First heard this on Sam's recent Acid Folk Comp. It's just lovely....

....but also tinged with meloncholy, as is the whole very good, if not quite so immediate album.

Interesting post by Alex on the Wild Beasts. Quite like the new one, but still long for some of that wildness of yore (yore these days being approx 2 years)

The thing here is that it IS enlarging to listen to something recommended/advocated to you because it takes on a certain colouration from another persons life, in a way it stimulates a kind of empathetic echo, ahh! so this is what moves them, this is an exteriorization in a way of their inner world, this is a part of what their soul looks like (please note absence of scare quotes around soul). It forces a kind of imaginative investment in the listener, a listening through the other, in this sense when you listen you listen together. This is why I think there was such a sense of communion and communication around the music press. You read (and re-read) the same writers week after week, often hundreds of thousands of words of prose over a few years and you got to know them, you felt familiar, intimacy developed, you listened often out of respect, in a spirit of friendship, often you struggled to like things, to see what they had seen in it.

Meanwhile, Wayne takes an elliptically autobiographical swerve.

I say, more! Less elliptically.

Right, Ladies and Gents, I’m going to be away for a while. I’ve got about another week in Okinawa, then I’m off to Miyako Island again, then Fukuoka for a few days, Seoul for two days, then to Osaka overnight before flying to London on the Saturday and starting work again on the Monday (jet lag!!!!!!!!!!!). Plus sorting out work for next year in Japan in the process.

The novel’s coming along too, you’ll be delighted to hear.

Mata atode!

There you go, ed.

see, I told you it was obvious....

Finished! Don't have much to say at this stage, other than that it was kind of good to read a really long novel (or in fairness five mid-length novels) again. Middle section's too repetitive though, innit? I mean I realise this is like a formal strategy on Bolano’s part, the sheer numbing, desensitizing pileup of corpses and how it eventually strips away even the reader's most prurient instincts, but for me he's made his point/achieved his effect around murder 700 and we could have done without the next 400 or so.

So...not blown away as I was when I read The Erl King and I do think that the open ended and “suggestively allusive” text that hints at some higher order of connection and interrelation between the disparate events is a bit of a clichéd, po-mo cop out.

Reader: What did all that mean?

Writer: Well, what do you THINK it meant?

Reader:*Blather*

Writer: Well if that’s what it means to you, perhaps that it IS what it means, ho ho….* author disappears in a flash of smoke-and-mirrors,*

Now I don’t want to suggest that this sophisticated and kind of “texturally correct” Barthesian/Derridian writing strategy of conferring ultimate authority on the reader allows for any old poorly thought out, random “weird” bullshit to be stitched loosely together and passed off as some intense commentary on the Late Capitalist condition/ Lacanian whatnot/ Eliminitive hooha, BUT if you’ve ever written a long narrative you’ll be aware of the way seventeen different directions/meanings are constantly fizzing away in your head at any point as you plow forward wondering how you’re going to tie this all up into a meaningful whole, and consequently when you watch, say “Donnie Darko”, your tendency is to think AHA! so you couldn’t find anything to hang all these multiple levels/cool “scenes” and ideas on, no overarching formal or thematic principle, and now you're going to try a bit of sleight of hand by going “ahh, yeah, but isn’t like an a-b-c narrative and like a “meaning” and like a “conclusion” just so old-fashioned, don’t we want like an open text that the reader can enter at any stage, that liberates them from linearity and into the play of multiple meanings and interpretations?” To which I say, maybe, but let’s not try to polish the turd of your shoddy, incomplete work with the increasingly threadbare rag of post-structuralism because it looks pretty old and overdone in itself that kind of approach, looks like a handy get-out-clause.*

Any other recommendations bookwise, by the way?**

*In all fairness you would have to say that Christopher Nolan is a great plotter, a great architect even if he's not thematically my cup of tea. This is probably due to the influence of Christopher Priest who I haven't read enough of, but who I suspect takes some of that looseness and independence of meaning you experience while writing and constantly uses it to switch the readers assumption back and forth.

