QUALITY TIME

David Collard’s Cultural Highlights.

In our regular post, David Collard recommends Stu Hennigan, Ali Millar, and Legally Blonde - the Musical…

What’s the last good book you’ve read?

I run a live weekly online gathering called The Glue Factory which features authors, poets, indie publishers, translators, performers and other creative practitioners. So I tend to read a lot of very good books when prepping for that, and it keeps me on my toes. In the past week I’ve read two non-fiction books which made a huge impression on me: The Last Days by Ali Millar and Ghost Signs by Stu Hennigan. You’ll be hearing a lot about these authors in the months ahead. Then there's Deceit by Yuri Felsen, the so-called ‘Russian Proust’, a modernist writer who was admired by Nabokov and is entirely new to me, elegantly translated by Bryan Karetnyk. And The Lascaux Notebooks by Philip Terry, which are poems prompted by neolithic cave paintings in the Dordogne, all wonderfully original. I’m currently reading Osebol by the Swedish author Marit Kapla, wonderful verbatim transcriptions of the spoken memories of (mostly) elderly residents in the remote village where she grew up, their words set out as poetry. The English translation by Peter Graves was published last year. It’s very simple, very effective and profoundly moving - ordinary lives, wonderfully celebrated. But like many of us I’m finding it far harder to read than I ever did in the past, or to concentrate on anything for long stretches, and I expect it's all down to the clusterfuck of Brexit and the pandemic and this hateful chaotic kakistocracy dismantling the Social Contract, and the war in Ukraine, and climate change and everything else - all conspire to make me feel angry and exhausted, all the time. And art, whatever form it happens to take, is not just a distraction for those of us who take it seriously, and is much more than a mere palliative, or consolation. It's a means of accessing truth at a time when truth is in short supply. In these dark days any act of creation is an act of defiance.

What are you looking forward to reading?

I’m keenly looking forward to Paul Stanbridge’s forthcoming novel My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is (published by you, of course) and the re-issued Tripticks by Ann Quin, the one book of hers I haven't read. But for me the biggest literary event of the year, and of the decade, will be the publication of two definitive volumes of Auden’s poetry, appearing in the United States on 14th June and in Britain in August. This will mark the completion of the magnificent ten-volume Complete Works edited by Edward Mendelson, and will see me out.

Tell us about a favourite book, and why we should read it.

Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy by C. J. Ackerley. It’s a book about Beckett’s first published novel and, as the title suggests, a work of extreme focus and concentration. The author works through the novel line by line, word by word, ferreting out every last detail, allusion, connotation and undertow. Beckett, being an author who demands and repays such close reading, means it’s worth the effort involved on the part of the reader. It’s a wonderful book about a wonderful book, each enriching the other. Ackerley really knows his Beckett, and wrote a second volume dedicated to the great comic masterpiece Watt, also recommended.Why you should read it I don’t know. If you admire Murphy (and most writers I know do so, and some of them fervently) you’ll need no persuasion. I thought I knew the novel tolerably well as it’s been a favourite for forty years and I've read it many times, but Ackerley really raised my game.

Have you seen a good film recently?

No, but I’ve seen too many average or mediocre ones, most of them violent. The Northman I found tremendously disappointing after the director’s previous two films The Witch and The Lighthouse. I tend to prefer low-budget indie movies and The Northman was that awful thing, ‘a major motion picture event’. Spare me that. Last night we watched A Town Called Panic (French title Panique au village). It's very funny inded - cheap little plastic toys, the kind you used to get in cereal packets, crudely animated and all constantly panicking, as if they’re over-caffeinated. Cowboy and Indian live with Horse, and it’s Horse’s birthday, but they forgot and in a last-minute panic (of course) they decide to build a barbecue but mistakenly order a billion house bricks which arrive within hours. What follows beggars belief. I was aching with laughter after an hour (it’s a short film, and that’s just as well). Later this month we've got tickets for Béla Tarr’s Sátántango which I’ve never seen on a big screen before. It’s a long film, and that’s just as well as well. Looking forward to it enormously.

How about a favourite film or television programme?

I’m currently writing something for a film anthology about Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry and have been watching it closely and repeatedly. It’s one of his very best movies, I think, but has attracted very little attention. The link takes you to a wonderfully high quality YouTube print.There are around a dozen films I watch repeatedly as a permanent private festival. They all tend to be from the 1930s and 40s - The Big Sleep Citizen Kane, L'Atalante, The Third Man, A Canterbury Tale, Ball of Fire, Foreign Correspondent, His Girl Friday, and anything at all by Renoir and Ophuls; then French and German films from the 70s, Godard and Fassbender in particular, and some more recent indie stuff. I expect my tastes, formed in the Aaben Cinema in Manchester in the late 1970s and at the NFT in London in the 80s and 90s, are quite conservative. But I love revisiting films as I get older because they don’t change, and I do. I rarely watch things on the telly. I haven’t the time to commit to long-running series and most of what’s streamed doesn't snag my interest. I can’t sit through anything that involves actors pretending to be policemen, and since that appears to account for 95% of telly drama I feel I’m not missing out on much.

