Geroge Gissing, Elena Ferrante and Tracking Characters

I have not read an Elena Ferrante novel, but I have seen S1 of My Brilliant Friend, 

and I have read a Natalia Ginzburg novel, 

so I'm good with Contemporary Italian Literature in Translation. I baulked at Ferrante when, opening one of her novels at random, I ran across a sentence along the lines of "Mary was upset that Thomas disapproved of the way that Marcel treated Angela after hearing about the way her parents had snubbed Toni and Loius". Too many people in one sentence. I just can't track that many people, I found myself saying, without really knowing what I meant. 

It wasn't until I was well underway with George Gissing's novel The Nether World 

that I realised what I meant. Gissing wrote Grub Street, which is about writers and journalists, so writers and journalists love it and that's the book "everyone" has read, but he wrote a whole lot more besides, and from an overview, with more interest in describing aspects of the wider society than, say, Henry James. He's not Dickens, but then no-one is, except maybe J B Priestly on a good day. 

The Nether World is about the poor in Clerkenwell and the surrounds. Everyone is poorly-dressed, in and out of work, hungry, living with two other families in one flat in a noisome tenement or multi-story house, surrounded by children, dropping in at the pub, speaking in a very similar manner with a limited vocabulary, doing piece-work in the garment trade, paying rents that take up much of their earnings, and there's a nice line to that working women have always looked down on stay-at-home-mums . ... and so on. It's hard to tell them apart, or at least I found it so. Gissing was a capable novelist and a proficient writer by the standards of the time, and maybe it was a deliberate effect to make a point: to the middle-class, the poor look alike. Whichever, I had to keep checking up who was who, and I could not summarise any of them for you now.

Because I couldn't track the characters.

As we read a novel, or watch a film or play, we build up a list of characters and facts about them. Here's the pseudocode:

If Passage.Text.Contains(Name) then 

    If Not Character(Name).Exists then Character.Create(Name)

Character(Name).AddFact(Passage.Text)

End if 

It's no problem for a computer, but if the last time a character appeared was sixty pages ago (say four days ago in your reading schedule), checking through your memory for it may take some time, or fail. Also updating each of the characters' fact-list in one of those many-person sentences may take time or fail.

That's what I mean by "tracking characters".

A number of things make it easier to do this.

First and obviously, give each of your characters a unique name, unless the plot is going to hang on a confusion.

Second, keep a character's name consistent: Detective-Constable Stephen Jones must be DC Jones, DC Stephen Jones, and can only be Stephen if he's off-duty and the context is very clear. Never call him 'Stephen" in one sentence and 'DC Jones' in another - if there is more than one 'Stephen' then the name-tracker will take the first one it finds and add the fact to that character, which might not be the right one. Gissing breaks this rule all the time and sometimes in the same paragraph, and I found it hard to get the characters established in memory.

Third, reduce the use of pronouns - 'he', 'him', 'she', 'her'. Whereas proper names have global scope - refer to the same character throughout the novel / trilogy / series - pronouns have a local scope, somewhere between one sentence and a half-page paragraph. Used over a number of sentences, in which other people's names may occur, the name-tracker may get confused as to whom the pronoun refers. As in "John asked Andrew to help. John and Andrew hefted the gun into the river. He brushed his hands and started walking back up the bank." 'He' most likely refers to John, but it might mean Andrew. If in doubt, use character names rather than pronouns and that will keep the name compiler straight.

Fourth, give each character something we can remember them by, even if it is to remind us that they are un-memorable. It might be the way they speak, or what they talk about, it need not be some physical characteristic, though it might be.

Jazz On A Summer's Day

I saw Bert Stern's movie when I was seventeen. It was playing at the Screen on Baker Street. It didn't turn me on to any more jazz that I already knew about, but I made sure to look for a music credit to J S Bach and a cello, and that was how I discovered the Bach Cello Suites. There were no music videos back then, and only a handful of music festival documentaries. What was the name of that movie? Oh. Yes. Woodstock. Stern's movie looked beautiful, even if the clips of Sal Salvador's guitar playing, and quite a few of the audience reactions throughout the film, bore no resemblance to what was on the soundtrack, but hey.

(This says it's the full film. YT doesn't seem to have many shorter clips.)

The film is about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, the fifth since its founding in 1954. The first one was a minor success, held in a casino. In 1955, Miles Davis played his famous "comeback set" there, and in 1956 Duke Ellington played his comeback set, during which Paul Gonsalves had them dancing in the aisles with a now legendary 27-chorus sax solo. In a smaller, simpler world, that's what it took to make a legend. Of course a young fashion photographer wanting to make his first movie before he was thirty would think of filming the 1958 Festival, especially since the America's Cup races would be on at the same time. All those beautiful pictures of yachts and sails and sparkling blue water. The film is Kodachrome heaven. It's worth watching just for the pictures.

