Collard and Collard

This blog is only incidentally about my family name. It's actually about the piano manufacturers Collard & Collard, to whom we are distantly related. Few piano makers, I'm pleased to report, have  a more distinguished literary pedigree.

From The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, originally appearing in Punch magazine from 1888 and published in book form in 1892:

After my work in the City, I like to be at home.  What’s the good of a home, if you are never in it?  “Home, Sweet Home,” that’s my motto.  I am always in of an evening.  Our old friend Gowing may drop in without ceremony; so may Cummings, who lives opposite.  My dear wife Caroline and I are pleased to see them, if they like to drop in on us.  But Carrie and I can manage to pass our evenings together without friends.  There is always something to be done: a tin-tack here, a Venetian blind to put straight, a fan to nail up, or part of a carpet to nail down—all of which I can do with my pipe in my mouth; while Carrie is not above putting a button on a shirt, mending a pillow-case, or practising the “Sylvia Gavotte” on our new cottage piano (on the three years’ system), manufactured by W. Bilkson (in small letters), from Collard and Collard (in very large letters).  

Thus begins what may well be the funniest comic novel in the language (unless you have a grumpy resistance to this kind of thing). Mr. Pooter is an ancestor of Leopold Bloom - lower middle class, of modest means and prone to pomposity. 'The three year's system' was a form of payment by instalment, what in my childhood was known, disparagingly, as 'the never-never'. The Grossmiths skewer the pretension of "W. Bilkson", a fictitious firm, with connotations of "bilking" or fraud, whose inferior quality pianos bear the more reputable manufacturer's brand. Nothing changes.

Collard and Collard upright (1874)

Speaking of Bloom I'm pleased to note that there's also a Collard and Collard piano in Ulysses. In the Sirens chapter (the one with a musical theme set in the Ormond Hotel that begins "Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn.") It features the two barmaids Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy, who strain to see the viceregal cavalcade passing by:

Miss Douce's brave eyes, unregarded, turned from the crossblind, smitten by sunlight. Gone. Pensive (who knows?), smitten (the smiting light), she lowered the dropblind with a sliding cord. She drew down pensive (why did he go so quick when I?) about her bronze, over the bar where bald stood by sister gold, inexquisite contrast, contrast inexquisite nonexquisite, slow cool dim seagreen sliding depth of shadow, eau de Nil.

—Poor old Goodwin was the pianist that night, Father Cowley reminded them. There was a slight difference of opinion between himself and the Collard grand.

There was.

—A symposium all his own, Mr Dedalus said. The devil wouldn't stop him. He was a crotchety old fellow in the primary stage of drink.

—God, do you remember? Ben bulky Dollard said, turning from the punished keyboard. And by Japers I had no wedding garment.

'A slight difference of opinion' with a grand piano? And is Joyce adding to the musical theme by the  near homophonic rhyme of Dollard and Collard (& Collard)?

Now, with a faint stink of the lamp, here's the history bit:

F. W. Collard was a director of the company Clementi & Co., a well respected piano manufacturer of the late 18th century.  Collard was apparently a mechanical genius, and awarded several patents for piano design and construction. When Muzio Clementi retired in 1815 the name of the firm was changed to the noble and euphonious 'Collard & Collard', becoming one of the great British piano makers of the 19th century. The 'cottage style' as acquired by the Pooters were small uprights, although the company also made concert grands. 

In 1929, the firm was sold to the Chappell Piano Company of London, but pianos bearing the Collard & Collard name were produced until about 1960. They're rather baroque objects for today's tastes - lots of ornate transfers and candelabra and what-not - can be picked up today on eBay for next to nothing. I'm tempted - but there's no space here, not even for a baby grand.

Camden was home in the 19th century to many piano-makers, as easy access to the canal network meant that materials could be brought in and the finished instruments could be shipped out around the country. The Collard & Collard factory and showroom can still be seen - it's the distinctive circular building in Oval Road.

Captain Beefheart

Here's Don Van Vliet (1941-2010), better known, of course, as Captain Beefheart.

The twenty-eight songs comprising his 1969 masterpiece Trout Mask Replica were written in an intensely creative eight-hour burst after which The Magic Band (consisting of the Captain himself and Zoot Horn Rollo, Antennae Jimmy Semens, The Mascara Snake, Rockette Morton and Drumbo) rehearsed non-stop for a year. The whole double album - dense, erratic, overwhelmingly original and without equal in modern music - was recorded in a single six-hour session. I love the whole record and I love this song. It's completely American. Click on the title and sing along.

