The Bogey Hole

Ginger Riley - Untitled (Limmon Bight Country)

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly."

"Africa--you know, that strange continent which serves as the subconscious of our planet"

"In Raissa, life is not happy. People wring their hands as they walk in the streets, curse the crying children, lean on the railings over the river and press their fists to their temples. In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins. At the workbenches where, every moment, you hit your finger with a hammer or prick it with a needle, or over the columns of figures all awry in the ledgers of merchants and bankers, or at the rows of empty glasses on the zinc counters of the wineshops, the bent heads at least conceal the general grim gaze. Inside the houses it is worse, and you do not have to enter to learn this: in the summer the windows resound with quarrels and broken dishes.

And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young serving-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: "Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.""

Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (1997)

With the recent release of the complete Basement Tapes after almost 50 years of mystery and clandestine bootlegs, I decided to revisit Greil Marcus's groundbreaking account of these fabled 1967 home recordings by Dylan and what was to become The Band. I first read Invisible Republics when it was originally published to coincide with the CD rerelease of another monumental work, Harry Smith's immensely influential Anthology of American Folk Music. Smith's Anthology, first released in 1952, was compiled from his collection of 78 rpm records of folk, blues, gospel and country music recorded between 1927 and 1932. The music it contained became a touchstone (an urtext, even) for the 1950s and 60s folk revivalists, including the young Robert Zimmerman. The Anthology was more than just a compilation of dusty old-timey music, as the ever-idiosyncratic Smith had collated the music thematically (and astrologically) as part of an arcane cosmography of his own divining. 

The book's opening salvo is a typically Marcusian estimation of Dylan's cultural cachet and influence in 1965: "Bob Dylan seemed less to occupy a turning point in cultural space and time than to be that turning point. As if culture would turn according to his wishes or even his whim; the fact was, for a long moment it did". Dylan was at his creative peak during this period and was to release a series of albums, culminating in Blonde On Blonde, which would transform the "cultural space" of the 1960s. Marcus depicts the vehement reaction amongst the folk revival fraternity to Dylan picking up an electric guitar as placing him at the centre of a schism between the pious 'Pilgrim' revivalists and another American archetype, the 'pioneer'. The incendiary political situation in America and the febrile atmosphere at Dylan's concerts in 1966, culminating in the infamous 'Royal Albert Hall' concert at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, are all described in compelling detail, as is Dylan's retreat to Woodstock while at his creative peak. 

Marcus also writes brilliantly about the sui generis Harry Smith and archetypal early performers like Dock Boggs (pictured), Clarence Ashley, Mississippi John Hurt, Frank Hutchison, 'Rabbit' Brown, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the Carter Family, and the dozens of often forgotten and obscure pre-Depression era musicians found on the Anthology. He dubbed this musical world "Smithville", and more influentially described it as "the Old, Weird America", a term which has entered the cultural lexicon. This was a seemingly lost culture (even to listeners in 1952) whose very fabric is soaked in rural hardship, violence, moonshine, murder, retribution, death and redemption through old-time religion. Marcus sees this world as being akin to a subversive counterculture running through, and connecting, American history and musical culture: "Smith's Anthology is a backdrop to the basement tapes. More deeply, it is a version of them, and the basement tapes a shambling, twilight version of Smith's Anthology, which was itself anything but obvious."

  "In the same moment with his advent, he stepped aboard the favorite steamer Fidele, on the point of starting for New Orleans. Stared at, but unsaluted, with the air of one neither courting nor shunning regard, but evenly pursuing the path of duty, lead it through solitudes or cities, he held on his way along the lower deck until he chanced to come to a placard nigh the captain's office, offering a reward for the capture of a mysterious imposter, supposed to have recently arrived from the East; quite an original genius in his vocation, as would appear, though wherein his originality consisted was not clearly given; but what purported to be a careful description of his person followed.

