http://www.spannered.org/books/ Music, art, film and literature from outside the mainstream bubble, a platform for writers. Spread a little mp3 love. en-gb Copyright 2007 Spannered. All Rights Reserved. Thu, 9 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT 240 http://www.spannered.org/images/skins/spannered/RSS.jpg http://www.spannered.org/ http://www.spannered.org/books/1215/ http://www.spannered.org/books/1215/ Two young artists take an expansive tour of the Middle East in Henry Hemming's first book. Tue, 12 Jun 2007 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/1159/ http://www.spannered.org/books/1159/ Charming and ever so slightly camp, or retreating to the sexism of a bygone era? Judith Evans finds fault with the Iggulden brothers' recent publishing phenomenon. Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/1114/ http://www.spannered.org/books/1114/ Self-publishers William Eckersley and Alexander Shields reveal the capital’s ragged edges and stale secrets. Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/648/ http://www.spannered.org/books/648/ Difficult second novel syndrome? This sophomore effort isn't quite the great American novel, but Foer should keep trying... Sun, 26 Jun 2005 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/635/ http://www.spannered.org/books/635/ Kazuo Ishiguro's latest novel is clumsy, awkward and often soporifically dull. So why does it feel this mysteriously good? Thu, 12 May 2005 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/607/ http://www.spannered.org/books/607/ Reason and unreason collide in McEwan's fine new thriller. Mon, 28 Mar 2005 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/577/ http://www.spannered.org/books/577/ A perfect coffee-table book for anyone who agrees that Dylan's canon of lyrics constitutes some of the most important poetry of the last half-century. Thu, 17 Feb 2005 00:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/578/ http://www.spannered.org/books/578/ Not, as one might expect, the original metaphysical detective story of 1985 (which is old news – but good news). Instead, the tale translated, transmuted, wrought in the language of comics by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli in 1994, and now published for the first time in the UK.Anyone familiar with Paul Auster's story, the first part of his justly famous New York Trilogy, will immediately recognise the ambition of this project. Within its pages we meet Daniel Quinn, disillusioned poet-turned-thriller writer, shocked out of his solitude by a late-night phone call. Down the line drifts an eerie voice asking for the Paul Auster Detective Agency. Intrigued, he accepts the assignment and is reluctantly drawn into assuming someone else's persona, and into a world of smoke and mirrors from which he will never escape. The voice is that of Peter Stillman, threatened by the imminent release from prison of his father, a Harvard professor whose insanity led him to lock away his son for nine years. Obsessed by God's language, he believed his son might learn it if he suffered no human interaction; now, years later, his damaged son fears for his life, and Daniel Quinn becomes Paul Auster, private detective. But the job is not as easy as he might have hoped. For what can he do when his identity is never certain, his intentions always in doubt, and the setting – New York City – one of fallen innocence and fragmented, shattered space?To render a book about the discontinuities between language, the world, and human identity (a detective novel written by Kafka via Barthes) into the language of pictures – and specifically the quasi-cinematic form of the graphic novel – might seem like an eternal torture set by Kafka for Barthes in whatever afterlife saloon they nightly share a bottle of absinthe. Luckily, the illustrators spectacularly succeed, mainly because they are unafraid to take on the original at its own game, delving into abstractions and posing the weighty questions in a style all of their own.Initially, the strokes are broad, clear, chiaroscuro, indebted to film noir. Yet as the complexities of the text become apparent, the illustrations shift register, borrowing from other works of art or creating a narrative through new and startling forms. Nowhere can this be seen better than in Stillman's extraordinary speech revealing the horrors of his childhood: as he recounts his father's attempt to erase his humanity, the speech bubble disappears down a vortex, flowing into an underworld of nothingness, morphing through disturbing shapes until it again issues from his mouth. Elsewhere, a city view dissolves to form a labyrinth, coalesces in a fingerprint, then zooms out to depict the fingerprint on a window in front of that very view. It's a vertiginous technique that is impossible to convey in words. It needs to be seen – but that's exactly the point.Adaptations too often limit or debase the work they stem from. But here the authors have fashioned a work of art that distils the novel's presence while expanding upon its themes. Some of the more complicated musings upon language are passed over, but the words are well chosen and the illustrators at their most inventive where the challenge is greatest. New York, a tangible presence in both versions, is portrayed in striking wide drawings, all the more remarkable because they break the regular grid of the pages that is only very deliberately interrupted. For these frames also take their place in the investigation of language (here the language of comics), explicitly figured as the prison of the self, the limit and yet also the condition of communication, gradually disappearing as Quinn descends into madness. One of the last straws is his discovery that the 'real' Paul Auster is a novelist, augmenting the identity crises for the reader as for the protagonist. The final frames that draw back from the narrative, and in which Quinn achieves his wish to be nowhere, are breathtaking.If this all sounds heavy going, theoretically challenging, then let me assure you it's not. I'm not a fan of the needlessly complicated, nor an aficionado of graphic novels – this is the first I've ever managed to start – but I devoured it as avidly as I have any traditional read and was thoroughly rewarded by the experience. In scope, style and every possible way, a revelation.Adaptation by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli Thu, 17 Feb 2005 00:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/579/ http://www.spannered.org/books/579/ Humphrey Jennings (1907-50) has long been recognised as one of Britain's finest filmmakers on the basis of his wartime documentaries, which, for many of his followers, reveal a rare poetic sensibility despite being ostensibly propaganda. Kevin Jackson, as editor of the somewhat inaccurately named but essential Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, recently reprinted, has made a forceful case for Jennings's work outside of film, placing his involvement in the British surrealist movement and his role as one of the founders of "mass-observation" near the centre of considerations of his work. Jackson's new biography consolidates this project, drawing together all of his subject's diverse achievements into an (almost) unified whole.In some ways the half-century of the Jennings cult that Lindsay Anderson inaugurated has dulled or at least made his films over-familiar, and Jackson's book is at its most evocative when it deals with Jennings's pre-war career. The first half takes in the early years of English studies at Cambridge (where Jennings was a friend of William Empson and a pupil of IA Richards), the frenzied world of surrealism, and the no-less-bizarre origins of the m-o movement. Like Jennings, Jackson is something of a "polymathic magpie-scholar" and his book is by no means an easy fit for the film studies ghetto.War gave Jennings a subject and artistic focus, but rather thinned out the life, and while Jackson's readings of the films are exemplary, Jennings himself falls somewhat out of focus in the second half of the book. There is something in Jackson's claim for Jennings as "cinema's Orwell" in that his films propose the same kind of national mystique found in The Lion and the Unicorn, but politics in the narrow sense were never as central a concern as they were for Orwell.A more obscure but perhaps more telling comparison is with the novelist Henry Green. It isn't simply a matter of shared subjects – like Jennings' Fires Were Started, Green's Caught (1943) deals with an East End fire crew in the Blitz. The two also have a similar manner, if one can compare film and prose styles, in their treatment of class (central to Fires and Caught alike). Theirs was the (Auden) generation of sometimes shallow commitment, in which real, direct contact with the working class became the ineffable object of many a political odyssey. Green and Jennings came closer to this even than Orwell: Green by working in a factory, and then allowing the voices of