MY BOOK WEEK : Mar 24 to 30, 2018

• I spent a large part of the week writing a review of Richard Powers’ new novel, The Overstory, for Caught By The River. It (the review) is due to appear on the site this Saturday and, as usual, I’m slightly nervous as to how it will read and whether it might be worthy of a site that, over the past few years, has become a source of inspired writing about the natural world. Powers’ book, by the way, is rather wonderful.

• And so, having now read four of Powers’ books, it’s time to become a completist. Some publisher will hopefully reissue all of his books as shiny new paperbacks with thematic covers (good luck with that), but for now it’s down to the second-hand and charity shops. Luckily, at one of my favourite used book shops, a tiny, crammed space near the cobb at Lyme Regis, I came across Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance and I can’t wait to read it.

• And on the subject of favourite book shops, a mention for the truly excellent Mr B’s Emporium in Bath : https://mrbsemporium.com. Friendly, knowledgable and innovative, they are the standard to which all other independent book shops need to aspire in these Amazonian times.

• This week saw the publication of the 6000th issue of the venerable Times Literary Supplement. I first bought a copy of the TLS in the early seventies largely because one of my heroes, the late Richard Boston, reviewed books for them. But I never got into the habit of buying it regularly, finding it mostly either too academic, aggressively critical, or just boring. Over forty years later that’s all changed and largely due, I think, to the influence of its new editor, the curiously-named Stig Abel. The TLS is now essential reading - lively, interesting, more irreverent, still rigorously critical but also fair and well-balanced. The covers are a huge improvement as well. I am also hooked on their weekly podcast, Freedom, Books, Flowers & The Moon : https://www.the-tls.co.uk/podcast-freedom-books-flowers-moon/ 

• The new issue (No.7) of the excellent Ernest Journal was published this week. I’m becoming increasingly wary of all the visual-orientated ‘specialist’ magazines that have lots of empty space on their pages, look like slim books and sell for a minimum of £10, but Ernest is one that is consistently interesting (to me anyway) and worth the £10 cover price. Check it out at : http://www.ernestjournal.co.uk 

• I read Sara Baume’s second novel A Line Made By Walking in the space of a couple of days. It’s had such favourable reviews and reading that it’s about a young woman, plagued for most of her life by the kind of mental disorder that somehow seems commonplace these days and who goes to live in her recently-deceased grandmother’s house in a remote part of Ireland to sort herself out, I couldn’t resist it. And I’m glad I didn’t.

• As someone who has, only relatively recently, come to terms with jazz and how it can play havoc with my listening habits, I am woefully late to pick up on Val Wilmer’s book As Serious As Your Life : Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977, recently re-published. There was an excellent radio programme celebrating her life recently : http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tcdx9 and listening to it got me wishing that someone would write a biography of her or that her memoir Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This : My Life in the Jazz World could be re-issued.

• Purveyors of aforementioned expensive magazines, Stack Magazines, recently posted an interview on their web-site that they conducted with Gail Pirkis and her team at Slightly Foxed :https://www.stackmagazines.com/literature/love-reading-slightly-foxed-magazine/ . The word on Slightly Foxed has spread steadily throughout its fifteen-year history so far and I can’t imagine the literary landscape without it.

• One of my favourite New Yorker writers is Jill Lepore and her essay in a recent issue on Rachel Carson’s neglected writings on the sea : https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/26/the-right-way-to-remember-rachel-carson is fascinating. Renowned for writing what is generally accepted as the first book (but her last) about our ongoing environmental crisis, Silent Spring, her trilogy of ‘sea books’ have now been added to my growing ‘wants list’.

• Finally, only one book purchase this week - The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben - bought in order to find out more about the world that the protagonists in The Overstory risked their lives to try and save.

