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.

Top 102 Albums. No 96. Liege and Lief

Top 102 Albums. No 96. 
Liege and Lief - Fairport Convention

Once again I would like to repeat that these albums are appearing in no particular order. And sometimes a day late - yesterday I didn't have a chance to post. I'll try to catch up tonight.

If they were this wouldn't be appearing for quite a while. It was a difficult choice between this and Unhalfbricking as the Fairport album to include.

Unhalfbricking, amoung others has the magnificent Who Knows Where the Time Goes but this has its equals, and doesn't have a weak track.  The highlight for me is Matty Groves. I just love the existential howl of Richard Thompson's guitar at the end. I don't think it fanciful to hear some of the grief and pain which he was going through at the time expressed in his playing. The band had been involved in a car accident and drummer Martin Lambe and Thompson's girlfriend were killed. These lines must have been difficult to hear.

Top 102 Albums. No 97. This Is Hip

Top 102 Albums. No 97. 
This Is Hip - John Lee Hooker

Time to break another rule. Live albums and compilations were to be left out of these lists but I couldn't resist this compilation because:

A. It was a formative record for me. This was the first blues record I bought and remains one of the best. The snaking, hypnotic rhythms fascinated me and hook(er)ed me for life.

B. It showcases songs from a period when John Lee released no albums, to my knowledge. In fact he released singles on multiple labels, under many names, including, the sleeve notes tell me, John Lee Cooker!

Top 102 Albums. No 98. A Grand Don't Come for Free

Top 102 Albums. No 98. 
A Grand Don't Come for Free. The Streets.

This is as much to convince myself that I have been listening to the odd record released after the year 2000. The Streets were one of the only bands I discovered at the same time as my daughter but despite this I was able to take this to heart and felt it was an instant classic. I was not alone. Youth and age recognised this one.

It seems to me that Mike Skinner is the poet laureate of the blindingly mundane. He talks about trying to find his phone in his pocket and the battery running out, what was on TV the other night, betting on footie, broken tv's, "watching Eastenders or the Bill". He manages to undercut the whole world of 'gangster rap' by being really 'street'. In one of my favourite moments he pastiches drive bys: "Then of course a mandatory car, drives by and splashes me."

Top 102 Albums. No 99: Link Wray, Link Wray.

Top 102 Albums. No 99  
Link Wray - Link Wray

For many years Link Wray was defined for me by his early instrumentals, particularly the mighty Rumble, an instrumental so suggestive of its subject matter that it was banned form some radio stations (I'm too lazy to look this up, if you want to know you know what to do).

That was until I found a double cd called Wray's Three Track Shack which included this album and two others recorded in Link's titular shack in 1970/71. This compilation is probably the easiest way to get these albums today and all are worth having but the Link Wray album is my favourite.

Jakob Von Gunten

Jakob Von Gunten - Robert Wasler

Wasler is one of those writers I have become steadily more aware of over the past couple of years as his name cropped up in blog after blog. He was published in his lifetime and is often cited as an influence, both during his lifetime and afterwards. Kafka and Hesse, it is often mentioned, were fans. He is also cited as an outsider artist, spending much of the latter part of his life in asylums, and producing work written in pencil in a miniscule script which wasn't published until long after his death.

I have just finished reading Knut Hamsun's Hunger and it seems to me that the two books share a lot. They both deal largely with the tension between renunciation, pride and desire. They are both narrated by people who are on a knife edge, physically or mentally.

Top 102 Albums. No 100 Resurrection of Bayou Maharajah

Top 102 Albums. No 100
Resurrection of Bayou Maharajah - James Booker

I'm not doing this in any sort of order, just picking whatever album jumps form the list when I sit down to blog. And few albums jump like this!

I first came across James Booker through a combination of The Clash and, I think, Jools Holland. Anyway, I remember hearing him perform Junco Partner and I recognised the song from The Clash's pick 'n' mix masterpiece Sandinista. The name stuck and I would always listen when I heard his name, and when you listen, you're hooked.

