Favourite Books #30

I have long been an admirer of the at once vibrant yet tremendously subtle writings of Ali Smith, and plan on getting stuck into her ‘Seasons’ quartet over the holidays (ha! ‘holidays’), now that it is completed. An earlier tome well worth checking out is 2005’s The Accidental – which owes something to Pasolini's 1968 film Teorema, in that the arrival of a charismatic stranger into a middle class family home has a profound effect on each member of that family. It also cleverly plays with multiple voices and points-of-view. A treat. 

Lou Reed & Metallica - Lulu

Lou Reed & Metallica - Lulu

Universal

Desmond Traynor

4/5

To say that this album has received overwhelmingly negative reviews would be perhaps the most monumental understatement of the now nearly 12 year old century (apologies, but the hyperbole is sanctioned by Lou Reed’s own pre-release assertion to the effect that, ‘It’s maybe the best thing done by anyone, ever’ – a statement which, in itself, despite how far you gauge Lou’s tongue was planted in his cheek, might go some way towards explaining the widespread derision the project has been greeted with).  

  Most of the opprobrium focuses from the outset on the inherent incompatibility of the participants, and then continues, self-fulfillingly, to cite spurious examples of how Reed and Metallica sound not so much as though they are not on the same planet, but not even in the same room. All tosh, of course. Lou, after all, once claimed to have invented heavy metal, and contrary to what some of these know-all detractors would have you believe, I don’t think he was talking about the largely atonal Metal Machine Music, which I agree has little to do with the genre. More likely he had in mind 1974’s Rock’n’Roll Animal and 1975’s Lou Reed Live, both products of the same December 21st, 1973, concert at Howard Stein's Academy of Music in New York, where Dick Wagner’s and Steve Hunter’s humbucker-equipped guitars pump out the power chords and riffage in a way that has served as a template for the more melodic side of metal ever since. Indeed, the Loutallica versions of ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘White Heat/White Light’, performed when the two first got together at the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame 25th anniversary concert in 2009, owe more than a little to those mid-70s predecessors. (It is a testimony to how great a song ‘Sweet Jane’ is that it can run the gamut of genre interpretation from these raucous arrangements to the Cowboy Junkies’ hushed campfire rendition, which Reed has called, ‘The most perfect realisation of that song I’ve ever heard.’) And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the interminable noise guitar work out ‘Like a Possum’, from 2000’s Ecstasy. Metallica, meanwhile, have more often than not cast themselves as the thinking person’s (let’s not be gender-specific about their fan base) hard rockers.  

 The source material is late 19th century Munich playwright Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box (the latter more well-known to contemporary audiences via G. W. Pabst’s 1929 silent film classic of the same name, starring bad girl Louise Brooks), which relate the story of a free-spirited stripper who becomes a social climber only to wind up a prostitute murdered by Jack the Ripper, whose uninhibited and amoral lifestyle bring tragedy to herself and those associated with her. Lulu is, incidentally, much in the local ether at the moment, between 3epkano’s live soundtrack for Pabst’s film at the IFI, and Camille O’Sullivan’s show The Lulu House at the recent Dublin Theatre Festival. 

  So, are the results of this collaboration as dire as they say? Absolutely not (and you saw that rhetorical answer/response coming a mile off, didn’t you?). ‘Brandenberg Gate’ kicks off proceedings, with ‘small town girl’ (as James Hetfield harmonises) Lulu arriving in the big smoke and soon tiring of her factory shifts, setting the agenda with ‘I’m just a small town girl who wants to give it a whirl/While my looks still hold me straight’. Lou gets to establish Berlin atmospherics, which hark back to his masterpiece of that title, by name-dropping obvious cultural reference points. A further agenda is set in ‘The View’, and continued throughout, most pointedly in ‘Little Dog’ and ‘Dragon’, which is Lulu’s zeitgeisty Nietzschean rejection of the conventional value system, especially the life goals expected of ‘decent’ women: ‘There is no more time for guilt/Or second guessing/Second guessing based on feeling’.

