Jazzy D's Soul Notes

Philip Roth "Everyman" (Vintage)






This short novel begins with the funeral of "Everyman," our unnamed main character, and then proceeds to relate his life story as fleshed out and structured around a skeleton of his various encounters with death or mortality. As a young boy he witnessed a drowned soldier/sailor who had washed up on shore, and shortly after when he was hospitalized for a hernia operation, his roommate, another young boy, died mysteriously in the night---"memorable enough that he was in the hospital that young, but even more memorable that he had registered a death." Thereafter, through-out he life he was haunted by health problems, and concurrently thoughts of death. In contrast, his older brother remained the picture of health into old age, while his own body was constantly betraying him.

I had stopped reading Roth when I became bored with his (male) characters constant obsessions with sex and female bodies. This "meditation on mortality," as it has been described, has less of that than in many of his earlier books, although Everyman does go through three marriages, each to a successively younger woman, and in his late sixties is still hitting on a 20-something jogger younger than his daughter. But on the whole, I "enjoyed," if that's the correct word, this story about how one man dealt with facing death.

Ben Coates "Why The Dutch Are Different" (Nicholas Brealey Pub.)




A quick overview of the most distinctive features of modern Dutch society, as seen by a young British professional who settled here a few years ago. Despite the "hidden heart" bit in the subtitle, it doesn't go beyond the obvious things — the Golden Age and colonialism; World War II; football; bicycles; the Zwarte Piet crisis; Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders; euthanasia, soft-drugs and prostitution; carnival; etc. — but what it says about them seems to be sensible and well-researched.

Nothing much about the arts, except Rembrandt and Vermeer, and not much about places other than Rotterdam (where Coates lives) and Amsterdam (where he works). Maastricht, Eindhoven and Breda appear in the Carnival chapter, and there's a trip to Westerbork in the WWII section, but that's about it for geography.

Coates isn't the most exciting writer: he has learnt one trick, building chapters by breaking up passages of objective background material with short passages of mildly funny subjective experience, and he applies that scheme doggedly throughout the book. But he is clearly good at condensing an argument to the essentials, and doesn't take up more of the reader's time than he needs to.

One minor caveat I had was that the external baseline Coates typically compares the Netherlands to is his experience of a few years in a very high-pressure job in London, which is scarcely "normal" by anyone else's standards. Perhaps because of that, he sometimes picks out characteristics as "typically Dutch" when they could equally well be called "typically German" or "typically Swedish", for example. But I still think this would be a valuable starting point for someone visiting the Netherlands or considering coming to work there.

Joan Didion "The Year of Magical Thinking" (Fourth Estate)




This is a valuable piece of writing on grief. In December 2003, her husband has a massive heart attack at the dinner table and dies. At the same time, their daughter is in ICU with pneumonia. Over the course of the next year, she goes through an emotional wringer, dealing with the grief and the health issues of her daughter. She tries to make sens of the emotions and thinking she is experiencing, by reference to her peer group, her parents' generation and reading.

I was particularly struck by the book on grief etiquette and how that has changed. Some of what she reported I recognised from the loss of my father (the shock, the bliss of forgetting and the pain of remembering, being side swiped). There is little writing on the nature of grief in the modern age, when faith is not the support it once may have been and when death is kept out of sight; this feels to be a valuable contribution to the subject.

But for those who grieve, and who go through all the changes Didion experiences, she helps us understand that this is just what it is like. Sometimes it helps to know we are not alone when we find ourselves alone.

Iain Banks "Canal Dreams" (Abacus)




The surface story is simple enough in which a famous cellist goes on a world tour by ship, because she is so phobic about flying she can't bear to step on a plane. Her ship is caught up in a civil war as it passes through the Panama Canal.

Initially there is nothing but tedium, as three stranded ships huddle together for safety -- tedium, and for Hisako the chance of a love affair with an officer from one of the other ships. But then the boats are seized by a group intent on using them in an escalation of the war that has until now not directly touched them. There follows a slow study of the psychology of a hostage situation where the hostages are initially well-treated, and then the explosion into violence when the hostages' usefulness comes to an end.

But more than that, it is a study of how someone who suffers from a severe phobia need not be a coward in other things. Hisako remains passive while there are other lives at stake; but the hostage takers fatally underestimate a woman who has more than music in her troubled past.

It's short,a dark, and a quite frankly observed revenge fantasy. It's not the best of the author's work, but if you like his books it's worth trying.

Jen Waldo "Old Buildings in North Texas" (Arcadia Books)




If ever there was a book that deserved having the term "novel" applied to it, "Old Buildings In North Texas" is it. I've never read anything quite like it. This is not a teaching aid with clear moral messages. It's the story of a woman in love with cocaine but having to deny her lover if she wants to have a life.

This is a story of recovery, rather than redemption. As our heroine (no pun intended) puts it: "I'm working to get better not to be better". Of course, she isn't always working very hard. She disdains her court-mandated therapist, is irritated by her parole officer and infuriated to be back under her (perfectly reasonable and deeply supportive) mother's supervision. So she finds a way to freedom, a personal path to her new life. Does it matter if it's built on lies and deception, trespass and theft and placing her heavily pregnant baby sister at risk? Actually, no, it does not. Suck it up.

Our heroine takes up "urban exploration" as a hobby. This initially involves finding a way into and exploring old abandoned buildings in North Texas but leads on to systematic, profitable looting.

I liked the voice of the main character. She wasn't always nice but she was always authentic. Her mixture of anger, denial, simple curiosity, complicated obsessions and determination to escape is beautifully described. She presents her worldview with humour and enthusiasm without allowing herself to sugar-coat the issues - well not much anyway.

