Memory of Fire: Faces and Masks & Century of the Wind

Faces and Masks; Century of the Wind - Eduardo Galeano
(Part 2 & 3 of the Memory of Fire trilogy.)

"History, the pink-veiled lady offering her lips to those who win, will have much to hide. She will feign absent-mindedness or sicken with fake amnesia; she will lie that the black slaves of Brazil were meek and resigned, even happy."

It took me quite a while to get around to the second and third books in Galeano's trilogy after finishing Genesis last year. Not because of quality but perhaps a reflection of the fact that I have been reading less and having difficulty getting through longer books. Mind you, that's nothing to the slow pace of my blogging. But I am making a last attempt to finish this for Richard's annual Literature of Doom over at Caravana De Recuerdos. And to take the chance to wish Richard good health for 2016. (It is months since I wrote this introduction. This time I am just going to post this as an idea toward a blog on books 2 & 3 in Galeano's trilogy without trying to 'finish' it...)

The trilogy as a whole is a towering achievement, poetic, revelatory and both harrowing and life affirming. Somehow the human sprit is what shines through all these examples of man's inhumanity. The strength to resist long after resistance has been proved to be less than futile, the re-emergence of traditions and cultures that had apparently long been eradicated and the very existence of this trilogy, the work in itself a testament to the human spirit and to Galeano's love of his subject and willingness to rummage in the dusty entrails of history to illustrate his thesis. "They were not wrong he said, in reading destinies in the entrails of the animals they sacrificed. In the entrails, he said. In the entrails, not the heads, because a prophet who loves is better than one who can reason."

Car

Car

I've had this story knocking around in my head since a friend told me the bones of it one night in a pub. He was great storyteller and at least some of the stories he told were true. He has passed on so there is no way of checking it out.

If there was any truth in what he told it's buried in the morass of my invention. I have thought of writing a book of variations as I have considered at least a dozen frameworks into which I could put the essential elements.

However, this one is the only version I've managed to make any progress with. And although I don't consider it finished (Is a short-story ever finished?), I consider it complete. And as I've never even managed to complete a first draft of anything else it's unlikely to find a suite of companion stories anytime soon.

Anyway, having recently reached the figure for 300,000 page views on this blog I thought I'd mark the event and spare myself the bother of collecting more rejections (at the rate I submit it would take years to reach a respectable number of rejections) and self-publish. Anyway, I've issued enough pronouncements on other people's writing. Now they can strike back.

Here's the link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3xRokQqsoEGaHZSTzNYdXkyU3c/view?usp=sharing


Love to hear your comments... (or would I?)

Favourite Songs, Part Four

Favourite Songs, Part Four

This is the final part of my long, long shortlist of 'Favourite Songs'. This part includes the songs from five minutes onwards and includes a few each by Dylan, Bush and Morrison. To be long and remain essential takes an extra something.

Favourite Songs, Part Three

Favourite Songs, Part Three

The songs are getting longer but the idea remains the same. These are the songs I dumped into a playlist as I thought about my favourite songs. Arranged in order of each songs duration it's basically four and a half hours of eclectic sonic genius. To me it is anyway.

Favourite Songs, Part Two

Favourite Songs, Part Two

More of my personal aural comfort food. These are the songs from 3 to 4 minutes in length. There is no other organising principle.

Favourite Songs, Part One

Favourite Songs, Part One
This is simply a selection of my favourite songs, arranged from the shortest to the longest. This first part covers the songs from nought to three minutes in length.

What song needs to be any longer?

List of songs below.

Self-Obsessed

Self-Obsessed
I have a number of unfinished blog posts but I don't feel like returning to any of them at the moment. Rather I am wallowing in a period of self-obsession. I find these things come in patches. Sometimes it seems like the universe, or at least the little dusty corner of it that I inhabit, is speaking directly to me. Or that I am surrounded by a reverberation of echoes. Not surprising seeing as I watch and listen from my own seashell skull, tuned to the sound of my own waves.

The Knocking Shop - Back Onstage after Twenty Years

The Knocking Shop - Back Onstage after Twenty Years

Here is some evidence that The Knocking Shop did actually return to live performance last week thanks to Ian Shirley of Record Collector Magazine. Thanks also to Emma and Tony for the images.

This is an updated version of the earlier post with much improved sound..

The Return of The Knocking Shop

The Return of The Knocking Shop

Caught in rehearsal, the engine room of The Knocking Shop sparking back into life after two decades!
Catch them on Tuesday 26th January in Corsica Studios, 4/5 Elephant Road, London, SE17 1LB
http://www.corsicastudios.com/…/wild-roscoe-record-collect…/
Also playing Final Hour; Triple Blind; Blindman's Rainbow
All bands feature on the Small Town Scenery album to be released this month by Record Collector Magazine.



You can now pre-order Small Town Scenery from Rough Trade, featuring the song Half Orphan from The Knocking Shop! Or you can wait and buy it from the next issue of Record Collector Magazine - due out on January 28th. http://www.roughtrade.com/albums/100250

Books of the Year 2015

Books of the Year 2015

As  I have lapsed somewhat into inactivity on the book blogging front I hope to use this post to quell those pangs of conscience that niggle in the back of my mind when I think of all the books I meant to post about but never have.
I have also been reading less, even with the extra time I should have had due to the lapse in blogging. However I took up running and managed to lose three stone in the first few months of the year and have not put much back on since. Also my band has risen from the ashes, at least briefly. I guess I have a tendency towards single-mindedness and that means that when one thing comes to the fore, another slips back into its wake.
Another possible reason was the revelatory re-read of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, which rather than having it's edge blunted by the passage of time had the same impact as when it ravished me a few decades ago. It is my book of the year and re-calibrated my sense of the excitement a book should stir if it is to become a true favourite.