** UPDATE, Yeah, I've just gone and bought Don Quixote....tried to read it a few times several years ago and and kept getting distracted by other stuff. It was never excatly the right time (same with The Possessed.) while I was in the bookshop, which has a really unusual range of stuff actually, I spotted a couple of novels by Steve Erickson, who I read pretty intensively in the 90s, and his newer stuff looks really intersting too, so depending on how long El Quijote takes me I reckon I'll get up to speed on his latest stuff.

errr.. anybody read any later Mailer, "Harlot's Ghost" and what have you? What about "Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson?

Wayne’s memifying over at the 70s blog, spinning off the recent last song before you die/world ends thing and pointing to the amount of Soul/Soul-influenced stuff in there

.
Now no doubt there are some ultra-avantistas who will insist on listening to Bartok or Xasthur or whatever as some final confirmation of their impregnable rejection of sentiment/the ”human” but I’d be getting fairly “soulful” myself I have to say. What you would want, or at least what I’d want confirmed to me, a confirmation that’s required periodically in life itself not just at its final stages is the sense that somehow all this has been worth it, that despite the dullness, the boredom, the confusion, the alienation, the doubts there were moments of intensity and beauty, of understanding, sympathy and joy that redeemed the whole, the feeling that your deepest needs had been met, even if only briefly.

I’d have this song partly because while hell may be other people, so too is heaven and at base the question of how meaningful any two people can be for each other haunts life. Partly because the child is father to the man and it’s always slightly shocking and embarrassing to find how little you’ve changed, how superficially experience has altered you on the deeper levels (sure, you’ve wised up and know how to play the game better now, but there’s still that bitter, tiring distance between you and your performance) because life is unfathomable and painful and you need to be consoled and you need to have the possibility of a reprieve held out to you. Because perhaps the most admirable of all qualities are compassion and quiet fortitude.

What you’d want I guess at the final moment is something that expressed the fullness, the multidimensionality, something that caught up the specific time and place of your being in the world, something connected to region, roots, class, that talked of home and work, that spoke to your fear and hope, your dreams of flight, your faltering courage, your willingness to try, the importance of finding a peer group, of drawing close to what’s most vital to you. If you’ve never felt trapped in your life, by circumstance of birth, by character, by lack of opportunity, if you’ve never surveyed the seemingly insurmountable distance between yourself and the self you want to be, the place you want to occupy, socially, interpersonally and your current life-world, never really known dismay, failure, depleted spirits and battered ego, the fear that this is all you are ever going to get, then this song will mean nothing to you.

But to be honest I can’t think of a song that better captures that intermediate stage between
ecstasy and despair, triumph and defeat, resignation and assertion that most of us inhabit most of our lives. It wants to live but deeply understands the desire to die.

It’s a really obvious choice but it says everything to me, and not just about my life. Oh, plus, I’d have the video, one of the most beautiful ever made, playing on a fifty foot screen.

We could watch it together, if you like.

I'm sorry but he's left me no choice.

Superlative post from Wayne!

Now Capleton’s More Fire is definitely a tricky proposition innit, what with having the absolutely thrilling (on like a sonic level, yeah) Old Testament hardcore homophobia of Pure Sodom, yet at the same time this stirring, numinous, ineffably lovely hymn to Jah.

Capleton you are “just lovely”. *Swoons*

small overlap time:

I notice that the drum and bass comp that Wayne recommends in the comments and the Zombi album I was listening to at the same time are both called (more or less) "escape velocity".

just saying like....

Ho ho...newborn Junglist I may be but I have to say that this....

is pretty awesome. I've long been a Zombi fan but they've excelled themselves here. Has this already picked up a load of mediocre reviews elsewhere? If so, they are simply wrong!

Just lovely cont.....

In other news I seem to be getting into Jungle at last, a mere twenty years after it hit its creative peak (alright 14 years, whatever) S'funny but I hear it differently now because I've started to think of it in different terms.....or perhaps it's more that the terms it was always discussed in seem more meaningful to me now...