   As if it had been a theatre-bill, crowds were gathered about the announcement, and among them certain chevaliers, whose eyes, it was plain, were on the capitals, or, at least, earnestly seeking sight of them from behind intervening coats; but as for their fingers, they were enveloped in some myth; though, during a chance interval, one of these chevaliers somewhat showed his hand in purchasing from another chevalier, ex-officio a peddler of money-belts, one of his popular safe-guards, while another peddler, who was still another versatile chevalier, hawked, in the thick of the throng, the lives of Measan, the bandit of Ohio, Murrel, the pirate of the Mississippi, and the brothers Harpe, the Thugs of the Green River country, in Kentucky -- creatures, with others of the sort, one and all exterminated at the time, and for the most part, like the hunted generations of wolves in the same regions, leaving comparatively few successors; which would seem cause for unalloyed gratulation, and is such to all except those who think that in the new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase."

The Bogey Hole has been neglected for some time now due to the travails of an aged parent and an intense period of work, not to mention a house move. As always, one solace has been snatching the time to read, and I've managed to delve into a great variety of fiction over the last few months. I've dearly wanted to write about number of these books, mostly ones written by women as it happens, but have simply not found the time of late.

In particular, I wanted to laud the short stories of the immensely underrated Nadine Gordimer (for a Nobel Prize winner, that is). Her stories are brilliantly subtle psychological depictions of life in South Africa under apartheid, a Chekov of the colour line.

Although I only heard of her recently, I kept seeing pieces about the life and work of Shirley Jackson, particularly a couple of mentions by the ever-interesting Jonathan Lethem, who I caught at the Sydney Writers Festival this year. It was no surprise, then, that I found myself completely bowled over by her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a very funny and strange story of familial murder, madness and revenge in Nowheresville, USA. One of those novels you thrust on friends, no matter what their tastes in reading are.

A contemporary writer that its been hard to avoid hearing about is Nell Zink, and I was deeply impressed by her first novel The Wallcreeper. Like Ben Lerner, she's taking the novel in new directions, and to similar effect, by mixing elements of fiction and non-fiction (and ornithology!) with what appears to be, at times, unflattering autobiography. I'm very much looking forward to reading her new novel Mislaid.

A less modish writer these days is Martin Amis, but my interest in his work was rekindled with his grimly humourous and moving novel on a Nazi concentration camp, The Zone Of Interest. 

My latest adventures in the literary ocean:

Martin Amis, The Zone Of Interest (2014)

Roberto Bolano, Last Evenings on Earth (1997) trans. Chris Andrews (2007)

Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night (1932) trans. Ralph Manheim (2010)

Breece D'J Pancake, Trilobites & Other Stories (1992)

William H. Gass, In The Heart Of The Heart Of The Country (1968)

Nadine Gordimer, Selected Stories (1976)

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Danilo Kis, The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1983) trans. Michael Henry Heim (1991)

Harry Mathews, The Human Country: New and Collected Stories (2002)

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961)

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle (1963)

Alan Warner, Their Lips Talk of Mischief (2014)

Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper (2014)

In Progress:

Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories 1933 - 1969 trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author (1971)

E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (1975)

The Art of Noise: Mbongwana Star - Malukayi (feat. Konono No. 1)

Mbongwana Star are a band from Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and features Coco Ngambali and Theo Nzonza from the remarkable band Staff Benda Bilili. Benda Bilili were originally a group of Kinshasa street musicians who practiced in the local Zoo and mixed the older styles of Congolese rhumba and soukous with reggae and R & B. What was striking about the band was that the four core musicians were all in wheelchairs, having contracted poliomyelitis when they were young. The band also included several abandoned street children who had been taken under the wings of the older musicians. They produced two albums and found an international audience with their incredible live shows. 

I tend to gravitate towards contemporary literature but try to make a point of regularly fitting in important or intriguing older novels. The books you know you should have read and never quite got around to for one reason or another. This month I read a fine 1980s Longman Caribbean Writers edition of Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, which has the wonderful illustration above by John Clemenson on the cover. It's a classic of Caribbean and diasporic literature and it was a highlight of my reading this month.

Okey Ndibe, Foreign Gods, Inc. (2014) -- I spent an evening with Okey Ndibe at the worst author event that I've ever attended. It was a rain-soaked, freezing London night in the middle of winter, and due to the weather and zero publicity the entire audience consisted of me. The organizer of the reading was stranded miles away in a broken down car in the London rain. There was nothing for it but to make a dent in the free wine and chat while we waited. Luckily for me, Okey is genial and charming company. I was enthused by Ndibe's impressive first book Arrows of Rain, published in 2000, and this is only his second novel. He was still a student in the US when I met him and since then he's been making a living there as a journalist, lecturer, poet and essayist, although he's an Igbo originally from Yola in Nigeria.