  Lyrically, BDSM is the recurring metaphor in all of Lulu, affording Reed the opportunity for a generational update on themes first explored all those years ago on the VU’s debut ‘Banana’ album, in ‘Venus in Furs’.  If lines such as ‘Pumping Blood’’s ‘I swallow your sharpest cutter like a coloured man’s dick’, or ‘Mistress Dread’’s ‘I beg you to degrade me/Is there waste I could eat?’, or ‘Frustration’’s ‘To be dead, to have no feeling/To be dry and spermless like a girl’ leave you nauseous, then this probably isn’t your idea of sexual recreation. One suspects the Marmite principle is going to apply with this one: there will be few neutrals. Disc 1 is written largely from Lulu’s perspective, while Disc 2 seems to be an angrily impotent (and impotently angry) male response, although point-of-view can be nebulously interchangeable, with first Disc closer ‘Cheat On Me’ the most reflexive of the bunch. The sadist needs the masochist as much as vice versa, and Lulu’s submission is a form of dominance.

  Musically, many of the songs begin with acoustic and/or orchestral tinkering before launching into full-blooded rockers. ‘Little Dog’ stays that way for its duration. As one who doesn’t listen to a whole lot of metal, I’m struck by how much, like blues, it uses the flattened fifth, or so-called Devil’s Note, for its effects. It’s not all super heavy either: ‘Iced Honey’ is straight, melodic barroom rock’n’roll, while 19 minute finale ‘Junior Dad’, a meditation on the disappointments of domesticity from the male point-of-view, shares tonal affinities with ‘Street Hassle’ and Songs For Drella’s ‘A Dream’, even if it goes on a lot longer.  

  Why all the hostility, then? I can only hypothesise that it stems from good old-fashioned snobbery, straight and inverted. One detects a sniffy assumption amongst the taste-making cognoscenti that poet and legendary art rocker Reed shouldn’t be demeaning himself by slumming with these raggedy, not-quite-house-trained, plebeian thrashers; while, from the other side of the fence, the notoriously conservative metal audience, who subscribe to a faith built upon simple pieties, don’t like to see their heroes getting all artily above themselves and up themselves. (One would think, however, that their worldview would be reinforced by a morality tale of a ballbreaking, never mind heartbreaking, femme fatale who comes to a bad end.) Pointing out the limitations of either case of tunnel-vision need not detain us here. One also suspects that a fair proportion of the naysayers may not have even given the discs a whirl, assuming from the outset that the whole shebang is an elaborate postmodern joke. Personally, I detect no irony in either of the collaborators’ professed admiration for the other.

  Not that Lulu is perfect, mind, not by a long chalk. Quite a few tracks are too long by half, particularly on Disc 2, seeking to bludgeon the listener into submission with the kind of dominance that depends on relentlessly lengthy repetition rather than genuinely inventive intensity. Pushing 90 minutes when an hour would have sufficed, the cliché about how an average double album would have been a great single album could certainly be invoked here. Also, Reed’s lyrics, for all that they may seek to, and arguably even successfully do, epater le bourgeois, too often come across as half-baked, repetitious, and lack a narrative arc. These considerations aside, Lulu is, while not quite the best thing either party has ever done, certainly the best new material either has come up with in some time, and deserves more of a hearing than the critical scorn it has been met with will probably allow it to receive.   

Favourite Books #29

Watching recently The Plot Against America, David Simon’s and Ed Burns’ excellent TV series adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel of American alt-history, reminded me of the rich vein of form that Roth hit at the turn of the century, including the loose trilogy American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). Reading these books, I get the same feeling I get as when I listen to an album like John Cale’s and Lou Reed’s Songs For Drella: this guy knows how to write a novel, just as these musician/songwriters know how to make a record. They’ve been doing it all their lives. They know how these things work. No matter how complicated the work may get, there is an internal structure and simplicity to them that carries them through.

