ANGELA BASSETT

Been a big fan of Angela Bassett for many years, probably since Whats Love Got To Do With It which she carried entirely on her own shoulders. I’ve seen Waiting to Exhale, which I didn’t care for at all and Strange Days which I wasn’t fussed about either although her own contribution was outstanding. IMDb calls her captivating, gifted and sensational: I would go along with that. In a recent interview she says: I am living my dream and preparing myself and trying to give the best I can today. I bring all of me today. Amen. I have tried to follow the same philosophy all my life.

She was nominated for Best Actress in the 1994 Oscars in a particularly strong field of Debra Winger for Shadowlands; Holly Hunter for The Piano; Stockard Channing for Six degrees of Separation and Emma Thomson for The Remains of the Day. I guess the OscarsSoWhite movement hadn’t been invented back then.

She has a good role on UK TV at the moment in Close to the Enemy which has received mixed reviews but which I like a lot. She plays Eva a post-war jazz singer and band leader; a fairly minor role for which Poliakoff was lucky to acquire her. 

When you check-out her website you are immersed in a world of Michelle Obama and black political culture; so refreshing to see someone of her stature putting it out there.

THE RIVER WAS DARK AND MUDDY

The river was dark and muddy

And the moon was on the rise

And all of the creatures in the swampland

Had woke up to feed for the night

Yes, we have been to see Tony Joe White. Still out there at seventy-three doing his unique and wonderful thing. Sold-out in three days.

I saw him once before ten [?] years ago just him unaccompanied for the first six songs then with a drummer on the bare bones of a kit for the rest of the gig. He took requests: incredible, never seen a big American star do that before. We almost saw him in Memphis in a bar when his career was on the downward slope in I think 1989 but we had to catch a bus to New Orleans that night and had to give it a miss.

Okay, okay it’s simple stuff: three chords E,G &A [mainly E] and all the songs sound the same but that’s what I want. I don’t want experimentation from this guy. I want the swamp music he has 

mastered so well.

Don’t know his work?

The lyric above is from Roosevelt and Ira Lee

He wrote Rainy Night in Georgia.

For Tina Turner he wrote Foreign Affair, the title of her come-back album after Ike and also for Tina, Steamy Windows. Polk Salad Annie, my least favourite track of his was a big hit in the seventies.

Just lovely to see him again.

SO LONG LEONARD

 

I was sorry to hear that Leonard Cohen had died. It comes to us all and he was aged eighty-two apparently but he was an important figure in my younger life.

When I was twenty-one I knew what I knew about poetry by being force-fed Wordsworth and Eliot at school, more or less all of which went over my head. I knew Dylan of course and had come to appreciate that lyric composition had a lot more depth than Up in the Morning and off to School . 

Then I met Anne Corner and Anne owned a copy of Songs of Leonard Cohen. By myself I would never have picked it up; doomy, gloomy meaningless American music about love affairs on Greek Islands that were as far from my young consciousness as it was possible to be.

I loved Anne. She was little with very short blonde hair: in those days, as now girls wore long flowing locks so she was to my eye interesting and different. But she was only fifteen, five years difference and that is a lot at that age. She found it difficult to mix with my friends, all of them in jobs with money and independence and I found it near impossible to mix with her friends, still in school uniforms with their heads full of exams. But she changed my life: she was a different generation, sharp as a tack the way youth can be, into everything, anything that was new. Wasn’t remotely interested in what had gone before. She adored Songs of Leonard Cohen, took me through it line by line: explained the nuances; explained the meter and the clever use of allusion. Show not tell but even more subtle and poetic than Dylan.

I didn’t know then that he was fifteen years older than us and that love affairs on Mediterranean islands was what people of that generation did and wrote about.

Effectively, Anne and Leonard allowed me to grow into the person I am today; I kind of dropped a generation. My school friends already married with a child and another on the way, working in the yards as draughtsmen or in the engineering factories along the Tyne as toolmakers moved on into a life I knew I never wanted.

We lasted three years on and off. I wanted to tie her down, get engaged or even married: I knew even then that I would never find anyone else so great, so beautiful, so soulful but she wanted out. Within a year she had a child by a gigolo who ran the moment he learned she was pregnant. Which of course was what I had wanted: a child and a partnership.

We lost touch and I never made any attempt to contact her again or find out what happened to her. Years later I met her dad he was an architect working for Alan Smith but it was in a business context and it would simply have been rude to enquire about her.

Songs of Leonard Cohen was the only one of his albums I ever bought: it’s upstairs in a box in the loft along with the Neil Youngs and the Joni Mitchells; Canadians all. I seldom play it. It stands alone as one of the greatest albums ever, not just from the late sixties, a decade crowded with genius albums but since forever. As I say, it changed my life.

RECENT READS

You get through a lot of reading lying on a hospital bed. Four big books this week:

BLACK NIGHT FALLING [By Rod Reynolds]. Not for me.

Reynolds is a young-ish Brit Crime Thriller author who sets his books in forties America: I think he is trying for a Chandleresque effect. His research is immaculate and although I like almost anything by Chandler/Ross McDonald this isn’t anywhere near the quality of these masters. I was persuaded to buy it by Laura Wilson’s rave review in The Guardian and a review by book blogger Liz Barnsley, who liked my Riccarton Junction thriller so much that she awarded it 4*.

Of Rod Reynolds she said something like: ‘Charlie is an engaging and sympathetic protagonist that readers will warm to and the narrative grips from the start and carries you along to the very last page.’ But it didn’t.

