The talk by Max Decharne on the cultural history of Chelsea's King's Road has been rescheduled for Friday 17th November. I shall be the host at Westminster Music Library, off Leicester Square.
It's FREE but best to reserve a ticket through Eventbrite here
An event and a radio show in the next month or so.
I shall be hosting a FREE talk by the wonderful Max Decharne on the evening of 8 September at Westminster Reference Library. He has recently revised and added to his book on the history and culture of the King's Road, which will be the subject of the event.
See here. SORRY BUT THIS EVENT HAS HAD TO BE POSTPONED DUE TO INDUSTRIAL ACTION. MORE DETAILS SOON.
Probably best to book in advance through Eventbrite.
Also a recent interview I did for a radio documentary, together with the always-entertaining David McGillivray hosted by Radio 4's reporter, writer and Any Answers presenter Anita Anand about the 'queering' of the magazine Films and Filming. Fascinating stuff.
It's for a radio series called History on the Edge produced by Sara Parker on Radio 4. The first programme was on this morning (Monday 24 July) at 11.00am. I think the Films and Filming episode will probably be the third on 7 August, although it hasn't yet been listed on the website. See here.
I just wanted to mention the passing this year of a couple of people I met when I spent more time in London hanging out with writers and publishers in pubs (those days are long gone now it seems). I was very sad to read of their deaths.
Christopher Fowler was a successful novelist (detectives Bryant & May were his most famous creation) and short story writer who kindly wrote the preface to the second edition of my Subterranean City and reviewed Decadent London favourably in the Independent on Sunday. He was always supportive and a really lovely man who will be much missed. He was especially brave writing about his terminal cancer on his blog, where he was always interacting with his readers. See here and here.
Alastair Brotchie I met on a few occasions and spoke to on the phone when he had a query about a location in 1890s London. The founder of Atlas Press, he was an indefatigable writer and publisher, expert on pataphysics and Surrealism and biographer of Alfred Jarry. One of those rare people who make things happen. Obituary here by Peter Blegvad.
The talk at the Horse Hospital went well I thought and I hope to organise one or two more events before the end of the year.
I have been devoting so much of my free time to writing my next book that blogging and other activities have had to take a back seat.
The Yes gig in a previous post never happened, so I probably won't bother again in future. Some interesting concerts in the space of one week recently:
Hatfield and the Health Wednesday 5 July The Piper St Leonards. A group of great musicians playing a selection of the Canterbury Scene repertoire by Hatfield and the North, Caravan, National Health and Matching Mole. While reading the transcriptions there was room for improvisation and it was lovely to hear Tenemos Roads, Oh Caroline, Nine Feet Underground, Binoculars, Share It and others. More here.
On Saturday 8 July I caught the second half of the Seaview Festival outside the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill. Fortunately the rain held off and I really enjoyed this well-organised event. Local supergroup Aircooled's mix of krautrock and disco is a surefire hit and I hope they do well. I knew nothing about BC Camplight but was very impressed by the unusual structure of the songs and the fact that he was playing for the first time with a very young band who performed brilliantly. Topping off the evening Warmduscher were very entertaining, echoes of The Fall and The Birthday Party at times, relentless for over an hour. You can find other reviews here and here.
Sunday 9 July Off to London to the Hammersmith Apollo to see Daryl Hall, only because his special guest was Todd Rundgren. I arrived at 7.30 and Todd had already started, so I missed 'Real Man.' It was very much a crowd-pleasing set - not something he always does - heavy on the blue-eyed Philly soul side of his oeuvre - understandable in the circumstances. Three out of thirteen songs were covers, set list here. I hung around for Daryl Hall although I've never really been a fan of Hall & Oates. I'm old enough to respect his music these days - I didn't realise he had written Every Time You Go Away. I thought his voice was reedier and not as strong as Rundgren's which still sounds remarkable for a man in his seventies.
Tonight I hope to get to Anthony Moore (from Slapp Happy and Henry Cow amongst others) playing at The Beacon in Hastings. See here.
In the meantime I should advertise two events:
Mr Stoker and the Vampires of the Lyceum A talk by Gothic scholar Matthew Gibson about his new novel. At Westminster Reference Library 9 June 6pm. See here.
My first in-person talk for a very long time in which I'll be talking about London folklore.
Salon for the City Pagan London at the Horse Hospital 29 June 7pm. See here
Happy New Year.