In other completely unrelated news I have a strong desire to go to Scotland. Now it could be because I am half Scottish on my mum's side and we went up there a lot when I was a kid, I have just watched NEDS (great, though not as good as his other two) and am mad keen to see We Need To Talk About Kevin (my two favourite film makers of the moment being Scottish) or the fact that I'm reading Andrew Crumey's essays and short stories online (he's Scottish) or the recent, very interesting political upsets, or the fact that compared to England, Scotland looks like deeply civilized and progressive place right now. Could also be the sheer glowering romance of the landscape, the undeniable charm, charisma and wit of the people.

If I have to live in the UK for any length of time over the next few years, it certainly won't be London if I can help it (but then again of course, A Job looms large) and I doubt it'll be down South at all. I used to swear I would never go back up North but now I have no idea why.

I'm in a bit of a "just lovely" mood at the moment so i might post a few songs over the next few days...

This is just a winner on every level... there's a lot to be said for the captain in straight/romantic mode... in fact I kind of prefer him being "commercial" to his neon meat dreaming really...

kind of the perfect summer evening song, really...

Excellent stuff from Wayne, Oliver and Culla over at the decades' blogs….

I’m a bit quiet at the moment as I’m, well, not exactly writing a novel but basically thinking about one a lot. I have the same experience every time I start something new, I tell myself this time I’ll keep it straightforward, commercial and after about two pages it all goes horribly wrong and you find yourself shackled to a rapidly mutating albatross for the next however-many-years.

A violently mutating albatross, perhaps.

more "just lovely."

I first heard this on a Gary War mix last year. I know youtube links are ten-a-penny, but seriously, if you don't click play on that you really will regret it for the rest of your short and wretched life.

My cup runneth over a bit today.*

Now while of course flattered and gratified by having Alex say exactly the kind of things I would want said about my writing the most important thing largely is that he has absolutely nothing to gain by saying it.

In this sense it’s pure generosity, and I have to say that in my experience of online life and interactions I think the internet is a superb facilitator of the generous impulse.

Certainly some people look on blogs or sites as steps in a career-ladder, a kind of generalized home based internship, but equally of course for many people the internet has allowed a reconfiguration of their social worlds, connecting up with people who they would otherwise never have met in order to share ideas. Fundamentally it has also allowed them to give.

As an example, I illegally download a huge amount of music and of course watch a vast number of films and videos on youtube, yet I myself, shamefully, have never uploaded anything. I know it’s all someone else’s hard work that they/we are stealing but still, there are people out there who take the time and effort to upload stuff, with no financial reward and a pretty minimal bit of ego gratification, yet hundreds of thousands of people do it. There isn’t even the arguable narcissism of Facebook or blogging to consider here, just a desire, a human-wide compulsion to give gifts to others, to all and sundry, to anonymously contribute, to use your spare time to do so. This impulse is a kind of generic desire to seek out and make happy or provide for some other who on one level is like yourself.

This, it seems to me is the utopian dimension to the internet in that much of what goes on here goes against rational self-interest, even on the basis of some kind of unconscious social contract: can the anonymous Canadian guy who has made literally hundred of brilliant films available on youtube really be doing so out of the self-interested idea that if he does this other people will upload stuff he wants to see and that therefore ultimately he will benefit: perhaps he is, but then you would have to question how rational his perceived rational self interest really is.

* It's kind of important to have other poeple in mind when writing and to write for them, innit? I have to confess that when I was writing Classless I pretty much thought to myself ahhh... I'm going to write something that will entertain Owen (who is himself a very generous soul).

For Wayne!

In My Craft or Sullen Art
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

next chapter in the "just lovely" season....

lovely warm night here in Naha and I'm just about to go out and wander its streets getting pleasantly drunk, before murdering the above tune in the Karaoke up in Shintoshi.

There was never a right time to leave her.

I wanted to, for years. There’s the absurdity of it, it took years even though it was obvious to both of us, almost from the start, that things weren’t going to work out.

Our relationship then rapidly became one huge delaying tactic, one crisis after another in which there was the implicit plea; not just yet, let me get through this first, this job interview, this course, this new position in work, this next trip.

