth as an inverse barometer in any political argument, though he makes his point in a gratuitous manner, marshalling assertions the truth of which I can’t verify:
"There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Polly Toynbee and her kind in their concern for Britain’s underclass, though the charge of champagne socialism sticks pretty hard on anyone who, like herself, owns a villa in Tuscany and educated her children at private schools."
Similarly, readers will know I’m with Hastings on the profoundly annoying Boris Johnson, whose sickly coveting of David Cameron’s job rolls on unabated. Please, someone, tell me London can cough up a better prospect for mayor than the Bounderby-ish Johnson or the alligator-blooded Ken Livingstone.

In Praise of 'Temptation'

2010-10-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

Flying Virgin Atlantic last week I had a choice of 60 movies on the small screen before me, and I must have watched 5-10 minutes each of a dozen of 'em, mainly to see how the special effects turned out. (Quite some Medusa in the remade Clash of the Titans, I must say...) But if one was a passenger in search of some drama, oriented toward grown-ups (i.e. not the Adam Sandler movie Grown-Ups), it was rather a hard hunt.
I watched all of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, and that wasn’t the wisest idea, since I get a bit over-sensitive at 35,000 feet anyway, and this is a movie that relies heavily on the image of three small children lying face-down-drowned in a lake. Shutter Island was impressively done in its own stormy psycho-noir Dennis Lehane way, and I wouldn’t be so crass as to say any old hack could have made it. But there’s probably a long-list of younger and less brilliant directors who nonetheless might have given it a good shake. Whereas Martin Scorsese is 67 years old, a lion.
Anyhow, so, I de-plane, then flash-forward to my New York hotel room where I lie awaiting the sleep that I missed while flying. Flipping the 200 channels on my TV I stumble on one showing Scorsese’s 20-odd-year-old film of Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Now there’s a movie that could only have been made by the respected firm of Scorsese/Schrader: an incredible treasure, of the sort they don’t make anymore (but, let’s face it, had to struggle very hard to make in the early-to-mid-1980s.) I don’t hesitate to award it the Capicola Cup for Personal Favourite Scorsese Movie.
Sceptics may think it resembles nothing so much as a troupe of Manhattan thespians, musicians and mime artists on tour in Morocco, shepherded by a director who’s only been allowed one day’s shooting with his beloved crane (but sure is making the most of it.) Still, I think anyone who lets themselves sink into the movie’s peculiar rhythm would have to admire it. For one thing, that rhythm is underwritten peerlessly by Peter Gabriel’s glorious score. But then just the performances, even. Willem Dafoe elegant and anguished as ever was (since when he’s often seemed to be acting in a foreign language.) Barbara Hershey, whose idea the whole thing was, exquisitely witchy as Mary Magdalene. Andre Gregory’s stark-eyed rail-thin John the Baptist, David Bowie unbelievably pitch-perfect as Pilate.
The picture reaches one form of climax in the Golgotha sequence, all stony, bloody desolation, Dafoe wearing the thorniest of crowns. But the best is all to come, the titular ‘Last Temptation’. As Paul Schrader put it, ‘The greatness of the book is its metaphorical leap into this imagined temptation; that’s what separates it from the Bible and makes it a commentary upon it.’
This is how I describe the film’s final half-hour in Ten Bad Dates With De Niro:
“… abruptly the Nazarene finds the noise gone mute all around, and his gaze falls on a perfect little blonde girl [Juliette Caton] who beckons him down. Calling herself his ‘guardian angel’, she has golden curls, a full mouth and a Roman nose. She offers him the life of a normal man, assures him he has already suffered quite sufficiently for his Father’s purpose. She sits serenely outside the dwelling as Jesus and Mary Magdalene make love, blesses their marriage, and consoles him when Mary dies in childbirth. She watches over his patriarchal old age, and steers away from that troublemaker Paul (Harry Dean Stanton.) It’s only when Jesus is visited on his deathbed by a bitterly anguished Judas Iscariot (Harvey Keitel) that this ‘angel’ is called by her true name: for the last temptation is domesticity, and in short order Jesus is renouncing Satan and begging to be set back upon the upright…”
That reminds me of what are probably the film’s two most powerful performances, even in the midst of that stunning array: flame-haired Keitel, passionately dour as a radical Judas, and Harry Dean Stanton, quite, quite phenomenal as Saul of Tarsus, he who became Paul. In the clip below Harry Dean is so good I almost want to pick up my mat and follow him.