My year got off to a good start yesterday when I noticed on Facebook a blog review of favourite books of the year that included my own Decadent London. My sincere thanks to the blogger - these things make you feel that you're not wasting your time. You can find it here.
Work on my next book continues slowly but surely. I would like to be more productive as a publisher this year but we'll have to wait and see. I have to admire the workload of this publisher.
Reading some academic articles online I became interested in the work of the religious studies scholar Carole Cusack, who has written about invented religions. I listened to a couple of podcasts she's been involved with:
The Religious Studies Project here. Also an interesting discussion on Gurdjieff.
Invented Religions here.
Also an article on occultural bricolage and popular culture here.
Jeremy Harte is an excellent speaker and has written about many aspects of folklore. His latest book on devilish folklore will be on my reading list this year. Guardian review here. Magonia review here.
Three gigs for this year:
April 2 Steve Hillage Band Brighton Concorde 2
April 4 Matt Ridley Hastings Jazz Club
June 20 Yes Hammersmith Apollo Definitely my last time seeing the much-depleted Yes, but have to go as they are playing my favourite of their albums: Relayer.
Reading the travel classic A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, in which he sets out to walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople in 1933. The passage below struck me, as he reminisced about the values of his public school - King's School Canterbury. Maybe the question needs to be asked in this troubled England, what, if anything, has changed since his musings?
"'It goes without saying that in a small, tradition-haunted public school of such improbable antiquity - founded a few decades after Justinian closed the pagan academy at Athens - the atmosphere was likely to be conservative, and it was; but it was conservatism of an inexplicit kind, unaggressive because it was unchallenged - at least, at the age of sixteen and a half it was, which is when I vanished for the scene; but deep in the bloodstream nevertheless . . .
Socialism sounded grey and without charm and Labour MPs conjured up visions of steel-rimmed spectacles, homespun cloth, cocoa and seed-cake and long killjoy faces bent on dismantling - what? Here an odd medley of targets would be bandied across fifth-form studies: What indeed? Why, the Empire for a start! The Fleet! The Army! Established religion - 'except Methodist chapels;' Gibraltar, the Lords, judges' wigs, kilts, bearskins, public schools ('No, steady on!'), Latin and Greek, Oxford and Cambridge - 'the Boat race too, most likely'; 'county cricket for a cert' - steeplechasing, shooting, fox-hunting, flat-racing, the Derby, betting, country-life, farming - ('I'd bet they'd plough up everything for swedes and beetroots if they got the chance!') What about London? Why, the Palladium and the Aldwych would be turned into lecture halls or bloody temperance canteens . . . Talk would languish and a pensive gloom descend. Then someone might say: 'It's a pity something can't be done about those poor chaps on the dole'; and the gloom would deepen; then: 'It's rotten luck on all those miners.' Awkward silence would prolong itself while these liberal thoughts fluttered overhead. Then somebody might tactfully put Rhapsody in Blue or Ain't Misbehavin' on the gramophone steer the talk into happier channels . . . "
As the economy collapses around us and costs spiral it might not be a good idea for me to embark on a publishing programme. I decided a few months ago that I won't be writing and publishing an updated edition of my best-selling Subterranean City to which I have the rights. I began to work on the project before COVID and my illness intervened. I now think it would be too expensive to print with its extensive colour pictorial content and there is a huge amount of competition that didn't exist when it first appeared in 2000. Time to move on. I am working on a new book but it is difficult to remain motivated these days - however, each week more words are added.
Last year I read a lot while ill - part of which was another periodic binge on classic Science Fiction of which my favourites were:
Joe Haldeman The Forever War - far better than I was expecting and still relevant of course. See here
Philip K Dick The Simulacra. See here
Kurt Vonnegut The Sirens of Titan see here I enjoyed the recent documentary on Vonnegut reminding me why I loved him in my late teens.
The one I enjoyed most was Solaris by Stanislav Lem, rightly deemed a classic. See here. I also watched Tarkovsky's brilliant film adaptation for the first time.
Talking of Tarkovsky I was listening to a fascinating podcast Trickster on Carlos Castaneda last night and learned that the great Russian director wanted to bring Don Juan to the screen, as did Federico Fellini who was also a massive fan. The podcast can be heard here. I found it through the website of Jules Evans whose book Philosophy For Life I am currently rereading. In these turbulent times some other readers may discover strategies for stoically coping in its pages. You can also find on that site an essay about Esalen which I mention in an earlier post.