Jen Waldo has a unique voice, I would like to read more of her work to find out what else she has to sa.

Ted Hughes "Birthday Letters" (Faber & Faber)




This work presents itself as a commentary on Plath and Hughes' relationship with the implication that the poems were written in real time. I don't believe this. I think this is a reputation washing exercise and therefore a different type of dishonesty than is usual in poetry.

We learn nothing significant about either person, Plath or Hughes, that we couldn't have already guessed, but the arrogance and cruelty shown by Hughes in this collection regularly took my breath away. He never shows any sign of attempting to understand her mental health issues, or reflect on his own feelings about those issues. She is reduced to a madwoman, a raving creature obsessed for reasons unclear with her own father, a compulsive unreflective beast dedicated to being difficult and getting in the way of him writing Important Poetry.

Her behaviours are not rational or based on any set of values, they're just childish tantrums that hurt random people around here, like the imagined English countryman setting traps to catch rabbits for his pot that she starves by tearing up the snares - he gaslights her from beyond the grave, her moral values are fake whilst his are unimpeachable. Their chidren are often mentioned, but only once are either of them refered to as 'his' or 'my', otherwise only 'her', but the children's feelings or lives are not touched on, only their existence refered to obliquely to draw attention to her failings are a parent. He shows no interest in the lives of their chilren or their inner worlds, just uses them as a stick to beat her with.

There are so many mocking references to Daddy and Ariel, but no engagement with the works. This is a world in which a woman's trauma is treated as a personality flaw, her bpd is treated as difficulties and troublemaking. I have seen so many people like him in my professional life, they are everything we seek to change about the world and their refusal to understand trauma and psychiatry or do any self-reflection is a major problem in the interpersonal lives of so many people.

I am a fan of Ted Hughes' work, but this is cruelty pretending to be neutrality, insults pretending to be artistic neutrality, and worst of all, there are very few poems in here that are Hughes at his best. Perhaps the best poem in the book is Wuthering Heights, or maybe The Minotaur, but mostly they are cold, like adverts, like PR bumpf, showing only excerpted versions of the human experience. Poems should make you see things in a new way, good poems should reveal the truths of the world in ways you never imagined. Not a single poem in this collection made my blood pump harder, made me exited, made me read the work out loud to my partner excitedly.

There were some good poems, certainly. Hughes skill is undeniable, but there were so few moments in this where his descriptions, his rhythm, his vision grabbed me and surprised me, only depressed me with his art, a great painter leaving a portrait to posterity that is a grotesquery, handing on hatred as truth to posterity. I feel so sorry for Sylvia Plath, being handpicked as a trophy wife by a selfish man who didn't understand her and didn't want to, who felt attacked by the existence of an emotional life that was inconvenient to him, and then having her pain and art turned into mocking and dismissive poems.

There is nothing in this book that tells you anything about why he loved her, what he liked about her, the good times they had together, the work they created during their relationship, how he felt and why, what she said about her subjects, their courtship, why they got married, why they had children, a whole relationship reduced to 60 or so bitter vignettes of him having the arse with her. It's the poetry equivalent of a man explaining that his ex is a nutter and you shouldn't believe anything she says. Horrible stuff, sometimes very good in a technical kind of way but mostly the only thing I felt was annoyance.

Jim Al-Khalili "Quantum: A Guide For The Perplexed" (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)




Reading books like this just makes you realize how smart and creative theoretical physicists are, and I am intelligent enough to understand the main gist of the book. He really, really tries to make this stuff understandable. He used examples and used pictures, and didn't use sophisticated language either.


I did come away with incredible admiration for folks who actually do understand this stuff and can apply it to real world applications because this is the most counterintuitive thing you will ever come across.

Another very strange thing about this book is that some of the concepts are so counter to reason that it really casts doubt in my mind on my own atheistic beliefs which are seriously derived from reason and rationale thought.

Quantum physics really seems to highlight the limits of our understanding while simultaneously showing how brilliant we are. We can create predictive mathematical formulas that WORK under all sorts of experimental conditions. But we don't know why they work.

All in all, hats off to the author for even attempting to bring this subject down to layperson's terms.

Malcolm Arnold
Symphony no.9
National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland/Andrew Penny




Arnold is probably better known for his film scores such as Bridge on the River Kwai,but his 9th symphony is his crowning achievement in my opinion. Composed in the eighties, this is his crowning glory with a heart aching lento in the fourth movement. The movement is bleak and intense, spare and grief stricken, like a gigantic funeral march but with a radiant resolution at the end. Without that final chord, the surrender to nihilism and despair would be total
Awesome..

Arnold: Symphony No. 9, 4th Movement



ENJOY

This is a classic prog rock alobum from 1969. Its 40th annoversary edition is just awesome. CD and DVD double in a slipcase style.

King Crimson - In The Court Of The Crrimson King

Jacqueline Harpman "I Who Have Never Known Men" (Vintage)



For years, 39 women and 1 younger girl have lived in an underground bunker in a cage. Patrolling guards are their only contact with the outside world, and at this point they despair of ever escaping, resigned to death in prison. Most of the women can remember their former lives, but the younger girl remembers nothing but the cage. But one day, a mysterious siren goes off just as the guards are opening the hatch to deliver them food, and after the guards disappear, the women are able to escape. But will they find freedom outside of the bunker?

This is a bleak dystopian novel that is less about what happens to its characters and more about the human spirit in the face of despair. The writing is beautiful, and every word is tense. My only complaint was that I desperately wanted to know more, to understand why and how, but Harpman does not answer these questions and leaves them to her protagonist and the reader to ponder.