Costello/Springsteen: my kind of cabaret

2010-10-24T13:48:00.000-07:00

Well, nobody told me this had happened, happily I found out for myself... But clearly Spectacle, the Costello show for Sundance Channel, is the sort of thing that should be on television all the time...

How the World Looks From Manhattan

2010-10-20T07:46:00.000-07:00

I am in New York City this week, once more on the trail of Sean Penn and Paolo Sorrentino’s film This Must Be The Place. NYC is, as ever, a marvel, and just the same, only different... a world city, defining of America and yet not wholly American. My New York Times this morning was gratifyingly slim and manageable over breakfast, and full of interest, to wit:
1. Government expenditure: A big deal, naturally, Republican candidates for the Senate unanimously pitching from a platform that deplores ‘runaway federal spending’, but very shy (or else full of drivel) on the ‘What I Would Cut’ issue (other than taxes, the extension of the Bush-era cuts clearly dear to many GOPers.) I am relieved, in one way, to be off the scene as George Osborne displays his axe in the Commons today. And while resistant to any ideological formulation of the beauty of small government (and seconding Hopi Sen’s abhorrence of lectures on welfare dependence from trust fund babes) – as a freelancer I approve of Robert Peston’s tough-mindedness today on the public sector’s needful adjustment to how the rest of us manage our anxieties.
2. Democracy in Action: the standard of candidacy and debate in the contests for the US Senate seems shockingly poor, at least as far as the media is reporting it. In particular a woman called Christine O’Donnell, running for the GOP in Delaware, is setting the bar strikingly low. The ‘race’ for New York Governor is also descending into farce, judging by a Monday night hustings in which the minor candidates were given so much room to be minor that the main Cuomo-Paladino contest, vaguely defined already, got no clearer. Lest we get smug in the UK, I suppose the real lesson, for the millionth time, is that we surely get the politicians we deserve.
3. Ghost towns: A ‘new town’ in a district of the city of Ordos, China, is reported to be near-deserted, a product of boom times but waiting still to be populated by consumer-citizens. Having seen the high-end ‘ghost estates’ of Dublin recently, a vertical version of the empty luxury high-rises by Newcastle Quayside, I certainly feel the power of this metaphor.
4. China All Over: ... but economically China’s every move, micro or macro, is being scrutinised intensely, of course. Its announced raising of interest rates has a thumping feel to it, as does its widening embargo on mineral exports to the West. Reporting has a cagey feel to it. I must read The Economist this/next week...
5. That Hi-Tech Lynching, Redux: The 1980s beckon us once more... Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, a Tea Party stalwart, is chasing Anita Hill again for an apology. Anita Hill is being very cool, in every sense, as the Times reports. (‘I thought it was certainly inappropriate...’ – Virginia Thomas’s request, that is...)
6. Gays in the US military: With Don’t Ask Don’t Tell seemingly erased, the TV news as well as print has had much of Dan Choi, an articulate young Asian-American previously discharged from the Army who yesterday, attended by umpteen reporters, sought readmission at the Army recruiting office just up the road from me at Times Square. Looks like he might have made it...
7. The decline of movie one-liners: The NYT arts section has it that Hollywood screenplays no longer offer widely quotable and cherishable dialogue in such profusion. But their ‘classic’ examples from Dirty Harry and Forrest Gump don’t have me lamenting in O tempora manner. Nor ‘Release the Kraken!’, from the remake of Clash of the Titans, parts of which I watched on the flight over, none of which seemed to me to surpass the pleasures of Ray Harryhausen’s hand-animated original.
8. Ryuichi Sakamoto: apparently the great man played a piano recital on Monday night, would I had been there. Though Steve Smith’s elegant review speaks of Sakamoto’s ‘curtains of white hair’ and ‘a decorousness better suited to a fern-throttled piano bar.’ But the audience apparently sighed with pleasure, as would I hearing the opening notes of the theme from The Sheltering Sky...