The Human Stain is another novel I used to teach. We always came back to the same question: is there something noble in Coleman Silk’s defiance, or is he just an arrogant old white (heh!) male, past his sell-by date? Maybe both…

Favourite Books #28

‘Does Milan Kundera Still Matter?’ and ‘How important is Milan Kundera today?’ were two headlines from articles which appeared in 2015, when Kundera’s last novel, The Festival of Insignificance was published. Which is kind of funny, as he was all the rage in the ’80s, when you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing a copy of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being or The Art Of The Novel sticking out of people’s pockets. A critical and popular success, as they say.

Personally, I loved this novel, and I read everything else he had published up to that point (as I tend to do, when I find a writer I really like). When I used to teach Contemporary Fiction, I alternated all his novels on the syllabus from year to year, just to keep things interesting for myself. His essays are also informative and illuminating.

Like Beckett, he is something of a transitional figure between High Modernism and Postmodernism, in that he has all the scholarly knowledge of the European Classicist tradition behind him, but rather than (re)producing epics, realises he can only function as an artist through fragmentation – a radical remaking of everything that went before, which he still nevertheless holds dear. (Kundera’s declaration, ‘The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal’, from The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, has always struck me as especially fuddy-duddy, when juxtaposed with what was then regarded as his formal experimentation and innovation.)  

If his reputation has taken a tumble in the intervening years, it is mostly at the hands of feminist critics who (quite accurately, if not entirely justifiably) take issue with his constant deployment of ‘the male gaze’. But what widely successful male novelist of that era (e.g. Mailer, Roth, Coetzee, Amis, Foster Wallace – hey, why not let’s go right back to Joyce and Beckett too?) has not come in for a retrospective bashing from the ladies? But all the young, straight white males who now signal solidarity with the sisterhood by disdaining these ‘problematic’ scribes will one day be Old White Guys themselves, if they live long enough, and inevitably Dead White Males sooner or later.    

A not bad film adaptation directed by Philip Kaufman (1988) also exists. Not as good as the book, though.

 

The Queen's Gambit

I know it’s been dissed a bit in some quarters, but I thoroughly enjoyed The Queen’s Gambit. I can see that it starts out brilliantly and finishes up rather conventionally, and maybe there was not enough story to sustain 7 x one hour episodes. But who cares, when the production values are so high, the design so beautiful, and it looks so good? Yes, Anya Taylor-Joy may spend a lot of time later on swanning around looking glamourous until it appears her character Elizabeth Harmon is serving as nothing more than an elegant clothes-horse for expensive fashion items, and her easy defeats of opponents may become a bit predictable (although she encounters tougher challenges as she reaches the summit), but I was still rooting for her all the way – especially in the heavily male-dominated world of competitive chess. Besides, her glamour is just a critique of the notion that a woman can’t be super smart and a knockout at the same time (a criticism addressed in her relationship with French model Cleo anyway). Look, I just plain liked the fact that the whole series stood on its head the often geeky, nerdy, buttoned-up image of high-level chess, and managed the not inconsiderable achievement of making chess look sexy. And I know that’s a bit like praising immaculate record production when the songs are naff, but in this case the material is not, in my opinion, naff at all. 

 

So many things I liked: the subtlety with which her amorous relationships with men (and women) were handled, everything understated; the Cold War atmosphere, which EH effectively disrupts in how she behaves after her triumph in Russia; the perfectly captured sense of stifling domesticity and thwarted ambition women suffered under in the ’50s, personified in the character of stepmom Alma (and also EH’s own birth mother); EH telling the good ladies of the Christian organisation which has been sponsoring her to take a hike when they want to use her as a propaganda tool – why? “Because it’s fucking nonsense?” (note the raised, interrogative, intonation); the sense it conveyed of what many top players – solitary, obsessive types – have spoken of as the appeal of chess, that they feel safe when playing, because it reduces the outside world to the sixty-four self-contained squares on the board. Finally, who doesn’t like a story of an orphan making their way in the world, overcoming adversity when the odds are stacked against them?