his co-workers to dominate the resulting novel, Living (1929); Jennings by revolutionising the British documentary in comparable fashion.Empson included Soviet cinema and the documentary movement under his idiosyncratic definition "covert pastoral" – about, but not really for and certainly not by "the people". What really sets Jennings apart, as has been recognised in different ways by most of his admirers, was the quality best expressed by Lindsay Anderson: rather than being figures in the pre-determined class struggle conjured by the mass of socially conscious British documentaries, the real people in Jennings's films are "ends in themselves". In making The Silent Village (1943), Jennings enlisted a whole village for the production, working in such close co-operation one could say that the film marked a transition: the subjects of the documentary became its participants. It's a tribute to Jennings and Jackson both that this book manages to perceive the work as a totality, but still leaves you wanting more. Thu, 17 Feb 2005 00:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/586/ http://www.spannered.org/books/586/ Wrong About Japan is something of an oddity and, given that it comes from the pen of a double Booker prize-winning novelist, a bit of a disappointment. It's a slim but lavishly packaged memoir-cum-travelogue that recounts the journey of the author and his son to Tokyo, opening in New York with Carey junior's discovery of Manga and Animé. His father, on the other hand, is knowledgeable about Japanese history and traditional culture and is curious to know more about these startling new forms that hint at complex relations with the past. This proves excuse enough for a shared trip to Japan and a search for the intersection between the hyper-modernity of Charley's comics and the land of temples, engravings and swords. Their guide along the way is an immaculately dressed teenager named takashi whom Charley met over the internet, but even he cannot stop the author from losing his way. For though it avoids the easy pitfalls of the lost in translation approach to culture clashes (Sofia Coppola's movie is a facile, insular film dressed as art house: it's OK to send up foreigners as long as they're nicely shot), it is difficult to say what Carey's inquiries actually achieve. Thanks to his status as an internationally renowned novelist, he can arrange interviews with some of the most important figures in the world of Japanese visual culture. But these interviews are unrevealing, as Carey's questions – probing to find an 'essence' of Japanese culture, or the link between modern Japanese life and history – are too often deflected with a flat assertion that his assumptions are mistaken. Of course, as Louis Theroux will tell you, the interviewer-as-ingénu can be a useful trick to gain the interviewee's trust. Here, though, stuck behind a translator, Carey frequently appears bewildered, unprepared, even outwitted. The final interview with Hayao Miyazaki – the man behind spirited away, and possibly the best known of the Animé directors – is skilfully billed as a lucky encounter with a reclusive, busy man. His eventual appearance should seem miraculous. When it comes, it's distinctly anti-climactic.This is not to say that there's nothing of interest within the illustrated pages. The volume is at its best when Carey successfully connects art to history, as in his interesting discussion of children in wartime and the Manga series Mobile Suit Gundam. and the Japanese experience of the Second World War – often overlooked in Europe, aside from the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – is sensitively and shockingly conveyed.There are some vivid descriptions, too, of Animé films and their distinctive graphic style. These sections prove Carey's ability as a writer to conjure up pictures with elegant prose, though they were, for me, far too brief. His skill with words has been put to great effect in the past: his last book, my life as a fake, evoked the sights, sounds and smells of humid, verdant Malaysia – rendering it as exotically tangible for the reader as it is for the prim English narrator. Unfortunately, in Wrong About Japan, there is little visual description and the metropolis is for the most part rendered drab and lifeless.I just got the feeling that I knew too little of Japanese culture for the numerous references to mean anything. Who, for example, exactly was Basho? Carey also too often relies on broad statements (the monster Godzilla is a direct response to the atom bomb; woodcuts depicting Commodore Perry with a large nose signify a correspondingly proportioned manhood) that are tantalising and doubtless true, but for the uninitiated need to be analysed, or at least substantiated. The book is subtitled A Father's Journey with His Son but, like the culture gap, the generation gap remains too wide to be bridged. The implicit theme here is of the young being more adept than their forebears with new technology, more at home in alien urban environments, but the insights are no more profound than 'my gosh, isn't he good at text messaging fast': a 21st-century update of the truism of little Johnny showing dad how to program the video. I'd say this book is a missed opportunity. For such promising subject matter, it's an annoyingly inconsequential read. Thu, 17 Feb 2005 00:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/540/ http://www.spannered.org/books/540/ It's the first decade of the 19th century, and societies of theoretical magic exist all over England – studying the history of magic with unspoken relief that the dangerous art is no longer practised. But by accumulating a magnificent library of books (much rarer things, of course, than they are today), the otherwise unadventurous Mr Norrell studies until he is able to revive the spirit of magic itself. Bringing his great news to London, Norrell proves himself by making stones speak and reviving a young heiress from the dead. He is soon employed to assist the government in the Napoleonic wars; but both his impulsive pupil, Jonathan Strange, and the eerie faerie magic Norrell invokes take the new English wizardry beyond the patriotic and wholesome and into treacherous ground.Susanna Carke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is written in an arch, Austenesque style that gently sends up all its characters, including the narrator of its tongue-in-cheek pedantic footnotes. Apart from magic, history takes a familiar form; Wellington's battles progress much as we know them, except they were actually won with a few behind-the-scenes spells. Much of this magic proceeds with an oddly routine feel – rivers are moved and roads created in a businesslike blink of an eye. But other spells linger in the mind's eye: ships made of rain, talking gargoyles, or the faerie magic that Norrell unwisely calls up. The eerie and exhausting fairy parties, the king's roads behind a mirror: these echo an ancient but sinister english magical tradition, and create a sense of cold peril, always just out of sight. And to hear the truly uncanny described in Regency drawing-room-speak is itself unnatural, neatly reinforcing the story's spookiness.The idea of combining fantasy, newly hauled from geekdom into the mainstream, with the Regency comedy of manners, is deliciously funny. There's a lovely cameo from the mad King George, and a slightly heavy-handed one from Lord byron. But the human interest in the novel is slight; some fairly major characters still seem like near-strangers at the end, and there's a weird absence of recognisable motive in many of their actions. What may have been an attempt to deepen the characters beyond obvious "types" sometimes results in them seeming amorphous and imperfectly drawn. One character, for instance, has all the hallmarks of a true villain at the start, but gradually dissolves into being... quite nice. It's somewhat anticlimactic.There have been plenty of comparisons between Clarke's debut and JK Rowlings's output. And despite Jonathan Strange's sophistication, these are apt. Both authors peddle a magic that is oddly comforting even as it raises the forces of evil. Both concoct plots of the kind that make you look up to find that hours have passed while you devoured their pages. Both create paper-thin characters, instead drawing us in through stories, endless funny asides and a jovial englishness. Both write about characters that pay lip-service to palatably liberal values, while enshrining old-fashioned structures: men wave their wands and women remain victims; only the upper classes practice magic; and we know that the hero will never die. Clarke took 10 years to write her book, something that its intricate detail reflects. In other ways, though, it's very much comfort reading, and works like a recipe rather than a spell. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell may ask few difficult questions, but it offers nearly 800 pages of childish, somehow uncomplicated pleasure. Mon, 25 Oct 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/527/ http://www.spannered.org/books/527/ The Fit is a perplexing little novel. It's a complete contrast to Philip Hensher's previous effort, The Mulberry Empire, a Kipling-esque epic that sprawled, both in terms of its subject (19th-century Afghanistan) and in terms of its length. The Fit is a compact, stylised domestic drama about the mundane and aimless trials of a freelancer caught in a minor tragicomedy in suburban Wandsworth. Gone is Hensher's imperial, purple prose – abandoned for short, child-like sentences and basic, non-figurative language that give the whole book an air of childlike simplicity.The novel opens with John, the narrator, in his garden, beset by hiccups that begin after he discovers that his wife has left him. He then encounters a bizarre, ageless girl who persuades him to drink champagne, propounds a few meaningless prophesies, and disappears, only to reappear at the end. The surreal, perverse air of these events sets the tone for the rest of the novel, which rests on John's befuddled misunderstanding of what is going on around him.John is an indexer, "the best in the business" and a typical example of the highly ritualised, emotionally retarded male figure that has become so familiar. His narration is naive and simple – "Before the party at which I met Janet, I had been born in Bromley" – and he greets the events that engulf him with mild-mannered perplexity. John finds all relationships difficult, failing to understand or even register his wife's increasing frustration with his habits and inadequacies, preferring an odd relationship with Mrs Granger, a rather unsavoury old woman whom he visits every week. Other details, such as the fact that John wears the same suit everyday and has trouble understanding simple metaphors, all confirm the suspicion that Hensher might be another devotee of the old "maleness is a mild form of autism" idea.Alongside this catalogue of bizarre and comic events are several rather puzzling references to the death of John's sister, who was murdered outside a nightclub. This clearly has traumatic connotations for John, and is meant to add some sort of seriousness to the tale, but it doesn't fit into the narrative in any meaningful way. Likewise the episode with a conceptual artist called Wasia, who breezes into the story and hangs around with John and his family taking photos, before she mounts an exhibition that exposes him to general ridicule. One suspects that this may have less to do with the plot than Hensher's public spat with Tracey Emin, whom he accused of sending him hate mail, before he was forced to issue a public apology in The Spectator. The Fit does have its moments of genuine pathos and insight during john's gradual mental deterioration after his wife leaves. Hensher is always capable of an incisive metaphor and the odd flamboyant piece of prose. Yet the novel is very patchy, and gives the impression of being little more than an amusing trifle dashed off between more serious projects. From mid-way through the book, you can almost sense the author's attention wondering – which adds to the final impression that The Fit is a slightly self-indulgent, half-finished sketch. Wed, 29 Sep 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/516/ http://www.spannered.org/books/516/ There is something about David Foster Wallace's new collection of short stories, Oblivion, that is irritating to the point of distraction. But I'm still not quite sure what it is.Wallace is the darling of contemporary American fiction. He was declared a genius, among other things, when he wrote Infinite Jest. (It's long, seriously long, and apparently very "clever" – although I haven't read it and I've only met people who claim they have, only to admit they haven't.) Listen to Zadie Smith effusing on Oblivion's cover: "[Wallace is] a visionary, a craftsman, a comedian... He's so modern he's in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us. Goddamn him."Goddamn him indeed. Smith's quote tells another story, though. And that is the story of McSweeney's, the independent publishing house established by Dave Eggers. In its time, Eggers has drawn together an impressive array of collaborators – Smith, Wallace, Nick Hornby,Jonathan Safran Foer. They are all part of a young, transatlantic elite whose trademarks are gentle subversion, twists of irony (Eggers devotes paragraphs in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to the misuse of irony), deft wit and cleverness. Sheer, unadulterated, look-at-me cleverness. McSweeney's is an exciting story – a testament to Eggers's energy and devotion to his craft (he is also committed to encouraging it in others and has set up two writing workshops on America's western and eastern coasts), and a wonderful encapsulation of the electric writing talent on both sides of the ocean.But it's the cleverness that gets me. Eggers, Smith and Hornby are fundamentally entertaining – they tell good tales in crafted prose. Wallace, as Smith concedes in her breathless encomium, is on a different level. There is an edge, an undeniable virtuosity to his writing. He can inhabit alien voices in the most extraordinary, uncanny way. There are moments of truth that make you catch your breath. He shatters cliches wherever he turns. But, quite a lot of the time, it's just not that great to read.An example: "As any decent small-set univariable probablity distribution would predict, not all members of the targeted focus group were attending closely to the facilitator's explanation of what Mister Squishy and Team **Y hoped to achieve by leaving the focus group very shortly In Camera to compare the results of their individual response profiles..."A little context: in this 66-page story, "Mister Squishy", written in unrelenting, perfectly executed management/corporate-speak, Wallace charts the progress of a marketing meeting, and dips into the lives of the protagonists. It's impressive. but it's also unreadable. It's like watching a world-class pianist practice scales: it might be dazzling, and you certainly couldn't do it yourself, but it doesn't mean you enjoy it. Wallace is simply showing off. There's a coldness, a cynicism about this way of writing which is more than irritating – it's unsettling. It's as though he's laughing at his subject – the poor fools who are stuck in meetings all day, trading vacuous jargon, wasting their lives away. He uses his writerly dexterity to elevate himself above the mundanity of everyday life, hollowing his unsuspecting characters out from within.There's an intriguing narrator in one of the best stories, "Good Old Neon", speaking after his own suicide. He has suffered all his life from being a fraud, adopting false characteristics depending on his surroundings. One gets the feeling that wallace is incriminating us all in this exaggerated portrait – it's a scathing attack on the unavoidable insincerity, the behavioural superficiality from which we all suffer, and which we all perpetuate: "We all go around trying to use English to try to convey to other people what we're thinking... when in fact deep down everybody knows it's a charade and they're just going through the motions."It is this very fraudulence, this element of "charade", that plagues Wallace's writing. But then, of course, that's probably why he created such a character. It's not as though he's unaware of what he's doing – on the contrary, it's all part of the plan. Wallace is cleverer than thou, a step ahead, laughing at you before you even realise there is a joke. And again, while this makes you sigh in admiration, it can also be exclusive and alienating. Technique, intellect, cleverness: they're all undoubtedly impressive, but they pale in comparison to a little slice of authenticity, and, dare I say it, soul. Thu, 23 Sep 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/515/ http://www.spannered.org/books/515/ The London Scene is a beautifully packaged sequence of six essays that Virginia Woolf composed for Good Housekeeping magazine in 1931. Collected together in this edition for the first time, these carefully sketched windows on London are so distinctively Woolfian you can almost hear her reading them aloud. From the first piece to the last, we are given contrasting impressions of the city that was always Woolf's first home. We see London as an abstract industrial machine in the first essay, inspired by a day spent watching the cranes and the ships in the Docklands in March 1931. And in the last, where Woolf paints a portrait of Mrs Crowe – an imagined londoner – glimpsed accidentally through a window, we see the whole of London embodied in an old woman. The London Scene is an essential addition to the canon, largely due to the characteristic way in which Woolf's complete writings converge both thematically and stylistically. These pieces expand her other works – in particular her short writings. In her 1930 essay a street haunting (collected in The Death of the Moth), Woolf walks out in a