“You Have Been One Too Many For Me, Mr Holmes”
Posted by: danhartland on: November 18, 2009
It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy.
"Two pistols were pointed at his head."
The Three Garridebs is proof, in case we needed it after the last few weeks, that Conan Doyle late in his career was still capable of spinning a tight tale. In the fashion that is customary for most Holmes tales in the context of the canon, the story’s relative success proceeds from its deft handling of Conan Doyle’s recurrent themes: the foreign past, the mysterious career criminal, the unlikely hermit. Even Birmingham – which we remember as the site of a hoax in The Stockbroker’s Clerk – serves a similar capacity here. Yet these elements are yoked together convincingly, and Holmes enjoys a sufficiently magnetic spell, which makes the satisfying whole much more than the sum of its potentially rather tired parts.
One of the keys to this renewed vigour is the unusual premise: Holmes is approached by a Mr Garrideb, who has in turn been approached by a Mr Garrideb, on the matter of the will of … yet another. The latter two Garridebs are Americans – and we get a good deal of evocative Americana (Conan Doyle seems particularly fond of Chicago, which of course was a favourite haunt of both Altamont and the Red Circle) – and the will of the one has tasked the other with finding two more Garridebs, with whom to share a $15 million fortune. The name, however, is uniquely rare, and the search has therefore come to London – and to Holmes’s client.
This ruse is quickly seen through by the detective (long inured to the lure of unlikely fortune): “I was wondering, Watson,” he says in the mischievous form he spents much of this tale, “what on earth could be the object of this man in telling us such a rigmarole of lies.” Naturally Holmes discovers the object – and naturally it involves an exotic past and a lack of honour amongst thieves. What is remarkable about the solution is that it hangs together so well. One must buy the idea that Holmes’s client is a total hermit, but agoraphobes are not uncommon. Proceeding from that fact, all the others slot into place rather nicely.
Holmes, too, feels more like his old self than he often does in the Casebook. In 1902, we are told, he refused a knighthood for services rendered – alas, we never learn what those services were. What we do learn about him, however – or perhaps what Watson learns – is one of the warmest moments in the canon. When a bullet grazes Watson’s leg, Holmes jumps to his side: “You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say that you are not hurt!” Watson’s thoughts are worth quoting in full:
“It was worth a wound – it was worth many wounds – to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment,a nd the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that revelation.”
All the reader’s years of following the pair, too, may well be rewarded in this moment. And Holmes’s next expostulation? “You are right. It is quite superficial.” The Three Garridebs is indeed lovely stuff for the faithful.
Mostly Who
Posted by: danhartland on: November 16, 2009
"Should I gurn yet, Rusty?"
Anna was hard at writing work this weekend, so we managed only a good old shop. Left to my own devices, my weekend accomplishments, bar some reading and a catching up with the papers, can be boiled down to:
1) Supported Pete Riley on Saturday night. Pete has a very pleasant voice, some rather fine songs, and is to boot a thoroughly good egg. Enjoyed playing and listening, so good times. You can listen to Pete yourself at his MySpace.
2) Watched the latest Doctor Who special, ‘The Waters of Mars’. Thoroughly marred by the usual sentimental over-selling of key plot points, this one was a bit of a mess. It started out promisingly, with the fate of Bowie Base One, the first human settlement on Mars, sealed before they had the first inkling that anything was wrong. Lindsey Duncan was good – and wasn’t it nice to see Shane from Neighbours get work again? But the whole thing quickly fell foul of the usual Whovian sins, wildly pulling the mood and the viewer hither and thither: the viewer is smacked around the head with how Special and Amazing the Doctor’s latest female assistant is; Murray Gold’s score swells beyond bursting point every time the slighest bit of emotion may (or may not) be being felt on screen; cloying, strung-out Moments Of Import are signposted with such heavy-handed insistence that the viewer is left without any agency at all.
Perhaps all this is a function of Who being (whisper it now) a kid’s show. (Though this comes dangerously close to what Helena Bonham Carter said in an interview this weekend about Enid Blyton’s fiction: ““When you write for very young children what they want is something familiar and safe and stereotyped.” And this seems to me to underestimate the audience.) Yet take the Doctor’s behaviour in the final 15 minutes of the episode: walking away from the doomed base, he suddenly realises that, as last of the Time Lords, he controls, rather than follows, the laws of time. Naturally, this instantaneously results in huge megalomania and a God complex. Even more naturally, this lasts all of a few minutes, at which point, again in receipt of a bargain bin epiphany, he is on his knees muttering about dying. Most melodramas would consider this too much.