Foreign Gods, Inc. starts a bit shakily with its embittered protagonist, Ikechukwu "Ike" Uzondu, alone and adrift in New York, with a failed marriage, and deep in debt due to his alimony, drinking and gambling. With seemingly no way out as he's been a cab driver for years, he stumbles upon the nefarious but lucrative market in the effigies of 'exotic' gods which are bought by rich Americans. It's only when Ike returns to his home in Nigeria with a vague plan to steal the village's famed god of war, Ngene, that the novel really comes alive. The depiction of Ike's mother and her obsession with a sham preacher that has led to a feud with his uncle, the deity's priest, give this thriller a real injection of humour and drama. In a nod to Chinua Achebe's classic Things Fall Apart, Ike is also haunted by a local legend about the first white missionary to the village and his encounter with Ngene, which precipitates his descent into madness and death. The question that draws the reader on, is will Ike succeed in stealing the effigy and what will be the consequences? This is an absorbing new novel from one of Nigeria's rising literary stars.

Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003) trans. Stephen Snyder (2009) -- I was intrigued by the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa's collection of three novellas, The Diving Pool, the first anthology of her work to be translated into English. She writes in a precise, unadorned prose but her stories manage to also be dreamy, disquieting and uncanny. The Housekeeper and the Professor was the first of her novels to be translated and it also has the same deceptively lucid prose. There is a pervading sense of sadness and thwarted lives in Ogawa's stories, and in this novel there are distinctly sombre undercurrents to the lives of the housekeeper, a single mother who  earns a precarious living as an agency worker, and the aged maths professor she looks after. Following an accident in 1975, the professor's memories stopped and he has been left with only eighty minutes of short-term memory, leaving him disoriented but able to remember his life and work before the schism. Amidst the decrepit conditions of his two room cottage, the two gradually form a strange relationship centred on the housekeeper's son, nicknamed Root by the professor. The three bond over a passion for the local baseball team and the wonder of the professor's explanations of the mysteries of mathematics. The maths occasionally lost me, but this is a novel of great subtlety and poignancy, and Yoko Ogawa is a writer I will gladly return to. 

Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956) -- The Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon's third novel is regarded as a pioneering work of modern Caribbean and black British literature. It's not difficult to divine the influence of the novel on such celebrated later works as Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000) and Andrea Levy's Small Island (2004). From the very first meandering sentence of The Lonely Londoners, you know you're reading something rather singular:

"One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if not London at all but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train." 

The narrator of the novel 'speaks' in an inflected form of English, a stylized literary version of Caribbean creole, as does the protagonist Moses, which was unprecedented when the novel was published in 1956. The book is structured around a series of episodic anecdotes, described as 'ballads' in the novel, which recount incidents in the lives of Moses and his mostly male acquaintances, from what became known as the Windrush generation. Selvon lays bare the hardship of the lives of these men in post-war London, the discrimination and poverty they faced, their homesickness and disillusioned dreams. The novel isn't all set in the grim rooming houses and bedsits of West London though, for it also depicts the men out 'liming', a term describing any leisure activity involving eating, drinking, dancing, carousing and the telling of jokes and anecdotes. The novel is also very funny, with my favourite story involving the hunting of windowsill pigeons. The reimagination of London through the migrant's eyes, its illusory attractions and harsh realities, are often brilliantly captured by Selvon. The Lonely Londoners is only a short novel, but it introduced a liberating perspective to English literary language, and a compelling new multicultural voice in literature. A crucial work of modern black writing.

Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection -- Temporarily/permanently abandoned.

