Artemisia by Anna Banti (Small Axes)

The show, alas, won't go on. I mean the keenly-anticipated National Gallery exhibition  National Gallery Exhibition dedicated to the work of the artist Artemisia Gentileschi  (1593-c1656). In 40 years from 1810 she produced more than fifty paintings that secured her reputation as one of the greatest painters of her time, and of all time.

First published in 1953, Artemisia is a novel, not a biography, and beautifully translated from the Italian by by Shirley D'Ardia Caraccioli. I've read it over the past two (self-isolating) days and was transported. This is by any measure a great novel, and surely one of the finest novels about an artist ever written.

Anna Banti (pen name of Lucia Lopresti, 1895-1985) was an artist historian and critic and this  novel has been acclaimed as a feminist masterpiece. As an investigation of the artistic process the publishers compare it to Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower and Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. I've read only the second of these and would agree. (Note to self: read the Fitzgerald.) Sontag's dazzling introduction (written in 2004) is a bonus:

“What makes Artemisia a great book – and unique in Banti’s work – is this double destiny, of a book lost and re-created. A book that by being posthumous, rewritten, resurrected, gained incalculably in emotional reach and moral authority. A metaphor for literature, perhaps. And a metaphor for reading, militant reading – which, at its worthiest, is rereading – too.” 

Small Axes is run by Pete Ayrton, founder of Serpent's Tail, as an imprint of HopeRoad  the latter set up in 2010 by Rosemarie Hudson to promote  literature from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Small Axes focuses on “republishing post-colonial classics that helped to shape cultural shifts at the time of their printing and remain as relevant today as when they were first published”.  Check their website for a brilliant backlist and details of forthcoming books.

Artemisia is published on 2nd April and you can pre-order here. The next best thing to seeing the show.

I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For by Jen Calleja (prototype)

I'm not yet sure whether this will be a daily blog, or something less regular. I'll aim for the former, for now, and we'll see how that goes.

What form these blogs will take is also uncertain. Perhaps no more than a title, and an author and their publisher, with a few thoughts. Perhaps (and probably) something more extended, about the publisher's backlist, forthcoming titles, that sort of thing. I shan't write about anything I don't like.

No more throat clearing. To business.

This is, let's agree, a golden age for short story collections. Recently highlights (all from small presses, who share an admirable commitment to the form) include Eley Williams' Attrib., Wendy Erskine's Sweet Home, June Caldwell's Room Little Darker, Hugh Fulham-McQuillan's Notes on Jackson and his Dead and David Hayden's Darker with the Lights On.  

186pp ISBN 978-1-9160520-5-5

I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For is a collection of short stories by Jen Calleja,  a poet, writer and translator shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from the German of Marion Poschmann’s The Pine Islands (Serpent’s Tail). 

This, the author's debut collection, is a real discovery.

The first (very short) story, 'Town Called Distraction', couldn't be more prescient, set as it is in a future society in which free movement is severely restricted (for reasons unrevealed), and one in which social encounters are followed by the application of hand cream. It's very unsettling in its edgy tone and lightly-deployed surrealism:

I started walking towatds the bridge, but very slowly. I was worrying, I remember, about whether things would turn out alright in the end, if things had already gone wrong sometime up to this point. On the way I saw a cash machine, but decided not to check my balance. It looked a lot like an arcade game with its fully-flashing colour screen, full quantum. Where is my money? There's more money than there is money, there's more money than there is needed for the whole world to be OK.

Critics like to use the phrase 'deceptively simple' when describing the slightly affectless prose style adopted by many contemporary writers, and Calleja's style is certainly simple (as in plain and unadorned) but never, I'd say, deceptively so. It is confident, direct, not consciously 'literary'.

There are twelve more stories making up this impressive debut - terse, bright, chillingly original fictions that offer welcome distraction, if not consolation, in these dark days.

Next week's launch has been cancelled (along with all other  book launches, which may be no more than a blip on history's radar, but a loss that is sorely felt, not least by the authors). But don't let this fine debut slip through your net.

Order I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For direct from the publishers.

Prototype is an East London-based indie press, and clearly one to watch. I first became aware of them through Astrid Alben's outstanding poetry collection Plainspeak (among the best-designed poetry collections of 2019, not to mention the brilliant content). Their chunky, large-print paperbacks have a distinctive look and feel, and their back list deserves a closer look. Get involved!

As I was saying

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and 

Enough already.

I posted my last Salvēte! blog in January 2017, on the day Trump was elected 45th President of the United States. I felt at the time that there were bigger fish to fry, more pressing issues to address, other priorities. My blog - not only about books, but mostly - seemed to me to be an indulgence.  Dig around and see for yourself, if the fancy takes you.