The dust blows forward 'n the dust blows back

Once or twice each year the mood takes me to play the whole record straight through (now of course as a single dinky compact disc), but I've held on to my original vinyl in the gatefold sleeve. It's the Burgess Shale of avant-garde music. Dig it.

© Columbia records/Don Van Vliet

Favourite Snatches (13)

Here's an extract from Canto XII, which appears in A draft of XXX Cantos by Ezra Pound (1930).

When I read this I hear  in my mind's ear the voice of Jimmy Durante. So after you've read Pound's wonderful verses to see The Great Schnozzola himself perform his immortal  Inka Dinka Doo.



There once was a pore honest sailor, a heavy drinker,
A hell of a cuss, a rowster, a boozer, and
The drink finally sent him to hospital,
And they operated, and there was a poor whore in
The woman's ward had a kid, while
They were fixing the sailor, and they brought him the kid
When he came to, and said:
            "Here! this is what we took out of you."

An' he looked at it, an' he got better,
And when he left the hospital, quit the drink,
And when he was well enough
            signed on with another ship
And saved up his pay money,
            and kept on savin' his pay money,
And bought a share in the ship,
            and finally had half shares,
Then a ship
            and in time a whole line of steamers;
And educated the kid,
            and when the kid was in college,
The ole sailor was again taken bad
            and the doctors said he was dying,
And the boy came to the bedside,
            and the old sailor said:
"Boy, I'm sorry I can't hang on a bit longer,
"You're young yet,
            I leave you re-sponsa-bilities.
"Wish I could ha' waited till you were older,
"More fit to take over the bisness..."
            "But, father,
"Don't, don't talk about me, I'm all right,
"It's you, father,"
            "That's it, boy, you said it.
"You called me your father, and I ain't.
"I ain't your dad, no,
"I am not your fader but your moder," quod he,
"Your fader was a rich merchant in Stambouli."

© The Estate of Ezra Pound. The Cantos published by Faber and Faber

Best. Sellers. Ever.

In the history of publishing only six works of fiction have sold more than 100 million copies. Can you guess what they are?

Six clues, one per book:

1.  The main character of this, easily the biggest-selling novel of all time, is a dissipated English barrister.

2.  W. H. Auden said that the author of this epic had in some cases outdone Milton's achievement in Paradise Lost.

3. Written by an intrepid aviator whose exploits inspired a French parfumier.

4.  First published in serial form in the Daily Express, this story was originally set on Nigger Island and featured characters named Lawrence Wargrave, Vera Claythorne, Philip Lombard, General John Macarthur, Emily Brent, Anthony Marston, Dr Edward Armstrong and William Blore.

5.  An 18th century dynastic tale by an author who died in alcoholic poverty.

6.  An earlier book by the author of one other novel on this list


Intrigued? Scroll down for the list (courtesy of Wikepdia), followed by some thoughts.

Book	Author(s)	Original language	First published	Approximate sales
A Tale of Two Cities	Charles Dickens	English	1859	200 million
The Lord of the Rings	J. R. R. Tolkien	English	1954–1955	150 million
Le Petit Prince	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry	French	1943	140 million
And Then There Were None  (aka Ten Little Niggers)	Agatha Christie	English	1939	100 million
紅樓夢/红楼梦 (aka Dream of the Red Chamber)	Cao Xueqin	Chinese	1754]–1791	100 million
The Hobbit	J. R. R. Tolkien	English	1937	100 million

Like you I've read them all - apart from 紅樓夢/红楼梦 (entirely unknown to me) and . . . er . . . A Tale of Two Cities. Never got around to it for some reason. I haven't, come to that, read Martin Chuzzlewit or Barnaby Rudge, but we all have our gaps. Dickens is a double surprise - for the truly astonishing sales and for the fact that A Tale of Two Cities, with its French revolutionary setting, is such an unDickensian novel. 

I read And Then There Were None during a damp holiday in the Channel Islands, aged 13, in an edition that carried its unfortunate original title (see below). I associate Agatha Christie's books with musty hotel lounges and the smell of fruit cocktail in heavy syrup. Her combined sales are simply mind-boggling - her 85 books have sold between 2 and 4 billion copies. The only author to outsell her is Shakespeare, although he's had four centuries to build up an audience.

Once you get way from individual books and look at the career totals for the most popular novelists (and Shakespeare) the mind begins to reel - both at the numbers and at the absolute nullity and fatuity of all but two of the writers in the top fifteen. The table below shows, from left to right, the author's name, their estimated minimum and maximum sales, the language in which they first appeared, the genre with which they are most associated and their nationality. Read this and wonder.