trance-like state down a twilit Oxford street to look for a new lead pencil. But it is London itself that seizes her imagination, along with the anonymous selves that haunt its streets. In each piece, she connects the mechanisms of the city with the human: "It is we – our tastes, our fashions, our needs – that make the [Docklands'] cranes dip and swing, that call the ships from the sea. Our body is their master... because one chooses to light a cigarette, all those barrels of Virginian tobacco are swung on shore... as for the umbrella that we swing idly to and fro, a mammoth who roared through the swamps fifty thousand years ago has yielded up its tusk to make the handle." The city and the citizen are inextricable. The bright lights and shop fronts of Oxford Street are, of course, inanimate, and yet at the same time, "the mere thought of age, of solidity, of lasting for ever is abhorrent to Oxford Street". It is paradoxically the most vibrant impression of London that she paints. The very architecture of the city interacts with the psyche of the characters Woolf draws. In all her works, rooms and living spaces take on an enormous significance, as they at once house and embody the inhabitant. In Great Men and Great Houses, the Carlyles' house has been opened to the public, and she observes the ways in which their home shaped them psychologically – crafting Mr Carlyle into the austere old sage she took such relentless delight in ridiculing. They "had no water laid on. Every drop used... had to be pumped by hand from a well in the kitchen[.] Carlyle with water laid on would not have been Carlyle". But we are also left with another Woolfian phantom – that of the empty room as a prefiguration of the morbidity that occupied her so intensively. Mrs crowe, like the eponymous hero of Jacob's Room, cannot sit entertaining her neighbours for ever – she can only witness a mere moment of London's vast lifetime. But it is this moment that makes living worthwhile. It is the dichotomy at the heart of Woolf's aesthetic; on the one hand, we can never really know one another – there are too many neuroses – too many unarticulated desires and fears – so many that we cannot truthfully even claim to know ourselves. And yet at the same time, this must not stop us trying. Mrs Crowe, Clarissa Dalloway, and Mrs Ramsay all shy away from intimacy; conversation is kept light and sociable, but through their parties and gatherings, people are brought together, and in contrast to the modernist paranoid fear of the city's alienating properties, human contact is made. It is a tentative illustration that we are not eternally alone. Wed, 22 Sep 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/502/ http://www.spannered.org/books/502/ What would you give to learn how to write at the feet of your greatest literary heroes? Sam Kashner was an aspiring poet who, to the bafflement of his accommodating parents, gave up a degree at a regular university to become an apprentice to his hero Allen Ginsberg at the 'Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics'. Kashner's highly readable and entertaining memoirs contain some valuable insights into the beats – those brilliant demigods of American literature. But Kashner successfully demystifies their enduring legend at the same time.The first question that arises is 'why?' Why add to an already over-crowded market of true accounts of life with the beats? More shelf space has been dedicated to covering their exploits than to any other literary circle before or since.The answer is that Kashner has a unique perspective on a unique period in the the beats' history. It is the mid-1970s. 'King of the Beats' Kerouac and his muse, Neal Cassady, are dead. Bob Dylan has taken over the mantle of prophet of the times. The surviving beats – Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Anne Waldman – have relocated to Boulder, Colorado to set up a poetry school in Kerouac's honour at the only Buddhist college in America. Kashner arrives in the school's infancy, and is set to work more as Ginsberg's personal assistant than as a poetry student. This affords him an incredible opportunity to understand the strengths and weaknesses of his idols.Ginsberg appears as an ageing, neurotic old queer, equally preoccupied with taking boys to bed as with his place in America's cultural pantheon. Despite Kashner's extended exposure to Allen and Orlovsky, his idiot-savant life partner, we really don't see as much of them as we would like. The same can be said for William Burroughs. A lot has been written about these principal beats, and maybe there was little else to contribute. Still, you feel that their confidant of two years should have more to say about them as people – though there are some fabulous moments. At one point, Burroughs, who was apparently as austere and sour as previous accounts claim, weeps over his lost friend, Jack. I assumed he meant Kerouac, but he's referring to Jack London, his boyhood literary hero. This was the first time I'd read of Burroughs shedding a tear at the notion of loss – it seems he didn't even cry when he shot his wife during a William Tell-like stunt.The one who really stands out as being, as the saying goes, 'beat down to his soul', is Gregory Corso. Corso was a lesser known poet than his friends Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, but was really as 'beat' as any of them. Kashner came to Denver in order to meet the heroes who 'lived their art', and it was only really in Corso that he found the passion for living on the fringes. That's what Kashner claims he was searching for, but while his wild heroes and their younger successors are getting up to all sorts of 'beat living', Kashner himself only rarely indulges, and even then only reluctantly: 'i wanted life to be "beat", but I also wanted a hot towel waiting for me when I got out of the shower... I wanted the beat experience, but I didn't want to get hurt.' and it shows. At the end of this book, we're left with an overwhelming sensation of opportunities not taken, of a mission unfulfilled. Kashner went to denver looking for life, but he neglected to leave his neurotic personality at home in New York.When I Was Cool is a rich, rewarding and occasionally brilliant read – even if, at times, it's a poorly organised and edited ramble down memory lane, too abrupt and lacking in the poetic prose one might expect. This ugly and beautiful book is essential reading for all with even a passing interest in the ugly and beautiful beat poets. Mon, 13 Sep 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/501/ http://www.spannered.org/books/501/ From handling rats on Werner Herzog's Nosferatu to a peek into Lana Turner's bedroom, the new Granta collection (somewhat heavily titled Film) brings together an interesting if incoherent array of essays on cinema. With the exception of Atom Egoyan's cheeky piece on the career of Paul Thomas (promising actor turned prolific porn star), filmmakers do not really get a look in. Instead, Granta have assembled a collection of writers who pitch their views as bemused outsiders to the strange workings of film.John Fowles offers up some extracts from the diary he kept during the production of the French Lieutenant's Woman. His dry insights are fascinating in their noncommittal approach to the medium. As various different cinematic luminaries wrestle with the prospect of filming the project, Fowles gradually seems to lose interest and becomes a passive cynic, giving some great pencil sketches of the contradictions and characters of the actors, writers and directors he meets on his way.He is frank to the point of brutality. Initially he's impressed by Michael Caine's professionalism on the set of The Magus, but when he sees the film his judgement is unreserved: 'Caine's performance... remains wooden and hopelessly without depth.' He finds Dennis Potter 'beyond dealing with' and observes with annoyance that Fred Zinnemann repeats the same anecdotes about Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy over and over. Harold Pinter, who ended up writing the final script, is a sad and isolated figure only comfortable after a couple of drinks. Fowles picks up on the air of sadness that permeates filmmaking: the compromises and imperfections of committee decisions and financial imperatives. These things must be foreign to the isolated novelist, as perhaps are the huge cheques he gets for doing very little as each draft is churned out by other writers.Thomas Keneally's story of the genesis of Schindler's Ark, 'The Handbag Studio', bolsters the sense that this is a novelist's book on film. Only remotely connected to cinema by the fact that the book was later turned into a film, it remains nonetheless a beautifully etched description of the beginning of a story. It also serves up an alternative portrait of Los Angeles through the shop of the endlessly energetic Leopold Page. Page, it turns out, introduces Keneally to the story of Schindler and talks of him as a demigod. The sheer force of this holocaust survivor's praise refreshes Spielberg's sentimental story in an instant and begs revisiting as one of the great human miracles of the 20th century.Alongside these two centrepieces, Granta serves up an art gallery of paintings by filmmakers (worth a flick through in the bookshop) and a variety of middle-of-the-road criticism. Most of the criticism is framed in personal vignettes about the writers' lives and can be vainglorious and not particularly insightful. Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight and Sound have more to say.But Granta should be praised for representing that curiously english brand of film criticism – the 'total hatred of all things cinema' school – in Andrew O'Hagan's essay 'Two Years in the Dark'. It would be a shame if history does not record the utter condescension with which it has become fashionable to approach film in the mainstream press. What is so odious about someone like O'Hagan, who spent two years as the Daily Telegraph's film critic, is that he does not attack the bad in film (he admits he likes bad films better because they lack pretension), but the films that set their sights on being good.Two of O'Hagan's particular bugbears during his two-year tenure were Russell Crowe and Miramax. Russell Crowe can be judged by two standards: the tough-guy, beer-swilling, Meg Ryan-seducing, BBC-threatening media jerk – or by his performances. Match Crowe, as a new mainstream star, performance for performance with recent offerings from Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford and you'll see an actor who takes on more difficult roles and brings to them more depth. I'm not saying that he's perfect – but at least he tries (Ford and Gibson palpably do not). That is why O'Hagan hates him.Miramax is the same. One way or another they made Hollywood wake up to the independent movie. Sure, a lot of their output is over-marketed tosh, but they have shown a genuine commitment to trying to make good movies. Why does that bother O'Hagan so much? The answer is that Miramax is just an easy target for his style – a style that depends on derision and condescension. The idea that there were no good films over the two years in which O'Hagan was reviewing is so absurd that, when you look at the movies released during that time, you wonder whether he was blind. For my part, I'm thoroughly glad he quit. Sun, 12 Sep 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/500/ http://www.spannered.org/books/500/ Nadeem Aslam's second novel Maps For Lost Lovers has just won a place on the Booker Prize longlist, after more than 10 years in the writing. The judges could have been forgiven for simply rewarding a lesson in perseverance – this was clearly an extreme case of the 'difficult second novel' syndrome with which only Donna Tartt's The Llttle Friend can compete in recent years. But if Maps wins a few more readers as a result of the publicity surrounding its difficult conception, they won't be disappointed. Just the right side of overwritten, this is a beautiful and angry book that deserves a wide audience.In one respect, the length of time it took aslam to complete Maps is of particular relevance. The teachings of Islam – which are the catalyst for every major event in the novel – are regarded with a great deal more interest (and in many cases, suspicion) by a British audience than they were 11 years ago. It is difficult in the current climate to see aslam's choice of subject – the murder of a British Pakistani girl to protect her family's 'honour' – as anything other than overtly political. It is also impossible to imagine any non-Muslim writing such a devastating indictment of the religion without being accused of Islamophobia and racism.At times Aslam is so determined to make his point that I balked at the horrors visited upon his characters in the name of Islam – not so much at the events themselves, but that they should happen with such frequency in a small town in the Midlands.It is not the murders and beatings that make the most lasting impression, though, but the wrenches which occur as the older generation feel they are losing their children to a way of life that is not only alien, but considered the path to damnation. Kaukab, the devout mother, puts 'holy salt' (actually a bromide) in her son's food to calm his wild behaviour, while her daughter lies to protect her from the reality of the violent arranged marriage she has fled. Trying to bring up both children to be good Muslims, Kaukab drives them away – the son in horror when he thinks his mother has been deliberately drugging him, the daughter accused of callously abandoning a loving husband once too often.These and other misunderstandings accumulate to break up family units which the more traditional members of the community proudly consider stronger and more supportive than their British counterparts. The insidious loneliness and isolation that follows, especially for the women who cling to their prescribed roles despite having the most to gain from abandoning them, is painfully rendered.Fortunately – and despite Aslam's anger – this feels like an accidentally political novel. He has told interviewers that he didn't know about 9/11 until a week later, but his point seemed to be more about how absorbed he was in his work rather than about his ignorance of Islamic fundamentalist actions. This innocence is there in the writing too – the dedication of the book is to his father, who 'told me always to write about love'. And despite the bleakness, on one level Maps is a series of love stories. The problem is that in the world Aslam describes, blocked at every turn by an inflexible and inhuman religion, even love can't bring any of the characters happiness. Sat, 11 Sep 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/464/ http://www.spannered.org/books/464/ A young man wakes from a coma to a world that resembles the one he knows, but which differs from it in nightmarish ways. Alex Garland's strange new novella The Coma revisits the premise of his 2003 screenplay, 28 Days Later, except he's replaced the voracious zombies for the vagaries of an unreliable mind.Carl, the hero and narrator, is attacked by a gang of thugs on the tube late at night and kicked unconscious. Apparently waking from this state, he tries to pick up the threads of his life, but finds himself increasingly adrift from the reality he remembers. As carl experiences ever more bizarre shifts in time and place, he starts to believe that he hasn't woken up at all and that the 'life' he's leading is in fact an exploration of his subconscious.After the phenomenal success of his debut The Beach – which was actually very good, though it's easy to forget this post-Di Caprio and Hollywood – Garland was always going to have a difficult task pleasing both the critics and the legions of fans he had won. The complex structure of his second novel The Tesseract impressed some and infuriated others, and it seems likely that his latest offering will do the same, with its curious mixture of very short, simplistic sentences ('That morning, this is what we did. We made love, we took a shower, then we went downstairs and had breakfast') and showy psychology.That's not to say that the writing doesn't have a sense of humour – and the flashes of it that occur are all the more effective for being unexpected. Trying to jolt himself awake with a memory-catalyst, Carl visits a book shop. This sets up a sequence that satisfyingly sends up the way we misremember 'great works of literature': ' "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in want of a woman is a man in need of things that a woman with needs can want to universally acknowledge..." I closed the book with a snap. It goes on in a similar vein for another three hundred odd pages. It makes you wonder why they teach it in school, don't you think?'Even these scenes are propelled by Carl's frustration and anxiety, and as in all of Garland's work, violence and fear are never far from the surface. But it isn't just this horror element which invites the comparison with 28 Days Later: The Coma feels like an idea for a film. Cinematic 'scenes' on every page are offset by noir-ish woodcuts created by Nicholas Garland, the author's father and political cartoonist for The Telegraph. If anything, The Coma is a picture book for grownups rather than a novel. The woodcuts are at least as responsible as the text for an unsettling atmosphere in which even a plate of toast and bacon seems doom-laden.Adopting this experimental format could be considered a brave move, but it also allows Garland to skirt some of a novelist's major challenges. Characters are merely sketched, and a dream-plot always runs the risk of being a lazy narrative device. As Carl points out: 'everybody dreams, but nobody has ever managed to tell me what their dream was like. Not so that I really understood what they thought or felt.' An accurate observation, but one that gives the entire book a built-in excuse in case of failure. And