This isn’t signposting or playing to the audience – it’s just lazy storytelling. Even Tennant, usually tolerably good at the manic mood swings, couldn’t properly paper over the cracks. One can only hope that Steven Moffat has some better ideas for Matt Smith.
The Fight Against and About Poverty
Posted by: danhartland on: November 14, 2009
- In: Politics
- 3 Comments
Hooray?
Unusually, perhaps, this was a political week which revolved around the poor. Afghanistan rumbled in the background, but The Sun’s depressing campaign against Gordon Brown’s handwriting seems largely to have passed through without making much running. Andreas Whittam Smith in The Independent tried to link Brown with another hapless Prime Minister, but his piece had an unsatisfying pithiness to it which suggested how tenuous was the link. Undoubtedly, Brown is like John Major a (publicly) undemonstrative politician, but his problems are otherwise very different; one of them does not appear to be the consequences of his handwriting on his profile in Tabloidland.
Indeed, this has been a halfway decent week for Labour – the victory in the Glasgow East by-election surprised many in its scale, if not in the win itself. No one really expected Labour to lose, but the share of the (admittedly low) vote, and the majority, was very healthy. Again in The Independent, John Curtice made a good argument that the victory in this most deprived of constituencies cannot easily be extrapolated – but this is the usual way for by-elections anywhere. Tuesday’s Populus poll, discussed by The Times’s Peter Riddell here, gave the Tories a majority of just two. In part, this is a reaction – from those working class voters again – against David Cameron’s reneging on the EU referendum pledge; but it also put Labour at the top of its recent range, too. Even the increasingly centre-right Politics Home’s panel aren’t making it so certain a thing anymore.
A turning of the tide? Obviously not. Peter Mandelson’s coming installation as ‘information minister’ is proof enough that the government still feels itself to be on the back foot. Rather, the closer Cameron gets to appearing a dead cert, the more scrutiny his thin proposals receive, and thus he slips back down again. Ben Brogan acted as mouthpiece for the Tory right when he wrote a sceptical piece about Cameron’s insufficiently Conservative policy platform, and his paper made it clear in a leader of their own that Cameron needs to go further if he is to seal the deal even with his own supporters.
All this followed a widely reported Hugo Young lecture in which the Tory leader went on about the big idea which has always been at the heart of his leadership – empowering the voluntary sector as a way of reducing the role and size of the state. Predictably, Polly Toynbee wasn’t convinced, but nor was the centre-left but sympathetic and astute Steve Richards. With the left and the right both unhappy, it’s probably true that Cameron’s lecture was aimed precisely at not saying anything at all. Certainly his big talk has always been light on policy details – how can the state get smaller when it will need to supervise ever more disparate agents? Or is the idea that a Tory government will simply leave them to their own devices in a sort of enlightened laissez faire policy? No one knows, and that’s his problem. Johann Hari’s article from last week (worth linking to again) remains foremost in my mind.
The point of it all, as Alistair Campbell argued (before being distracted by a very clever diversionary personal attack from Michael Portillo) on This Week on Thursday, Cameron is winning by default. Labour attacks feel desperate and not a little pitiful, but it is easily within their grasp to prevent a thumping majority – or even a Tory win. After all, Labour politicians took both of the big prizes at the annual Spectator Awards – Politician and Parliamentarian of the year – which must mean they’re doing something right, surely?
But A Plot To Train You To Your Ruin
Posted by: danhartland on: November 13, 2009
So I read ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, and posted some thoughts over at EMU’s collaborative reading. There’s a great deal to say about the play, which I consider to be not just Ford’s masterpiece but one of the English Renaissance more generally. But following what I said last week about looking for historical clues in literary sources, one of the things which struck me was its depiction of sexuality.
No doubt about it, ‘Tis Pity is a racy play. From Soranzo’s penchant for virgins to the central incestuous pairing, Ford’s is a play which spares few blushes. And yet, remarkably for the age, Ford treats his transgressive couple with a good deal of tenderness. Giovanni and Annabella, brother and sister but also lovers, are not merely vehicles for titilation, as they might have been in a less writer’s hands. They are given rather moving speeches of love, and share equal responsibility for their dangerous relationship: though it is Giovanni who first confesses his love, it is Annabella who first pledges her troth, as it were.