William Shakespeare	2 billion	4 billion	English	Plays and poetry		British
Agatha Christie	2 billion	4 billion	English	Whodunits including the Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot series	85	British
Barbara Cartland	500 million	1 billion	English	Romance	723	British
Danielle Steel	500 million	800 million	English	Romance	120	American
Harold Robbins	750 million	750 million	English	Adventure	23	American
Georges Simenon	500 million	700 million	French	Detectives, Maigret	570	Belgian
Sidney Sheldon	370 million	600 million	English	Suspense	21	American
Enid Blyton	300 million	600 million	English	Children's literature, Noddy, The Famous Five	800	British
Dr. Seuss	100 million	500 million	English	Children's literature	44	American
Gilbert Patten	125 million	500 million	English	Adolescent adventures	209	American
J. K. Rowling	350 million	450 million	English	Harry Potter	11	British
Leo Tolstoy		413 million	Russian	Anna Karenina, War and Peace, philosophical works	48	Russian
Jackie Collins	250 million	400 million	English	Romance	25	British
Horatio Alger, Jr.	200 million	400 million	English	Dime novels	135	American
R. L. Stine	100 million	400 million	English	Goosebumps series, Fear Street series, Horror, Comedy	430+	American
Corín Tellado	400 million	400 million	Spanish	Romance	4,000	Spanish
Dean Koontz	325 million	400 million	English	Horror, Thriller, Science fiction	91	America

I've left in most of the links so you can, if you're so inclined, learn more about these authors - several of them, such as Danielle Steele and Sidney Sheldon, entirely unknown to me.

One other thing that strikes me is the approximate parity between male and female writers; of the top seventeen - seven are female. Make sense of that who will.

An do, please, take a closer look at Corin Tellado (1927 - 2009) who published, as you can see above, 4,000 romantic novels. That's right - four thousand. Most of these were only 76 pages long and issued weekly (as required under her draconian contract with the Barcelona publishers Braguera), but she still makes Georges Simenon look like a workshy dabbler. 

Punchdrunk - The Drowned Man

I went recently to the latest production by the Punchdrunk theatre company, an ambitious epic entitled The Drowned Man.

The venue was an abandoned building next to Paddington station - a colossal Edwardian pile empty for the past half century and presumably a warehouse of sorts built for the Great Western Railway. It has been taken over by Punchdrunk and four vast floors cunningly remodelled by stage designers to resemble a run-down 1940s film studio (complete in every detail with dozens of rooms for wigs and  costumes and editing suites and make-up and a producers' boardroom and commissary. That's not all - on one floor was an acreage of scrubland desert; on another street of stores and a movie theatre; in the basement a stagnant lagoon. There were also clusters of run-down slum caravans housing starstruck newcomers and those who never made it. All lit in dim Edward Hopper tones, the entire building dingy and hazily atmospheric.

On arrival we had been issued with a sinister beaked mask, given a short introduction by a camp lift attendant (and the warning not to speak during our visit) and then let loose to roam freely around the site for three hours in what's known as an "immersive theatre experience". After two hours I'd seen about half of the installation (including some spectacular dancing and some very surprising and satisfying moments watching actors in close up in remote parts of the building) and was completely exhausted, so found the very congenial bar (complete with torch singer but, alas, unstylish cans of warm Budweiser) and waited for my companion to join me (the point being that one had no choice but to navigate the building alone, like a ghost revisiting the past).

Well it was alright. I'd prefer an evening re-reading Nathanael West because three hours of crepuscular mystery, athletic dancing, ambiguous encounters and overwhelming portentousness soon begins to pall, no matter how awe-inspiring the treatment. The lighting and sound were superb, and the choreography (which involved moving a company of over thirty performers seamlessly around the site from one episode to another) was astonishingly good. But (to use an old cliche) it all amounted to less than the sum of its parts.

It struck me that the reason for this was that the whole conception of A Drowned Man was based around an essentially Protestant sensibility. There were thousands - thousands - of "clues" scattered around the building - photos and letters and typescripts and postcards and memos and love notes and so on, and one was expected to read them (in the dim light) and piece together a (quite banal) narrative  -seemingly lifted from The Day of the Locust. 

By Protestant I mean the belief that "the World is God's second book" as John Calvin said, an elaborate code to be broken, an accumulation of symbols the meaning of which we are placed here on earth to decipher. The makers of the show have decided to create an environment absolutely saturated with detail, but detail that adds up to nothing much. Worth seeing though, and even worth going to see, if only to confirm that God is not in the details. And we may be reminded of that distinctly modernist principle - that a work of art should not be about something, but should be that thing itself.