Since then I've done a lot of other writing, usually for money but sometimes - like now - for love.

Love for writing, and for independent publishers and for their authors, and their authors' books. For the past decade or so my life as a reader has been enriched tremendously by strange and wonderful novels and poetry collections and essays by authors new to me, from publishers I've come to regard as cultural staples. In a garish world of corporate bullshit there is something uniquely untainted and beautiful about indie publishers and the authors they support.

This revived blog will promote new books from small independent presses in the UK, Ireland and elsewhere. That's it, and that's all, because that's what I know about, what I care about and what I can do.

I'm an author and critic with regular bylines in the Times Literary Supplement and Literary Review and various print and online publications. For the past two years I've had a bully pulpit in The Idler magazine in which I bang on about favourite publishers and their backlists. More recently I've had fun organising one-off literary cabarets in London, working with some dazzling literary and musical and theatrical talents. But that's on hold for the time being, obviously. More about them when the time comes

Before the next blog (featuring porky prime cuts of forthcoming indie press releases) here, in a blaze of shameless self-promotion, are links to some of my TLS reviews of indie press titles:

PHARRICIDE by Vincent de Swarte trans. by Nicholas Boyle (Confingo)

HAPPINESS AND TEARS The Ken Dodd Story by Louis Barfe (Head of Zeus)

MACHINES IN THE HEAD Selected short prose by Anna Kavan (Peter Owen)

LUCIA by Alex Phoebe (Galley Beggar Press)

PLAYING POSSUM by Kevin Davey (Aaargh!Press)

IN THE ABSENCE OF ABSALON by Simon Okotie (Salt)

 spill simmer falter wither by Sara Baume (Tramp Press)

Slouching towards Washington

20 January 2017

(With apologies to Robert Frost)

Whose words these are by now we know.   

His tower is in the city so  

He cannot see us gathered here   

To hear his words with pain and fear.

His hair elaborately deranged
His thoughtless thoughts are more than strange,
His soul's a void, his tan is queer -
The darkest day (so far) this year.

His words teem from a mind that's blank, 

A cocksure foghorn honking swank;

His little fingers prod the air,

His rasping bullshit's everywhere. 

His words are dreary, dark and fake.

The prick has promises to break -

And years to go before we wake,   

And years to go before we wake.

December index

  
    Here's the index for December's blogs. Click on the title (and don't ask me why they all appear underlined).. Knock yourself out. And the scroll to the bottom of this blog for a message.



      December 2016

• 01  Forbidden Line - an Essex epic 
• 02  The last artist - NASA's Pioneer plaque
• 03  Listomania - literary lists from Fitzgerald and Nabokov
• 04  Poetry books of the Year - Campbell, Morgan, Oswald and others
• 05  Lonely as a cloud - Wordsworth revisited
• 06  The Cambridge Humanities Review - a plug
• 07  My novels of the year - the unusual suspects
• 08  Man with a Movie Camera - Dziga Vertov's masterpiece
• 09  On pointless virtuosity - John Fuller and Kuke Kennard
• 10  Otherwise mint - a new poem
• 11  On St Trinian's - in flagrante delecto
• 12  The London Nobody Knows - a bizarre 1960s documentary
• 13  Finnegans Wake - the dust wrapper - why 'BY'?
• 14  No blog today (technical problems)
• 15  No blog today (more technical problems)
• 16  Intellectual humility - the Templeton Foundation
• 17  Prufrock on film - poetry and cinema
• 18  Jacko, Prince and me  - brothers under the skin
• 19  My fifth most popular blog - on Harry Parker's Anatomy of a Soldier
• 20  My fourth most popular blog - on Paul Stanridge's Forbidden Line
• 21  My third most popular blog - Worst. Poem. Ever.

• 22  My second most popular blog - and it's an odd one
• 23  My most popular blog, ever - and it's not what you'd expect
• 24  Parlour Games - is that you, Montagu?
• 25  Ho ho ho - no blog today
• 26  Ho ho - not today either
• 27  Ho - nor today
• 28  Ho hum - getting bored
• 29  Comedy clergymen - my top five
• 30  On Kate Hopkins  - two blogs about the artist from the archive
• 31 December index - you're looking at it 

      

   And that's it, from me, for now.  

   Much as I enjoy blogging regularly I simply shan't have the time to do so in the foreseeable future (not that the future is ever foreseeable). I have two books to write in 2017, and a new job that will keep me very busy as well as other commitments, so will start this new year with an extended hiatus. Thank you for reading. You know who you are.

                                                        
                                                                  Salvēte!