The new SLIGHTLY FOXED

 

The first week of September contains a red-letter day in my literary world, as does the beginning of December, March, and June. Four times a year the new edition of Slightly Foxed drops through the letter box and the rest of that particular day is given over to delving in and out of its 96 luxurious cream pages and making a list of out-of-print books that I never before knew existed but which I now MUST READ. Issue number 47, Autumn 2015, which arrived last week is no exception. It contains the usual mix of essays on books I'm familiar with – in this instance Patrick McGrath's Asylum, Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and John Updike's Rabbit novels – alongside a couple I enjoyed reading about but don't think I actually want to read – Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy and Ronald Welch's Escape from France and Nicholas Carey. But for me, the joy and value in each issue of Slightly Foxed are in those essays that describe and enthuse about books that I wonder how I unwittingly have conspired to overlook. My first discovery in the new issue was The Cone Gatherers by Robin Jenkins, an intriguing tale of two brothers who work on a Scottish estate beside a sea loch during the second world war. The book is lovingly summarized and endorsed by Julian Hoffman, a first-class writer himself and author of a book called The Small Heart of Things which is near the top of my current 'wants list'. He also has his own web-site/blog : www.julianhoffman.wordpress.com and is, like another writer to be found in this issue – Amy Liptrop, an occasional contributor to the world's best web-site, Caught By The River. A copy of The Cone Gatherers, which I had no problem finding at a very reasonable price, has now joined the teetering 'to be read' pile in my study. And the dangerously unsteady stack will, I know, continue to grow in the coming weeks as I get deeper into this issue. Brandon Robshaw's piece on the stories of Robert Aickman looks like it might entice me to investigate further and Anthony Longden's article on The Diary of William Holland, Somerset Parson is sure to as it concerns itself with an area of ths country that I am becoming increasingly familiar with. And then of course to coincide with every new issue the good people at Slightly Foxed also publish a book, invariably a memoir, that is out of print, hard to find, and deserving of re-evaluation. This quarter the new 'Slightly Foxed Edition', and the 31^st in a series that has become eminently collectable, is Gavin Maxwell's The House of Elrig, his account of his childhood in a large house in rural Scotland with his eccentric mother and sisters and the countryside that went on to inspire him as a writer and conservationist. In his introductory essay, titled Mowgli with a Gun, Galen O'Hanlon concludes his testimonial for the book by describing it as “a brief glimpse of a wild childhood that is recognizable even in its strangeness – he has captured the essence of youth, that delicate balance of happiness and misery”. When I have posted this piece I will be attempting to balance my handsome new copy of The House of Elrig upon the leaning tower of books.

www.foxedquarterly.com

THE HAPPY READER

Has there ever been a time when bookish types have been better served by literary magazines? The book review pages of the quality newspapers have diminished and deteriorated during recent years (with the exception of the Guardian's excellent Saturday Review supplement) but literary magazines appear to be surviving if not thriving and growing in numbers. I subscribe to the Literary Review and Slightly Foxed, both of which I couldn't live sanely without, and I occasionally buy the London Review of Books and the TLS when there's something in them that arouses my interest and that I might possibly understand. And then there are the U.S. mags like Bookforum, The Paris Review and the New York Review of Books, and online magazines like Five Dials. They all have their own distinct style, occupy their own particular space in the arena of literary criticism and without them the habit of book-buying and the pastime of reading would undoubtedly be less interesting. But is there any room and any need for any more literary magazines? Well when a magazine as innovative as The Happy Reader comes along the answer has to be yes. The Happy Reader is a “Bookish Quarterly”, is published by Penguin books, and costs just £3 per issue. They have just published their third issue and had a presence at this year's Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall where their modest but well-appointed tent staged interviews with the likes of Margaret Drabble, Simon Garfield, and Patrick Gale. They are clearly a force for good.

