Words for Seamus Heaney

For Séamus Heaney 
13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013

To call this a poem would not serve the memory of a master craftsman but here are some words that emerged on a day when poetry and one very special poet was constantly on my mind. Séamus Heaney was as close as this island had to a spiritual leader, as he carefully negotiated the gulfs between modernity and tradition, republican and unionist, and showed us that these and other gulfs were merely cracks. He led us halfway to healing.

I somehow feel that I knew him, both through his poetry and his sons, who were in college when I was and were warm, intelligent and generous men.

My thoughts are with them and all his family.

Stone
(for Séamus Heaney)

"Ah, no; the years, the years
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs" (Thomas Hardy)

You made rubbings
of the marks of death.
easing them carefully
onto the page

worn words rising
sharp
from crumbling stone.

The strong hands of death
ease you
into the earth
but your careful marks
will outlive
stone

Top 102 Albums. Minus 7. The Clash

Top 102 Albums. Minus 7. 
The Clash - The Clash

"Everybody's doing
Just what they're told to
Nobody wants
To go to jail!"

Things have been a little quiet here among the smoke and darkness at Vapour Trails so I felt it was time to set the speakers shaking again and what better than a bit of 100% proof punk rock 'n' roll to shift the cobwebs.

I did think for a while that Sandinista would be #myclashchoice but every time I listen to this it inspires a wave of optimism - a rare enough event around here to warrant making a splash about it. But Sandinista is a cruelly undervalued album which sounds like it was tuned in to the future and there are always surprises in the wayward generosity of it's thirty-six tracks.

Young Adolf

Young Adolf - Beryl Bainbridge

"Never in all my life, thought Adolf, under torture or interrogation, will I mention that I have been to this accursed city, visited this lunatic island."

Rarely has a book I've read drawn so many covert glances on public transport. The front cover of the young bellhop Adolf Hitler saluting while dressed in his uniform seemed to encourage multiple double takes.

Bainbridge deploys a virtual blitzkrieg of ironic frisson in this tale of the visit of the young Adolf Hitler to pre-WW1 Liverpool. As the hapless anti-hero bumbles his way through some down at heel adventures during his stay with his half brother Alois' family, his future is farcically foreshadowed.

Loitering With Intent

Loitering With Intent - Muriel Spark

Like champagne bubbles being burst with a scalpel, Spark's novels are outrageous fun with a bitingly sharp edge. Loitering with Intent tells the story of Fleur Talbot who, while writing her first novel, takes on a job with Sir Quentin Oliver's Autobiographical Association. They prove to be a strange group and to bear an odd resemblance to characters and events in Talbot's first novel.

And although I am not overly familiar with Spark's life, my sketchy knowledge is enough to inform me that there are resemblances between Fleur Talbot and Ms Spark. The Autobiographical Association in which Fleur finds a job bears some resemblance to the Poetry Society, where the young Spark worked. The graveyard in which the book opens was one in which Spark spent much time writing poetry. Dexedrine plays a part in both Spark's life and the book.  At the same time the book is not so much realism as a series of games.

Detective Story

Detective Story - Imre Kertész

This was my first brush with the Nobel Prize winning Hungarian author Imre Kertész and it won't be my last. It is a spare short novel that explores the mechanics of totalitarianism. Names that came into my head while reading were Beckett and Kafka. The book is light on specific details of time and place and remind you that those details often create a distance from the guilty secrets that lie mouldering in humanity's closet. The book looks at the working of the law in an unnamed South American country recently taken over by a shadowy 'colonel'.

Holiday Booty

Holiday Booty

One of the things I most enjoy while on holidays (sad obsessive that I am) is the opportunity to visit second hand bookshops / charity shops that are new to me. What purpose this serves given the fact that I have already got at least a decades worth of unread books I don't know but I guess it's a sort of addiction. Perhaps one of these days I'm going to suddenly find the time and energy to start reading at a hugely accelerated pace...

I spent a week and a half in South Kerry, staying in Caherdaniel and Ballinskelligs. The weather was fabulous and the ocean temperature was over twenty degrees, which was frankly a little perturbing when you are used to the sudden intake of breath usually caused by the rather lower temperature of the seawater. However it is a perturbation I am more than willing to suffer on a regular, ongoing basis.

Anyway my time spent in Kerry was not a disappointment and I would have bought more books had there been more time to spend in the bookshops and more space in the car for books. As it was the absence of both of these kept my wildest impulses under control. Breaking new ground for this blog, here is some  travel writing centred on the hunt for second hand books.

