I've
just written and posted a free e-book. 'Microwalking' is a
pamphlet about short walks. It includes
descriptions of several examples taken from Swaledale in the
Yorkshire Dales. As it says in the pamphlet: 'A 'microwalk' ...
contains, in microcosm, the kind of experience one can enjoy in a far
longer walk. Scrambling up a stream-bed, enjoying a panoramic view,
negotiating tricky terrain, encountering a waterfall or a hidden
valley.'
To read it as a flip-book, just click on the link, and 'enlarge' as one would a YouTube video. It is, I think the easiest way to read it:
I've just finished reading Iris
Murdoch's novel, The Sea, The Sea. Ageing actor and director, Charles
Arrowby, decides to retire from the limelight. He buys a house,
Shruff End, in a remote spot on the coast of the North of England.
It's a strange, dilapidated place with no electricity. The sea, only
a short walk from the house, looms large.
He seeks solitude: among other things,
to write his memoirs (the text of which becomes the book). However,
his old friends, uninvited, seek him out. Not only that, but he
discovers that his first sweetheart, now old, like himself, lives in
a nearby village. She and her husband have bought a bungalow there.
Arrowby, though charming, is a
controlling, manipulative monster. He gives a disarmingly honest
account of his doings. He seems not to realize how unacceptable and
out of the ordinary his behaviour is. The seeds, though, are there for the rest of us to
see. Talking of his love for his father, he says 'if you long and
long for someone's company you love them' – a remark that might be
innocuous when seen in some contexts, but which turns out to be
revealing in the context of this man.
Again and again, as the story unfolds,
he describes the controlling, abusive behaviour of others while
seeming blind to his own. Having been a famous theatre director, he
seems to think he can direct the lives of real human beings the way
he directed actors. He thinks of himself as the magician, Prospero.
The whole book, in fact, has the feel of a Shakespeare play. It helps that many of the characters – Arrowby's
old friends – are actors. The way the house itself and the sea let
us know how the balance of the universe (and Arrowby's mind) have
been disturbed has a Shakespearean feel to it, too.
As the book goes on, it becomes clear
that the man who thinks he's a magician is no more than a bully,
incapable of foreseeing, understanding or caring about the effect of his actions on the emotional life of others. The real magician in the
book is his cousin, James, a (retired?) soldier and Buddhist. To
explain much more would be to give too much away, although at one point, Arrowby
asks James about a man he'd once seen at his London flat:
'Oh him,' said James, 'he was just a
tulpa.'
'Some sort of inferior tribesman I
suppose! And talking of tulpas, what about that Sherpa that Toby
Ellsmere said you were so keen on? The one who died on the mountain?'
James doesn't pick up and correct his
cousin's facile assumption. (Incidentally, it's not the only time
Arrowby's racism breaks through). If he had, he would have explained
that in Buddhism, a tulpa is 'a magical creature that attains
corporeal reality, having been originally merely imaginary'. It can
also be defined as 'a type of thoughtform capable of
independent action, with a persistent personality and identity; a
kind of modern imaginary friend.' (Wiktionary). That Arrowby is
cheerfully oblivious to the real meaning of the word is an irony that
reverberates through the book Iris Murdoch would have us believe he's
written.
The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize for Murdoch in 1978. Has it aged well? I'd say so. I first read it back in the 1980s. Re-reading it now, it's still an enthralling read.
I'm a fan of the work of Andrew and Eden Kotting. I'm also a fan of John Rogers' weekly walking videos. I was particularly pleased therefore to see that, this week, John Rogers' walk incorporated a visit, with Andrew and Eden Kotting, to their latest exhibition, Excuse me, can you help me please? I’m terribly worried (runs until Sat 30 July at New Art Projects, London).
The whole film is well worth a watch, but if you want to cut straight to the exhibition visit, start watching at 12:30.
The gallery website can be found here.
For anyone who doesn't know, Andrew Kotting has often collaborated with his daughter, Eden, going right back to his first full-length film, Gallivant, which documents a trip he made round the coastline of Britain in the company of Gladys, his 90-year-old grandmother, and a then 9-year-old Eden.
We recently returned from a holiday in Cumbria. We stayed for a week on a caravan site in Haverigg. The site's situated on the edge of a lagoon on the far side of which stands a lighthouse. The lagoon was once a vast industrial site - an iron-ore mine - which has since been flooded and turned into a nature reserve. Literary associations kept popping into my head all week: every time I looked out of the window and saw the lighthouse I found myself thinking of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and of Mr Ramsay telling his son that the weather wouldn't be fine.