while The Coma is atmospheric and thought-provoking, it is also vaguely unsatisfying, like listening to a description of someone else's dream. Mon, 26 Jul 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/465/ http://www.spannered.org/books/465/ As memories of apartheid recede and South Africa becomes an increasingly stable democracy, books such as this one become ever more important. A Burning Hunger chronicles the deprivations of apartheid and the immense courage of those who struggled against the oppressive weight of the white nationalist regime, and reminds the world of a horror that must not be forgotten. Lynda Schuster's biography of a Soweto family and its involvement in the struggle for liberation traces the lives of Rocks, Tsietsi, Mpho, Dee and Tshepiso Mashinini, from the student uprisings of June 16, 1976, through the mobilisation of the black townships in the 1980s and the repressive responses of the white South African state. The narrative, largely constructed from newspaper reports and interviews, follows Rocks, Tsietsi and Dee into political exile, and describes Mpho's continued struggles inside South Africa and Tshepiso's escape to study in Australia and England.The exploration of life as a political exile is particularly fascinating and Schuster does an excellent job of sketching the terrible pressures of such an existence. Whether she is describing the brothers' constant fear of being kidnapped and returned to South Africa by the security forces or the immense boredom and loneliness of long periods spent in the African bush, Schuster writes with simplicity and directness. Her style produces a sense of immediacy, allowing the reader an insight, however small, into the horror of life as an enemy of the South African state.The narrative also powerfully conveys the sense of the unhinging paranoia generated amongst the exiled community – the ever-present mistrust and fear of betrayal and the bureaucracy and inscrutability of liberation organisations such as the ANC and PAC – as well as the enormous difficulty faced by the returning exiles in readjusting to life in the new South Africa. it is here that Schuster's narrative is most interesting, as it suggests reasons for the sometimes bizarre behaviour of the present South African government – a highly centralised, highly bureaucratic and mistrustful clique of former exiles marshalled by Thabo Mbeki, who are notably out of touch with some of the most pressing concerns of the South African people. On the downside, although the subject matter of Schuster's book is fascinating and absorbing at all times, A Burning Hunger is overly long and Schuster can be guilty of structural clumsiness and an over-reliance on sentimental cliché. More difficult, particularly in a book that occasionally speaks on behalf of black consciousness ideologues, is the role of Schuster herself – an American journalist absent from South Africa for much of the period she describes. In his excellent book My Traitor's Heart, rian malan noted that when the barricades went up in the townships, no white faces were to be found on the other side. With this in mind, it's troubling that the Mashininis have not been allowed to write their own histories, and although much of the information is taken from interviews with several family members one cannot escape a feeling of slight discomfort at the occasionally patronising tone.Another difficulty lies in the book's claim to 'tell the story of black South Africa in microcosm'. Although detailed, Schuster ignores the struggle in rural areas, or in any township other than Soweto for that matter. Moreover, while the roles of the ANC, PAC and the student and church organisations are given significant consideration, the fundamental importance of the trade unions, for example, is largely missed. As a general history of the lives of black South Africans under apartheid, A Burning Hunger falls far short of the mark, but as the story of one family's experience, Schuster's book remains a powerful and utterly enthralling account. Mon, 26 Jul 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/466/ http://www.spannered.org/books/466/ Anytime a novelist prefaces his book with a quotation from The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy alarm bells should ring and the reader should know he's in for a difficult ride. Of course, the difficulty of Jose Daramago's The Double may have as much to do with Margaret Jull Costa's translation from the Portuguese as with the constant, circuitous and often extremely funny digressions from the narrative, à la Sterne. Caveats aside, though, this is an enjoyable novel, written by an octogenarian Nobel prize winner who seems very much in control of his mental faculties. The book centres on the discovery of a secondary school history teacher, who's already somewhat overshadowed by low-level depression, that an identical copy of himself lives in his own city – a city, we are told, of five million inhabitants. The teacher, unfortunately named Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, makes the discovery while watching an otherwise unremarkable video in the comfort of his own apartment. The dramatic impact of the discovery propels Afonso away from the mental and physical security of his settled existence. Forced from the safety of his routine, Afonso begins the search for his mirror-image, all the time motivated by a deeply unsettling doubt about whether he or his double is the original.The story itself has sufficient twists to engage any Agatha Christie murder-mystery junky, but there is a great deal more to Saramago's novel than the pull and thrill of suspense. The very idea of the double – of replication, copying, mirroring – lies at the heart of conceptions of art and literature and of the relationship between the real and the imagined, and it is this powerful idea that allows saramago to explore, in a sometimes playful and sometimes serious manner, the act of novel-writing itself. The Double also engages with notions of identity and self-fascination – by re-imagining the archetypal myth of echo and narcissus – while simultaneously analysing the modern insistence on the importance of unique individuality. Saramago makes use of the image of a river and its various tributaries on several occasions. The structure of The Double may be viewed in similar terms, as the reader is endlessly diverted down side-streams before being returned to the novel's original course. These diversions are almost always entertaining and often extremely clever. In fact, in spite of an occasional difficulty or obscurity, Saramago's latest work of fiction is a wonderfully rich, intelligent and original novel, with a great deal of humour and a good dose of insight. But a final word of warning is perhaps necessary. For those who despise Sterne, this book is most likely not for you. Equally, for those who cannot bear postmodernist textual games, think twice before spending money on Saramago's latest work. For everyone else, prepare yourselves for a thoughtful and thought-provoking read. Mon, 26 Jul 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/463/ http://www.spannered.org/books/463/ It's 1871, and Max Tivoli enters the world, wrinkled and withered, like any normal baby first blinking their way out of the womb. But max is different. The wrinkles remain and, instead of becoming a sweet-scented baby, he resembles a 70-year-old man. For Max is a victim of a rare disease – one that causes him to age backwards. whilst he has the mind of a baby, he has the body of an old man, and, as he grows older, his body will grow younger. This is the entrancing basis of Andrew Sean Greer's latest novel. It sounds mightily confusing, and is potentially a technical nightmare, but read on. It's mesmerising.The tale is told by Max, now almost 60 but with the body of a 12-year-old, as he sits in a sandpit in a loud school playground surrounded by 'real' children. He calls his life story a 'confession', tarnished with deceit, murder and love. As a child in the body of an old man, his mother whispered in his young/old ear to 'be what they think you are' – and her 'rule' curses him forever more to act as he appears to the outside world. The 'rule' brings him heartache and confusion, but it also allows him a chance of happiness with Alice, the love of his life, in three different situations – although only one encounter brings a sense of normality to his pitiful existence.Without wishing to spoil the story, Sean Greer cleverly evokes shades of Lolita and the story of Oedipus, leaving us squirming uncomfortably at Max's disturbing nature. For instance, when, aged 17 but in a 53-year-old's body, Max visibly wilts with hormonal angst over a teenage Alice, we can't help but picture him as a pathetic old pervert. Sean Greer is boldly peeling back the layers of prejudice and societal norms to reveal our deep mistrust of apparently deviant individuals. We are left bewildered as to whether we should pity Max or just loathe