The format of the magazine is unique and bold. Each issue basically has two main sections. The first half of issue three for instance is taken up with a lengthy interview, mostly about books, with “renowned standup and comic actor” Aziz Ansari. I'm afraid, being allergic to most modern comedy, I'd never heard of him before, but the interview was engaging and revealing and I'm glad I had a chance to meet him. Nice chap. The second half of the issue, and the real meat for me, consists of a series of articles about Dorothy Carrington's acclaimed portrayal of Corsica – Granite Island, about Corsica itself, about travelling, about islands, about Corsican cheese and Corsican crime. I didn't know about Granite Island before I read these articles but now a copy sits invitingly in front of me awaiting a hot summer's afternoon when reading is the only thing that makes sense. The other two issues of The Happy Reader are divided up in a similar manner. Issue one I must admit had me scratching my head to a long interview with the actor Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey!) but the second half saved the day spectacularly with essays on, about and around Wilkie Collins' Victorian thriller The Woman In White. Issue two turned the tables somewhat and carried an excellent interview with Kim Gordon followed by a set of essays loosely connected to a book I have so far resisted – Kakuzo Okakura's The Book Of Tea. There are rogue essays in every issue which appear to have no connection at all with the main themes under discussion but that is a large part of this magazine's charm and attraction and cleverly demonstrates how the best reading can catapult you off on surprising diversions, arcane explorations and previously unheard of avenues of interest. Lateral reading. Of course, being a Penguin publication, every chosen title for each issue is a Penguin Classic, but as someone whose appreciation of the 'classics' leaves something to be desired I am very glad to be given the opportunity to discover more titles from that imprint in such an enjoyable and engrossing way. Bookish magazines launched by publishing houses have mostly had depressingly short life spans in the past; I just hope that The Happy Reader is here to stay.

For further details go to www.thehappyreader.com and for a good interview with editor-in-chief Seb Emina go to http://magculture.com/at-work-with-seb-emina-the-happy-reader/ .

SAINT MAZIE

A few weeks ago I wrote a review for Caught By The River of Thomas Kunkel's excellent biography of the great New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell - Man In Profile : Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker - http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2015/05/man-in-profile-joseph-mitchell-new-yorker-andy-childs/. Pleasingly, the book seems to have garnered a great deal of praise and attention and will hopefully have introduced Mitchell's timeless prose to a whole new audience. The wonderful compendium of his best work - Up In The Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) - is still available and hopefully always will be. The second piece in this book is of particular interest at the moment. It's called Mazie and is a short profile of "a bossy, yellow-haired blonde named Mazie P.Gordon....a celebrity on the Bowery....has a wry but genuine fondness for bums....and each day gives them between five and fifteen dollars in small change, which is a lot of money on the Bowery" (a very large amount actually, this being the late 30s). By day Mazie worked, practically lived even, in the ticket cage of the Venice movie theatre which her family owned and from where she presided, like some street-wise, life-hardened matron and angel, over the destitute and the down-on-their-luck inhabitants of the Bowery. 

Joseph Mitchell should always be remembered first and foremost as a great writer and chronicler of New York life, but there are two perhaps more newsworthy elements to his story that will seemingly always resurface in any discussion of his life. The first is the last thirty years of his life working for The New Yorker and never publishing a word, and the second is the revelation, relatively soon after they were published it must be stated, that some of his celebrated profile pieces on various individuals were in fact composite creations. Hugh G.Flood (in Old Mr.Flood), King Cockeye Johnny (in King of The Gypsies) and Mr.Hunter (in Mr.Hunter's Grave) didn't actually exist. In the hands of a lesser writer this underhand blurring of fact and fiction would have devalued the journalistic merit of his work. With his impeccable eye for detail and detached perspective though Mitchell succeeds in creating characters that perfectly represent the essence of the places and the time that he's writing about and they are as real to him as any living person could be. 

