But understand these acts are no mere jests…

You may or may not know the story of Cardenio, or Double Falsehood. Briefly, and avoiding the repetition of claims of forgery, mis-attribution etc, it runs that late in his career William Shakespeare may have collaborated with the younger playwright John Fletcher on several plays, one of which was the lost Cardenio.

These late collaborative plays pose a problem to the romantic, shapely arc often assigned to Shakespeare’s writing career. This suggests that, having written the theatre’s greatest histories, comedies and tragedies, Shakespeare’s art rarefied to romance, a second childhood of shipwrecks, fathers and daughters reunited, evil queens and gods descending from the heavens to untangle confusion. This theory crests with The Tempest, where Prospero – virtually Shakespeare himself striding onstage to put everyone straight about a thing or two – rounds off two miraculous decades in art by ‘drowning’ his book and renouncing magic (for which read writing plays). Prospero/Shakespeare then retreats to Stratford to a dignified retirement of grain hoarding and minor litigation.

Except he doesn’t. Instead, he writes one, possibly two, possibly three plays with John Fletcher.

She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist…

By 1968, we are commonly told, the Summer of Love had ended. The Beatles responded with the fractured, insular and troubled ‘white album’, the Rolling Stones issued sneering, provocative anthems, Street Fighting Man and Sympathy for the Devil, Dylan had almost disappeared completely save for 1967’s sparse, biblical John Wesley Harding and rock groups in general were beginning to favour the dark, the heavy, and flirting with ever-more extreme (and schlocky) satanic and otherwise unsettling imagery.

The approved narrative, of course, brings things to a head in 1969, with Altamont and the Manson killings, the end of the 60s etc. What I’m interested in is the way that the emergence of explicit darkness into popular music seems to correspond with the significant influence of several powerful women artists on their more famous male partners during that time. Arguably, the exploration of dark, chthonic sounds, themes and textures by many leading artists of the time seems to correspond with their relationships with several significant, cultured, powerful and self-determined women for whom the rock spotlight either held no place or no interest.

Henry VIII

Henry VIII, by Shakespeare and John Fletcher, is a strange play. It is rarely performed these days, the play’s Arden editor Gordon McMullan notes that its decline in popularity since the nineteenth century has matched the decline in theatre’s unquestioning pageantry and celebration of royalty.

Certainly, it offers us grand characters on a grand stage: Henry himself, Anne Boleyn, Cardinal Wolsey and a scene-stealing, visionary Katherine of Aragon. There are falls from grace, deceptions, seductions and intrigue and yet the play is not a parade of crowd-pleasing grotesques such as Shakespeare’s earliest history plays, nor a redemptive portrait of flawed power, as so many of Shakespeare’s later works are. It is something in between, barely touching on the characters’ inner workings, and the Globe’s current production offers little illumination.

The Globe, along with the RSC, has a near-duty to perform plays such as Henry VIII, those too uncommercial for less prestigious companies, so that we get to see the lesser-know byways of our greatest poet’s works. Sometimes these are a triumph – the RSC’s history cycle at the Roundhouse in 2008 revealed Henry VI as a monumental theatrical achievement. Sometimes, however, we can experience first hand the limitations of a text in performance. Such with Henry VIII.

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain…

In writing a couple of thoughts about William Blake I am engaging in a very minor piece of family heritage. My great-great-great grandfather, Alexander Gilchrist, wrote a biography of Blake, published in 1863. In fact, Alexander died of scarlet fever aged 33, before the book was completed. His wife, Anne, finished the work.

Prompted by an interest in Anne, I was recently drawn to Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Blake. I discovered that his life was sadder, and far funnier, than I had known. The archetype of the struggling artist is a cliché in our time; wander through Soho, Whitechapel or any arts college and you’ll see several dozen who might, in their cups, confess themselves a hidden genius. But the popular vision of the overlooked genius seems to prefer the saintly gazer into eternity, careless of worldly recognition. Not the angry, embittered rationaliser of their own defeat, enervated by disappointment which so many who strive can become. Blake, as Ackroyd observes, was both. He saw his work as of and for eternity yet railed against those who overlooked him, the fashions of the time that prevented any chance of his wider success and recognition. One of the saddest moments in Ackroyd’s book comes when detailing a private journal entry of Blake’s. Having outlined the worldly successes of his peers, Blake concludes ‘I was hid’. At a later time, or as an afterthought, he crosses through was and writes am: I am hid. For a man who was clear enough in his genius to emphatically and publicly compare himself to Michelangelo and Raphael and to declare his verse the greatest since the Iliad, the humiliation of being overlooked, passed over, must have been of hellish intensity.

The Road

Warning: contains spoilers

I’ve not read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but last year I was introduced to his work. I read Outer Dark, which I’ve written about before, and Blood Meridian. Blood Meridian is an extraordinary, unrelenting descent into the kind of temporal hell that the fortunate amongst us will only ever fear, never experience. Its biblical language, sense of creation being somehow corrupt at root – a kind of inverted gnosticism – is operatic and visceral; its depictions of savagery are unflinching.