‘Tis Pity is the first English play to deal so baldly with incest (as far as I know); it’s fair-mindedness – in a play busting outwards with other examples of sexual deviancy – is thus even more surprising. Its setting, however, might hold the clue – Catholic Italy is removed from Protestant England. It is ‘other’ and distanced, and for English audiences of the time Catholic carnality was a source of some fascination: through Queen Henrietta Maria, for whom this play was first performed, it was at the very heard of the monarchy of the time (the play was first performed around the 1630s). As Richard Cust puts it in his Charles I: A Political Life, “[Charles I] was the first English monarch for well over a hundred years to enjoy anything approaching a happy and fulfilled family life and it did much to define his kingship.” [pg. 148] His virility, and his wife’s fecundity, bestowed upon England a quite unprecedented royal line, subverting the tenuous stability of a virgin queen and a homosexual king before him.
Yet this stability was the product of a Catholic womb. This, as Michael Braddick shows in God’s Fury, England’s Fire, “could become the basis of a conspiracy theory” [pg. 23]: namely that England was being converted by stealth, by dynastic usurpation. The wranglings over Catholic counsellors in the Long Parliament would follow right through to James II’s fall forty years later. I started this latest literary/historical train of thought on the back of Thomas Corns’s The Royal Image, in which Ann Baynes Coiro convincingly argued that, “Charles’s reign introduced the possibility of over-whelming dynasty, on the one hand, and of a feminized king dominated by a woman, notably a papist woman, on the other.” [pg. 28] Ford plays a woman, and a papist woman, at the heart of Giovanni’s fall from grace, whilst the rest of Parma falls apart around him.
‘Tis Pity is no political allegory – it is a profoundly literary piece, reaching out to other classics of the English Renaissance (Romeo and Juliet, Doctor Faustus, The Spanish Tragedy). And yet its deep concerns about retribution and power politics, about rebellion against both state and Church, and its concern with marriage – as Cust argues, central to Charles’s public image – and its role in reproduction, all resonate in the politics of the day. Everyone is corrupt in ‘Tis Pity, and the polity is heading for self-annihalation: “To what a height of liberity in damnation,” Vasques, the selfless but ruthless servant, opines towards the end of Act IV, “hath the devil trained our age.” [IV.iii, ll 268-269] The complex and benighted tensions of Ford’s time are all too present in his play.
“We Had Thought It Some Wild Tale Of Foreign Parts”
Posted by: danhartland on: November 11, 2009
Holmes had read carefully a note which the last post had brought him.
"I chanced to glance at Holmes and saw a most singular intentness in his expression."
The Sussex Vampire is notable for the manner in which Conan Doyle allows Sherlock Holmes the last word. The author, of course, was in later life a great believer in the supernatural and occult. Holmes, naturally, is far more sceptical: “The world is big enough for us,” he says. “No ghosts need apply.” This is why the Granada adaptation of this case, in which the master is asked to investigate an apparent case of English vampirism, got it so disastrously wrong: the point of this story, unusually for Conan Doyle’s more flamboyant concepts, is not the sensationalism of the set-up but the rationalism of the denouement.
That is not to say the story is particularly good: there are a number of unanswered questions about the actions of the characters which probably don’t have any sensible answers. What struck me about the story, though, was its similarity in many ways to the Road Hill case as written about by Kate Summerscale in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: set in 1896, there is here, as was not apparent in The Three Gables, a properly Victorian modesty. Outsiders aren’t welcome, and the scandal must not get out. As usual, the other fall-back position is the exotic history of one of the house’s inhabitants.
The lady of the house is from Peru, and her resultant inscrutability is key to the story’s success (or otherwise). If we can believe that, alien as she is, she may well hold “this horrible, this incredible secret” of vampirism, we will be gripped. If, as modern readers are likely to feel, we find Conan Doyle’s insistence on the strangeness of the Latin unconvincing, we are simply waiting for the other shoe to drop. Holmes, too, is not as obfuscatory as he sometimes is, aiming almost all of his questions in the direction of his client’s elder son.
For all that, however, Holmes’s method is at the centre of the story – as if the occultist author is testing the rationalism of his character. Conan Doyle’s integrity is too great simply to use Holmes as a fall-guy, however, and thus the great detective’s methods are vindicated. He protests that Watson “has given an exaggerated view of my scientific methods.” Certainly there is imagination at work, too – “It has been a case for intellectual deduction,” Holmes explains, allowing that his method is essentially to make up a story and then see if it fits. As most notably in Silver Blaze, however, this concoction of a theory, and then the testing of that theory “point by point by quite a number of independent incidents”, is of course a fundamentally scientific method.
