Jazzy D's Soul Notes

It has been another great day here in town. More festival events taking place across the literary world. After the wonderful Jnnifer Lucy Allan talking about her new book on Clay, today I attended a poetry evening.

This was held at the Guidhall.



The poet that enthused me most was Maggie Harris , the others were Rosie Johnston and Michael Bartholomew Biggs. I bought Maggie's current set of poems.



Maggie Harris, originally comes from Guyana.



I shall be reading that over the next few days with glee.

This morning, I was listening to music at home, from around nine through to at least one in the afternoon. Mostly vinyl, such as ones by Marianne Faithfull, Cymande and The Wailing Souls, plus the album (on CD) by 75 Dollar Guitar called I Was Real.

Lunch was sausage casserole with butternut squash cubed and peas.
Dinner when I arrived home this evening was a bowl of garlic mushrooms with a touch of soaya sauce.



Well, I might pop into town on Sunday, but my next event day is a week away. Monday I will be heading to Brighton for a short visit to see my brother.

J.G. Ballard "Crash" (Harper Perennial)





This is a perverse novel about a group of automobile accident victims who develop a sexual fetish for car wrecks and the resulting injuries. There is a lot of sex in this book, but it isn’t very arousing. If this is an attempt at pornography (I don’t think it is), it’s not very successful. Ballard’s prose is too clinical (I believe he contemplated a medical career once), to be arousing. This prose tone and quality mutes his attempt at poetic explanations for his narrator and Vaughn's (that "nightmare angel of the highways”) thuggy, obsessed psychological state. While l I realize that people can and do develop all sorts of bizarre sexual fetishes, Ballard never really convinced me of the reality, plausibility, or emotion behind this one.

While this is not an sf novel per se, it has a science fiction sensibility about it in its exploration of the erotic attraction and mediation involved in a technology – here autos and automobile transportation (even for the failures of the latter in wrecks). Ballard uses the novel to plot an extended series of sexual metaphors involving autos. In that sense, I can see his influence on the cyberpunks and their use of technological metaphors (though William Gibson is more skilled in this area). His fascination with celebrities and media – here symbolized by Vaughn’s obsession with “the film actress Elizabeth Taylor” – also prefigures cyberpunk themes. Sf critics antagonistic to the New Wave and its major figure Ballard accused him of creating disaster stories in which not only does the hero not try to prevent the disaster, is passive in the face of it, but actually seem to desire it. This is certainly true here. The narrator – named James Ballard – not only senses a coming “autogeddon” but looks forward to his death in it and plots the erotic configurations of his future death.

Weird and yet an intriguing novel.

Louise Willder "Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A-Z of Literary Persuasion" (Oneworld Publications)




How to snare your reader: the secret of a good blurb of course.

Louise Willder’s examination of the dos and don’ts of blurb-writing is a small masterpiece in itself.
This is an utterly enjoyable and charming book, and I now consider myself well-schooled, and more convinced than ever that I am right to leave blurbing in the excellent professional hands of Little Brown amd other publishers.


Willder’s aim is to reclaim the blurb as ‘a humble and arduous literary form... a cramped rhetorical space, less fascinating than that of a sonnet, but equally exacting’, in the words of the Italian author and publisher Roberto Calasso. No less a writer than Iris Murdoch considered blurbs ‘a mini art form’. Roger McGough used to swing by his publishers to oversee his. And Richard Adams was extremely rude about his, although not quite as rude as Jeanette Winterson, who hated her recent blurbs so much she took a photograph of herself setting fire to the books they adorned – an act which earned her a ton of publicity and got the blurbs changed. She is a genius in many, many ways.