THE YEAR OF THE RUNAWAYS [By Sunjeev Sahota]. God, I loved this. It was shortlisted for the Booker in 2015, beaten by Marlon James and it is easily one of the best things I have read this year, up there with The Book of Strange New Things.

It is kind of a web of interconnected short stories of four people of Indian descent, one upper-class Brahmin, one Sikh, sorry two Sikhs and a lower-class Chamaar. The Brahmin arrives in England on a fake marriage certificate; the Sikh on a fake student visa, the Chamaar [an untouchable] via plane and truck across Europe and the other Sikh, a girl, already lives here. The narrative is about their struggles to survive in England; the constant fear of the being caught by the authorities and imprisoned or sent home; the pressure to take a job, any job at slave wages; the need to send money back home . . . the whole purpose of the exercise . . . or repay the debts incurred for the fake marriage certificate or the student visa. And the immense consequences for both themselves and their families back home, if they don’t make the payments. What makes it so great are the back stories of each protagonist: the Chamaar in particular the lowest of the low castes in Indian society, living in a hovel working the land, persecuted at every possible level. Stuff here I didn’t know anything about. I spent a month in India in the seventies and I am not totally ignorant of or about the caste system but reading it here I was just staggered by the level of racism.

Narinder, the devout Anglo-Indian who already lives here is a wonderful creation and adds real depth. Living the Sikh life of religious and family obligation, curtained away from British society at large, when she is thrown into the furnace of the real world lived by these illegal immigrants, the novel becomes quite unputdownable.

There is racism but interestingly for me, Sanota never at any point invokes white on brown racism: almost every character of white/European origin is fair if not kindly. Mostly, the racism is inter-caste; inter-religious; inter shade-of-black/brown. In fact it is the smaller moments of injustice that wear them down rather than encounters with UKIP and fascists. I found the women remarkable: every mother, sister, auntie deeply prejudiced toward the new arrivals, the freshies as though they wanted no reminding of their Indian heritage.

It’s long . . . 450+ pages but this is because the writer doesn’t want to oversimplify: he needs to tell their story in full, not in shorthand. Certainly worked for me.

I loved the what-might-of-been ending by the way: beautifully done.

THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS [By Edna O’Brien]. The adverb queen.

Hated this. I read it, all of it didn’t skim it: worst thing I have read since the bloody White Crocodile a few years ago. It has very patchy reviews on Amazon: a lot of people taking it down. Completely baffled by Eimear McBride’s  ’. . . proves once again how inimitably she can place a woman’s soul on the page’. This book Eimear? Or Country Girls or one of her other classics?

Do you know the story? It’s a take on Radovan Karadzic and his later wanderings when the whole world was trying to bring him to trial for war crimes and he was living in plain sight as a healer in I think it was Spain, except she has him here in rural Ireland charming the womenfolk. It is gruesome and as a reviewer on Amazon says unequivocally, ethically dubious. Actually, I found it a cold-hearted book: research, research, research does not a readable novel make.

What I think she was trying to do was write about lost children and used the Balkan wars as a kind of platform for her opinions. Her heroine is childless; another character has a miscarriage and can’t ever get over it; another character leaves her child behind when she emigrates to the USA; yet another is running from parental abuse in an African village. And so on. The red chairs themselves a symbol of the murdered children of Sarajevo. Story after story unearthed to fill the plot-holes and hammer home her message about the way the world treats women. And to me at least, her writing is not great: adverb after adverb. Why can’t a tree be a tree? Why does it always have to be a blackened tree or a gnarled tree? Awful really.

Just a postscript to these two novels: an observation. Apart from one very minor exception, all of the male characters in this novel are weak, spineless, uncaring and ultimately hold little if any respect for their womenfolk. The book was written by a woman. In The Runaways, all the women with the exception of the heroine, Narinder are grasping and mean spirited . . . everyone loves a martyr . . . and most of the men seem to cower in fear of incurring their displeasure. This novel is written by a man. 

THE WAKE [By Paul Kingsnorth]. Liked this a lot. Long-listed for the Booker in 2014 it isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, written as it is in Old English or more precisely, Paul Kingsnorth’s version of it and it took me fifty pages of hard slog to engage with it but overall I thought the month I spent reading, absorbing and comprehending it well worth the effort. Some things don’t come easy: why should they.

It’s about 1066 and the aftermath of the Norman invasion and focuses on the life and times of Buccmaster of Holland, a Socman a free tenant farmer in the Lincolnshire Fens and owner of a large timber-framed house, three Oxgangs and two indentured servants. The Normans burn his village, his home and rape and kill his wife on a day when he is out in the Fens fishing for eels. He tries to avenge them and gathers around him a small war-party, a Werod armed with knives and scythes and an ancient handcrafted sword which Buccmaster has come to believe was gifted to him for this very task. The narrative follows the Werod as they waylay the Normans on the roads, attempt a an attack on a castle in the early stages of construction and along the way we get a sense of how the invasion has impacted upon the population, many of them now widows reduced to penury by the avarice of the French for Geld.

I liked it. I learned a lot and like you hope any good book will, it opened my eyes to history I for one was quite unaware of. I think the use of Old English is an interesting device: it makes it hard at first anyway to get to grip with the story but on the other hand greatly and authentically enhances the inner workings of Buccmaster’s mind. You should give it a go.