Two bits of background. First, there was a chunk of the American Upper Class who liked to differentiate themselves from the nouveau-riche by taking up abstract art, Stravinsky, "modern dance" and other such stuff as leaves the majority wondering what's going on. Jazz was one of the things they took up, both the more traditional stuff (cf Bing Crosby et al in High Society) and the post be-bop, cool, Third Wave, hard bop and later developments.

Second, the jazz made between about 1945 and 1965 is a man's music: hard, fast, loud, technical, requiring great skill, knowing when to follow the rules and when to bend them, and at the top level, a nerdy deep understanding of music theory. Nearly all white women, and the majority of white men, don't get it and don't like how it sounds. At the time liking jazz was a way to show that you were out of the mainstream, could dig technically demanding music and (in America) could be easy around black Americans and Jews. It wasn't a virtue signal: it was a hip-signal. You knew, you were cool. Aside from a handful of acts (Ellington, Armstrong, Paul White, Benny Goodman, for example), jazz had a limited audience.

Okay. Enter George Avkian https://thefilmstage.com/the-history-behind-jazz-on-a-summers-day-a-landmark-concert-film/ , one of the smartest musical entrepreneurs in the business.

The story is that George Avkian "helped" Stern pick the acts for his film - many of whom were on Avakian's labels - and arranged the clearances. His choices were already famous-famous (Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson) to help get the audiences in; jazz-famous (Anita O'Day, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonius Monk); or juke-box hits (believe it or not, but The Train and the River was a juke-box hit). And Chuck Berry. The background soundtrack was mostly ragtime, and, yes, we get "The Saints".

Any work of art can be interpreted in many ways. My take is that Stern wanted to make a movie, had chosen this subject, and Avakian likely recognised that the film could be a PR opportunity, not just for his acts, but for jazz. The film could present a domesticated and even upper-class face: yachts, and sparkling blue water, and kids playing, and peaceful mixed-race audiences, patrician organisers and audience members, and a guy playing Bach. Exactly the film Stern wanted to make. See? Jazz is American Music, good wholesome stuff for good wholesome people, having a fine weekend holiday. Sometimes art and business can work wonders.

The movie is on DVD and TV streaming services, and the soundtrack is on CD and sound streaming services. Well worth it.

Lizzy Mercier Descloux

Good God, ZE Records! There's a name from the past. Kid Creole and the Coconuts. Was Not Was. Big at the time, known only to ageing aficionados now. The E stood for Michel Estaban, who ran a (or possibly the) punk record store in Paris Les Halles in the mid-1970's. Across the road was this cute 18-year old girl who was living with her uncle and aunt. He tied a message on her bicycle, and she visited him in his shop.

She turned into Lizzy Mercier Descloux.

Probably sometime in the early-1980's, when record stores were a thing, I used to browse in the Virgin Megastore on New Oxford Street some lunchtimes. One day, I saw this album

and my art-work spidey senses twitched. This was going to be interesting, even if it wasn't going to be a Regularly Played. So I bought it, took it back to wherever I was renting at the time, and played it...

Sometimes you see a painting or a movie, or hear a piece of music, and it has almost nothing to do with the mainstream, and nothing to do with the academic avant garde, and you click with it immediately, even if you can't say why. You also know that the squares, the NPCs, the mainstream, and the Good People, are not going to click with it. You know that if you see it in someone else's collection, that they are not quite what they seem, even if they do not turn out to be a fellow conspirator. That is Lizzy's music. It's weird and interesting and even fun in a way that's still fresh - which cannot be said for much music that was "progressive" twenty-five years ago. There's a way in: all of it grooves, and some of it swings. She can take one phrase, and drop it here and there to make an entire song.

Lizzy and Michel moved to New York, where they got into the no wave thing, meeting Patti Smith, having an affair with Richard Hell (Lizzy, not Michel), plus all sorts of other things, and of course setting up ZE records. She bought a Jazzmaster (what else?) and started writing songs for her first album, Press Colour, was on ZE. She didn't sell a lot, except for the big-in-France hit Mais ou sont les gazelles

but enough people who worked at small record companies gave her reasonable budgets to make albums. There's a Pitchfork essay with plenty of details (which I've drawn on), and an artist's bio on ZE records courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

She left the New York scene and spent time in Africa and travelling around the world, making four other equally quirky albums on the way. She died of ovarian cancer in 2004.