She kept me busy, bound up in these crises with twenty texts a day and emails, demands, questions, requests, anything to stop my mind wandering off onto the basic fact of our unsuitability to each other.

I could never devote enough time or thought to her concerns, her crises. There was a central, gaping hole at the core of it all, the fact that I didn’t love her and that neither of us were ready to accept that. She demanded proofs of love, tokens of love, not material things but focus, attention, involvement, concern, but in the absence of the spontaneous and natural pleasure we should have taken in each other, the freely-given sense of fullness, we had only The Demand and The Void.

Nothing could fill that void, no amount of running about, no quantity of time given, it was a black hole into which we were both slowly and inexorably disappearing, sometimes it felt as though the whole house were imploding.

There were other factors mixed up in all this of course, all that family stuff for her, my own cowardice and doubt, our lack of self esteem, scepticism about love, past disappointments that weighed on us.

It’s hard to feel that your essence is not in some way celebrated, that what you are is of delight to no-one. Then, no matter where you are, you’re not at home, no matter how well you do you lack comfort and security. Whereas to be loved and to be in love is to have a home anywhere, to enjoy a basic freedom, to have trivial daily fears and concerns seem surmountable, secondary.

Some people have never been in love, I suppose and have told themselves that it doesn’t exist. I know quite a few, some of them get married thinking that a reliable husband who’ll bring in money for the kids they want is the best you can ask for, or that nights out with the lads, maybe a few one night stands, visits to prostitutes on Stag weekends, or at the very least porn will get them through it. That’s how life is. These people tend to be in their early thirties.

Some people fall in love once, it goes wrong, they never recover from that and then they drift into realism and a refusal to risk anything. Give me someone who has been as disappointed as I have. But two disappointments don’t always cancel each other out, won’t add up to satisfaction.

Equally of course I know lots of couples who have been together for years and are happy, and whose love for each other I don’t doubt. But you need love, without love your relationship is just one more thing you have to manage, one more negotiation between your fear and need, one more drain on your spirit, one more cost/benefit analysis. It will weigh on you, you'll begin to steel yourself for your partner’s return home from work, find you're hyper-alert to every nuance and tic of their mood, feel your heart sink when the phone goes and it’s them.

Call me naïve, tell me: give it time, come back in five years and tell me the same. But you can trust me, Ive already been there numerous times and that’s not the point, even if it all goes wrong, I’ll still stand before the Lord of song, with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah.

As my close friend Mr Cohen has so wisely and rightly put it.

Johnny the Fox meets Jimmy the Weed

it's a belter that album.

She laughed in her sleep again just now

I love it when she does that

It makes me feel I’ve made her happy

Run out the boat, my broken comrades;
Let the old seaweed crack, the surge
Burgeon oblivious of the last
Embarkation of feckless men,
Let every adverse force converge--
Here we must needs embark again.

Run up the sail, my heartsick comrades;
Let each horizon tilt and lurch--
You know the worst: your wills are fickle,
Your values blurred, your hearts impure
And your past life a ruined church--
But let your poison be your cure.

Put out to sea, ignoble comrades,
Whose record shall be noble yet;
Butting through scarps of moving marble
The narwhal dares us to be free;
By a high star our course is set,
Our end is Life. Put out to sea.

Now, i reckon that if he wasn't really dead and they'd just made the whole thing up he would be in a pretty good position to expose them as liars, right, by, y'know, appearing on the internet holding a copy of todays' Jihadist Times.

Perhaps he died in the desert years ago and they've only just confirmed it so the whole shoot-out thing is a fiction, but surely a less verifiable and more convenient fiction would be if they'd claimed they got him in a mountain cave miles from anywhere.

But given that he's a CIA operative and is in reality enjoying a peaceful retirement in Guam at the taxpayers' expense I guess they're all free to say what they like.

We are however now going to have seven millenia of people shouting show me the body! followed by, that's not him for X reason, followed by: tell me the truth, all I want is the truth!

honestly...barely string two words together....

i mean.....what a limited analysis of contemporary England....

It's sad the way "they" just can't get "our" culture, isn't it?