This book is full of fun and bookish treasures. There is wonderful advice on whether or not to swear in blurbs (only if ‘cleverly sprinkled’); whether you should ever mention Jesus (even for books entirely about Jesus), and examples of some of the world’s worst blurbs, my favourite being for Frank Herbert’s (terrific) Dune, which begins:

When the Emperor transfers stewardship of Arrakis from the noble House Harkonnen to House Atreides, the Harkonnens fight back, murdering Duke Leto Atreides. Paul, his son, and Lady Jessica, his concubine, flee into the desert. On the point of death, they are rescued by the Fremen, who control Arrakis’ second great resource: the giant worms...

When the Emperor transfers stewardship of Arrakis from the noble House Harkonnen to House Atreides, the Harkonnens fight back, murdering Duke Leto Atreides. Paul, his son, and Lady Jessica, his concubine, flee into the desert. On the point of death, they are rescued by the Fremen, who control Arrakis’ second great resource: the giant worms…

Ah, the second great resource.

Then there are children’s books:

“Meet Dave. Caveman Dave.
Dave live in Cave.
Dave cave perfect
But Dave not happy…
Dave want new cave

As Willder points out, this isn’t just a terrific way of setting up voice, character, time, and space in under 20 words; it also basically sums up the human condition. And try finding a bookish child who can’t complete by heart the poem that adorns the back of Susan Cooper’s seminal The Dark is Rising:

“When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back…

There are also crime, romance, and erotica blurbs, and ones for literary fiction, in a chapter winningly titled ‘Come and Have a Go if you Think you’re Hard Enough’. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. On every monochrome jacket, Willder complains, there is ‘a writer at “the height of their powers”, which begs the question, is it all downhill from here, or was everything they wrote before a bit crap?’ And why is everything ‘liminal’ these days?

Whenever blurbistas have to write copy for literary fiction, she explains, they desperately try to insert as much story as they can, as that is what readers are looking for. Particular praise is reserved for Milkman by Anna Burns, whose jacket reads: ‘It is the story of inaction, with enormous consequences’ – an excellent piece of blurbing cakeism. Willder dislikes the blurb for Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow – ‘We could tell you the year is 1944 and bombs are falling across Europe, but that doesn’t really begin to cover it’ – for implying that if you, the reader, are looking for plot, you’re a ‘bit basic’; but then she wonders whether that even matters, seeing as the only point of reading it is to tell other people you’ve read it.

Along with the bad, sometimes the good takes your breath away. How well does the blurb for Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five show you exactly what the book is going to be like?

“POLLY, ANNIE, ELIZABETH, CATHERINE, and MARY JANE are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales.
They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, breathed ink dust from printing presses and escaped people traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.

If that doesn’t immediately make you want to step right into the world of this book, it’s hard to know what will.

The first edition of The Great Gatsby in 1925 includes the line: ‘[This novel]... is infused with a sense of the strangeness of human circumstance in a heedless universe.’

“A letter arrives. You’ve got an appointment with a trainee clinical psychologist on April 29, 2008.
You don’t attend.

Another letter arrives. It says they don’t normally reschedule appointments, but they know this is hard for you, so they’re offering you another appointment. It’s on May 13, 2008.

You don’t attend.

Two years later you shoot three people and shoot yourself. You will be called a monster. You will be called evil. The prime minister, David Cameron, will stand up in parliament and say you were a callous murderer, end of story. You have nine days and your whole life to prove you are more than a callous murderer.

So, nutshell time, and thus highly recommendable.

Jostein Gaarder "Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy" (Orion)







This is such a readable book and the third time I have reread it. In fact, it turns out to be a wonderful journey into the history of philosophy.

A 14-year-old Norwegian schoolgirl, Sophie, comes home from school and finds in her mailbox, an unstamped letter addressed to her contains a note that just asks "Who are you?". A couple of minutes later, she finds another letter in her mailbox addressed to her, containing yet another note with a simple question "Where does the world come from?. And still yet later on in the day, she finds in her mailbox, a postcard addressed to someone named Hilde, but in care of her address.

And so the letters prick Sophie's curiosity and get her to start thinking about who's sending these letters to her, what they mean, and really.... where DOES the world come from?

