Messy literary girls of eleventh-century China
I wrote about Li Qingzhao for the Spectator!! Am using my literary cache and the skills (?) from my degree for the greater good. The research for this was so much fun. I think if Rookie magazine were still alive they would have done a feature on LQZ and used her to convince precocious teen girls to drink themselves to death. I tried REALLY REALLY hard to translate that Song dynasty historical pun challenge into English but was too tricky to do it in a pithy, Spectator-ready way :(
London Fields by Martin Amis
This was my first Martin Amis even though we’re birthday twins - I also read my first book by his dad (Lucky Jim) earlier last month. I get what London Fields is trying to do, ie. erode common notions of truth as we bump and grind slowly into the impending Y2K disaster, but I still didn’t actually like the novel that much. I thought it relied far too much on classic Nabokovian device (clever character names, unreliable narrator enigma) but completely sidestepped Nabokov’s best bits, ie. disarming descriptive insight, in favour of a self-congratulatory doom spiral of repetition. Also mirrors my experience with Jonathan Coe’s Brexit writing, ie. everyone in the book is a joke, but you can still sense a level of depth to the middle-class characters that doesn’t exist in the characterisation of the working class. If there’s a British writer who is good at NOT doing this then it’s Zadie Smith.
Some Came Running (1958) dir. Vincente Minnelli
Shirley MacLaine deserves to be adored for this - one of the best performances in that tricky cavity between classical Hollywood and Kazan. Some troubling direction from Minnelli, who benefits from CinemaScope scale but only manages to use it to its full potential in the film’s last fifteen minutes. Elsewhere there’s an overwhelming sense of flatness and ennui. The emotional climaxes have no symbolic weight to them, which means they’re swallowed by the film’s massive runtime - Lana Turner’s Peyton Place movie did all of the same things more effectively, despite also being long and widescreen. Could have been Bigger Than Life!!! Great jazz soundtrack.
La Notte (1962) by Michelangelo Antonioni
Antonioni sits with Hitchcock and Polanski on the top visionary rung of my directorial pyramid. He’s been there since I watched Zabriskie Point and had an epiphany about camera movement. Truly the eye conquers all, and his eye extends really really far. Nothing much happens in La Notte, as in L’avventura and L’eclisse - the wandering/floating world (ukiyo!!) is the whole point. The actors might wander out of sight (and mind) but they never wander out of frame. To Antonioni the modernist wanderer is centrepiece, and it is the rest of the world that is wrong and must angle itself to fit. I am an enthusiastic walker in both country and city, and a section of this film made me recall favourite trespass-y memories - stumbling across baby foxes in someone’s cavernous garden, being nearly run over in the dark by massive Range Rovers, walking very confidently into Liz Truss’s press conference and being asked to leave, being threatened in rural Taiwan by rabid dogs, etc (these are the sort of memories you’re supposed to have from your early twenties, and I say modernist but when I walk in the hills where I grew up it feels very Hardy-slash-Gone to Earth). Think this was at the crux of Blow-Up too and didn’t get it the first time.
Walking to the Secret Ceremony house!!!!!!
OMG and speaking of trespassing… (legally a joke, but it is MY LIFE AMBITION to go inside). You too can play at being a Freudian Mia Farrow. Will only cost you a 15-minute ramble from Holland Park tube station and loads of stares from some of the poshest people in London. The house hasn’t changed at all since 1968 and is very vibrant in real life. It’s a crime that there isn’t a plaque outside - we were exceptionally lucky to have had Joseph Losey in the UK and he deserves respect for the magic wasteland of meaning he made out of this country, in SC and also in Accident and The Servant. Camille Paglia loves the film too and wrote about her fixation on all the same scenes I fixated on, like the ones with Elizabeth Taylor against the bright green tile… but I bet she hasn’t BEEN TO THE HOUSE!!!
Also…
Writing some exciting challenging things but can’t say now what they are. If I’m busy that’s the explainer. Also I’ll be on TV in a few months but I can’t tell you why yet. Is this how celebs feel all the time?
In more boring news, I’m still writing my dissertation - I am at word count and retooling the bits I think are crap. Turns out it’s really hard to write a concise synopsis of two films at once. Would rather be doing my cutting-edge analysis re. The Midcentury Aspect Ratio and The Sirkian Staircase Death but am stuck doing this. I have spent lots of time listening to Italian film soundtracks in order to fend off madness. (This is a pattern in my life - remember when I wrote a verse novel and spent the entire time listening to Bruno Nicolai’s trashy, urgent, hypnotic Eyeball?) Have got a Letterboxd list where I log all the soundtracks - the best are the lounge-y ones written for ‘mondo’ sex documentaries. I haven’t seen any of the films but I LOVE the music! Did you know that the Muppets song Mah Nah Mah Nah actually originated on the soundtrack for a steamy film called Sweden - Inferno and Paradise?
The pro of doing my dissertation is that I get an excuse to reread some old Hollywood stuff!! I forgot how absolutely luminous (and FUN) Jeanine Basinger’s writing was, and was a pleasure looking for citations in the early chapters to her Star Machine (if you’re still reading and looking for an intro nonfiction book about classic Hollywood, I would start here!). Also spent some time today rooting, with considerable delight, through a biography of Joan Crawford. Experience has shown me that historians of classic American cinema tend also to be fantastic writers, whether writing for academics or for general audiences. Specialists in other fields are not always so. I think this is because the big studios KNEW wit and knew who to hire for it - if you watch enough fast-talking lady comedies you’ll absorb their vocab and syntax. Maybe I should have just done a film degree (LOL would have been a disaster)
I can play Soma by the Smashing Pumpkins on acoustic guitar now, but I’m writing this from my parents’ house very far from my guitar and conveniently have no means to record it. Still it’s a beautiful song and getting the notes down in order makes me soooo happy. Can sight read but only the treble clef and still struggle with the B chord.
(This guy makes a professional-quality 90s house remix of an archival Madonna track every week, for nothing. He’s my hero. This one’s his best I think)