Top 102 Albums. No 101 The Wayward - Harry Partch

Album No. 101 - Harry Partch - The Wayward

One of the pleasures of music has always been the way one discovery leads to another. And some discoveries are harder to make. It was probably fifteen or twenty years after first reading about Harry Partch in a Tom Waits interview that I finally got to hear him. These days that sort of time span is unimaginable as typing a word into Google will lead you down the most obscure musical pathways. And perhaps, had Partch been in a Youtube clip then I might never have pursued him any further, nor given his music time to infiltrate my mind. I'm glad I did, and glad for the impetus given by the years of waiting.

Top 102 Albums. No. 102 Red Headed Stranger

My Top 102 Albums
I'm currently revisiting these posts to fix some dead links and many errors. It's also an excuse to re-listen to all these albums.
I began posting on my "Top" albums as two of my favourite bloggers were going through their top albums on a daily basis.
Friend of Rachel Worth at Cathedrals of Sound was blogging his Top 125 Albums  and Trevor Jones at Hissyfit joined in to blog his Top 110. Their lists are still live and available as at 11th April 2018.

I joined in at 102 with a still growing list of 140 plus albums to hand. I started blogging an album a day and continued editing this list as I went along. It led to some fraught choices when it gets to the what do I leave out stage. I sorted this by continuing on past my number 1 to 0 and beyond.

The rules: no compilations, no live albums. I tried to stick to these but broke them a few times. That is what rules are for.

The Infinities

The Infinities - John Banville

John Banville is one of the most artful of prose writers. His sentences are often delightfully cadenced and structured and are a pleasure to tease out. However, I was reminded at times while reading The Infinities of Beckett's decision to write in French because he was afraid of English “because you couldn’t help writing poetry in it.” I take this to mean that Beckett felt his writing in French achieved greater directness.

One of the narrators of this book is Hermes, holder of "the grave title Psychopompos, usher of the freed souls of men to Pluto's netherworld." Hermes is waiting in the house of Adam Godley (the other narrator), an eminent mathematician who is in a coma and apparently dying. His wife Ursula has placed his body in a bed in the "sky room' where he did most of his work. This work has concerned the infinite, and infinities. It has led to the discovery of nuclear fusion. Despite being called the "sky room" the room is dark as the curtains are kept closed. Both narrators are quite detached from the concerns of the world around them, separated by immortality and immanent mortality.

White Teeth

White Teeth - Zadie Smith

Right at the start of this book we are shown that there will be some darkness in this light comedy of modern metropolitan life in London. We arrive "Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 06.27 hours on 1 January 1975" to witness the suicide attempt of Archie Jones, recently divorced. Smith loads this one image with religion, marriage and war, three of the big themes taken on in this big, sprawling, comic novel "He lay forward in a prostrate cross, jaw slack, arms splayed either side like some fallen angel: scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left) and his marriage licence (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes with him." The image of the hoover tube which is to form a part of the failed suicide attempt stayed with me, it "lay like a great flaccid cock on his back seat, mocking his quiet fear.."

The overriding theme of the novel is identity, particularly as it is formed in the furnace of cultural expectations. More specifically the competing cultural expectations at play on the second generation, represented in this novel by Archie's daughter Irie, and Millat and Magid, the two twin sons of Archie's best friend Samad, great grandson of Mangal Pande, the sepoy who fired the first shot in the Indian rising of 1857. (The uprising upon which J G Farrell based his comic masterpiece The Siege of Krishnapur). The uprising was a result of bullets being covered in "a grease made from the fat of pigs, monstrous to Muslims and the fat of cows, sacred to Hindus. It was an innocent mistake - as far as anything is innocent on stolen land - an infamous British blunder." And the date, New Years Day, introduces the idea of new beginnings.

Kafka on the Shore

Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami

“The darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams, from which those two twilight figures, the shadow and the anima, step into our nightly visions or, remaining invisible, take possession of our ego-consciousness.”  Carl Jung

I was a latecomer to the phenomenon of Haruki Murakami. This is only the second of his books I have read. And yet I have already started to wonder how much more there is to be drawn from the particular well he draws his water from. He swims in the sea of Jungian archetypes, trusting that the unconscious has a message for us.

