The Left Handed Woman

The Left Handed Woman - Peter Handke

 This is an odd, spare novella. Set in anonymous suburbia it tells a tale of marital disintegration, or does it? It manages to be both mundane and fabulous. The reader is never quite sure what exactly is happening.

The book opens with the woman (who is never known as anything else) sitting at her sewing machine in a room which has a glass window taking up one side. The window opens on to the windowless wall of the neighbouring house. A clear visual metaphor for isolation and communication difficulties.

Top 102 Albums. No. 81 The Day the Earth Stood Still

Top 102 Albums. No. 81 
The Day the Earth Stood Still - Bernhard Herrmann

Reading Trevor's post at Hissyfit on Ennio Morricone's soundtrack for Once Upon a Time in America got me thinking on soundtracks. I have a few in physical copies and others tied securely to the films they accentuated. Years of watching rough cuts of films taught me that you can get away with poorly shot images in a film but bad sound just doesn't work. Music is a big part of this, of course although sound can be carefully composed for film without becoming music.

Top 102 Albums, No 82 My Dark Places

Top 102 Albums, No 82 
My Dark Places - The Television Personalities

Once again, very late at night, I choose (with ever more desperate randomness) another of my favourite albums with which to regale my many acolytes. Having mentioned Dan Treacy in a comment on my last post I thought I would continue my random linking and choose a Television Personalities album for your perusal.

Top 102 Albums. No 83 Songs for Drella

Top 102 Albums. No 83
Songs for Drella - Lou Reed & John Cale

Over on Cathedrals of Sound the selection at No. 84 was Grant McLennan's Horsebreaker Star, an excellent album. Following a trail from it I've been listening to it, then others by McLennan and his on/off songwriting partner Robert Forster. I remember the trepidation when buying the first solo album after The Go-Betweens split. Then I followed the trail to albums by Husker Du's Grant Hart and Bob Mould and then spent a long time listening to John Cale albums before I thought of this and for some reason this spoke to me and said "I'm today's choice." In a tone not to be argued with (I started this post yesterday but something disagreed with my stomach and I had to take to bed. Seems sort of appropriate as this album was made between disagreements.)

Top 102 Albums. No 84. A Tonic for the Troops.

Top 102 Albums. No 84. 
A Tonic for the Troops - The Boomtown Rats.

Time has not been kind to The Boomtown Rats. They are generally written off as a side project of that famous philantrophist and controversialist Bob Geldof. But there was a time when they were one of the biggest bands in the world, and whats more, they came from just a few miles away. I even saw Johnny Fingers in his trade mark pyjamas walking past Trinity College when I was in Dublin City Centre shopping with my family. That practically made me a celebrity.

Group Portrait With Lady

Group Portrait With Lady - Heinrich Böll

The form of this book is fictional documentary, with the author interviewing as many as possible of the friends of Leni Pfeiffer (nee Huyten) with a view to establishing the facts about her life experience and character as closely as possible. As well as citing interviewees the author often cites the most mundane opinions as being his own (Au.). However he claims to imagine nothing: "The Au. imagined nothing, his sole desire being for factual information."

This method allows Böll to distance us from the events and to lace the book with industrial strength irony.  And given that Leni came of age in Nazi Germany and was thrice bereaved during WW2, distance is necessary to tell this story.

Top 102 Albums. No 85. Dread Beat 'n Blood

Top 102 Albums. No 85. 
Dread Beat an' Blood - Poet and the Roots / Linton Kwesi Johnson

"blood, bitterness, exploding fire, wailing blood, and bleeding"

Once again I feel like I am doing this album a disservice by listing at 85. But I guess any album on this list should feel like a top ten album, should be capable of bewitching my ears and energising my belief in music when I am listening. And there is a reason for it being '85, for that is the year with which it is yoked in my mind, although it was released in 1978 (of which more later).

Top 102 Albums. No 86. Jazz Goes to College.