Images © Punchdrunk Theatre Company 2013

Follow the Money!

Here's a chance to get involved in a terrific film project and brag about it to your friends.

My friend John Hardwick is a wildly talented and ferociously hard-working film-maker. He's close to completing a brilliantly original documentary film which follows a $10 bill on a 30-day, 6,000 mile journey around the United States. Please read John's pitch below click on the link to see some of the film (which is almost ready to screen). He'll explain why he has to get the full sum by the end of October - and after three days is already half way there! If you don't want to support this very worthwhile project (and get a credit) please circulate the link to everyone you know.

Over to you, John:

John Hardwick

Hello friends and colleagues,

Most of you know that I'm making a new film called Follow the Money. It's a feature length documentary about a month in the life of a ten dollar bill. For thirty days and thirty nights myself and two colleagues followed a ten dollar bill as it criss-crossed the United States of America. The bill travelled 6,000 miles and through 13 different states. And it passed through the hands of countless incredible characters, building a unique and collective portrait of American life.

So far, me and my colleagues Ben and Steve, have financed the film ourselves but we're now at a stage where we need to pay to edit, score and finish the film. This is why we're launching an appeal for funding via Kickstarter.com - a website that helps artists, film-makers and authors to complete their projects. 

Our appeal will run from October 1st to October 31st and in that period it is vital that we get as many people as possible to see the project. Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing platform - if you reach your target you get the funding, if you don't, you get nothing. Here's a preview link to our Kickstarter appeal. It includes a trailer to the film.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1460639069/1824982202?token=2acb2df3

 If you like what you see, please keep the project in mind, and I'll mail you again next Tuesday (October 1st) with a live link. When you get it, please pass on the live link to anyone who might be interested. 

Obviously feel free to lash in a few quid to the project yourself if you wish! But even more crucial than that, please pass the link on. I'm hoping you'll ask your colleagues, friends and any billionaires you know to take a look at it. The more buzz we get via Facebook, tweets and emails, the more chance we have of funding the film.

And in return for your generous endeavours I will obviously love you forever - at least until we narrowly loose out on a Bafta - at which point I will become too bitter to love.

Thank you,

John

Don't let John become too bitter to love - he has so much to give! Here's the link again: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1460639069/1824982202?token=2acb2df3

  

  

The Goldsmiths Prize

The shortlist was announced yesterday for a new literary prize - the Goldsmiths (as in the college). According to the press release "it will be awarded to fiction that breaks the mould and opens up new possibilities for the novel form. The annual prize of £10,000 will go to a book that is genuinely novel, and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best."

That sounds promising, and the winner will be confirmed on November 13th. Let me blow my own trumpet because the shortlist includes Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. I happened to be the first person to review this brilliant novel (for the TLS, here). The author and her book are the subject of previous blogs - most recently here. I am, you'll gather, a fan.

The other titles on the Goldsmiths shortlist are:

Harvest by Jim Crace (also favourite to win the 2013 Booker) Very good this.

Red or Dead by David Peace (it's about football, and very long, so one to avoid. I don't get Peace)

Artful by Ali Smith (haven't read this but Ali Smith has never made much of an impression on me)

Exodus by Lars Iyer (have just ordered this and it comes highly recommended.)

Tapestry by Philip Terry (a period novel, telling the story of the Battle of Hastings from the perspective of a Bayeux Tapestry weaver. I'll reserve judgement - but if it's written even partially in the present historic sense I'll be the first to denounce it)

My money's on Eimear McBride because her's really is the most impressive first novel I've read in thirty years and deserves the widest possible audience.

Here's what one of the four judges, the novelist Nicola Barker, has to say about McBride's novel. No prizes for guessing where she'll cast her vote. although she seems to be influenced by Fifty Shades of Grey:

Imagine being repeatedly slapped in the face, only quite lightly to begin with, by a delicate little hand wearing a large and ornate signet ring. You want to turn away, to lash out, to resist, but the little hand is so dogged, so persistent, and the ring has caught your eye, somehow, and you just want to study it, to focus in on it, because you know that it is strange and special and very beautiful. But as the little hand continues to slap it becomes more painful and your cheeks gradually start to sting and to redden. Is it a pleasurable feeling? No. Well, yes. Is it startling? Certainly. And afterwards? When it’s all finally over? The devastating bruises, spreading and flowering across your flesh in their terrible palate of blue, green, black, purple...

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is at once the slap and the gasp after the slap. It is, in a single word, breathtaking.

Read more about McBride's spectacular arrival on the literary scene here.