I am easily frightened by post-apocalyptic movies. The first hour of 28 Days Later, Day of the Triffids, the parts of Threads I managed to sit through, even scenes in I Am Legend leave me nervous, claustrophobic and aware of the vast, overpopulated urban space surrounding me. I remember, years ago, alone and drunk, watching Things To Come late one night and feverishly wondering where I could get my hands on a firearm.

So, when a friend asked me if I wanted to see the film of The Road, I said yes – with reservations. Post-apocalyptic McCarthy? Did I want to start the weekend preoccupied with planning escape routes from Clapham or wondering how best to transport water on foot? As another friend told me this week: “Since I read The Road I keep a store of food and supplies in my house. And so do three other people I know.”

More new-fangled than an ape…

That the internet is a singularly wonderful thing was again proven for me when I renewed contact with a schoolfriend I’ve not seen for almost twenty years. Of course, this happens all the time. That’s what Facebook’s for, who cares, etc…

Ah, yes, but this friend has a secret identity.  He is Organ Monkeys. And he sounds like this:

ORGAN MONKEYS

I love Beefheart. I once spent several weeks only listening to Trout Mask Replica. I wanted it to become so familiar that it would become my default setting for ‘normal’ music and thereby transform every subsequent auditory experience into some avant-garde trip. I love Funkadelic, the squelchy bass and keys, the exuberance and, like Beefheart, the courageous wisdom that humour can deliver a serious message. Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense changed my life when I was 13, replacing any latent idea of becoming an author with dreams of jerking around in a big suit with Bernie Worrell getting up on his bad thing behind me. I also love Ivor Cutler, the gnomic (and gnomish) surrealism, the darkly child-like wordplay and the concision of his vision. Organ Monkeys, I think, shows all these qualities and (Joe, correct me on this if I’m wrong), he plays it all himself.

Further, he builds banjos. I urge you to visit his site and learn of his quest. Here’s an appetiser:

I looked for an old guitar. I needed one which was really really bad. Eventually I saw a white acoustic hanging on a guitar shop wall. “METALLICA” was stencilled in tiny writing on the body…

The guitar shop guy didn’t want to sell it to me as it was so bad…I said “it’s OK” in Japanese and did my best to mime sawing motions with sound effects. He looked a little bit shocked.

Read more here

Jibbs McAllister – Lost Master of the Zydeco Fiddle

For much of the material in this essay I am indebted to online musicologist ‘Sean’, who also brought Jibbs McCallister to my attention.

In October 1972, 37 years to the day last week, a temporary worker brought in to the Yazoo offices to catalogue a job-lot of donated shellac sides failed to extinguish a cigarette correctly and, in what has now become known as the Great ’72 Barn Fire (although it was no barn but a lock-up in the West Village), an entire department of Yazoo’s archive was destroyed. It could have been worse, or so many have observed. Once the smoke cleared, almost all the destroyed records came from the section named ‘Problematic’. These were the scratched records, the poor performances by forgotten jug and hoss-tube artists, the discs without labels and, famously, a near-complete set of White Star shellacs by Jibbs McCallister. Rumours persist that this was no accident.

Jibbs who?

Exactly. McCallister is as forgotten today as he was notorious in his time. In the categorisation frenzy of the 60s folk revival Jibbs was most commonly referred to as a Zydeco fiddle player but even this apparently simple piece of information crumbles when examined. The reference originates from a taped interview with folklorist Stuart Palmer. Palmer asks Jibbs what style he plays and Jibbs, slurring, apparently replies ‘Zydeco fiddle’ but recent digital analysis has suggested he may have said ‘psycho fiddle’ or even ‘zygote feel’ although the latter theory has few adherents within professional studies (Greil Marcus excepted).

What happened

I posted this on October 2nd, in a rather distracted state. I may remove or edit it but will let it stand as it is for the time being.

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Just over two hours ago I was sitting on the terrace that overlooks the hundred-metre gorge of Ronda, eating supper with my beloved and her mother. We had been watching a family of wild dogs that seems to live amongst the cacti on a narrow ledge high on the cliff. A mother and perhaps eight pups, they troop in a line along ledges that are barely more than kerbs. We watched a wide-winged bird of prey circling above, spooking the swallows, or smugly gliding lower, frightening a giant flock of rock pigeons from their cliff face roost. We’ve noted the cycle of life, here, something one rarely notes in London. Now it’s October, clusters of starlings have begun to swerve back and forth across the gorge, between old and new Ronda. There are red-beaked crows that slide past in cool formation, dipping with the synchronicity of an aerial display.