In Progress:

Nadine Gordimer, Selected Stories (1976)

Harry Mathews, The Human Country: New and Collected Stories (2002)

Nadine Gordimer, the opening to "The Last Kiss" (1960)

"When people become characters, they cease to be regarded as human; they are something to be pointed out, like the orange tree that President Kruger planted, the statue in the park, or the filling station that once was the first church hall. Mr Van As was a character, formed as many characters are, by neglect. He was an Afrikaner who had started up as a cartage contractor before gold was discovered, when the town was a coal-mining village between black hills of coal dust on the high veld of the Transvaal. His donkey-drawn wagons moved the swaying household goods of the Cornish miners from the station to their cottages. Then there was gold; the shafts went down, the houses and shops went up. Mr Van As bought a team of dray horses and four wagons, and he moved machinery and equipment for thee gold mines as well as smart new furniture for the influx of miners and tradespeople. He bought a large corrugated-iron shed and converted it into a storage place; he had an office and an expensive trap for his personal use. His wagons, with VAN AS FOR CARTAGE painted across them in two-foot letters, were seen all over the village.  He was an elder in the church. He built himself a house with white cake-frill railings to the verandah, an ornamental turret, and an onion dome of corrugated iron -- the first time that indispensable material, the very stuff of which the Witwatersrand was built, night-cold all winter, blazing noon-hot all summer, was made the soul as well as the substance of local architecture. Inside, neither plush nor ball fringe was spared, and there were mirrors in mahogany frames to multiply the heads of his wife and daughters.

  As he became self-conscious of money and fine possessions, so the village, now a little town, became self-conscious too; civic pride required a mayor and a gold chain for him to wear, and councillors for him to consult with. Van As was mayor, and wore the gold chain for three years running, and the first stone building in the town, a bank, still standing, has one of its stones inscribed: '15th July, 1912. This foundation stone was laid by His Worship the Mayor, Councillor G. G. Van As.'

The Art of Noise: Sister Rosetta Tharpe -- That's All

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, known as 'The Godmother of Rock 'n' Roll', was born in 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas. Her mother was a travelling Pentecostal evangelist and by the age of 6 she was playing guitar and singing in the Church of God in Christ in Chicago. She moved to New York in 1938 and became a sensation after playing at the famed Cotton Club.

She's best known today for her rocking gospel songs Strange Things Happening Every Day, recorded in 1944, and Up Above My Head (I Hear Music In The Air), a duet made with her friend and lover Marie Knight, which was recorded in 1948. She was one great guitarist (Pete Townsend was said to have copied her theatrical big guitar swing) and a powerful singer who could equally turn her talents to both sacred and secular songs. She was an influence on a host of musicians, including Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Aretha Franklin.

February is always a grim month spent in the post-yuletide doldrums. The weather is tedious and the endless prairie of the year ahead stretches away to the horizon. I sought solace in a variety of reading, the highlights being Michel Faber's latest (and possibly last) novel, The Book Of Strange New Things, and Ben Lerner's much lauded 10:04.

Donald Barthelme, Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964) -- Barthelme possibly doesn't get the recognition that he deserves these days, being thought rather experimental and postmodern, although he clearly has a contemporary kindred spirit in George Saunders, who has written of his admiration for Barthelme. It's a long while since I read his splendid collection Sixty Stories, and a few of the works in this first anthology of his stories reappear there, including one of his most famous, "Me and Miss Mandible". It's the unsettlingly comic diary of a 35 year-old failed insurance adjuster who finds himself back in elementary school for an unknown misdemeanour, only to become the object of a schoolgirl crush and attracted to his teacher Miss Mandible. 

Barthelme revered the work of Samuel Beckett, but his writing also bares the influences of surrealism, jazz and the ironic gaze of pop art. You never know what you are going to get with a Barthelme short story, as he constantly changes styles and narrative voices, often within the same brief story. His audacious writing is full of non-sequiturs and playful language and his stories are littered with references to pop culture (here it's B movies, movie gossip mags and Batman comics). Barthelme's stories are deliriously peculiar and often very funny indeed.

Michel Faber, The Book Of Strange New Things (2014) -- I've been an evangelist for Michel Faber's writing since reading his stunning debut novella, Under The Skin, and several collections of his short stories. Being generally averse to neo-Victoriana, I've so far avoided his most popular novel, The Crimson Petal and the White. I also like Faber as he's a music obsessive and even recorded an album of his short story The Fahrenheit Twins with no less than Eno providing the music. And he grew up in Melbourne.