him. There are times later on in the story, though, when we only feel anger at Max's selfishness. If he truly loves Alice as deeply as he imagines, why pursue her throughout her life only to cause her pain and confusion?Amid Max's sorrowful confessions is Sean Greer's glimmering prose, which depicts a San Francisco of days gone by. the chintzy glamour of this faded city positively leaps from the pages with astonishing sparkle and clarity, as colours and sounds dance before your eyes (though the writing can simper and at times feel contrived). You'll want to read on with a feeling of pure indulgence. In the opening sequence of the courtship of Max's mother, for example, Max writes: 'my mother wore the latest paris fashion: a live beetle, iridescently winged, attached to her dress with a golden chain. "I'll kiss you," my father whispered to her, shivering with love – the beetle tugged at it's leash and landed in her hair. Her heart exploded.'With language drenched with decadent imagery and passion, this is Sean Greer at his best. As he did in his debut, The Path of the Minor Planets, he writes about the tragic sides of the human condition, focusing on our obsessive nature and tendency to self-pity in a hugely compelling and imaginative way. It's a rare thing to discover a story so orginally conceived, and even more so to find one so masterfully executed. But Sean Greer has nurtured the seed of this story beautifully. He has created a poignant and heartrending tale of love, loss and longing. Sat, 24 Jul 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/469/ http://www.spannered.org/books/469/ British silent film, since the introduction of sound, has endured a dismal reputation. Kevin Brownlow wrote that British silents never advanced beyond the sense of technological astonishment visible in early experiments by GA Smith, Williamson's Kinematograph Company and RW Paul. The period's greatest director, Alfred Hitchcock, did not peak until his move to Hollywood, despite the success of The Lodger (1926); even Wyndham Lewis, the most iconoclastic modernist, declined to experiment with film, and the UK avant-garde did not involve themselves with cinema like Brecht, Dalí, or Mayakovsky. The failure of British directors to match DW Griffith's narrative skill, Murnau's technical mastery or Eisenstein's level of formal experimentation has resulted in its critical mauling, as it failed to contribute to the process of determining cinematic form as did American, French, German and Russian films of the period.Rachael Low's seminal history of the British film, with its comprehensive volume on the 1920s, remains the authoritative work on the subject. Gledhill, keen to revise the perception of British silents, builds on low, looking at how various cultural, social, political and aesthetic debates fed into an attempt to create a specifically British idiom in the new artistic field. A sense of national identity, fuelled by nationalistic demands for a film culture distinct from popular Hollywood movies, was established through various discourses of related binary oppositions, influenced by the massive upheavals of the First World War, which necessitated a rethink of long-held 'British ideals'. These dialectics eschewed formalist concerns, focusing almost entirely on content, and on acting rather than construction.Gledhill emphasises debates about film acting, using a wide number of contemporary sources (interviews, newspaper and journal reviews) to pinpoint key discourses in characterising British film: the opposition of 'British' restraint and 'American' passion dominates, besides competition between naturalism and stylisation, and the casting choice between established stars and 'non-actors' playing 'types'. However, Gledhill avoids centralising her argument around acting debates, and carefully assesses how oral tradition, Britain's impressive literary heritage, popular fiction and the related art of photography influenced the thematic, intellectual and visual character of the films she studies.Modernist conceptions of cultural hierarchies, defining avant-garde production as 'high art' distinct from popular culture, are crucial to Gledhill's understanding of the development of British film. The theatrical and literary heritage of the Victorian and Edwardian periods were important: much of British narrative film owed something to dramatic works and ideas by playwrights such as Noël Coward, Dion Boucicault and Stanley Houghton; indeed, the high number of adaptations was criticised in 1920s film journals. This heritage, Gledhill argues, met with music halls, melodrama and traditional images and to form a predominantly 'middlebrow' cinematic culture, consciously repudiating Hollywood populism and the modernist experiments in Europe.Another binary opposition, crucial to inter-war political debate, fed into the process of establishing a narrative tradition: the conflict of (conservative, liberal or parliamentary socialist) reformism and revolutionary politics. In Britain, Gledhill states, revolutionary politics gained very little ground – only the general strike, which had little impact on contemporary directors, threatened parliamentary democracy. Gledhill identifies Houghton's Hindle Wakes, expertly filmed by Maurice Elvey (1927), as exemplary of the class-conciliatory politics, aware of the necessity of post-war social changes, which infused British film; its heroine, Fanny Hawthorne, typified protagonists who 'set about readjusting rather than overthrowing the boundaries of previous generations', and the way in which larger social issues were often played out in small, familial scenarios.An astonishing number of films are assessed by Gledhill, with the deliberate exception of Hitchcock's The Lodger and The Ring, extensively detailed elsewhere, and by no means contradictory to her argument. Key works by Elvey, George Pearson, Asquith, Gaham Cutts and others are subjected to impressive technical analysis, with interpretation of content informed by Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism, Bakhtinian theories and a perceptive understanding of inter-war society and politics. Gledhill does not so much suggest, then, that British silent film was the equal of its American and European counterparts (despite unearthing several forgotten classics), but more that the aesthetic and content debates were so complex that they could not have been resolved by 1928, and that the flowering of the 1940s owed much to foundations laid in the silent era. Thu, 22 Jul 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/453/ http://www.spannered.org/books/453/ Does Hari Kunzru get you shelf-cred? His latest book, Transmission, oozes edgy cool. Sun, 04 Jul 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/442/ http://www.spannered.org/books/442/ If you fancy a rendezvous with a half-cut Begbie, check out the latest Scottish rant novel from Booker prize-shorlisted novelist James Kelman. Tue, 22 Jun 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/443/ http://www.spannered.org/books/443/ Part travelogue, part cultural history, Where You're At sees the journalist and novelist Patrick Neate undertake a journey into hip hop's dark heart, in an attempt to locate both himself and the music he loves within contemporary global culture. He begins in New York (where else?), confronting the powerful idea that 'hip hop is dead', overwhelmed by its own massive commercial success in both black and white America and undermined by its status as merely a 'hustle' or a 'game' for its principal exponents. Neate's mission to discover how it is that we have come to live on a hip hop planet takes him from New York to Tokyo, South Africa and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Whether questioning the authenticity of a Japanese b-boy's assertion that you've got to 'keep it real' or admiring the business acumen of two South Africans who produce and market their own hip hop gear to rival Fubu and Hilfiger, Neate casts a tolerant and well-informed eye over 21st-century hip hop culture. He never forgets the significance of allowing those who produce a culture to articulate its values in their own voice and, to this end, the book is peppered with quotes from everyone from Jay-Z to Run-DMC, as well as interviews with rappers, producers and 'heads' the world over. Careful footnoting of songs and albums anticipates a time when hip hop will attract the attentions of the culture industry as surely as jazz and blues do today. Neate's combination of theory and fieldwork builds a coherent picture of hip hop's local manifestation of global patterns of consumption and production. In a world in which alienation is a common mode of experience (not merely a condition suffered by subjugated peoples), he suggests that hip hop's nation of the imagination can bring people together and offer them a vital means of expressing and cultivating their identities, even while the music is appropriated and sold for profit by an oppressive mainstream. This ability