The tourists, too, have their cycles. They flock in the morning across the bridge, as the first buses arrive, but lessen as the evening comes in. As we ate there were fewer, but still a steady stream, some stunned mid-wander by the vast, grey-scale mountains and the dizzying distance between the bridge and rocks and stream below. They crowd, lean over, take photos. One woman seemed, although it couldn’t be right, to be crouched atop the grille that curves outwards so that tourists can see straight down, arms out behind her like a diver. Then she jumped.

A short, high squeak, like someone leaping into a swimming pool that’s too cold, and then she was out of sight.

I’ve given a statement from the police station, over the phone to a woman who spoke English. Whilst waiting for my turn in the interview room I searched my tiny Spanish guide for the words to describe what I’d seen. I drew diagrams, with lines of sight and possible distances. They didn’t need them so I’ve brought them home, folded, to open by accident one day. My statement is useless, I saw nothing but a distant, nameless figure disappear. Now, it’s official.

Walking back, I met our landlord’s wife, who lives on the floor below. She had her three-month old baby with her, tiny, in a high-wheeled carriage. I helped her carry the child to her door then said good night.

It’s amazing how many clichés run through your head when you see something like that. I don’t know if I should write about this but, with her public death, this woman has sent little ripples through the lives of everyone who saw her jump. She wanted to be seen.

Give me the glass, and therein will I read…

I’ve been thinking about this one for a while; how to frame and explain what seems a rather esoteric idea. It goes something like this…

If I had been born in the Netherlands during its Golden Age, if I had studied painting and produced work for the exploding population of middle-class merchants seeking work of less religious and more domestic themes, and if I had I been a genius, I could have painted something like Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing. I could never have painted Vermeer’s Wine Glass.

If I had been developing television series for the BBC in the 1980s – and had been hugely talented – I might have come up with something like the Singing Detective; I would not have been able to conceive Smiley’s People…

I glimpse in these first works, dim and incomplete, qualities that are deeply and personally felt, superior reproductions of my own semi-conscious preoccupations and sense-tones: I see aspects of myself expressed better than I could ever say them.

And this is not the same thing as admiration or enjoyment, or even quality. I stand stunned before the works of Proust, Fra Fillippo Lippi, Miles Davis, as acts of skill, as vast intellectual and emotional accomplishments, yet I do not encounter myself in their works, I am located outside the perimeter, gaping in. Passages of HP Lovecraft, on the other hand, echo to me the histrionics of my own prose, and sometimes even my gloomier suspicions about the world. It unnerves to identify more with the tormented Rhode Island racist than with, say, a genius such as Joyce.

We don’t choose the works in which we recognise ourselves (I say we, assuming that others may have the same eerie experience). A work resonates with private truth or it does not. In Gunter Grass’s Tin Drum – the film when I was a child, the book as an adult – I found what seemed the perfect ensign for how I imagined the best my fiction could aspire to, not because it was the best I’d ever read but because I sensed, radiating through it as a kind of palimpsest, qualities that felt intimately familiar. For the good and bad.

There are some geniuses that can produce both kinds of work: King Lear, for me, reads like my darkest, most pagan inner voice speaking direct, human truth. Julius Caesar, whilst magnificent, seems beamed from another thought-world entirely. Titian and Dylan also achieve this, I think.

These thoughts are instinctual and inconclusive; could we each amass a tribe of these avatars, on a separate shelf, and say ‘over there is the great work, but here is the work – good and bad – that explains me to myself’? And if you could do that, would you show anyone, or would you box them in the cellar?

The naming of cats is a difficult matter…

Warning: this post contains dewy reminiscence and less-than-critical personal analysis

There is a window to the right of where I sit. Just below there, I can see a small sun terrace belonging to the neighbours on the floor below. But beyond that things fall away for another hundred metres into a gorge; two plateaus are linked by the Puente Nuevo, which leashes Ronda’s old town to the new. The old town – which perches opposite me across the gorge, is one of Spain’s oldest settlements. There are signs of habitation going back to 2,500BC. The architecture is a palimpsest of Moorish, Counter Reformation and modern tourism. Beyond the town the mountains, currently paled in a morning haze quite unlike the unfiltered all-day sunshine I had expected.

I’m not sure why I’ve included this information, except maybe to illustrate that I’m far from home, which may explain one of my current preoccupations.

We travelled here from Weeze airport near Düsseldorf, just across the border from the Netherlands. It was a quick flight but, coming after several weeks of sofa-surfing with friends and family, we caught the bus from Seville airport to the centre of town with a sense of newly-relaxed exhalation. I remember the moment precisely; we had passed through the rotating door of the budget hotel we were to occupy for the night before moving on to Ronda and, smiling at the dried flowers and twigs – giant pot pourri – sealed into the glass between the compartments of the door, I felt a tingle of excitement that all had gone well and soon I would be somewhere in the town, drinking a beer with my beloved and marvelling at the tiny, inconsequential differences between nations that still, to my untravelled eyes, seem so telling, alien and thrilling.