      

On Kate Hopkins

For my last blog of 2016 I ransack the archives once again for two pieces I wrote about the artist Kate Hopkins, the first in 2013 and the second in February this year. If you're expecting to read something about her ghastly near-namesake Katie Hopkins you will be, I hope, agreeably disappointed. 

Friday, 16 August 2013

Kate Hopkins - recent paintings

Here are three lovely recent paintings by the artist Kate Hopkins:

What we call 'still life' (with such appealing ambiguity in that 'still') is what the French call nature mort. This is not the place to explore the complex cultural relations between art and mutability and death, but let's agree that they exist and that these beautiful images are part of that discourse.

French film critics have long employed the term temps mort (literally 'dead time', although also meaning 'injury time' in sport) and this is something I'd like to mull over with you. An example of temps mort would be the wonderfully ripe moment when Laurel and Hardy settle down together 'outside' the narrative, as it were, to deliver some ruminations unrelated to the plot, if there is a plot. The story is temporarily abandoned, or put on hold, while the protagonists reflect, bicker, mooch around, smoulder (and Ollie in particular is a wonderful smoulderer), or do nothing at all. It's lovely.

Hollywood cinema isn't much given to rumination these days - hyperkinetic helter-skelter blockbusters have no room for thought, for reflection, for stillness and for what the silent film pioneer D. W. Griffith called 'the wind in the trees'. There's no place in such films - as in much contemporary art - for nature or the human.

In a rowdy market-place Kate Hopkins' paintings create their own space. Here are two more pictures - of grapes (below) and cherries (below the grapes). She must have looked very closely and for a long time at these two modest clusters of fruit, and has captured perfectly, and permanently, the mustiness of the grapes and the enamelled glamour of the cherries. They are small images but have monumental presence. These and the pictures above all have something of temps mort about them - something essential salvaged from the wreck of time. They are not loud or pushy or overbearing or sentimental or gauchely confessional - they're the sound of the wind in the trees. 

But this prompts an afterthought. Victor Enrice's 1992 film The Quince Tree Sun (El Sol del Membrillo) is that rarest of things - a film that captures the process of the making of a painting in the smallest detail. It's a quasi-documentary about the painter Antonio López García (playing himself) and his attempt, in the course of a long summer, to paint a quince tree. López works conscientiously as the tree changes day by day, and the light changes constantly, and old friends drop by and interrupt him. Just as he chronicles the dying tree, the film chronicles his effort. It becomes, improbably, a nail-biting race against time. Beautiful.

Still from The Quince Tree Sun

And here's a second blog from earlier this year:

Comedy clergymen

My blog on Harold Davidson, the disgraced Rector of Stiffkey who was killed by a lion in Skegness, prompted an email from a regular reader and prompts further brooding on clergymen, and their representation in film and on the telly as comic figures.

Clergymen, mind you, and not priests - my shortlist is all Protestant, which explains the omission of Father Ted Crilley and Father Dougal McGuire, immortals both.

Who are they, then, the top comedy vicars?

1  The sans pareil is Canon D'Ascoyne, played by Alec Guinness in Robert Hamer's masterpiece Kind Hearts and Coronets. Here's a short clip, featuring Dennis Price trying to keep a straight face as Guinness pulls out all the stops, but quietly. "Ab-sti-nence!"

Who can forget his delivery of the great great line, chumbled with manic dodderiness as he shows Price (who is bent on murder, and who can blame him) around his church: "My west window has all the exuberance of Chaucer without, happily, any of the more concomitant crudities of his period."

2 Dad's Army offered a secure billet for some wonderfully odd actors, not least the camp, adenoidal, short-tempered Reverend Timothy Farthing of St. Adhelm's, Walmington-on-Sea (which Ive always assumed was in Sussex). He did a kind of double act with the Verger, a very eccentric performer called Edward Sinclair.

3 I loved All Gas and Gaiters as a child - on the radio and later on television. Wonderful booming fruity actors. most of whom seemed to be pissed, in a gentle sub-Trollopian comedy awash with gallons of sherry. The cast included Derek Nimmo (Mervyn Noote), Robertson Hare (Archdeacon Henry Brunt), William Mervyn (Bishop Cuthbert Heaver) and John Barron (Dean Lionel Pugh-Critchley). I wonder if old episodes are available on the internet. If so i can suspend all other priorities for an afternoon.

4 A huge dental overbite and a strong weakness for pious homily, the  anonymous vicar incarnated by the unlikeable 'character actor' Dick Emery was a staple of BBC Light Entertainment back in the 1970s. Was he funny? Not really, but he was on the telly.

5  Can't think of any more. But there must be dozens.