The problem with the idea of the collective unconscious is that it can, no matter how strange or bizarre its denizens appear, be strewn with cliches, the collective phrases and ideas worn of the friction and risk that makes great literature.

The Woman in White

The Woman in White®- Wilkie Collins

If you like long meandering gothic tinged plot lines, villainous aristocrats and comic 'foreigners' with an edge of threat, this is the book for you. Throw in some proto-feminist comments on the place of women and a few more labyrinthine plots and you're almost there. You can add multiple voices, from diaries, comments written in diaries, letters, lawyers notes, a confession and even straight narrative. It's genesis as a serial in one of Dicken's magazines is betrayed by enough hooks, tantalisers and cliffhangers to keep even the most demanding audience engaged.

Right from the off Collins is busy setting the tone and letting us know some of what we are in for. He also tells us that the story will be told by many narrators. Then there is a humourous interlude where we meet Walter Hartright, painter, and his best friend, the Italian, Professor Pesca, a comic innocent who seems not very far from  Roberto Benigni in Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law. But when Walter Hartright leaves his mothers and sister to head back to his room a sense of mystery is introduced as he walks by Regent's Park.   "The moon was full and broad in the dark blue starless sky, and the broken ground of the heath looked wild enough in the mysterious light to be hundreds of miles away from the great city that lay beneath it."

Time Regained

Time Regained

"In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self."
And every writer too, it would seem. While continuing to excavate the sexual mores of society, snobbery, human attraction, the meaning of art etc this volume is where our narrator describes how and why he starts to write. His thoughts and conclusions are, one presumes, close to being Proust's own. The events in the life, he says, are not nearly as important as the perception of the motivating forces that inspire them, for those are the truths of humanity, no different in the drawing room or the hovel, although expressed in a different manner. "Just as a geometer, stripping things of their sensible qualities, sees only the linear substratum beneath them, so the stories that people told escaped me, for what interested me was not what they were trying to say but the manner in which they said it and the way in which this manner revealed their character and their foibles; or rather I was interested in what had always, because he gave me specific pleasure, been more particularly the goal of my investigation: the point that was common to one being and another. And as soon as I perceived this my intelligence - until that moment slumbering, even if sometimes the apparent animation of my talk might disguise from others a profound intellectual torpor..."

The Sweet Cheat Gone / Albertine Disparue (2nd post)

 The Sweet Cheat Gone / Albertine Disparue (2nd post)

In this book Proust returns again and again to the idea of a sort of RAPTURE engendered in the mind. Even if only for a moment we can have experiences which are so rich that they seem of a different magnitude of experience to everyday life. And yet they can be inspired by the most commonplace objects and attached to the most quotidian experiences. This is because the real epiphanies happen inside our head and are the result of intellect, emotion and memory acting upon experience.

I was reminded at times of passages in Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. Pessoa's narrator feels that the real journeys are internal -  "Only extreme feebleness of imagination can justify anyone needing to travel in order to feel." Proust's Marcel says something similar - "Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination." Whatever we see is not transferred COMPLETE to our consciousness, it is interpreted and shaped by our consciousness.

The Sweet Cheat Gone / Albertine Disparue (1st Post)

The Sweet Cheat Gone

This is the second last volume in Proust's masterpiece and it is difficult to discuss it without there being some spoilers, although I will try to keep these to a minimum. For although plot is not pre-eminent in this book, it is full of twists and turns.

Albertine has gone and Marcel alternately misses her and explains how he is forgetting her. He is still eaten with jealousy, both of what is happening in the present and what might have happened in the past. Before she left, Marcel imagined he had fallen out of love but her leaving turns the wheel once more and fills his heart with loss: "a moment ago, before Françoise came into the room, I had supposed that I was no longer in love with Albertine, I had supposed that I was leaving nothing out of account; a careful analyst, I had supposed that I knew the state of my own heart. But our intelligence, however great it may be, cannot perceive the elements that compose it and remain unsuspected so long as, from the volatile state in which they generally exist, a phenomenon capable of isolating them has not subjected them to the first stages of solidification. I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart."