Archive for the 'Enthusiasms' Category

One way to celebrate the great Leonora Carrington’s birthday is to reread her 1976 novel The Hearing Trumpet, a key item on the Hooting Yard Reading List.

“Ducks are a very important part of the Mama Rosin story,” Girod explains. “We have a boat on the lake which we use for birdwatching trips and that is how we became known in Geneva as the Frères Souchet (the name translates as “Wild Duck Brothers”). Also because Cyril sounds a bit like a duck when he sings.”

Nige has a postage about Barbara Comyns, which served to remind me that Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead (1954) is one of my favourite novels, and without any doubt the finest book in the popular outbreak-of-ergot-poisoning genre. I have not reread it for years, so have removed it from the shelves in readiness.

Those who like to delve into such things may wish to know that I consider it an important influence on my own scribblings. How could it not be, when, leafing through it just now I note sentences such as:

There was a great smell of mud, and it was the first of June.

We always have cocoa after a thunderstorm.

The village bachelor, drink-sodden Lumber Splinterbones, usually ambled along to Grandmother Willoweed’s birthday party.

Dennis was frightened of cows

and there should now be a question mark to end this sentence on a grammatically sound footing, thus… ?

I must thank my son Ed for drawing to my attention the band Dirty Projectors, which appears to be a nominal vehicle for the musical outpourings of one Dave Longstreth. (It may well be that some readers are already familiar with them/him, but I was not, until this year.) I have been particularly taken with The Getty Address. Here is a description of it: ” Inspired by Aztec mythology, the Eagles, and the 9/11 aftermath, it is a sprawling, layered glitch opera about Don Henley, leader of the aforementioned country/soft-rock group, and it was recorded over the course of almost two years, in three different states, with more than twenty-five people. Dave Longstreth, the principal Dirty Projector, wrote and recorded arrangements for wind septet, women’s choir, and cello octet, digitally deconstructed them, and then sang over the reconstituted parts in order to make these songs.” If that doesn’t sound exciting enough for you, consider this further note, from the Wikipedia: “Although the lyrics have been described as gibberish, the words actually do tell a narrative beginning with Don Henley contemplating suicide, and ending with a new installment of Longstreth’s songs involving brown finches.” I need hardly point out that anybody who writes a series of songs “involving brown finches” is almost certainly a genius.

It is rare indeed to find video links at Hooting Yard, but… good grief, this is superb! Mr Key’s favourite beat combo, Henry Cow, performing “Living In The Heart Of The Beast” at Vevey in Switzerland in 1976. (It looks to me as if they’re in the middle of a field*, which may explain the absence of the standard lamps which were such a beguiling feature of their usual stage set.) Irritatingly split into three parts. Watch, listen, and learn.

Incidentally, “Living In The Heart Of The Beast” was the piece that prompted Peter Blegvad’s dismissal from the Henry Cow / Slapp Happy collective on the grounds of flippancy. Tim Hodgkinson wrote the music and, as Blegvad recalled in an interview in Hearsay magazine, “I was assigned the task for the collective to come up with suitable verbals, and I wrote two verses about a woman throwing raisins at a pile of bones. Tim just said, I’m sorry, this is not at all what we want. And he wrote reams of this political tirade. I admired his passion and application but it left me cold. I am to my bones a flippant individual”.

Well, it is a tirade, but it’s still magnificent.

*NOTE : This being Switzerland, I am reminded, most appositely, of the timeless quotation “Here we are in the field of dreams, surrounded by fields of cows.” See here for the source.