Despite all this, it was with some trepidation that I approached Faber's new novel, as it was written under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, over a long period, while his wife Eva was terminally ill. It's also nearly 600 pages long and reputedly his last foray into long-form writing. Like Under The Skin, the novel has sci-fi elements and involves encounters with aliens, although here the protagonist is a fervent Christian priest, Peter Leigh, who has been employed by a shadowy corporation as a "Missionary (Christian) to Indigenous Population" on Oasis, a distant planet where they are building a base. His inseparable wife, Bea, is back on an Earth which is increasingly wracked by natural disaster and economic and institutional collapse. 

There is a melancholy lucidity to Faber's writing which patiently draws the reader into the priest's obsession with the mysterious beings who provide ersatz food for the corporation's base in exchange for medications, and their obsession with learning about the Christian promise of eternal life. The way Faber subtly conveys the uneasy undercurrents of the bland corporatized culture of the base and the psychological disintegration of Peter Leigh, and his faltering relationship with his distant wife, are reminiscent of Stanislaw Lem or J. G. Ballard. Faber also states in the acknowledgments that it's an "esteemed" homage to the Marvel Comics of the 1960s and 1970s (the title alone could have come straight from a Marvel comic). Faber's novel is also many other things: an epistolary, a pastiche of the colonial encounter, and a philosophical meditation on love, religious belief and death. It's also a hauntingly sad novel. Above everything else, though, it's a fitting tribute to his wife Eva, for at it's slowly unfurling heart are stories of love and constancy in adversity. The British first edition is an aesthetically beautiful object, with a white and gold dustjacket and a stark white cover with a biblical quotation debossed into the front: "I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS, EVEN UNTO THE END OF THE WORLD . . ."

Ben Lerner, 10:04 (2014) -- Ben Lerner is one of the most interesting (and hippest) writers in America right now. I found reading his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), an exhilarating experience. Lerner blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction, sometimes in uncomfortable ways. The narrator of his first novel is an unprincipled, lying neurotic who shares similarities with Lerner himself (both are young American poets in Madrid on a Fulbright Scholarship). At other times it's more clearly Lerner exploring his ideas and theories on poetry, politics, social interactions and culture. He belongs to a disparate group of writers with an affinity to the work of W. G. Sebald, who share an interest in taking the novelistic form into new inter-genre territories. I'm thinking here of writers such as Will Self, Jeff Dyer and Teju Cole, whose works often intermingle fiction, essays and travelogue. Sebald described this hybrid form of writing as "documentary fiction".

Lerner's latest novel 10:04 is set mostly in New York, as is Teju Cole's wonderful Open City (2013), and is bookended by two natural disasters, the superstorms Irene and Sandy which threaten large parts of the city. What goes on in between these events is difficult to encapsulate. The narrative is fragmentary and includes versions of previously published stories, poems, and exhibition reviews, as well as Sebaldian grainy photographs. Lerner's writing riffs on threads of words, art works and ideas, as well as real, imagined and fictional events. The unnamed narrator is more politically engaged than in his first novel, and the Occupy movement is another event that is playing out in the background. 

In a common trope of this form of writing, the narrator takes us on a number of perambulatory journeys through landscapes and the story records his impressions and thoughts. And it is Lerner's magpie thoughts that make his writing so engaging. He writes exceedingly well about poets and poetry, as one might expect, and the narrator even describes himself as "a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid" at the very beginning of the novel. But there are other touchstones which surface repeatedly in the story: Brooklyn; the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster; Back to the Future; Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas; baby octopuses that are massaged to death by chefs and a kaleidoscope of other subjects. The novel works to create meaning using associative techniques and the repetition and development of ideas in different contexts throughout the text. This is a very accessible novel that grapples with contemporary experiences of the world, its pasts and futures, while all the while acknowledging the impossibility of the project. Lerner might be slightly less successful in satisfactorily pulling all the pieces together than in Leaving the Atocha Station, and in a few places the writing falters, but he is attempting something more complex in 10:04. These novels are essential contemporary reading.

In Progress:

Harry Mathews, The Human Country: New and Collected Stories (2002)

Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection (trans. and edited by M. A. Screech)