Anas’s Blog

Happy new year! If 2007 was a bit shit, I hope 2008 is a bit less so.

(I know it’s a bit early but I don’t have computer access again until 2008.)

‘I postulate that the function of all art and all creative thought is to make us aware of what we know and don’t know we know. You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already. Like those folks living on the sea coast in the Middle Ages, watching those ships come in mast first year after year — then Galileo wises them up and they are ready to burn him as an egghead deviant. But they cool it out over the years and finally have to admit:”It’s round boys, it’s round. We knew it all along.” Cezanne showed the viewer objects seen from a certain angle in a certain light and they attacked his canvases with umbrellas at the first exhibition. Well, that doesn’t happen any more and any child would recognize the objects in a Cezanne canvas. Joyce made readers aware of their own stream of consciousness and was accused of promulgating a cult of unintelligibility.’

– William S. Burroughs

Much as I love this particular excerpt I have to ask myself how accurate it is. ”You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t already know.” Take for example Einstein’s theory of Relativity, how many people already had a strong intuition of its veracity before he’d formulated it? Not many at all judging from the contemporary response to his ideas. The same thing applies to quantum mechanics, which is so amazing precisely because it goes against what we’d come to expect from reality up to that point – again its impact testifies to just how unexpected it was.

In matter of fact the reason I’m posting the excerpt is because I love Burroughs’ style — and most of all his pitch black sense of humour, the mordant acidic wit that is typical of his writing. In the above instance summed up for me by the little quote he inserts “It’s round boys, it’s round. We knew it all along” — and I couldn’t stop laughing at that line on first reading the passage — and the dry use of hipster language. The other thing is of course what everyone who’s heard him speak gets: that you can hear his arid, corrosive, monotonous voice in almost everything he writes, which personally I find makes it even more pleasurable to read.

Here are some of my favourite books, CDs and films from the past year. Now, the criteria for anything to appear here is both that I really liked it and that *I* discovered it this year – not that it was published/released this year or anything like that. I’m reasonably behind the times so the list is anything but up to date.

Books:

This was the year I discovered the great F Scott Fitzgerald, who I now rate as my favourite author (in the English language, anyway). And so my two favourite books of the year are Tender is the Night and the Great Gatsby with their beautifully trippy and masterful descriptions of reality.

I also managed to read Richard Brautigan’s An Unfortunate Woman and A Confederate General in Big Sur, both of which I enjoyed a lot and I’m proud to say that I’m now a great admirer of Brautigan’s idiosyncratic prose.  Oh yeah and I finished Dostoevsky’s the Devils, but I wrote about that in another blog entry & I’ve run out of things to say about it.

Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side which I finished a few weeks back, is a very good novel but deeply grim. Also Algren’s often ornate style has a tendency to become confusing and his writing hard to follow — but when it works it flows beautifully. And his empathy and compassion for the down and outs, whores, drunks, pimps — the outsiders that society has cast out – whose lives he details is deeply touching. 

I’ve also become a big fan of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendo(u)r comic series. I have to admit, for me, a lot of the enjoyment comes from recognising a lot of myself in Pekar’s neuroses and doubts. But Pekar has undoubtedly been instrumental in pushing the limits of what can be done with the format.

Music:

No contest. For me the best thing I heard all year was Shack’s Waterpistol which was only reissued properly in2007. Really it belongs to the 1990s, or would have if by a tortuous series of accidents it hadn’t become a ”lost” album, like that other masterpiece Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers. The highlight from Waterpistol for me is the haunted jangling glittery misery of Undecided; a love song dedicated to heroin, and the high that lets you be somebody, also the sweetest song about addiction I’ve ever heard. I also listened to a bit of Indian classical music, the ultra-influential 60s piece Call of the Valley as well as to  Debashish Bhattacharya, the Calcutta Hendrix, and found it utterly exhilirating. Oh yeah, I also really got into Congregation and Gentlemen by the Afghan Whigs this year. Both are pretty soulful records, the latter is more polished, but their power derives from Greg Dulli’s soul-baring honesty — or at least he plays that role convincingly enough. Shockingly I only got to hear Joni’ Mitchell’s Blue for the first time in 2007, but it helped get me through some heavy times.