 

I’m no grandmaster (in fact, I’d be one of the amateurish guys Elizabeth Harmon would have blown away with bored, dismissive ease at the start of her career), but maybe you just need a passing interest in and appreciation of the game in order to fully enter into the JOY of the series. I could have watched it all day – and night. My kind of girl (although of course she’d break my proverbial heart).

Favourite Books #27

And we think the postmodern novel came along sometime after the Second World War? Think again. First published serially between 1759 and 1767, Tristram Shandy remains as unconventional now as it was then. It gives us little of the life, and few of the opinions of its writer/protagonist, the hapless Tristram. Hell, he doesn’t even manage to get himself born until Volume III, and the story terminates when he is four. He realises he will never have enough time in the rest of his life to tell the story of his life, so prone is he to digression and exactitude. He is engaged in a race against time which he is bound to lose, if it takes him a year to write about a day in his life. “A COCK and a BULL – and one of the best of its kind I ever heard.”

Favourite Books #26

During the first lockdown in March (ah! those halcyon days!) my friend Deirdre Irvine, owner of The Open Window Gallery in Rathmines, kindly asked me to post the covers of 7 books, with no reviews, as part of a challenge to create a library of great classics. Deirdre wrote: ‘It was difficult choosing one book over another and leaving swathes of beloved authors behind. But, now I nominate Des Traynor to take the baton and run. He has been known to read a few books, so I look forward to seeing his choices.’ I stopped at 25. As we are in the midst of another lockdown now, at least until the end of November, I’ve decided I’ll press on. Will I reach 30? 50? Most of my library is in storage still, which makes this a more difficult task, but I’ll see what I can do. Note: I didn’t adhere to the ‘no reviews’ stipulation.

 

A Roland Barthes Reader, edited by Susan Sontag, who did so much to popularise Barthes’ work in the Anglophone world. A compilation is the ideal introduction (although I’d previously enjoyed the accessible and witty Mythologies). Just look at the table of contents to get a flavour of the material covered in these essays:

 

Table of Contents

 

  Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes by Susan Sontag p. vii

Part 1      

  On Gide and His Journal   p. 3

  The World of Wrestling   p. 18

  from Writing Degree Zero   p. 31

  The World as Object   p. 62

  Baudelaire's Theater   p. 74

  The Face of Garbo   p. 82

  Striptease   p. 85

  The Lady of the Camellias   p. 89

  Myth Today   p. 93

  The Last Happy Writer   p. 150

  Buffet Finishes Off New York   p. 158

  Tacitus and the Funerary Baroque   p. 162

Part 2      

  from On Racine   p. 169

  Authors and Writers   p. 185

  The Photographic Message   p. 194

  The Imagination of the Sign   p. 211

  The Plates of the Encyclopedia   p. 218

  The Eiffel Tower   p. 236

  Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives   p. 251

  Flaubert and the Sentence   p. 296

  Lesson in Writing   p. 305

Part 3      

  The Third Meaning   p. 317

  Fourier   p. 334

  Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers   p. 378

  from The Pleasure of the Text   p. 404

  from Roland Barthes   p. 415

  from A Lover's Discourse   p. 426

  Inaugural Lecture, College de France   p. 457

  Deliberation   p. 479

 

My copy is covered in pencil underlinings – the sure sign of a riveting read. (George Steiner: “An intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.”) ‘Flaubert and the Sentence’ is a particular favourite. (‘For Flaubert, the sentence is at once a unit of style, a unit of work, and a unit of life; it attracts the essential quality of his confidences as his work as a writer.’) But so are the extracts from The Pleasure of The Text and A Lover’s Discourse – which I went on to read in full, along with my own personal favourite, the last book he published before he died, Empire Of Signs.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/10/books/books-of-the-times-020710.html