Credo / Mark Oliver

'All the things in your head'

I was listening to a an old Guardian book club podcast with Hanif Kureishi about the Buddha of Suburbia and he said something which rang true with me, that a novel is about the writer trying to find a story which allows him to write about what is currently in his head (his interests and observations and curiosities).

I was listening to it as I went for a run around the dinosaurs in Crystal Palace park. This is my first blog posting with ScribeFire, a Firefoxplug in which lets you post to blogs quickly, within the browser.

'You never see the Taliban'

Interesting little film on Afghanistan by BBC's Ben Anderson, for VBS. A British squaddie tells him most of the guys he's with have not seen the Taliban even though they have had firefights with them for hours. During non-combat they have probably seen lots of Taliban because, as he says, they only need to "pick up a pitchfork and then they are Johnny farmer".

The most difficult thing is fighting against guys who don't fear death and are looking forward to "27 virgins or whatever". Anderson says some positions that are being fought over are now being administered by "Good Taliban", a scenario they could have reached six years ago with far less bloodshed.

Colours

My first blog from an iPhone

Berlin in July

 

 

 

 

We are now beginning our descent

By the end, this novel really got under my skin. It is former Guardian journalist James Meek's first book since his highly regarded, wonderful book The People's Act of Love. We Are Now Beginning our Descent is about a war reporter, Adam Kellas, and is partly set in Afghanistan, during the US-led invasion, partly set in the UK and the US, to where he travels to try and win the heart of a particularly complicated woman he falls in love with while in Afghanistan. There are lots of people who are pretty but who are 'only curators of their own beauty ... Astrid was one of those other ones, who inhabited her looks'.

Kellas's character has written a novel and the book is very good on journalists who want to write literature, which I found interesting. There's a couple of great scenes. SPOILER ALERT! One is where he trashes a London dinner party where his variously literary / media type friends are assembled and the second is in Afghanistan where he is with the Northern Alliance and his request for them to use a tank results in some enemy Taliban in a truck being incinerated (thus contravening a rather essential journalistic war reporting credo of non participation). 

At the dinner scene, there is this wonderful rant by Kellas. It is obviously informed by an anxiety that he and his friends, who were obviously quite left-wing in their youth are now somehow sellouts. Kellas tells them:

'... the price of caring is set so low. You just have to say you care and you've paid. You don't have to give anything up ... You can talk as radical as you like here on the island and you can live such a, such a comfortable life and people'll still call you a Marxist. When you're so safe. Your house is safe, your money is safe, your family is safe. Your reputation is safe, and so's your sanity. Your British passport's safe. Even your spare time is safe. How can you write about so many jeapordised people so self-importantly when you're so unjeapordised yourslef? When did it happen that the people who stand up for the losrs began to be so afraid to lose anything at all?

The novel does not quite have the inspired conceits of People's Act of Love (SPOILER ALERT! the castration cult and the lost Czech unit and the escape from Siberian prisons with another inmate to use as potential food). But it has a raw, and I'm guessing here - autobiographical? - true edge to it.

In an interview with the Independent, Meek, who is an amazing journalist and wrote wonderful articles for the Guardian, seems dismissive of all things hackery.

'By the time he was grown up, Meek decided he needed a real career. Journalism beckoned, but not for any glorious reasons. "I needed to eat," he explains matter of factly. "More than that though – I didn't want to be poor." He stills wonders, he says, whether such a demanding career delayed his writing success – but then without its experiences, perhaps his writing would lack its stirring worldliness.'

There's a rather great portrait of Meek, which you can see in full size on the article, by Mark Chilvers.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I loved Drown, Junot Diaz's first book, a collection of short stories, published in 1996, which rippled with atmosphere and sadness; he's from the Dominican Republic and lives in New York. The stories were partly from his growing up and partly from his experience as an immigrant.

There's two bits I remember from it. One of the characters sleeps with an ex-girlfriend and wakes in the morning and she has gone and has rifled through his jeans and taken his money, leaving his pockets hanging outside the trousers "like elephant ears ... she didn't even other to put those fuckers back in". And then there's a bit where a guy is having an affair and takes his son with him to the woman's house and he has to wait in the living room while his dad is upstairs. In the family home the affair is this unmentioned phenomenon like a crater in the living room.

Diaz, so feted in places like the New Yorker, has taken 12 years to publish his next book, his first novel. I enjoyed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, though it perhaps does not dazzle quite so much as his stories. It is funny and easy to read. I like the fuku, the curse that dooms Oscar's family, and the evils of Trujillo make a great backdrop to the book. Trujillo, as he Guardian describes him, was the 'kleptocrat and Rwanda-style génocidaire who ruled the country from 1930 to 1961'.

The book won a Pullitzer, so must be pretty good. And it got lots of good reviews. The Guardian notes Diaz manages the transition from the short to the long form: 'Happily, unlike some successful short-story writers, he seems comfortable with the impresario aspect of novel writing: making them laugh, making them cry, bringing on the dancing girls and so on.'

Chris Coekin

Knock Three Times

A very cool photographer. The second one is from his 'Hitcher' series, which I saw at the Photographers' Gallery earlier this year.

Coming of Age: American Art 1850s-1950s

Edward Hopper

 

Frederic Remington

This was an exhibition I saw a while ago at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, which has a nice cafe. I wondered about writing a blog about the cafe's in art galleries. I once had quite an embarrassing exchange with a guy in the lobby of the Met in New York.

Me: "Do I need to buy a ticket if I just want to go into the cafe?"

Guy on door: (frowns) "I guess not ... "

From Russia

This is a very belated post but a while ago I saw the Royal Academy's blockbuster From Russia show; I had earlier gone to St Petersburg and Moscow with its curator and other assorted hacks to look at similar works that were going to be in the show. This is my main piece about it here - a travel piece about things to look out for when on an art jaunt to Russia.

I saw the RA show on a day off and after a very expensive but rather perfect breakfast omelet at the Wolsey (a sophisticated start for a sophisticated day!). I was very grateful for my press ticket as there was a huge queue (it was really crowded inside as well). It was a very good exhibition, and definitely worth seeing the Dance, though I still prefer Music:


I really enjoyed some of the art and artists which I had not heard about while on my trip. I loved Derain's Man with a newspaper.


I was also really interested in the room with a Tatlin towerand a great film showing his plan for an enormous tower in St Petersburg. My friend Danny pointed me to this link which has great examples of huge Soviet artworks that were never made.

The exhibition ends with an image of Malevicth on his death bed (which I can't find online) that Waldemar Januszczak describes as "an exceptionally touching ending to a particularly exciting show".

Jacob Holdt

The other week I wandered into the Photographer's Gallery, just off Charing Cross Road in London, and was wowed by the photographs of Danish photographer Jacob Holdt, who is on the shortlist for the Deutsche Borse prize.

Holdt travelled in the US in the 1970s taking photographs of the country's underclass and the super rich. I love the one of the Shell sign so much I may try and investigate how easy it is to buy a print of it.

Holdt has a huge website which seems to have hundreds, if not thousands, of his photographs. According to my sources at Wikipedia, Holdt stayed at somehting like 400 homes and his images of poor Americans were so powerful the Russians wanted to sue them as anti-US propaganda.