Fortunately, it was fine. I didn't have to resort to cutting out pictures from the Army and Navy Stores catalogue to while away the time. And then, looking at the surface of the water, which stretched away to the lighthouse from just outside the door of the caravan, I couldn't help wondering what lay beneath it. It would be interesting, I thought, to lower an underwater camera into the water, to explore the landscape of the lagoon-bed see what remained of its industrial past. I was reminded of JG Ballard's The Drowned World - another book I very much enjoyed reading. I had a silly thought, too, that this was the way Mordor might look, fifty years after the defeat of the Dark Lord, the pits of the orcs landscaped, filled with water and turned into bird sanctuaries and suchlike.
It's a few miles north of Haverigg to Silecroft beach. You get there down a road that winds back and forth over the railway line through a series of level crossings. There's very little there - once you've driven through Silecroft village, there's a small caravan site, a handful of old, substantial houses, a couple of bungalows and little else. The beach itself is a shingle beach that curves away to the north for miles, up towards Ravenglass and Sellafield. On a good day, we were told, you can see the Isle of Man. On our first couple of visits, try as we might, we could see no sign of it. Then, one particular clear morning, we drove down to the beach and there it was - hilly, substantial, filling a good part of the horizon. It's easy to see where myths of magic vanishing islands come from.
Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver have
been working together for some years as a duo making innovative
improvised music. Both are established figures in the New York Jazz
scene. On this album they've come together with American poet Fred
Moten. It was recorded during the pandemic, in the wake of the George Floyd
rebellion.
Combining poetry with jazz goes back a
long way. The idea, however, while retaining curiosity value, has
never become mainstream. The Beats and, later, the Black Arts
Movement tried to develop it. Some of the results have become iconic. This album, which has been compared to the work of Amiri Bakara
with the New York Art Quartet, may well be up there with the best.
The problem – according to detractors
– is that one is never sure what to concentrate on, the music or
the poetry. This is a mistake, I think. As TS Eliot said, 'genuine
poetry can communicate before it is understood.' One can think of the
poet in this context as just another musician, only a musician
playing with words. If one is paying the right kind of attention to
the poetry, there is no need to be preoccupied with trying to
understand it. The words work like notes, the phrases like musical
phrases. Just listen and you'll find out what you need to know. This
doesn't mean the meaning of the words will be lost on you: Moten is
poet who writes powerfully about the politics of being black in the
USA, of how – referencing the death of George Floyd – “somebody
black and poor can't breathe”. The title of the first poem/track on
the album tells you what it's standing up against: “the abolition
of art, the abolition of freedom, the abolition of you and me”.
Moten's poetry is ideal
for this kind of project. Its phrases live for
themselves, like the latest thought of an improvising musician. Derek
Bailey once said of improvisation words to the effect that improvised
music was like music without memory. This quality of living in the
moment, shared by Moten's poetry – on one level – and musical
improvisation, is what I think makes this album work so well.
I
don't think it'll be forgotten in a hurry. I don't buy much vinyl but
I'm tempted to buy it for that reason - and because, if I do, I can sit it next to my Iskra 1903
double LP (1972), which it reminds me of, possibly because that,
too, hit me between the eyes when I first heard it. Bailey,
Rutherford and Guy released that album of improvised music fifty years ago, in a different country, in a different context. Hopefully
people will still be listening to Moten/López/Cleaver fifty years
from now, too.
I always keep a look out for any new
releases by Jumble Hole Clough. If you don't know it, it's the
brainchild of Colin Robinson of Big Block 454, which describes itself
as 'making exploratory, highly individual music that encompasses
rock, funk, electronica, folk music, Dadaist collage and much
more besides.' Jumble Hole Clough seems to have grown out of this. It
started out, as Robinson puts it, 'to produce music influenced by the
landscape, industrial remains and experiences around Hebden Bridge in
West Yorkshire'. I would respectfully suggest that although JHC
retains some of the eldritch oddity that I associate with that neck
of the woods (it was once my stamping ground, too), it has, over the
39 albums now produced under the name, gone beyond it.
Of the 38 albums produced prior to this
one it's hard to single out a favourite but mine is probably Answers
on a Postcard. They're all more than worth a listen.
...and
I think the little house knew something about it; don't you?
is something of a departure – but less of one than might appear at
first glance. It's a collection of generative music, an approach
which has certainly not openly figured in JHC's music so far. As
Robinson explains, 'you set up a system and some rules... A variety
of probability and aleatoric functions are used, such as Turing
Machines and nested Bernoulli gates. The probability process means
that the music gradually changes over time.' Reading this, it was
hard not to think of the work of Brian Eno. However, I was reminded
of something someone once said of John Cage, that however much he
used processes and aleatoric techniques to put distance between
himself and his music, it still, somehow, managed to sound like John
Cage. For all the processes, this album still manages to sound like
Jumble Hole Clough - but in new and unexpected ways. The quirky,
eldritch quality still shines through.
Jumble Hole
Clough -as Cage once said of Satie- is indispensable.