Films:

Favourite film is Jodorowsky’s El Topo which I caught at the GFT just before my move to that shithole Nottingham. A disconcerting and powerful series of mystically derived visual symbols combined with a number of the most common motifs, themes and cliches from Spaghetti Westerns and a lot of lithe, attractive nude women (I’m talking about El Topo not Nottingham here) , all somehow put together to make what is obviously a complete masterpiece of world cinema — a  bit sleazy, a bit cheesy, and even a bit profound. I also enjoyed the Lives of Others which I saw with my pal Natalie also at the GFT.  

Websites:

My favourite this year as it has been for a while now is Mortimer’s Media Underground site, which frustratingly I can’t access through my library account (the only access I have at the mo). It’s usually the first site I click onto when I get online. Myspace has gotten passe, even for someone like me who’s not really with it when it comes to online fads. Facebook is pretty cool, even tho I’ve only 4 friends. I don’t really visit many sites to be honest, the internet isn’t a big part of my life. But I make a point to check out Norman Finkelstein’s site, the excellent Lenin’s Tomb, Jews Sans Frontieres, and Counterpunch when I am online. I also like Zinzin’s new blog and liked his old one before he removed it due to his troubling obsession with the McCann’s (only echoing the general public’s  disturbing obsession however). I hate putting fucking links in, it’s a pain.

Here’s a review of Mansfield’s The Garden Party I wrote a while back. I’ve made a few corrections to it: 

Recently, I got a bit caught up reading The Garden Party, a collection of Edwardian author Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. First off, I liked her name. It seems strangely familiar at first, but that’s largely due to the fact that it’s an amalgam of the names of screen goddesses Katherine Hepburn and Jayne Mansfield. Anyway, Mansfield who was born in 1888 and died tragically young in 1923, was an extremely gifted writer who grew up in New Zealand but eventually moved to Britain — I don’t suppose there was much going on in New Zealand at that time or whether there is even now. She’s strongly associated with the modernist movement in literature and as the author biog at the front of my shiny new Penguin edition explains she was quite happy to label herself a modernist; it’s not a label that later critics would awkwardly try to shoehorn her into. The modernists to explain briefly, were an iconoclastic literary movement who felt themselves duty-bound to free literature from such outmoded notions as plot, storyline, the conventions of narrative and of grammar: they were unconventional. You’ve heard the usual roll call of names from the early 20th century — Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Elliot, etc. — and if you haven’t you really ought to read more.

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The streak of wank that is Morrissey 

Why is it that the arseholes who moan about there being too much immigration into the UK, and about how it’s diluting Britain’s distinctive Anglo-Saxon/Aryan culture, always end either up threatening to IMMIGRATE themselves, or like bequiffed indie tosser Morrissey –who’s just got into some bother for opening his big fat mouth about there being too many foreigners round these parts – have already immigrated to somewhere else, much to the betterment of this country. I mean, why do you think it’s OK to pollute ’someone else’s’ country with your pasty white presence and your loud ignorant opinions?  Why spoil another country?

In the past one of the most popular solutions to the prospect of an overwhelming tide of foul-smelling foreigners coming here and threatening the greatness of this nation was to cry repatriation. But nowadays that’s a bit too nazi-like even for the likes of Mozzer, so they’re reduced to fucking off somewhere else or telling us about how they’ve been forced to contemplate it. The UK is such a cold, miserable shitty country, crammed so full of deadbeats, workshy drunkyards and Conservatives that we should welcome these influxes of new blood, of people willing to actually work for a living and willing to live here. In particular we should be thankful to this influx of foreigners if it means we lose a Morrissey or two along the way.