Top 102 Albums. No 86.
Jazz Goes to College. The Dave Brubeck Quartet

I am late with today's instalment and had an album in my head but when I read the news of Dave Brubeck's death I figured that it was time for this album to make an appearance. When I was younger jazz both attracted me and made me slightly uncomfortable. There is just so much of it. How could you establish a foothold on the lower reaches of the foothills?  Well like everything in life all you can do is take small steps and hope that they are the first steps in an interesting journey.

Top 102 Albums. No. 87 Current Affairs

Top 102 Albums. No. 87
Current Affairs - Johnny Duhan

This is one of the more obscure albums on my list, an album that, as far as I know, has not seen the light of day since it's initial release in 1984. And, on form, we were lucky to hear it then. Johnny Duhan has become very much a part of the Irish songwriting elite, with songs covered by Christy Moore, including The Voyage, which is particularly ubiquitous. That was not the case back in the late seventies / early eighties..

Duhan had originally come to notice as part of Granny's Intentions, a 'beat group' from Limerick who moved to London and released some singles and an album on Deram and flirted with success before they broke up in 1972.

Top 102 Albums. No 88. In My Own Time

Top 102 Albums. No 88. 
In My Own Time. Karen Dalton


When I first came to town
They brought me drinks plenty
Now they've changed their tune
They bring me the bottles empty
(Katie Cruel, Trad.)


I thought of this album last night but decided to leave it until later in the list but I kept listening to it and so decided by default that it would be the album added today.

Top 102 Albums. N0. 89. The Carl Stalling Project.

Top 102 Albums. N0. 89.
The Carl Stalling Project, Vols 1 & 2. Carl Stalling & The Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra.

I started this post with the intention of posting on a jazz album, narrowed it down to Miles David but then couldn't narrow it down to an album. There are just so many - Sketches of Spain, Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew, On the Corner & on & on. I was listening to Davis and thinking of how his music reminds me at times of a Mondrian canvas, full of joy and imagination, references and surprises.

And then I thought of this record. Few are as full of joy and imagination. This is wild anarchic, joyful, funny music, hardwired into our brains from an early age. This is some of my very favourite music to listen to on my iPod. It seems to make the world around a different place although it's hard to resist the urge to spread banana skins on the pavements and sit back waiting for life to match it's soundtrack.

Top 102 Albums. No. 90. New Wave

Top 102 Albums. No. 90.
New Wave - The Auteurs.

This is the first, but will not be the last appearance of Luke Haines on this list. In a voice dripping cynicism and a talent for melodies Haines could claim to be a progenitor of Britpop and simultaneously nothing to do with it. In terms of his own progenitors I would proffer Ray Davies and Steve Harley. Like both Haines often sings in a voice dripping with cynicism but with a simultaneous talent for creating beautiful melodies.

There always seems to be a tension between his desire to 'make it' and his disdain for the circus of fame. Somewhat like that wielder of American Guitars Kurt Cobain. Haines had a subversive bent and was often to subvert the possibility of success.

Top 102 Albums. No 91 Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano

Top 102 Albums. No 91
Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano - John Cage / Maro Ajemian

When it comes to selecting some albums I feel very much as if declaiming from a dark fount of ignorance. This is the only album by Cage that I own, and the only version that I have heard. (I have now briefly listened to two other versions  which did not match this version.) However, using ears and instinct, I was drawn to this having heard snatches and have never regretted that attraction.

Hawthorn and Child

Hawthorn and Child - Keith Ridgway

"The city rushed past them like words on a screen, and he would have read them but they went too fast."

Regular readers will possibly remember that I recently undertook a course in reading and writing fiction with Keith Ridgway. I have read his earlier novel The Parts and enjoyed it but it was really the synchronicity of seeing some glowing reviews for Hawthorn and Child and a friend sharing the course on Facebook that led me to take the course. And I'm very glad I did. It gave me push to complete a draft of a short story and some other short pieces of fiction. I hope to hammer the short story into something approaching a finished form by years end, completing one of my resolutions for the year. It's just finding time to write that is difficult, (or is that making time?), a form of alchemy I rarely master unless it is to no useful purpose.