to encompass the numerous ironies and contradictions involved in the global 'rap game' makes neate's a valuable, as well as an entertaining, work. According to Where You're At, hip hop ultimately reflects the circumstances of those cultures in which it has taken root (the old 'think globally, act locally' chestnut), helping those involved to negotiate the tricky territories of race, history and individuality. But Neate also makes a powerful and positive case for the reclamation of hip hop by what he terms its 'cultural brokers' — those 'heads' and ghetto kids whose massive cultural capital is rarely reflected by anything other than the financial gains of multinational corporations. It is this programme for change and development in the culture he loves that marks Neate's work out from that of less engaged and engaging commentators. Mon, 21 Jun 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/444/ http://www.spannered.org/books/444/ Find out if Marilyn Monroe was 'truly schizoid'. Mon, 21 Jun 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/439/ http://www.spannered.org/books/439/ Benny Poteat is a watcher. He watches from the sidelines, through car windows, from the safety of his house – but mostly Benny watches from the tall metal towers on which he works when one day he sees a young woman walk into the big toe river and drown herself, and a new kind of watching begins.Having discovered the camera she used to video her final act and a collection of video tapes that document her recent history, Benny buys a VCR and slowly uncovers the woman's past and the various events leading to her death.Visits from the Drowned Girl, Steven Sherrill's second novel, is billed as a book about the destructive capacity of secrets, but it seems equally concerned with the act of watching – and, more specifically, with its passive nature.As his voyeuristic desires mount, Benny watches more and more and does less and less, failing to take action even when those close to him are threatened. His fascination with the visually exciting overwhelms his seeming good nature – making him a constant spectator to the various and increasingly horrible events which unfold before him, both on his television screen and in his life.The novel has much to say about our current fascination with reality TV and celebrity culture, and what effect this fascination has on our various societies. Sherrill handles these ideas well, though they're hardly earth-shattering, and his flair for passages of great descriptive beauty is as evident in this novel as it was in his first – the much acclaimed The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break.The unwatched videos prove an effective plot mechanism, impelling the novel forward with some pace, though perhaps not always with enough subtlety, and the duplex-trailer park setting is interesting and unfamiliar. If there is a single criticism, it is that Sherrill's characters are somewhat roughly sketched. At times, they lack sufficient depth for the reader to really engage with the book or care about what it says.Visits from the Drowned Girl is probably not a great novel, and in some respects it fails to live up to the promise of Sherrill's first. But, overall, it is a good one, and well worth the read. Sun, 20 Jun 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/440/ http://www.spannered.org/books/440/ Martin Amis and pornography go together like a hand inside a lubed-up, latex glove. Think of the succession of set-piece fantasies in his cocksure debut the Rachel Papers, after its narrator embarks on his quest to get laid. Think of Money, where stockings, garter belts, silks and straps festoon the naked body of the glamour girl Selina Street like bunting at a fair. Think of the 'murderee' Nicola Six in London Fields, the jezebel vamp who loves to take it up the 'black hole' from which babies don't emerge. 'Good sex seems to be something that writing can't manage,' says a character in his latest novel, Yellow Dog. Trashy sex, though: that's where Amis excels.It's predictable, then, that he would contribute an essay to a book of photography entitled Pornoland. Not that this prevents the book being a fresh and funny parody of the glossy coffee-table publications Thames & Hudson more usually produce. Appropriately printed on crimson paper, Amis's essay forms the book's centrefold – titillating and titivated piece of prose over which his fans can whack off. It's an eccentric bit of entertaining flim-flam that was first published in the Observer in 2001. it examines that commercial zone of Hollywood nicknamed 'Pornoland' where scarred and damaged people churn out blue movies by the hour.It will appeal to Amis aficionados primarily because it's research for Yellow Dog, in which 'Pornoland' plays a starring role. Yellow Dog depicts a world so tawdry even its planes spurt jism over the cosmos (their vapour trails look like 'incandescent spermatozoa, sent out to fertilise the universe'). It received some vicious reviews – unfairly I think – when it came out last year. One thing that narked people was the way amis had rehashed his previous work. The idea of the porno star as a 'contemporary gladiator', or the joke about porno identifying 'the near-infinite chaos of human desire' (and that you better hope this doesn't happen while you're watching a film about an 'undertaker' or a 'coprophagic pigfarmer'): they first appeared in the Observer and resurface word for word in Yellow Dog.The only line Amis didn't recycle is my favourite – the following irresistible observation on the industry: 'Whatever porno is, whatever porno does, you may regret it, but you cannot reject it. To paraphrase Falstaff: banish porno, and you banish all the world.' Here's a ready-made defence to have to hand along with the Kleenex next time you're caught enjoying some dirty fun with an adult cable channel. Forget the pernicious objectification of women: porn is all part of life's lusty merriment. Shakespeare nearly said so. Right?Surrounding Amis's essay are 54 colour photographs snapped by the Italian photojournalist Stefano de Luigi on the sets of porno flicks around the world, from Budapest and Prague to Tokyo and Los Angeles. Where Amis's essay is full of ironic riffs and punchy prose, though, Luigi's photographs have a different tone. None of them are hardcore, but they remain shocking because they've been composed to disturb.Most of the pics are blurred, like the smeared lipstick and mangled mascara on the women they show. The effect is unsettling, off-kilter. some resemble pixelated images or downloaded jpegs – turning the reader into the kind of internet nerd whose hard drive collection gets him hard. Luigi challenges assumptions: one naked woman, perhaps resting in between takes of some complex scene of anal fisting, feeds a baby cradled in her arms – the contrast between her maternal and porno identities so vicious it almost makes you gasp. Other images make you queasy too, such as the Chinese girl in a dog collar who masturbates as red liquid – fake stage blood, we hope – pours out from between her legs.The most potent image by far, though, was taken in Dortmund in 2001. It shows a blown-up sex doll splayed in a gynaecologist's chair, the rubberised pink skin and violent slashes of red that mark its nipples a stark contrast to the clinic's chilled blues and blacks. There's a whiff of S&M about the set-up. The legs have been distorted to fit the iron armatures beneath the stirrups. But it's the doll's face that is most affecting. Its deflated expression is a rictus of despair. the mouth is a gaping black void, the eyes a fuzz of blue paint, the platinum-blonde wig droops off the head. The whole is a grotesque parody of those other female faces in the book, contorted in fake-orgasmic bliss. It's pretty bleak.Perhaps there's only so far you can intellectualise porn, but Luigi is making a clever point. As in many of the other images, where the sex-acts occur offstage and the machinery of pornography dominates the composition (the plastic mats, the booms and cameras, the lights), Luigi is deconstructing the industry. Pornography is itself parody – as Amis has it, 'a parody of love' – in which people fake sex. This forlorn doll, as though discarded after satisfying its gynaecologist owner, parodies that parody. She's a reminder of porno's artificiality, of the way in which its stars are objectified with violent abandon and examined with pseudo-medical intensity. If this is porno's reality, despite Amis's flash phrases, then perhaps it is something we should reject. Maybe his Falstaff line isn't so convincing after all. Sun, 20 Jun 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/441/ http://www.spannered.org/books/441/ Who won between Madonna and musical cyber-pirates? And is Richard Branson really a tightwad? Sun, 20 Jun 2004 23:00:00 GMT http://www.spannered.org/books/454/ http://www.spannered.org/books/454/ How Pornoland inspired Martin Amis' latest novel, Yellow Dog. Sat, 19 Jun 2004 23:00:00 GMT