Every now and then there's a revival of interest (all right, a couple of articles) in Lizzy, but it never lasts long. Because she never had The Hit. Patti Smith did - though Springsteen wrote it for her - and so did others on ZE records. But, in the words of the Adam Neely piece, have you made anyone any money, have you won anyone any awards? If the answer is NO, then the industry will... let your moment pass. Not that she gave a flying do-do.

Warmly recommended.

Spy Novels: Deighton, Le Carre, Rimington, Brookes

James Bond was, in a phrase at the time, the man all men wanted to be and all women wanted to have. I have fond memories of a small book that described how to be Bond, based on what could be gleaned from the novels. It covered everything from weapons and cars to breakfast, and I learned to cook scrambled eggs because of it. James Bond is not a spy. Spies gather information. James Bond blows s**t up. He is a special forces operative, based on idealised versions of some of the men and women in the Special Operations Executive in WW2.

Bond is the forerunner of Jason Bourne and Jack Reacher. Simon Templar, created in the 1930's by Leslie Charteris, may have been a forerunner. Templar was in turn more suave and volatile than that ultimate man's man Richard Hannay from the 1910's. Stella Rimington, who should know something about spies, has a number of novels featuring Liz Carlyle which are really thriller-procedurals, and I was prompted to over-think all this by Adam Brookes' Spy Games and Stella Rimington's At Risk recently. 

Both are cracking good reads, but neither is a spy novel.  The English-language spy novel came from two seeds: Len Deighton's 1962 The IPCRESS File, 

and John Le Carre's 1963 The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. 

Neither Harry Palmer (Deighton) nor Alex Leamas (Le Carre) are anything like Bond. Leamas is a washed-up, cynical operator, and Palmer is working off a prison sentence for black marketeering while in the Army. The organisations they work for are not well-equipped military operations, but fumbling bureaucracies run by barely competent ex-public schoolboys playing little one-upmanship games. Their Russian counterparts are, by contrast, ruthless and endlessly efficient and effective, yet still the bumbling Brits win, more by the native wit of the hero than anything else. It's a vision of the UK at the time: a country ruined by war, run by amateurs, and surviving on the maverick talent of a few individuals. 

Deighton says he did not intend to create an anti-hero - though casting Michael Caine decided otherwise - and none of his central characters are intended to be role models. George Smiley is a cuckold with a taste for antique books and seemingly no other pleasures, someone to avoid being at all costs.

By the 1990's both Le Carre and Deighton were writing slightly different books: less angst about the ideas of loyalty, patriotism and betrayal, more about business-like deception, double-dealing and plot twists. Who could blame either? Their earlier themes were pretty intense, and also of the time.

In the dim reaches of my memory is a remark by General Norman Schwarzkopf to the effect that the 1960's and 70's saw the US Armed Army at its lowest morale and readiness, full of "embittered drunks", and his story is of how his generation of general officers brought it back to a decent condition. My guess is that much the same could be said of many of the institutions of the West, from the intelligence organisations, through the universities, to many private-sector companies. The socio-economic circumstances that made the disillusioned spies of Deighton and Le Carre passed - the recovery started in the 1980's, as did the polarisation of Western countries into their public (left-wing) and private (non-political) sectors - and the spy novel faded away

Sales figures alone mean we must acknowledge the slapstick comedy of Slow Horses, which is a Le Carre tribute: barely competent people saving the world despite themselves, lead by an irascible outcast. The intelligence organisations - now called Five and Six (which is awful insider slang even if it is real) - are efficient and the technology works - except when the plot requires it to fail. Some of the staff may be pompous, creepy or miss something important, but they are only dodgy if it serves the plot, and then only in the way criminals are: they have broken a law, a technicality, not a fundamental bond of trust in their soul with their society. Le Carre's Bill Hayden was a bisexual philanderer and a traitor - to Le Carre the bixsexuality is a single remark at the end of the story, to a post-80's writer it would be a feature of story. There are women in central roles, with varying degrees of sass and snappy put-downs for any man who isn't their boss who dares patronise or ignore them. Rimington's Liz Carlyle is works too hard, is a terrible housekeeper, but a good bureaucrat, going along to get along. Adam Brookes' lady spies are keenly aware of status and fight for theirs.

There is and has been a continuing campaign of treachery and treason in all Western countries since the 1980's, the trahison des clercs whose values have departed too far from those of the ordinary working man and woman, who regard taxpayers as mere economic fodder for their projects, and voters as sheep to be manipulated as needed. Sadly, Five and Six do not work for the taxpayer and the voter and the NHS patient... they work for the traitors.

I'm too old and too slow to turn that into some kind of spy story. Maybe one of you young whipper-snappers might give it a shot?

150 Piccadilly ... aka...

 

Once the temperature goes over 80F or so, I go into survival mode. I can't really think ahead too far. And when I do try to visit my osteo in Marylebone, the signals at Gunnersbury fail and we are all tipped out onto the Chiswick High Road. Gunnersbury is in the middle of transport nowhere. I re-scheduled and went home. This has nothing to do with the Ritz.

When We Were Dreaming - Clement Meyers

Robert McKee's criticism of Betty Blue was that it had no story: it was two hours of watching someone fall deeper into a violent madness that we knew she had in the first five minutes of the film. Its director understood his audience: there's a type of twenty-something woman who laps this stuff up. Along with vampire movies and anything else with Beatrice Dalle covered in blood. (Just as, I suspect, there's a type of man who laps up anything with St Isabelle - awkward shuffle.) McKee's point still holds - there's no character development, no situation-complication-resolution, no Heroes Journey. The same can be said for Morvern Caller: we know she's a dissociated psychopath within ten minutes, and she doesn't change throughout all the weird little adventures she has. It's a mood piece, one of those films we watch because the lead actress is fascinating (cf every Andrea Arnold or Jean-Luc Godard movie ever). Films can get away with being story-free if they are visually arresting, the soundtrack is cool as heck, and the cast fascinate us.

Novels can't do any of those things. NO soundtrack, no luscious setting and photography, no Samantha Morton / Anna Karina / Norah Jones to be fascinating. Just those darn words on the page. A novel needs a story: a series of events that change the thoughts, feelings and circumstances of the lead characters in a way that makes the end of the novel feel satisfying. Novels without this are called picaresque, and are interesting partly because of the adventures but mostly because of the portrayals of the society and people with whom the picaro deals. A good picaresque novel will have brushes with the law, the military, high life, and give us a sense of how the low life works. It will have a picaro who fascinates, amuses and educates us, and who has a reasonably complex character. Otherwise it's just a long sequence of drinking and fights.

Clement Meyer's When We Were Dreaming, published by the Deptford-based Fitzcaraldo Editions, is 597 pages of drinking and fights. It's an account of the lives of low-level teenage delinquents in one rough district of Leipzig after the Wall came down, who are in awe of the gangs in the "red light district" which may as well be on Mars. The narrative is a mess. At one point Danny, the central character, does four weeks in a juvenile detention centre, amongst other things, for trespassing, but the only trespassing we're told he does is a good few chapters later when he runs an illegal club with others in the gang. It has its moments, but by about page 250, I was starting to want something to happen, but instead Danny goes to a brothel and gets drunk.

At 597 pages, with so many minor details and no overall direction, it feels like speed-writing. Not the shorthand they used to teach, but what happens when the writer takes one too many Adderall and lets fly. I have no idea if that's what happened, but it feels a lot like it. Whichever, Meyer's editor should have sat him down and asked him to take 350 pages out, and put the rest into a tighter linear narrative.

There are some books that when I read them, I can wander round a bookshop and choose the next books I'm going to read. There are other books that put me off making those choices. As if I have to grind through this one before I can choose another. That is usually a sign that I'm not enjoying reading it. A movie ends after a couple of hours, but a damn novel can go on for a long time if I'm not really enjoying it.

I tried to read it so you don't have to.

Thank me later.

Ferdinand Ries, and Announcement

I have been blogging since April 2009. Over sixteen years. I started it with the intention of writing about the things I was doing and the things I needed to vent about at the time.

As the title suggests, it was never my intention that anyone should actually read anything I wrote. The point of venting is to say it, not start a discussion about it. I've only ever seen a handful of blogs with extensive comments sections, and those were functioning as a kind of forum where the moderator / blogger set that day's subject.

I've been trying to follow a two-a-week schedule for most of the time. Regular readers will have noticed the occasional lapses, followed by bursts of catch-up posting. This is often caused by my falling into the rabbit-hole of a multiple-post long-form essay. I'm not going to do those anymore, and I'm going to switch to once-a-week, and something simple. With the occasional bit of personal trivia.

When I was working, the insanities of the time affected me, if only slightly, and I had to make some kind of sense of what was happening. Now I'm not working, I don't have to, but it's a habit I haven't shaken yet, and I've been feeling it's a waste of time and energy. The Sophons arrived in the mid-1990's and have been messing with our politics and culture ever since, and so much of it is second-rate trend following that it's not worth the effort.

As opposed to the music of Ferdinand Ries, who started as a young virtuoso and a pupil of Beethoven, who said of him "he copies me too much", conducted the first performance of the Master's Ninth Symphony and wrote lot of perfectly pleasant music during a long and seemingly well-lived life.

I streamed quite a bit via Qobuz, and then took the plunge, getting a couple of CDs from Foyles: a volume of string quartets and the flute quartets.

Warmly recommended.