A few days later, Sophie receives a package, and therein begins her introduction to philosophy. We are taken on a journey tracing the history of philosophy from the natural philosophers in Greece back in about 500B.C., to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the moving through the ages and continents to St Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Darwin, and Freud.

For anyone looking for an easy way to learn philosophy or interested in a refresher course in philosophy, this is a good book to pick up. Sophie's child-like wide-eyed curiosity and eagerness to explore new ways of thinking put a fresh new face on the subject.

And by the way, who's Hilde and why is someone sending postcards for her to Sophie? The answer to this puzzle is quite a surprise.

Well, dear reader, it had to happen. The afternoon siesta or wobbly wistfulness, after another bottle of that delicious Pinotage red vino. Yes, I imbibed when having my spicy beef madras curry today.

And why not? Much else I could do in lockdown.

El vino collapso!

Apart from that, and a saunter to the supermarket this morning, it has been a very quiescent day. Much reading was done and for a change a silence that was inspiring.

The funny thing about where I live is that there are many readers and often you will find in a spot that has become ubiquitous with exchanges a number of books read and swapped. I have four more genre-focused books thrust in my hand today.

Most of the ladies here prefer their crime and thriller genres. Peter James, as my bro coming42 will concur, is very popular here. Also, Ann Cleaves, Iain Banks, P. D James, James Patterson, and others of a similar genre seem to be ubiquitous. The authors I prefer such as Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, and so on do not get a look-in. Probably too literate, too highbrow, and obscure for these consumers in Waterstone Place. Hence, I search these out elsewhere such as the charity shops and second-hand stores - all of which are closed at the moment.

So is there anybody interested in taking off me Peter James's book "I Follow You", or Ann Cleaves's "The Darkest Evening" both in hardback and looking almost new? Please PM me if so.

Now, where did  I last lay down that Camus book?

The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Reblog this and bold the titles you’ve read.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible -
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo


Remarkably, I have read 35 of these as an adult and I assumed that the BBC meant as adult readers rather than as children.
Thanks to thespian15 for kicking this off.

Well, what a lovely sunny day for the start of the festival weekend. Feels like  Sring already.

I have just quickly run the hoover around the flat and dusted a little. Then I shall shower next before going out.

I will pop down to see Kate at Past Sentence to unload some paperbacks on her for remuneration.

My first literary event starts at 2pm which will be Iain Sinclair.
The next one featuring Eliane Glaser is at 3.30 pm and Viv is on at 5pm.

I hope to take some pics as well.  

The Amy Licence discussion of Anne Boleyn was fascinating  and afterward there were copies of her book for sale, But ar £25 i hinki shall wait for the paperback version.

​Amy Licence is a journalist, author, historian and teacher, currently living in Canterbury, Kent, UK. Her particular interest lies in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in gender relations, queenship and identity, rites of passage, sex, pilgrimage, female orthodoxy and rebellion, superstition, magic, fertility and childbirth. Other interests include the Bloomsbury Group and Modernism, specifically the Post-Impressionists and Cubism. Amy's favourite authors are Woolf, Plath, Zola, T.S.Eliot, Nabokov and Dostoevsky. She is also an admirer of Mozart and Picasso, the Renaissance and the Baroque.

I might buy the book via Amazon.




The discussuion took place atThe Limes in Faversham.

Found this via You Tube-

Introducing Angela Carter

So, not wanting to be stuck indoors, unlike yesterday, i snook out to go Faversham to sell some unwanted books , including that one on The Goons. It was only four books in all, and i received a five pound note for them from my usual bookseller. I then perused some of the thrift shops, charity shops, and ended up in the library.

I picked up two more paperbacks, twenty pence and a quid respectively (the Hoggart book was a pound) . These being a Penguin Modern classic and an autobiography.

.

Then i shall be doing some scanning for a drug store, and finishing of the day for q awhile in the Office. .