Donald Barthelme...and Stewart Lee

Barthelme's most anthologised story 'The Indian Uprising' works like allegory, where 'Indians' stand for all the other races that the US have oppressed (especially, in 1968, when the story was published, the Vietnamese). It's also like allegory in the apparent randomness of many of its references, but where the associations become surreal.
That story isn't all that representative, though, because it's not funny as so many of Barthelme's stories are. I was just reading 'The King of Jazz' and the self-consciousness about language there reminded me of certain stand-up comedians. Stewart Lee in one of his books talks about the comic value of certain words like 'wool' for example. But one of his comic effects is based on being exaggeratedly articulate and wordy, and, when Barthelme describes an especially effective piece of jazz playing he does something similar when he says that it 'sounds like the cutting edge of life...like fumaroles smoking on the slopes of Mt.Katmai...like an oyster fungus growing an aspen trunk...like a mule deer wandering a montane of the Sierra Nevada...like coatimundis moving in packs across the face of Arkansas...

Stewart Lee on observational comedy

Stewart Lee objects to observational comedy in the same way that modernists object to realism:  it's an impatience with a stale, populist and complacent consensus. Lee parodies the observational mode of calling upon the audience to agree that, eg, this is how women behave, or how children behave, because it makes assumptions, for one thing about the observer and the observed, and places the observer in a position of authority, and stereotypes the observed and implies they're thoroughly predictable. He has a great range of strategies at his own command, but an especially brilliant one is to defamiliarise observational comedy by doing it from a radically skewed point of view - from the perspective of an insect in his 'Pestival' riff, and, in his recent TV show, from the perspective of an 'oligarch' living in London. The repeated words emphasise the alienness of these points of view - 'mandibles' in 'Pestival', 'prostitutes' in the oligarch one - because they parody the stale parameters in observational material with concepts that are entirely other to 'common-sense' consensual reality. This mode, like modernist deconstructions of realism, reveals ideological assumptions in what it parodies.

'Martin Amis's England'

I've written in praise of Amis's Money and London Fields, in particular, and those novels did seem to sum up much that was going on in Britain when they were published, so it was shocking to watch Amis on BBC 4 sounding utterly out of touch, describing an England that hasn't existed since the death of Princes Diana. He looked and sounded like someone parodied by Paul Whitehouse and struck a note that suggested that he had stopped thinking actively some time ago. The lowest point (but the whole thing was an extended low point) was when he declared that English people binge drink because of the loss of Empire.  This was accompanied by ancient footage of English youth frolicking in the streets: those youths are by now middle-aged, but even for them the Empire might have been something that Kenneth Wolstenholme had elegised in black and white - 'They think it's all over' - except even older and more irrelevant.

Lou Reed and John Cale

None of the tv tributes which I have watched to Lou Reed, who died yesterday, have mentioned his collaboration with John Cale in the Velvet Underground. But it was that collaboration which produced Reed's best music, and it was the Welshman's experience of avant-garde music (he studied with Lamonte Young) that injected into rock music at that point a brilliantly discordant edge. Cale also made a brilliant album with Terry Riley called Church of Anthrax which I used to own on vinyl and which doesn't seem to exist on cd. But the fraught, horrified, yet somehow melodious screech of Cale's viola at the start of Venus in Furs is one of the most memorable moments in rock music history.

Christopher J.Koch

The Australian novelist Christopher J.Koch died a couple of days ago: he was most famous for The Year of Living Dangerously, which was made into a film. An early review of that book complained that it required the reader to know too much about its political context, and most of that was left out of the film, which focused on a love affair. Where Koch excelled though was in his ability to define the importance of political context in the lives of individuals, so that in his brilliant Highways to a War the background of the rise of the Khmer Rouge is made movingly urgent because it is related to the fate of the central character, a photojournalist called Mike Langford, whose disappearance inside Cambodia during the civil war initiates and drives the plot. His friendships with fellow journalists, and his relationship with a young Cambodian woman, are a highly believable emotional foreground which reveals the human impact of political disasters. And all of this is underpinned by Koch's marvelous evocation of the Cambodian landscape:

In the time of the monsoon rains, when the Mekong overflows, its tributary the Tonle Sap performs its annual miracle:  it turns around to run backwards. Carrying the Mekong's torrents to the lake from which it takes its name, the river enlarges the lake from a thousand to four thousand square miles. Whole forests are submerged at the country's heart; fish swim among the trees. Then, at the beginning of the dry season, Tonle Sap river flows back to the Mekong. It siphons off the water from the Great Lake and the drowned heartland; it uncovers the underwater forests, leaving fish trapped there by the thousands; it exposes silt-rich acres for rice planting.

Tebbit on the Iron Lady

I was in the Visitors' gallery of the House of Lords and saw Norman Tebbit, amongst others, pay their tributes to Margaret Thatcher. Tebbit's speech was remarkable for the level of bitterness it expressed towards those Tories who finally brought her down. In expressing the wish that he had been able to serve in her final cabinet, and so, as he put it, to save Thatcher from her friends, Tebbit hinted at something that has been missing from the recent reactions to her death. It was fascinating to observe the level of protectiveness that Tebbit evidently felt (and still feels) for his leader, but it also indicates how much Thatcher depended on the support of others in what she did, and there has been too much in the recent responses that has suggested that she was the sole architect of massive change. The vilifying that Thatcher has received from commentators on the left has been unwise in its emphasis because it concedes ground to right-wing thought in the assumption that individuals play a massive role. Another of Thatcher's ex-colleagues in this Lords tribute declared that she played an important part in the downfall of the Soviet bloc because she advised the Polish head of state to speak to Lech Walesa: this sort of approach ignores the pre-eminent role of economics and ignores to what an overwhelming extent the Soviet Union collapsed because of its economic weakeness in the late 1980s. Similarly, Thatcher's changes were possible because of wider cultural and economic conditions in her period of power, and far too little has been said, in the recent responses to her death, about the role of monetarist theory in structuring her policies and of its most fervent adherents in her circle - ideologues such as Keith Joseph.
That's not to say, though, that individuals don't make an impact and some, like Thatcher, make a much bigger impact than most. For that reason I'd want to join in the vilification:  in 1979 Britain was the second-most egaltarian country in Europe and we're now we're about eleventh. The changes brought about by Thatcherism (which is bigger than Thatcher the individual) have ensured that no-one from Thatcher's background will be prime minister in the foreseeable future.

tony conran again

here's the rest of the Conran piece:

The key point is that, in emerging out of a specific community, and addressing itself to specific individuals, the poem transcends lyric and enters the ‘magnetic field’ of the dialogic. Tony wrote some personal poems, but there is remarkably little in his work, for example, about his cerebral palsy which, for many writers with such a major disability, would’ve been the starting-point and core of their work. Instead he invented an outward-looking poetic which was as generous as the stress on gifts implies. So ‘Upright Slate’ explores the way that objects acquire meaning in poems, and the way that poems become centred upon objects. However, it is not itself object-centred, but celebrates how the object had value imposed upon it by individuals, one who carved and abandoned it, and one who later found it and cherished it, and gave it to the poet:

On one side only the flesh of the slate

Has been split:

Was it once the bed of a stream, this featherlike pattern

Rippling through it?

I don’t even remember

Who gave it me –

Only that someone did.

Yet he or she

Liked me and it enough

To carry it home

With hands that its dead weight chilled

To the bone.