Top 102 Albums⁺ Minus Six. In Cassidy's Care

Top 102 Albums⁺ Minus Six. 
In Cassidy's Care - Miracle Mile

"Hope will be the death of me"

Regular readers will know Trevor Jones from his many comments on posts here and quite possibly from his own excellent blog at http://hissyf.blogspot.co.uk. Some may even know his music but not as many of you as should. His band, Miracle Mile, have released seven studio albums and a compilation since 1997. In Cassidy's Care is their eight studio album, and was released officially on July 22nd. I've had a copy for a month or so (bought here) and have been listening to it more and more.
My experience of this album began with a series of posts on Trevor's Hissyfit which grew into the short story In Cassidy's Care from which the songs on this album grow. The story tells of a teacher, Cassidy, who has moved to London from Connecticut, met his then future wife on a park bench to which he now takes his two sons when they are "in Cassidy's care", as he is now separated from his wife. His wife is called Amelia, calling to his mind the Joni Mitchell song. Indeed, detritus from the song are strewn through the story, from geometry to a cactus. Slanted and pointed.

Top 102 Albums⁺ Minus Five - Plastic Ono Band

Top 102 Albums⁺ Minus Five
Plastic Ono Band - John Lennon

I remember where I first came across the idea of Primal Scream therapy as proposed by Arthur Janov. It was in an explanation of where the name Tears for Fears came from, in Smash Hits magazine, I think. I must have been intrigued by the idea as this has stuck in my head for many years. However the bands songs never seemed to live up to the idea although I liked their first single Pale Shelter. My guess is that Tears for Fears had come across the idea through John Lennon, who was Janov's most famous client. Lennon was a client of Janov's for some months in 1970 and although he broke off therapy the album which followed clearly accessed deep wells of feeling and remains one of the most powerfully emotional records in the 'canon'.

Troubles

Troubles - J.G. Farrell
(Winner of the "Lost Booker' awarded in 2010 to novels from 1970 that had been denied a shot at the award because of changes in the dates for eligibility.)

This is the second book from J.G. Farrell's "Empire Trilogy' that I have read after The Siege of Krishnapur. It is just as impressive and I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for the third book in this trilogy, The Singapore Grip (or anything else by Farrell). Rather than follow each other in any plot driven way the books cohere thematically around the crumbling of English colonialism.

In Troubles we follow the journey of Major Brendan Archer from London to a massive old hotel on the coast of County Wexford, in Ireland. He is badly shaken by his experiences in the trenches during World War One and goes to Wexford to see Angela Spencer whom he met during a break from the war and believes that they became engaged. He is familiar with elements of the hotel and the life within from the stream of letters he received from Angela but is surprised to find that some things have been left out of the letters and that Angela is very serious and withdrawn. This is not what he expected. In fact so withdrawn is she that his decision to break off the engagement can't be carried out as he never sees her after the first couple of days. Her father Edward is a man being consumed from within by rage. He sees English rule as being responsible for whatever civilisation there is in Ireland and the rebellion as a damned impertinence.

Top 102 Albums⁺ Minus 4 The Memphis Album

Top 102 Albums⁺ Minus 4 
The Memphis Album - Elvis Presley

"My home town won't accept me
I just don't feel welcome here no more"

Elvis is such a colossus that he can lie hidden in his own shadow. We all know 'Elvis', but sometimes it feels like the music is consumed by the jumpsuits, the musicals, the resurrections (I read somewhere that the resurrected Elvis has been seen more times than that other resurrected messiah), the manager, the hips, the sneer, the burgers, the movies, the city in the sand, the sweaty towels, the grubby flood of money and on and on.....

In the crunching darkness of that shadow are his many achievements. Even those known to all like The Sun Sessions or Heartbreak Hotel are often discounted somehow as if they existed like some natural occurrence. It's as if Elvis was inevitable, his importance more the intersection of socio-cultural events than an artistic creation. He is buried under the mountains of tat like my Elvis clock, the pendulum of which is a cutout of those forbidden legs.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie

I've been finding it difficult to gather the time and attention to read for the past few weeks and I thought I'd try something a bit lighter to try and get those pages turning for me again. It has been anything up to thirty years since I read any Agatha Christie but I did read a large number of her books in my early adolescence. I may or may not have read this one, at times it seemed familiar but familiarity is one of the reasons to read Christie.

Indeed I found myself reminded of other books from my childhood that I've recently been reading for my ten year old and that I probably read at around the time I was reading books by Christie - Enid Blyton, The Hardy Boys etc. Christie is far more sophisticated than these but there are many structural similarities. It moves swiftly from set up to denouement with the minimum of excess writing. At its heart is an England of leafy lanes and villages, upstairs and downstairs, gardeners and parlour-maids, with the addition of intrigue and murder most foul.

Top 102 Albums⁺ Minus 3 Sketches of Spain

Top 102 Albums⁺ Minus 3 
Sketches of Spain - Miles Davis

Life seems just a little more dramatic and exotic when this album is on in the background. It brings   colours to the dullest day. It is an album that gets played regularly even if there was never a time when it was on constant rotation, seeming to have slowly insinuated itself into my consciousness.

I could have picked a number of other Davis albums. He was both consistent and ever changing and is one of the few artists that remained essential over decades. I could have picked Kind of Blue or Bitches Brew, Porgy and Bess or The Birth of the Cool. It could even be that this album will be replaced in the future by one of the albums I haven't listened to.

