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We’re planning a trip to the pictures this afternoon/evening, to see Slumdog Millionaire. I’m not completely sold on this visit. Granted, the films had great reviews and stuff, what with Golden Globes and all that ballyhoo, but I’ve been put off Danny Boyle somewhat by the execrable Sunshine, a film that, for me, redefined that famous old phrase or saying ‘tedious loud of pseudo-theologicalising bullshit’. Fingers crossed that Slumdog doesn’t go down the same route.
But maybe it’s not Danny Boyle that’s the problem: maybe it’s films with Sunshine in the title. After all I did pretty much despise Little Miss Sunshine. And don’t get me started on all the reasons why I think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is really, really not a towering work of genius, but rather a derivative, imagination-free, maundering yawn-fest of epic proportions.
Good job no-one’s ever offered to take me to see The Sunshine Boys.
I took this photograph by accident. We were on the 1A, going home to Roy’s parents’ house in Mile Oak after a day shopping in Brighton just after Christmas. I was snapping away on the bus, almost randomly, not bothering to check the exposure or focussing or any of that technical malarky. When I looked at what I’d taken there was, as you might imagine, an awful lot of dross – but there was also this, which I think is pretty groovy.
Like many folks, I discovered Mervyn Peake as a result of reading Lord of the Rings. Not, of course, that Peake’s writing in any way resembles Tolkein’s. It was simply that in 1969 there was little in the way of ‘follow-on’ literature once LOTR had hooked you into literature fantastical.
I’m not sure I even liked the Gormenghast stuff when I first read it – the baroque grotesqueries of Peake’s world weren’t really my cup of tea. But it was fashionable to be enamoured and so I claimed to be, following up on the ‘trilogy’ with the (infinitely poorer) Mr Pye and the nonsense poems Rhymes Without Reason. And gradually, what had begun as a mild flirtation turned into something a bit more serious. I read his wife Maeve’s biography A World Away and learned that he was as much of an artist and illustrator as he was a novelist and poet (if not more so). So I searched out collections of his drawings and copies of stuff he’d illustrated and it was the art, rather than the writing, that I came to love. One particular drawing summed up for me the utter genius of Mervyn Peake; it’s a drawing of Maeve’s head in profile, lightly sketched in pencil in a way that is both spare and intricate, a kind of delicate, whispered drawing that still takes my breath away every time I look at it. I’ve tried to find the picture on tinternet but with no luck, so you’ll just have to take my word that it is a thing of wonder.
I loved his book illustrations too (there is no better Treasure Island or Alice in Wonderland in my opinion) and bought what I could, both new and secondhand. I’ve ended up with quite a reasonable collection of Peake-abilia, some of which I’ve pored over, some I’ve barely opened. As with many of my fancies, this one came and went – I no longer seek out the published works, avidly read every biography and newspaper or magazine retrospective, or trek off to exhibitions. But, like all old loves, Mervyn Peake has a place still in my heart. Which is why, on our recent trip to Sussex, Husband and I went to visit his grave in Burpham churchyard:
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| From Burpham Church and Mervyn Peake’s Gravestone |
The encounter made me a bit sad, as much for the loss of the person I was when I was a ‘fan’ as for any other reason. Which is also the way of old loves, I think, to remind us of past selves who were younger, brighter, more enthusiastic, more passionate, but also more confused, less self-assured, less confident of our tastes and affiliations. I don’t really miss that old me – I really like what the intervening years have wrought of me. And I honour the small but important part Mervyn Peake plays in that continuing process.
Roy is a big fan of comics and graphic novels, as those of you who read his recent blog post and/or attended the session it advertised will know. I, however, am not. I don’t really ‘get’ graphic novels – I look at those nine-panel grids of somewhat hectic pictures and wonder where all the words went. I know it is as possible to read the text of pictures as it is any other text, but somehow I don’t feel I have the knack. So it was with some misgivings that I picked up my latest book group reading, the graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.
I already had the book in my possession, having bought it a couple of years ago from a comics shop in Brighton. Roy was busy gathering together a stack of items and I wanted something to rest my eyes on, and a comic book about a girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution seemed a novel antidote to the long-underpants-style stuff in the rest of the shop. So I bought it, took it home, read a few pages, left it on the bedside table and moved on, still unconvinced.