Ship of Fools

Ship of Fools.



Yet another of my 'videos' for The Knocking Shop, with Douglas Fairbanks starring in this nautical romp over a song which seems somehow apt for the beginning of a new year, the one in which we will once more get on deck and brave the choppy waters of live performance.

So, Happy New Year to all who read this and I hope to post some of my more usual 'literary' posts in January as I have brought some draft posts close to completion. It's been a while.

Heaven

Heaven

Please find my latest for into the field of music videos... A paean to the elevating effects of religion drugs.

Ambition, with a Taste of Honey.

Ambition

Rehearsing The Knocking Shop's alt-city™kitchen sink classic Ambition inspired me to make a video with added TASTE OF HONEY.



By the way, any London readers would be more than welcome at our long awaited comeback gig!

Resurrected

Resurrected.

For me this is proving a year of resurrections, musically at least.  The musical highlight of the year has been an album and gigs from The Drays, led by one time Star of Heaven and Revenant Stephen Ryan. I have written about that album Look Away Down Collins Avenue at some length and am still listening to it months after its release. I have only managed to see them twice but hope to do so again next week. That would be more gigs than I went to in some recent years.

Probably the gigs I have enjoyed most over the last few years have been those of the revivified Blades, who I have also written about here. They also feature Conor Brady, a mainstay of The Drays. Jesus only brought one man back from the dead!

Perfidia

Perfidia - James Ellroy

"The looming apocalypse is not of our doing. We have been good citizens and did not know it was coming."

I am sad to say that this book was a disappointment. I have been reading Ellroy with excitement since the late eighties, working backwards and looking forward to each new book but this is the first new book to disappoint me.

I'm not sure why. I will have to return to a favourite some time to see if it is just this book or if some spell cast by Ellroy's manic distillation of paranoia and gift for creating voices that carry the whiff of a genuinely authentic desperation has lifted.

I imagine the first, and as a reader all you can do is trust your own instincts.

While the Women Are Sleeping

While the Women Are Sleeping - Javier Marías

This collection of Marias' short stories spans his writing career from his teenage years in 1968 through to 1998. Quite a stretch of time. While not essential, perhaps, this collection hangs together better than might be suspected and includes much to  savour.

Crime and Punishment - A Playlist

Crime and Punishment - A Playlist

Just thought I'd let the blogosphere know that I'm still alive by posting one of my intermittent playlists, this one loosely loosely held together by the theme of crime and punishment.

The Ache - Crime and Punishment by Seamus Duggan on Mixcloud

Gruts

Gruts - Ivor Cutler

Although Ivor Cutler has long been a favourite of mine it has been of his recordings rather than the written versions of his work. When I saw this in the children's section of a local Oxfam store for €1.50 I had to have it. The pieces within it are the scripts for radio broadcasts from 1959 to 1963.

And I was not disappointed. These pieces work just as well, if not better, on the page. Cutler's quirky, sinister, humourous flights of fancy beguile in both formats.

No matter how strange these stories get, whether it is the cold potato man throwing his goods to a woman at a window on the twelfth floor or a man leading another to the top of a hill to show him the way, waving his arms and taking off, the stories all have a conspiratorial tone that seems to say "They won't believe it was like this, will they? But you and I know better."

Dublinesque

Dublinesque - Enrique Vila-Matas
(Translated by Rosalind Harvey & Anne McLean)
"'Dublin?' she asks, surprised. 'And what are you going to do there? Start drinking again.'"

When #SpanishLitMonth was brought to my attention it was Bloomsday so this was an obvious choice, concerning, as it does, a visit to Dublin for June 16th to hold a funeral for "the Gutenburg Galaxy" - the world of the printed book. I was also eager to read more from Vila-Matas as I had enjoyed Bartleby & Co so much. This was also sitting on my shelves in three-dimensional, ink on paper form...

The central character is Samuel Riba, retired publisher, sober alcoholic. He "has published many of the great writers of his time" but, we learn, is not great with figures and his company went under. Drink almost pulled him under with the company and threatened to bring his marriage to a painful end. With little to fill his time Riba has developed an unhealthily close relationship with his computer screen and feels that he is becoming like the "hikikiomori, young Japanese people who suffer from IT autism, and who in order to avoid outside pressure react by withdrawing completely from society." I felt a certain fellow feeling...

The Mulatta & Mister Fly

The Mulatta & Mister Fly - Miguel Angel Asturias

As August has been united with July under the umbrella of #SpanishLitMonth (at Caravana De Recuerdos, WinstonsDad's Blog & on Twitter) it means that this post is not my usual #SpanishLateMonth. Although, as I'm now reading my fourth book there is plenty of time to be late yet...

This is the first novel I have read from the Nobel prize winner Asturias, and I have to say that it was not quite what I expected. The book is less a narrative than an incantation: an amalgam of myth, history, sex and politics that seems more closely related to the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, or William Burroughs, than to other South American writers I have read.

This isn't the whole picture, though. The book is soaked in the myth-story of South America and clearly draws on the same sources as Galeano's Memory of Fire. Indeed the author note in my copy says that Asturias "studied the philosophy and religion of the Mayan civilisation at the Sorbonne." This clearly gave Asturias the foundation upon which to build this strange world. At times the book heads into very weird terrain, as is shown this quote I scanned and posted on Twitter as I read.