In his earlier, shorter pieces like Mazie however there was no room or necessity for any fictional embellishment. Or so Joe Mitchell thought. And so I also thought until I discovered that all of last week and this week BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime is a book called Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg (Serpent's Tail) which is apparently a novel that imagines the life and times of Mazie and "honours an extraordinary life and heralds a completely original approach to writing historical fiction. Weaving together fictionalised diaries, writings and interviews, Attenberg has constructed an utterly convincing portrait of Mazie Philips, which is also a deeply moving portrait of New York as it passed through the First World War, Prohibition, the boom of the '20s, and then the terrible depression of the '30s."
So it seems that in an audacious manner that Joseph Mitchell would have surely approved of in his courteous Southern-gentlemanly way, Attenberg has taken the essence of Mazie's story (with perhaps only Mitchell's original seventeen-page piece as source material) and brought her to life in a way that feels as credible as it does remarkable. I'm only going on what I've heard on the radio - I have yet to get my hands on a copy of the book - but the voices and narrative sound thoroughly authentic to me. Despite the increasing and bewildering insistence on radio and TV to use English actors for American parts, Samantha Spiro does a very creditable job as Mazie's voice and the supporting voices are equally good. It's riveting radio and I can only assume that the book is even more rewarding.

BRIAN CASE - On The Snap

In the early 70s, when I was editor of Zigzag magazine and based in Soho there was a group of us, some contributors to the magazine and some loosely connected to it, who used to convene on a regular basis to discuss the important records of the day, ridicule anyone in the music business we collectively disliked, extol the virtues of our heroes, and drink. The core of this increasingly-addled coterie consisted of Pete Frame, John Tobler, Tom Sheehan, Paul McNally, Jerry Gilbert, Keith Smith, Rocky Prior, Monty Smith, Will Birch and myself. There were several casual attendees such as Jonathan Morrish and Chalkie Davies and, most often at the behest of Tobler and Sheehan we used to invite the occasional 'guest'. Tobler, who was working as press officer at CBS Records at the time, once brought along a young Rolling Stone journalist who was in town named Cameron Crowe. Very amiable chap, talked to me about Neil Young (who he'd just interviewed) for ages, and was quietly appalled at the amount of alcohol we were able to consume in a lunchtime. And Tom Sheehan, one of the more gregarious members of our tribe, invited several 'personalities' who he thought might amuse us. Danny Baker was one of them I recall (talked so much that none of us could get a word in and consequently drunk even more than usual) and on a couple of occassions he brought along Brian Case, eminent jazz journalist, fine raconteur, proper drinker. All round ace chap. I should add at this point that our particular gathering, enthusiasts of the vituperative arts as we were, didn't suffer fools or other music journalists easily. Sheehan, one of our very greatest music photographers, friend of the stars, and much sought after by the music press, often found himself in the offices of either the NME or MM at lunchtime with a raging thirst and impatient to join us for a restorative 'lotion' (his terminology) he would airily announce that he was “going down the pub”. Being an immensely popular figure and amusing company for witless scribes he would be greeted with a chorus of “which pub are you going to Tom?” Heart sinking at the thought of inflicting these wretched hacks on our esteemed company, Tom would briskly announce :“to the Million Barking Dogs”. Clueless as to where this establishment was located but far too cool to admit it they would all cheerily reply “OK, see you there later”. The Million Barking Dogs of course didn't actually exist. Tom had invented the name to deter any unwelcome intruders with their fatuous opinions who might threaten to lower the tone of our rarified assembly. At various times the Million Barking Dogs was a number of pubs whose names I can't remember, the Princess Louise, the Pillars of Hercules (which became our regular) and a pub near, I think, Windmill Street which is where Brian Case graced our company. I may have got some, if not all, of that wrong but that's how I like to remember it. I'm do know though that Brian, ensconced in a corner with his roll-ups and a selection of beverages, impressed us all with his humour, frightening knowledge about 'difficult jazz' (more inventive terminology from Sheehan), his refreshing and lightly-veiled belligerence towards the many frauds, charlatans and idiots that plagued the music business, and of course his capacity for booze. He must have seen through our tarnished veneer of bohemian pretence immediately and marked us down as imposters because the number of times he illuminated the proceedings were too few. I for one, a mere amateur in comparison at the time, was no match for his level of critical precision, incisive wit and dry humour. I've always loved his writing if not always the subjects he chose to write about, but it is with absolutely no hesitation that I can wholeheartedly recommend On The Snap as a taster of Brian Case's style, humour and ability to paint a vivid portrait in a paragraph. It is, as the title suggests, a series of snapshots of musicians (mostly jazz), actors, film directors, and crime writers who Brian has interviewed over the course of three decades. Most of these subjective profiles are very funny, mercilessly opinionated and infused with respect and admiration for the subject (his encounter with the Sex Pistols is an exception). My favourites are the story about him turning up for an interview with Al Pacino with 100 rounds of ammunition in his trenchcoat pockets, his Chet Baker story, his memories of Ronnie Scott, and the Richard Harris chapter. I will probably read the whole book several more times though (it's 60-odd pages and easily devoured in one sitting) just because it's the sort of great, uninhibited writing about musicians and 'artists' generally that seems to be in short supply these days.