Cosmopolis: what a day that was

2010-10-13T13:57:00.000-07:00

I've only just noticed that the Think Something Different site has posted up a pretty thorough record of proceedings at the Cosmopolis events at UEA campus on a blazing Saturday back in early June. There are transcripts, videos and photos of pretty much everything that went on. 'The Politics of Storytelling' session I did with Giles Foden and Oscar Guardiola Rivera is logged here, and the 'How To Pitch Your Film' dialogue with producer Judy Counihan is here. The transcripts are especially useful, as I would otherwise find my memory fighting a losing battle against all the beer I thirstily consumed (well, it was really hot...) at several pleasant hostelries during the conference period - one such joint being the reassuringly synthetic student bar close to where all the panellists had their lodgings, in clean-swept Novotel-like student digs.

NUFC: Half-Term Report 2010-2011

2010-10-11T06:30:00.000-07:00

1. Seven points from seven... Would one have taken that back in mid-August? I suppose so, expecting wins over Stoke and Blackpool, a point at either Wolves or Everton, losses at Trafford and Eastlands and - pessimistic, like - home to Villa... So my radar’s about 50% askew.

2. Call the Blackpool result an off-day when none out of many chances got converted. But it was 2-2 with Stoke at SJP in 2008 when I knew we were going down. So one has to hope this season’s 1-2 will prove no more disastrous (i.e. merely depressing) than the 1-2 home losses to Sunderland in the reassuringly mediocre lower-than-midtable seasons of 1999-2000 and 2000-2001.

3. There we were thinking we had another French bobby-dazzler, younger and possibly with a better attitude than the last few, in Hatem Ben Arfa; and then that despicable Dutch Nigel from Millionaire’s Row near Moss Side goes and breaks the lad’s bliddy leg... My slightly one-eyed regard for the Orange, which even survived that last thuggish World Cup, has gone in the dustbin of history.

4. The Steve Harper injury had a cruelty to it and all. Tim Krul has been in our hearts ever since his UEFA Cup heroics of four years ago, but he’s being tested now, questions about his positioning here and there, though of course he’s not playing behind Cannavaro.

5. We’ve had some dastardly refereeing, and they’d better start giving us at least a few throw-ins, just to level it all out, y'knaa.

6. Andy Carroll - signed to 2015. He only wants to play for NUFC. May you stop at the top, bonny lad, by banging in enough savers for us this season.

(Illustration is the front cover of the latest issue of the mighty True Faith)

The taste of Labour

2010-10-08T16:55:00.000-07:00

(Sighs...) I suppose now that the New Generation (TM) has truly got its feet under the desk, a tired hack like me needs to get a life, move on etc, from the dismal events of a fortnight ago. It's hard, though, to spit out the rancid taste of that spectacle, those grim cheerleaders for 'change', that result that could have been cooked up by some demoniac scientist in a laboratory, his intention to make everything about Labour look backward and third-rate and full of spleen... As someone who only came round to Blairism about 10 years too late I can't be regarded as a genuine tribalist or a reliable guide to 'the soul of Labour' (an expression you'd expect to see in any Gordon Brown peroration, and one I'd like to club to death with a baseball bat). Still, hard to bear, son...
My fellow college/student-paper alumnus Peter Hyman wrote in the Times the other day that "only victory at the next election will justify Ed Miliband's leadership bid." Even I - finding 'Death Ray Panda' hard to look at/listen to, and agreeing vehemently with Hyman's withering assessment on Newsnight last week - would say that's setting the bar too high. A Labour leadership candidate can't promise that sort of sway over the wider electorate, he can only hope to impress his congregation, work the ridiculous electoral college system, and so jump the hurdle in front of him - which for DRP was defeating his brother. And, you have to say, no prospective Labour leader can hope to ascend without having reached at least a hand-shake settlement with the trade union leadership, even though that settlement will, of course, be broken by said leader over time; and the failure of David Miliband and his footsoldiers even to get to the foot of the hill in this respect will always count as a serious demerit. For want of a nail...
A great political party doesn't die overnight, though the annals show it can slip into suspended animation or, if you like, aggravated nostalgia. For instance, my pre-Labour-leader-result prediction about the impending return of Neil Kinnock, the consummate Labour career-pol and parader of principles he would later junk in the hope of favour - proved grotesquely accurate, and gave David Cameron an easy joke for his Conference speech. As for the shadow cabinet, I would never seek to patronise Alan Johnson, but really, and nervously, I have to wish him the very best of luck for his new posting. In the words of their last elected PM, I will still be wishing Labour well, wanting them to win, since they are the future now... But I'm still reaching for the full-strength mouth-wash, looking for something to like about the new dispensation.
(Cartoon above by Steve Bell, of course.)

"Faber takes Doctor Forrest to Frankfurt"

2010-10-04T01:52:00.001-07:00

That's the sort of headline a writer likes to see... The Bookseller's Charlotte Williams today reports the news that The Possessions of Doctor Forrest is one of the titles my publisher Faber is taking keenly to market at this week's Frankfurt Book Fair; and my editor Lee Brackstone is quoted handsomely in summary of the book's form and content. Yes, it's good to set the ball a-rolling...

The image herewith is of a sculpture in Vermont marble by the artist Philippe Faraut, entitled 'Yesterday' ((c) 2003) - nothing to do with Forrest save that its rather sinister allure is a quality with which I've tried to imbue this book - also, Forrest is certainly a tale in which face-masks and face-sculpting figure prominently...

Bookhugger column #7: Out of the woods...?

2010-10-01T13:54:00.000-07:00

This month at Bookhugger I write about what I've mostly been doing this month as a writer (not to say last month, and several before that) - which is completing and revising the manuscript of my second novel, The Possessions of Doctor Forrest. Much, much more to come on that subject - possibly a whole other blog... As I say in the piece, Amazon now summarises the plot and reports the book "hitting stores" on May 19 2011.

Books about filmmaking: not tap-dancing about architecture

2010-10-01T13:44:00.000-07:00

I just remembered... that over the summer I contributed to a Sight & Sound magazine poll that sought to determine what are the best-ever books published on the subject of cinema. Like all the other scribes consulted, I submitted my own personal Top 5 which was collated into an overall result, and you'll find my list among the 50 others here.

Credits are currency in this town...

2010-09-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

'Big time, Bill! Big time, big time...!', as that old rock 'n' roll cove Ronnie Hawkins cried cheerfully (to Bill Graham, one assumes) near the start of The Last Waltz. Yes, I finally have my very own entry on the Internet Movie Database - the first, that is, under my current stage name, as 'Richard T. Kelly (Writer, "Coming Up: Eclipse (#8.6)" (2010))'. However, owing to past problems with consistency and consolidation, and the difficulty in finding the time to pursue these matters, it remains the case that I am also the IMDB's 'Richard Kelly (III) (Self, The Name of This Film Is Dogme95 (2000))' and also its 'Richard Kelly (VI) (Miscellaneous Crew, Lee Marvin: A Personal Portrait by John Boorman (1998)'. That's the problem with having a familiar name. Still, if the day should dawn that someone feels like typing up a Wikipedia entry on me (everybody else has got one), then they'll want to know this stuff...

A great hope fell, the ruin within, etc

2010-09-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

I’m often left feeling sick around 4.50 on a Saturday afternoon, but that’s because I’m a Newcastle fan. Some might say I’m inured to losing, that losing, indeed, is my ‘comfort zone’, and accordingly that my being a David Miliband supporter fits firmly into that trend – since rumour has it the Labour leadership result is ‘certified’, and the polling/betting tendencies of recent days would strongly suggest that younger, shorter brother of his is home. Jesus wept. At least I can watch the football scores come in at ease... but then the Toon aren't playing Stoke until Sunday anyhow.
But somebody please do wake me up whenever this curious Ed Miliband character has demonstrated an iota of worth. I will have to avoid the airwaves tomorrow, as I strongly anticipate a number of interviews with a euphoric Neil Kinnock… Still, as before, at least I’ll have to find something else ‘political’ to blog about now. Wonder what’s happened to that Purnell fella…? Has Alan Milburn started attending cabinet meetings…? Maybe I need to make a fresh assessment of what’s-his-face Clegg…

The Friends of David M

2010-09-20T15:47:00.000-07:00

A shout out/back to Mark Nottingham, Labour councillor and blogger, who seems to have enjoyed the sport of my previous post on teenage pop-rock nostalgia, and has just kindly commended this blog of mine to his own readers on the additional grounds of my being agreeably mad for both the Toon and for David Miliband - two noble causes, I'd say, the epousal of which, sadly, seems to bring more sorrow than joy... Still, I do give thanks that this Labour leadership contest is nearly done, for without doubt I need to find something else to obsess/blog about...

15 albums when I was 15...

2010-09-18T14:19:00.000-07:00

Currently doing the rounds on Facebook again is one of those pop-cultural chain-letters wherein a friend offers a list of 15 albums that have meant something to them, this list copied to 15 friends and appended with the request that each friend make their own selection of 15 LPs and copy this on to 15 more... Impossible for me to play this game by the stated rules - what, only 15? - but I thought I could put some useful parameters round the exercise and give myself a little Proustian rush by picking 15 albums that had influenced me considerably by the time of my 15th birthday in late 1985... List as follows, roughly in order of when I first heard/bought/taped off a friend the long-player in question.

Blondie, 'Parallel Lines'

The Beatles, 'Revolver'

Talking Heads, 'Remain in Light'

Elvis Costello, 'Imperial Bedroom'

Kraftwerk, 'The Man-Machine'

Dexy’s Midnight Runners, 'Searching for the Young Soul Rebels'

Peter Gabriel, 'Peter Gabriel (IV)'

Echo and the Bunnymen, 'Porcupine'

Bob Dylan, 'Infidels'

Bruce Springsteen, 'Darkness on the Edge of Town'

Frankie Goes to Hollywood, 'Welcome to the Pleasuredome'

Run DMC, 'King of Rock'

New Order, 'Low-Life'

Propaganda, 'A Secret Wish'

Kate Bush, 'Hounds of Love'

Good old common sense in the FT

2010-09-13T15:47:00.000-07:00

Because I agree with him, I must say that Phillip Stephens talks customary good sense in the FT on the already wracked state of the ConDemNation, and the resultant opportunity for Labour:
ConDemNation: "Britain’s coalition government set out its plans to eliminate the fiscal deficit in the bright sunlight of certain conviction. A couple of months later, it confronts the chilling realities of shrinking the state...Nick Clegg protested the other day that the spending cuts drawn up in Whitehall were “not dramatically different” to plans laid by the previous government. This softening in the language of austerity says it all. The Liberal Democrat leader once thought “savage” reductions were vital to repair the nation’s finances. Now he must weigh the political costs..."
Labour: "David [Miliband] is the choice of those at the top of the party, who are keen to return to power. Alone, he has talked about rebuilding the coalition that won the party three election victories from 1997. His handicap is that this tags him as the Blairite choice... Ed, the younger Miliband, who could yet win as everybody’s second choice, has offered mostly mush – policies and promises calculated to make the party feel good about itself and about his candidacy... By choosing David Miliband, Labour would be saying it wanted to win back England’s aspirant classes – that it was still serious about power. But the party’s heart could yet rule its head. Mr Clegg – and Mr Cameron – are cheering on the younger of the two brothers."

Bookhugger column #6: Novelists talking on telly

2010-09-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

My Bookhugger column last month (last week, frankly) was inspired by the wonderful BBC4 archive series In Their Own Words, culled from the Corporation's back-catalogue of interviews with major British 20th-century novelists. Television does indeed compel us to look at books, so long as the programme-making and writing in question have sufficient spark. It took a while for TV to 'do' book-chat without too many excruciating pauses, but P.G.Wodehouse, here c. mid-1950s, biting amiably but hard on the end of every query, shows himself to be ahead of his time, whatever the culture once thought.

What We Did on Our (Bank) Holiday

2010-09-06T15:52:00.000-07:00

This picture just in courtesy of my brother, who was one of our party of nine (inc. 4 kiddies) sharing a big old family-cottage-rental up in Suffolk last weekend. Behind us here is the 16th-century Melford Hall, as impressive up close as it likely seems even in miniature, the lawns of which were as lush and springy as any I've ever laid foot on.