Top 102 Albums. No 92 Born Sandy Devotional

Top 102 Albums. No 92 
Born Sandy Devotional - The Triffids

As some of you may be aware, I am listing 102 favourite albums, having joined in with similar listings at Cathedrals of Sound and Hissyfit. Tonight's listing at Cathedrals of Sound is The Black Swan by The Triffids, which was sketched to appear in my list.

For added value, I thought that I'd change my selection and having wavered with the thought of including a compilation of the early EP's which includes the extraordinary  Bright Lights Big City, indeed the whole Field of Glass EP and their great version of St James Infirmary along with other great tracks and a violent, glassy edge which is subsumed largely by doomed romanticism as their career progressed. But few people do doomed romanticism as well as The Triffids.

Top 102 Albums. No 93 Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music

Top 102 Albums. No 93 
Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music - Various Artists

When I started this list of albums I laid out the two rules - no live albums and no compilations. I broke the rule on live albums early on and thought it was about time I broke the other. This various artists compliation is about as far from Now That's What I Call Music as you can go. Harry Smith was an eccentric, experimental filmmaker, artist and practitioner of magick who lived in the Chelsea Hotel where he was, late in his days, a friend of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith. This neatly connects him to Lenny Kaye who was responsible for the similarly influential compilation, Nuggets.

Hunger

Hunger - Knut Hamsun

This is a book that I approached wary of its great reputation but neither my wariness nor its reputation spoiled my appreciation. It seems to look backwards to Dostoievsky and forwards to Samuel Beckett. I also found parallels with Robert Wasler's Jakob Von Gunten, which I finished not long before this.
Both books deal with renunciation, although in Jakob Von Gunten the renunciation is deliberate but not successful whereas in Hunger it is successful but not deliberate.

Top 102 Albums. No 94. Saturday Captains

Top 102 Albums. No 94. 
Saturday Captains - Saturday Captains

This is my list so, my rules. It might seem a bit previous to be including an album that I only discovered this evening but, hey, it's my list. Firstly, a declaration of interest. More years ago than I care to remember I met Barry O'Mahony. I was working with him and got on famously. Barry had the most encyclopaedic knowledge of music and a wonderfully sly sense of humour. When he asked me along to see his band play I was worried that they wouldn't be good and that I'd end up in awkward prevarication when he asked me what I thought.

Top 102 Albums. No 95. Song of a Road

Top 102 Albums. No 95. 
Song of a Road - Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker and Peggy Seeger

Ewan MacColl is now probably best known as the writer of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and Dirty Old Town, either of which would guarantee the debased immortality available to us poor sons of Adam.

I could have selected one of Ewan's albums of the Child Ballads or of Sea Shanties but for me the most extraordinary albums he produced were the Radio Ballads, in collaboration with Charles Parker and Peggy Seeger. These records share Harry Partch's fascination with the voice and are made up of sound collages and songs, the songs often arising directly out of the interviews with which they are intercut.

Dark Lies the Island

Dark Lies the Island - Kevin Barry

Before I begin this review first I have to thank Rob at robaroundbooks.com for I won my copy of Dark Lies the Island as a prize during the Edinburgh Book Festival. His thoughts on this, far more comprehensive than mine, are here. I was eager to acquaint myself with his work for there is a buzz attached to his name and I have had a few recommendations for his novel City of Bohane. Also, one of the stories was set as a reading exercise in the writing/reading course that I have been doing with novelist Keith Ridgway. (Hawthorn and Child)

This is a collection of thirteen short stories set among Irish emigrants in Britain and Berlin, real ale drinkers on a train to Llandudno, a hotel in the west of Ireland, a traveller settlement in rural Ireland and elsewhere. I approached it with high expectations, and a certain wariness of how high expectations can damage the experience of reading. And I have to admit that some stories did pass me by without leaving much of an impression. However, even these were easy to read and there are a few stories here that feel like they will repay multiple readings.