This week I picked it up again, not really expecting very much. But, quite suddenly, I ‘got’ it. The almost-crude, blocky illustrations of the text began to reveal for me multi-layered depths of meaning in much the same way that a line of poetry does, and with the same immediacy. Sure, a written text could have conveyed the same information, but in the time taken to read the words that immediate understanding of the situation and its emotional load would, I think, have been lost.
So here I am, a convert to the world of picture story-telling. This is not to say that I now think graphic novels are ‘better’ than traditional ones. For me nothing can beat the long-term immersion in another world that a really good read gives you. But, as I have said, I think the graphic novel is more analogous to poetry than it is to the traditional novel, or to film, a medium with which it is also frequently compared. It seems to invite more opportunities to fill in the gaps and thus leave more space for the reader to interpret (or misinterpret?) the action.
Good job Christmas is coming, cos Persepolis 2 is on my wish list.
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now. Use the closest, regardless of what it is.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions somewhere – blog, facebook, etc.
Here’s mine:
Cosmographia introductio was accompanied by a globe 9on which was marked the continent ‘America’) and a large map of the world ‘containing the islands and countries recently discovered by the Spaniard Americus Vespucius in the western sea’ – from Mercator: the man who mapped the planet by Nicholas Crane
Here’s a little something I nicked from kinkywolfgang on The Word blog
How to Create Your Debut Album
1 – Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 – Go to Random quotations: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
If you want to do this again, you’ll hit refresh to generate new quotes, because clicking the quotes link again will just give you the same quotes over and over again.
3 – Go to flickr’s “explore the last seven days” http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
Put it all together, that’s your debut album.
So, pop-pickers, may I draw your attention to my latest opus:
Vistilia
To argue about them
Now you try.
When I was 17, Miss Webb took the A Level French group to Paris. This was an occasion of many firsts in my life: first trip abroad, first holiday away from parents, first stay in a hotel, first flight in a plane, and and so on. It was not, however, my first experience of unrequited love: that had happened when I was five and David threw my valentine’s card in the bin without even reading it. And that pretty much set the tone of my relationship with lurv for the next decade or so.
Anyway, on the Paris trip the object of my moonstruck gazing was Richard. He – tall, dark and fairly handsome – was however largely oblivious of me – small, mouse and fairly gruesome (it took me a while to grow into my beauty but I did, in the end) – choosing instead to set his cap at my roommate Julie of the dark ringlets and womanly curves (in retrospect, I can see his point).
However, he and I did discover a mutual love of Curved Air (though in his case, I think it was more a love of Sonja Kristina than the band in toto) and fell to talking about music in general. And it was thus that I learned for the first time of Fairport Convention. Richard loved them with an all-consuming passion and, in order to give me a taste of fairporty goodness, taught me the words to Matty Groves. Yes, all the words – well, we were in Paris for a whole week.
When we got home, I went out and bought History of and a lifelong love of folk music was begun.
So I went to Paris hoping for a snog, but instead I got this great, rich, wide musical tradition. I think I got the better part of the bargain.
Cheers Richard.
Ever eager to escape the thrall of that specky bloke, I have elected to eschew Photoshop in favour of GIMP for the purposes of gussying up some of m’ photos.
So, software downloaded and installed, I hied me to Borders in Churchill Square in search of a manual or two. Checked the (as usual, monstrously untidy) shelves – no manuals visibly (though rank untidiness made visibility difficult). Accosted sales assistant – sales assistant, haughty and dismissive, responded in a manner that suggested that I (a) am an idiot for daring to want such an arcane item and (b) should be horsewhipped for daring to waste his precious time with such an outre request.
He could, he lukewarmed, probably order something in if I really wanted it. No thanks, says I, I’ll get it from Amazon (which, of course, I probably won’t, as they are running dogs of capitalism, but he doesn’t know that and it gave me a frisson of pleasure to toss this threat in his haughty and dismissive teeth). And so saying, I turned on my heel and consigned Borders to my (increasingly long) list of shops I boycott because they are utterly rubbish.
Then I went to Waterstones. They didn’t have any GIMP manuals either, but at least they had the decency to be humble and apologetic about their shortcomings. So I bought coffee and cake and two expensive books about photographic technique.
See, that’s how a good bookshop works – they treat me nice, I spend lots of money.
And they gave me extra loyalty points for using my own carrier bag.
That said, I did go back to Borders this morning for breakfast in the Starbucks concession … but I didn’t buy any books, honest!
The least we can do is wave to each other 
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