FRENZIED YOUTH RUN AMOK

FRENZIED
YOUTH
RUN
AMOK

INTO A WORLD BEYOND

HUMAN COMPREHENSION!

A WORLD WHERE TIME HAS NO MEANING!

Here's something from the days of dubbing from vinyl to cassette and then decorating the cassette case with the aid of a photocopier and some Pritt stick.

I found this one amoung a pile of old cassettes in the attic. A favourite 'uptempo' mix in which I avoided the darker corners of my record collection. Each song is burnt into my auditory retinae from its time as a long term resident of my walkman. Memories.

I think I made this for going abroad in summer 1988. So this is the twenty fifth anniversary digital remaster!

Top 102 Albums Minus 2. The Queen is Hollow

Top 102 Albums Minus 2. 
The Queen is Dead / Hatful of Hollow - The Smiths

May 18th, 1984. Walking up the North Circular Road. All the gardens have been stripped of their blossoms. Flowers haven't been so in vogue since 1967.

Bend Sinister

Bend Sinister - Vladimir Nabokov

Well, Nabokov has thrown this whole blog enterprise into question. All I am, apparently, is increasing the tedium of the world
"There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction. The purpose of this foreword is not to show that Bend Sinister belongs or does not belong to 'serious literature' (which is a euphemism for the hollow profundity and the ever-welcome commonplace). I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: 'great books'). I am not 'sincere', I am not 'provocative', I am not 'satirical'. I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of 'thaw' in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent. As is the case of my Invitation to a Beheading - with which this book has obvious affinities - automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka's creations or Orwell's cliches would merely go to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one."

He's not afraid of opinions, whatever about 'general ideas".

Top 102 Albums⁺ Minus 1. Unknown Pleasures

Top 102 Albums⁺ Minus 1. 
Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division

"I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand,
Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man?
These sensations barely interest me for another day,
I've got the spirit, lose the feeling, take the shock away."

Irony. A definition. One of the very first vinyl albums I bought was Unknown Pleasures. The copy I bought was never listened to. Before I even got to take it out of its sleeve it was broken. Someone sat on it. (It may have been me.) It was a few weeks before I managed to replace it and I considered framing the broken disc as it seemed like such a perfect accident.

Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin - Colum McCann

It is hard to avoid cliches when talking about this. It invites the automatic blurb generator to cough and splutter into action:
"a dizzying achievement"
"a high wire act"
"poise and balance"
"vertiginous"

The book circles Philippe Petit's astonishing high wire walk between the two towers of the World Trade Centre in 1974, a feat that induces vertigo even thinking about it. It was also the subject of the hugely successful documentary Man on Wire, which I have yet to see.

The Known World

The Known World - Edward P. Jones

Time to return to book reviewing here at Vapour Trails after a hiatus caused by my focus on my Top 102 Albums⁺. Although I intend to continue blogging on my favourite albums I will not be doing so quite as regularly and hope to achieve a mix of book and music posts. I also hope to write on film a bit more, although I do often find that by the time I can settle down to watch a film I am too tired to do so.

I knew nothing about this book when I started reading and was therefore surprised when one of the central conceits was revealed after a few pages, in this description of the slave Moses and his master, Henry Townsend.  "He was thirty-five years old and for every moment of those years he had been someone's slave, a white man's slave and then another white man's slave and now, for nearly ten years, the overseer slave for a black master." In fact  I was a little afraid that the 'black master' might be a 'gimmick' that was the reason for the book's popularity but as I read on this fear proved unfounded.

The book pushes you to try to understand what it was to only have value as livestock and to be bought and sold at a whim, moved away from friends and family as a child or an adult, even put down if you were too troublesome. Even free blacks were required to carry their papers with them at all times and were repeatedly forced to show them by the law, which mainly existed to ensure that no slaves escaped.

Top 102 Albums⁺ MY GROUND ZERO Sister Lovers / Third

Top 102 Albums⁺ 
MY GROUND ZERO 
Sister Lovers / Third - Big Star
"Things fall apart / The centre cannot hold"

This album has probably been played more than any twenty other albums in my possession. There were a number of years when the day that I didn't play it was rare and the days where I played it on repeat for hours were common. Late nights were its preferred habitat but anytime was ok.

It's an album with a strange history and one that is probably more famous now than ever. It languished unreleased for four years after it was recorded and was released intermittently after that, usually on small labels, and with different tracks added or subtracted and in different order. They had different covers. The copy I got my hands on was the Castle Communications version released in 1987. This is the one pictured at the top of this post.

Bonus Top Tens - John Healy

Bonus Top Tens - John Healy

John was the drummer in the first incarnation of The Knocking Shop. He is a Dubliner who grew up in Sydney, his family having moved there when he was young. He came back for a number of years but is now based in Sydney again where he is still making music, including the wonderful Broken City People album which he released in 2011 and which includes the heartbreaking, wonderful Longreach.

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John's passion for music and the way, as with all of us, music and memory intertwine is captured in a great Top Ten.