The telegram with which this story opens is replied to in its final lines. Characteristically, Holmes’s response is terse, matter-of-fact and without sensationalism. It is to Conan Doyle’s credit that he allowed his characters such strong and consistent voices, even when he himself might have disagreed.
Why A Fox?
Posted by: thestoryandthetruth on: November 9, 2009
- In: film
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Ocean's Eleven.
We saw Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox at the weekend. It was a curious experience: the film looked and sounded beautiful, and naturally Anderson is superb in styling his world. Mr Fox’s corduroy,and Mrs Fox’s dresses, were all beautiful stuff, and the vaguely 1970s feel was offset by the antiquey furniture – tiny replicas, apparently, of Roald Dahl’s own home. At the same time, though, we had to ask, ‘why?’ Why make a film of this wonderful children’s book (Dan’s favourite when a tot), and turn it into a wise-cracking, neurotic, referential film with terrorist analogies and heartbreaking rat death scenes? It wasn’t that the film wasn’t good; it was just a strange prospect.
Mr Fox himself was clearly depicted as an untrustworthy fantasist (particularly in that scene with the fully animalistic wolf), which in and of itself is enough to make the whole affair more morally complex than Dahl’s original – and not the same story at all. Throw in the school angst (Rushmore with fur), the aforementioned Western redemption scene, and a whole lot of dialogue – characters in this film talk a lot – and you have, well, a Wes Anderson movie. No bad thing, but you still wind up asking, ‘why use the title at all?’
We enjoyed it, though. It is, as it were, worth a gander. (Anna would like to note that was Dan’s pun.)
All Europe, All The Time
Posted by: danhartland on: November 6, 2009
Thinking Dave is thinking
This has been another political week dominated by foreign policy, and by Europe in particular. In the latter case, the focus was almost entirely on the Tories. In a sense, this is good for Labour – as Natalie Haynes said on Question Time last night, we’re just months away from a General Election, so it must be time for the Tories to tear themselves apart on Europe. But it’s also bad, because such a sundering is unlikely to happen in the same way we have known them to in the past, and any focus on the Tories simply positions them as a de facto government-in-waiting. There was a time when all we wrote and read about was Labour, except when we were staring in gawping amazement at the Tories’ idiocy. It ain’t so now.
The Tories must have known it was coming for a long time: when Václav Klaus signed the Lisbon Treaty on behalf of his country, he was doing only what both his parliament and his court had told him he must. Yet Cameron has for months parroted the line that his party would only announce their post-Lisbon European policy when Lisbon was indeed ratified by all 27 member states. Whatever the wisdom of this strategy – and it surely leaves him resembling his own caricature of a vaciliating and Prime Minsiter more than he allows – the news that no referendum would be held, but that this would never be allowed to happen again, was not welcome in some Tory quarters. Tim Montgomerie, for one, finds the policy unconvincing and insufficiently Eurosceptic. (Iain Dale, on the other hand, is predictably with Cameron.)
As usual, Bagehot eloquently sums up the conventional wisdom: this was a necessary decision, and Cameron is right both to avoid full confrontation with Brussels (and closet Tory fan Nicolas Sarkozy is responding, if nore supportively, then conciliatorily) and with his party. But the debate between Montgomerie and Dale is writ larger in the party as a whole: Guido tells us that Daniel Hannan, one of the two front-bench Tory MEPs who resigned this week over Cameron’s Lisbon move, doesn’t want a confrontation with Cameron, but at the same time says Hannan (a noted swivel-eyed loon, of course) is preparing a “long march”. Against whom, exactly? His post-resignation blog post makes it sound like a rearguard action against his own party: “We need a broad movement within the Conservative Party that will push for referendums, citizens’ initiatives and the rest of the paraphernalia of direct democracy.” Meanwhile, Cameron is urged to sack Hannan and fellow rebel Roger Helmer by the form Tory leader in Europe, and warned he risks losing votes to UKIP by Lord Tebbit. Even David Davis came out of the woodwork. The spin, as so often, is not quite the substance.