On The Snap : Three Decades of Snapshots from the World of Jazz, Film & Crime Fiction by Brian Case is published by Caught By The River and can be purchased here : https://caughtbytheriver.greedbag.com/buy/on-the-snap-by-brian-case/packshot.html

One For The Books

I've been a fan of Joe Queenan's writing for quite some time now. If You're Talking To Me, Your Career Must Be In Trouble is one of a handful of books guaranteed to make me laugh out loud and his writing on films, film stars and the film industry generally has been mercilessly scathing and mostly right on the button. By his own admission his work "largely consists of ridiculing nincompoops and scoundrels", and he is refreshingly unapologetic in his refusal to suck up to the movie business or any other business that has an inflated sense of its own importance. Up until recently I'd assumed that film was his overriding passion as well as the target for his vituperative wit, but it seems that Mr.Queenan is first and foremost a bookman, a voracious reader and an incorrigible collector of books. I chanced upon a copy of One For The Books in The Last Bookshop, a well-stocked and imaginatively presented remainder book shop in Bristol, read it in a day and, in as much as my own deranged book-acquiring habits pale in comparison with those of Queenan's felt much better afterwards. I even went out a bought some books I felt so good. Queenan may be sarcastic and dismissive about certain books and authors but there is no doubting his passion for books and reading and libraries and bookshops and all things literary. One For The Books would appear to be a partially re-written, re-editied and re-configured collection of columns that Queenan has had published in various magazines and papers and it is perhaps a little drawn-out and repetitive in places but there are enough laugh-out-loud moments and passages of shrewd observation to make it well-worth the investment. And Queenan makes the best argument for printed books over e-books that I have read anywhere.

One For The Books by Joe Queenan (Viking U.S.) (£3 in The Last Bookshop).

Sandy Denny Saves Zigzag!

I spent a couple of weeks last month reading Mick Houghton's excellent new biography of Sandy Denny - I've Always Kept A Unicorn (Faber) and reviewed it for Caught By The River - http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2015/03/ive-always-kept-a-unicorn-the-biography-of-sandy-denny-mick-houghton/. Discerning music lovers of my generation whose tastes were broadened and developed in the mid-to-late sixties will hold a special place in their hearts for Denny and Fairport Convention from that era. Not to deride the current Fairport line-up but the Fairport Convention of the late sixties that made What We Did On Our Holidays and Unhalfbricking were a truly remarkable band and if tragedy hadn't struck and events conspired to change the course of their history then one can't help feeling that Sandy Denny might have achieved more acclaim and success than she ultimately did. Even today, almost thirty eight years later, her death and music's loss is still too harrowing for many to re-visit. Zigzag founder Pete Frame - one of the first writers to recognise Denny's talent, reminded me that we both owe a debt to Denny and Fairport that we'll never be able to repay. In its early days Zigzag, like almost every magazine that is independently funded, went through severe financial difficulties and it was a benefit concert, headlined by Fairport Convention and also featuring Mighty Baby, that raised the cash for the magazine to stay afloat and allowed Pete to continue to edit it. The photo at the top of this piece shows the cover of the very first issue of Zigzag with Sandy Denny on the cover alongside an ad for the benefit concert that appeared in issue number six. If Zigzag hadn't survived then my life might have been completely different as well. I wouldn't have succeeded Connor McKnight as editor and would have had to settle for a proper job. Perish the thought.