Tell us about a place we might enjoy visiting.

I’ve barely left the neighbourhood in the past three years, on account of lockdown, and writing a book, and general inertia. But one place unlikely to be on your radar, that I thoroughly recommend is The Stephens Collection a one-room museum in the former home of Henry ‘Inky’ Stephens MP for Hornsey and Finchley. His company made Stephen’s Ink, which was the internet of its day. You have to book ahead for a private view and it's an absolutely wonderful way to spend an hour or two, if you’re interested in ink and inkwells and blotting paper and that sort of thing. In the garden outside there’s a statue of Spike Milligan.

And if you happen to be in London go to the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre and see Legally Blonde - the musical which is running until 2nd July. Ridiculously enjoyable, and I speak as somebody with a huge resistance to anything kitsch, camp, raucous, and life-affirming.

Can you recommend a podcast, an audiobook, or something to listen to on the radio?

Stephanie Elleyne’s audiobook of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport is absolutely wonderful, and a great achievement that does justice to the novel. I’ve read the novel and listened to Stephanie’s reading of it and in both cases had the same sense of profound loss when it came to an end. Stephanie kindly did the readings at the Dublin launch of my new book last week (see below), and there’s a serendipitous connection with James Joyce which I won’t give away here and which your clued-up readers will certainly have figured out before they reach the end of this sentence. I don’t get to listen to many podcasts as organising The Glue Factory keeps me busy. A couple I do look out for are Backlisted, an excellent literary gathering presented by John Mitchinson and Andy Miller, and Neuromantics with Will Eaves and Sophie Scott, a monthly podcast ‘at the intersection of neuroscience and literature’.

Tell us about a good record.

Do we still talk about records in these streamy times? About albums? Double albums? Gatefold sleeves? Not a record but a group. Whenever the Trio Mandili appear on my timeline I’ll stop whatever it is I’m doing to watch them wandering around some scruffy rural backwater in Georgia. I love their supernaturally beautiful harmonies, and the complete lack of pretension. The performances are shot on a smartphone taped to the end of a selfie stick, and there appears to be no entourage, no post-production, no showbiz razzle-dazzle, just three astonishingly talented young women who love to sing and are very good at it. Otherwise there are three things that are guaranteed to put the snap in my celery:

Diana Ross and the Supremes performing Where Did Our Love Go? on the Champs-Élysées in 1965, and this tremendous performance of the ballad Finnegan’s Wake by a great bunch of lads called Victor, Danny, Pete, John and Gary, in a pub in Ballyshannon, in 1998. And of course Horse Outside by The Rubber Bandits.

… And anything else you want to recommend?

If this is an invitation to plug my new book I’m in. I’ve spent the past year researching and writing Multiple Joyce, which was launched in Dublin on Bloomsday, June 16th. It’s 100 short essays about James Joyce’s cultural legacy in the century since Ulysses was published, although it’s less about the life and work and more about everything else, about what Walter Benjamin calls the ‘aura’ surrounding a writer. So I rope in the Kardashians and Johnny Depp and Marvel Comics and theme pubs and graphic novels and Stanley Unwin (for my older readers), and music and fan fiction and cosplay and all the commodified stuff, and I look at the issues surrounding editions and copyright, and Derrida and Beckett, and the films, and the astonishing number of Joyce blogs and websites, and the way Joyce, more than any other writer, enjoys a complex afterlife on the internet. There’s a London launch in Bloomsbury on Monday 27th June, organised by the Irish Literary Society with live music, readings, and a huge Joyce giveaway.

If this is not an invitation to plug my own book then of course I shan’t, but would like to mention another, from the same publisher. Neither Weak Nor Obtuse by Jake Goldsmith is a book about extreme illness and chronic pain, and it’s published next month. Jake is young and very ill, with a complex range of conditions including cystic fibrosis. He is also very bright and very eloquent. This is a book that will make a huge impact on the way we talk about disability, and one that everybody should read. It’s a book of the first importance by a uniquely gifted author.

DAVID COLLARD writes for print and online publications including the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, 3:AM Magazine, gorse, Exacting Clam, White Review and others. About a Girl: a Reader’s Guide to Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing was published by CB editions and he contributed to the recent anthologies We’ll Never Have Paris and Love Bites. You can buy David’s most recent publication, Multiple Joyce, here.