In my reading binge I also devoured all of Brian Catling's Vorrh trilogy, an unsettling but incredible feat of imagination. I was particularly impressed by how he could write about non-human 'life'. The books manage to include a number of real people including Eadweard Muybridge Raymond Roussel and Nicholas Parsons! I was thinking about asking him to contribute something to my new book, when I read this week that he had died. He only attained some form of fame, thanks to his books in his sixties. Prior to that he had been known for his art and performance pieces. See here and here. I had seen him a couple of times when he accompanied Iain Sinclair at events in the 1990s and found him pretty scary and intimidating as a performer, which is what he intended no doubt. RIP.
Another book I've enjoyed this month is Borges and Me by Jay Parini (Canongate 2020) recounting the author's experience, when studying in Scotland in the early 1970s, of driving the protean Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges around that country and the Northern Isles. He had never read any of the author's work at the time and did not appreciate his international fame. Borges was blind and needed Parini to describe in detail the towns and landscapes they were passing through.
The book is funny, moving and very well written. Parini confesses in the final chapter what the reader has suspected all along - that this could not possibly be a fully accurate account of the encounter as there are long passages of apparently perfectly remembered conversations and monologues from Borges (some of which I think are adapted from his stories). Instead: 'It's a bit of a palimpsest, a text written over another text, with many erasures; the underlying text is barely legible but nonetheless important, its bones poking through the skin. This story was shaped as fiction, or auto fiction, and the residue of that shaping in its transformation into this text, "An Encounter."' There are just too many perfect coincidences - the three 'Weird Sister' 'witches' at a foggy Scone Castle stop for example - enabling Borges to wax lyrical from his formidable literary knowledge. I also dipped into Borges Collected Fictions to reminder me of his unique style. I think I first became aware of Borges when reading Umberto Eco's bestselling The Name of the Rose in the 1980s in which an important character is based on him. I also found the first few chapters about Parini's student life before the arrival of Borges equally absorbing.
I recently read an autobiography by Jeremy Lewis called Kindred Spirits: Adrift in Literary London (Harper Collins, 1995), chronicling his adventures in London's publishing world of the 1970s and 1980s, a landscape that has since been transformed by mergers and takeovers, so that most if not all the small publishers he worked for are now defunct or part of huge corporate conglomerates.
It's very readable and offers an insight into a closed world, dominated by an Oxbridge and public school intake - there are many comparisons to various publishers' offices resembling prep schools. It's also quite amusing, although the self-deprecation gets a bit wearying after a while. It introduced me to some new names and books, the most interesting sounding being Haunts of the Black Masseur (1992) which I am currently reading. It was written by a good friend of Lewis, Charles Sprawson, who he accompanies on some of his swimming expeditions around Europe, attempting to discover the sites of ancient springs mentioned in classical literature, often to find polluted horrors or tourist travesties.
Sprawson's book is recommended: a chronicle of swimmers through literature and history, again revealing the dominance of the public-school educated writers who wished to relive the epic feats of Leander and other classical natators; Byron naturally features heavily. From my present perspective it's a model for how to write about a single subject without becoming too repetitive and boring - Sprawson must have had a large file of quotations gleaned from prodigious reading, before the days of Google. A number of figures familiar from this blog put in appearances - there is a substantial section on Fr Rolfe/Baron Corvo for example - as well as Percy Shelley, Rupert Brooke, Goethe, George Borrow and many others. Swimming also provides a plethora of useful metaphors and analogies for writers, which Sprawson beautifully illuminates.
Much of the swimming described takes place in lakes, rivers and the sea, what would be called 'wild swimming' today and a lot of it during the winter months, which has recently regained popularity. A few years ago I read Roger Deakin's wonderful Waterlog, which I believe encouraged many people to swim in less frequented places. After years of never swimming, and persuaded by my wife, I started to swim in lakes when we were on holiday in Switzerland and France, the reedy and fast-flowing Rhein at Stein-am Rhein and other less frequented spots. I still find swimming is helpful for the various aches and pains of middle age and we try to swim in the nearby sea, although recent discharges of sewage into the English Channel by Southern Water are discouraging. I think it unlikely that I'll ever swim in the Hastings sea in the winter.
A review here.
Sprawson's obituary can be found here.
Jeremy Lewis is also sadly no longer with us, an obituary here.