Of course, all of this is played out in the context of a likely General Election victory. Cameron is, like his Foreign Secretary William Hague, one of the most Eurosceptic Tory leaders ever, but he knows that Eurosceptic campaigns do not win General Elections. His party knows it, too, and will stave off the big debate until they have won – hence the first phase of Hannan’s long march. The new ‘policy’, announced in a deliberately underwhelming and unshowy speech by Cameron on the same day that news about Sir Christopher Kelly’s expensesgate recommendations broke, is, like the mealy-mouthed referendum talk before it, at best a soft-headed place-marker, not a proper policy at all. He is biding his time.
Which leads us to Gordon Brown’s travails this week on Afghanistan, where his continued inability – or unwillingness – to offer a decent narrative of why Britain is in that poor, put-upon country, did himself and his parties no electoral favours. Reviewing the rather well done Into The Storm this week, Sam Woollaston made a cheap-but-true quip that Brown could learn something from the rhetorical ability of Sir Winston Churchill. In an interview with the Evening Standard today, meanwhile, Cameron, whilst squarely aiming at renewing his appeal to True Blues, continues to be more eloquent and more likeable. (“If you spend your life in a poorly-lit bunker surrounded by your aides you are not going to make very good decisions,” he snipes innocently.)
The always excellent Johann Hari reminded us in this morning’s Indie why a Tory government would be a Bad Thing. But as long as he remains the best communicator on the political scene, his party will stick uneasily with him, and Labour will wander further and further into the wilderness. The EU – and the British electorate – might miss those nice social democrats when they’re gone, but it’ll be too late then.
Literary Texts and History
Posted by: danhartland on: November 5, 2009
- In: History
- 4 Comments
Obviously a great historian.
Remember the fun I was having with Thomas Corn’s edited collection, The Royal Image? It closes with an afterword by Kevin Sharpe, who naturally makes the case for the contribution of critics – literary and otherwise – to historical study. “What we now need,” he writes, “is to combine the skills of critics and historians in a full history of the relationships of courts and kings (and republics) to the images and representations of those courts and rulers over the period of the English Renaissance.” [pg. 290] You could, if not constrained by the theme of a collection, make the wider point that critics, with their sensitivity for genre and mode, are well-placed to identify cultural contexts where the specifity of historians may not do so.
Sharpe himself wrote in his Criticism and Compliment, “it is my purpose to [re-read] literary texts as documents of the culture and values of Caroline England.” [pg. ix] That book was published in 1987; The Royal Image, meanwhile, was published in 1999. Since then, we’ve had David Norbrook’s Writing The English Republic, but the use of seventeenth-century literary texts as historical sources still seems (with the possible exception of some writing on Milton, or the work of historians like James Loxley), in academic historical circles at least, to be a relatively niche activity. There are good reasons for this, of course, not least that such texts tend to prioritise artistic effect over fidelity to their particular age; but isn’t there a broader context yet, in which culture is generative as well as reflective, to which literary material might well be a useful guide?
I was struck by Blair Worden’s particular permutation of an old argument, in his Roundhead Reputations, that, “historians, like novelists, are makers of order.” [pg. 19] Naturally, Worden wasn’t suggesting that this makes the two professions identical in method or intent, but there’s still a hint in those bon mots that the old walls are not as impermeable as they are often still taken to be. You might not be surprised to hear, then, that I’ll be trying to take part in Early Modern Underground’s collaborative reading of ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore. Probably mostly for the great beauty of Ford’s masterpiece; but, also, perhaps, for a bit of historical insight…
“You Have Overdone It On This Occasion.”
Posted by: danhartland on: November 4, 2009
“I don’t think that any of my adventures with Mr. Sherlock Holmes opened quite so abruptly, or so dramatically, as that which I associate with The Three Gables.”
"He swung a huge knotted lump of a fist under my friend’s nose. "
The Three Gables in truth starts not so much with a bang as a sterotype: Steve Dixie, the “negro” who barges in on Holmes and Watson and proceeds to inflict upon them threats of violence and tortured minstrel grammar, is one of the most embarrassing characters in the canon – and quite at odds with Conan Doyle’s earlier treatment of African-Americans in The Yellow Face (although admittedly closer to his treatment of Tonga in The Sign of Four). We only need Dixie to burst into a rendition of Old Man River and all would be complete.
This incongruity is part of the fabric of the whole story – another which, along with The Mazarin Stone, Meyer’s Watson will dismiss as a forgery. It would be happy if such were the case: many of the stories collected in The Casebook, as the last stories an increasingly weary Conan Doyle would every write about Holmes, reek of fatigue and laziness. So, for instance, the central story here, revolving as it does around femmes fatale, sex and impropriety, feels far more like a story of the period in which it was written than the one in which it was set; likewise, Holmes’s presence is thin and at times poorly characterised – the moment he pulls a woman into a room by the arm feels most unlike the gallant-if-aloof detective we’ve come to know. Small details, too, echo this larger malaise – Lucerne is not in Italy.
“I suppose I shall have to compound a felony as usual,” Holmes breezily declares at the story’s end, and as he often does lays down his own particular – and extra-legal – kind of justice. The mystery preceding this dispensation, however, is so potted and ill-constructed (Conan-Doyle has done many ‘missing document’ mysteries, but this is by far his most soft-headed) that the reader has long since given up. It simply doesn’t feel like our Holmes. 48 short stories into our acquantance with him, this is a little much to take.
Can’t Help But Smiling
Posted by: danhartland on: November 3, 2009
What Will We Be, by Devendra Banhart
Devendra Banhart is a funny old bird. His most successful release to date is probably Cripple Crow, a 22 track monster which defied the listener to develop an intimate relationship with it. Habitually, he skips from one form of folk to another, offering Latin rhythms at one moment in a song, and the next seguing into some Appalachian moan; this makes him a unique voice, but also a frustrating one. It sometimes feels as if Banhart never stays at one vein long enough to mine it properly.
What Will We Be, his latest record, is no different. In the space of one song – ‘Angelika’, for example – he can go from lilting pop folk to a 50s jazz shuffle, from one language to another, and then sidestep into bluegrass. He’ll follow a straight-forward indie folk piano piece (‘First Song for B’) with a more shapeless offering (‘Last Song for B’) – deliberately, and cavalierly, toying with the structure of his own record. Banhart does not wish to be captured in any one moment or any one song. Even, one might hazard a guess, any one album – his first release for a properly major label, What Will We Be still steadfastly refuses, like all the others before it, to have anything like a defining characteristic.
Yes, it’s perhaps smoother than anything he’s done before; and, sure, this makes in a way for a more unified listen. But pay anything like closer attention – that beautifully restrained brass solo in ‘Chin Chin & Much Muck, the chugging rock of ‘Rats’, the hyperactive reggaeish closer of ‘Foolin’ – and the whole thing is curling at every conceivable edge. Does this make the record a mess? Yes, undoubtedly. And is Banhart’s wilful kookiness wearing a little thin in places? Possibly. But I’m charmed by this record despite myself. It might well help you enjoy this record more if you’ve never come across Banhart before – which may well be Warner Brothers’ plan. Either way, I dissent from Pitchfork’s view: if you can listen to it with fresh ears, What Will We Be is a very sweet little record.
71 is the number of an apartment we return to regularly in Whinfell Forest, Cumbria. We like it there.
‘We’ are Anna French and Dan Hartland. The Story and the Truth is a sort of inadequate catch-all term for what goes on here: we tend to talk about novels, history, food and fashion, politics and music, but there may also be photographs of soft toys and musicians. Stick around and see.
Sounds We Like
Mumford and Sons - Sigh No More
Dan already wrote about this album here, but Anna's been loving it, too! Like a happier and more stirring Noah and the Whale, Mumford & Sons have a great way with arrangement and melody which makes for a great listen from start to finish. There are highpoints which you'll skip for, but the whole record hangs together perfectly. One of our favourites of the year!
Words We Like
Escaping The Delta, by Elijah Wald
We all know the cliches: Delta blues as the music of the downtrodden, a remnant of slave art, a holler-back to West African forms. Wald never pretends that he has not bought into, continues to buy into, the cult of the Delta bluesman, but shows they were in truth informed not by ancestral memory but by radio playlists. Robert Johnson in particular is assessed not as a unique genius but an accomplished magpie, able to assimilate the pop forms of the day - not just blues, but country and vaudeville - and regurgitate them anew. Escaping the Delta refashions the blues not as cultural fetish but as a particular product of its era and its people. Controversial among those who read books about acoustic blues, but a compelling and rewarding thesis.
Flicks We Like
Alice In The Cities (1974)
It helped that we watched this one together quietly on a calm, dark night. Wim Wenders's careful film, shot beautifully in a grainy black and white, follows a journalist with writer's block as he is left stranded in New York with a young girl, whom he must help find her grandparents back home in Germany. Nowhere close to a voyage of self-discovery, their journey instead feels like a walking round in a circle. Neither of the characters have a true sense of place in a globalising world, and with an inventive economy Wenders explores their resultant, reflective, wanderings.
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