Another Bump in the Writer's Road

How fondly I look back on those happy, carefree days when I was still writing my book. It's been an uphill struggle ever since – first, getting it into book shape and print ready, and now, having achieved that, trying to get Amazon to do the heavy lifting for me. Despite being an all too frequent Amazon buyer, I cannot, it seems, become an Amazon seller. To establish my identity (as if they didn't know it already) I had to supply scans of my passport and a bank statement. Easy enough, you might think, but each attempt was rejected with the words 'could not verify' – and now, it seems, my time is up. I had a thoroughly discourteous message today telling me I could not be an Amazon seller, and any further communication on the subject would elicit no response on their part.
  So, what do I do now? I have the books, a hundred-plus of them, and it looks as if I'm going to have to become a freelance warehouseman if I want to shift them. Of course I've no idea what the demand is likely to be – I could end up with half of them unsold, in which case I wouldn't have much of a problem shipping the sold ones myself. But if there's a more substantial demand, I could be looking at a time-consuming and rather laborious job (might have to refresh my fork-lift truck skills). Are there any alternatives? Could I get anyone else to take these books off my hands and flog them for me (for a percentage)?
 Whatever happens, I'm doing nothing just yet. It can wait till after I get back from France (I'm off again on Wednesday), and then I'll announce the book to the waiting world. Meanwhile, if anyone's got any bright ideas, they'd be very welcome...

When Kenny Met Lenny

Last night I watched a long and richly depressing documentary on BBC2 – Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love, made by semi-gonzo film-maker Nick Broomfield. As the name suggests, its focus was the relationship between L. Cohen and Marianne Ihlen, the Norwegian girl he met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960. In a way, it's quite a sweet story about a loving relationship that lasted, off and on (mostly off), through both their lives, and resulted in some great songs. However, the film also made clear that the free-form hedonism of life among the expats on Hydra in the Sixties took a pretty terrible toll: less on the men (unless they succumbed, as some did, to the drugs and booze) than on the women and, especially, the children. Among the casualties was Marianne's own son (by writer Axel Jensen), who at the age of eight was dumped at A.S. Neill's madhouse of a boarding school, Summerhill, and who spent most of the rest of his life in mental institutions. 
  The poet Kenneth Koch, however, came through unscathed. He spent some while on Hydra in the Sixties (see 'The Departure from Hydra', 'With Janice', etc), where his path inevitably crossed with that of Leonard Cohen, whose later rise to fame as a singer surprised and bemused Koch. Cohen later suggested that Koch too should try his hand at being a singer. In an interview, Koch ruefully recalled the occasion:

'I met Leonard Cohen on the island of Hydra in Greece where Janice [K's wife] and Katherine age five and I had gone for a summer vacation. And we became very good friends. We travelled also to Turkey together, to Istanbul. I liked Leonard a lot and so did Janice. We saw each other then a few times after that, it was nice and intense, but never more than a day. After some years, we were already living on West 4th Street, Katherine must have been ten by then. I ran into him on a bus. “Leonard!” I asked him what he was doing and he said, “Don’t you know? I’m a singer.” He had been a poet and a novelist. I got him to tell me all about it. I invited him over to our place and he told me I should become a singer too. I should sing all my poems. It was wonderful because you met lots of women and made a lot of money and you got to travel around and it was very satisfying to sing your poems. I said, “That’s great, Leonard,” and of course I was interested. I said, “Leonard, I can’t sing.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I can’t carry a tune.” He said, “That’s good, that means no one else will be able to sing your stuff.” And I said, “Well okay, but also I don’t play an instrument.” He said, “You can probably learn — let’s try.” There wasn’t anything that made noise except a vacuum cleaner. I plugged in the vacuum cleaner and I thought I’d be more in the mood to sing if I stood up on a chair. He said, “Sing one of your poems.” I said, “There’s no music to any of my poems.” He said, “That’s okay.” I sang, with intermittent noise from the vacuum cleaner, “You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse” in a hillbilly voice.

Leonard interrupted me after a few bars I think they’re called — “You’re not serious.” Well there I was standing up on a chair and playing a vacuum cleaner. I stopped playing the vacuum cleaner and tried to be serious. He said, “I don’t believe you. Who are you singing to?” “Leonard, I’m singing to you, there’s no one else here.” “No — who in the audience. Who do you want to go to bed with after the show? Who are you addressing? Who do you want to like you?” “Twenty-two year old women.” “No. Everybody wants 22-year-old women. Sing to somebody else. You know who I sing to? 14-year-olds and 40-year olds.” I’m not sure those are the exact numbers — something like 14 and 40. I said, “Okay, I’ll try to sing to 14 yr olds.” But trying to sing my poems? It didn’t work too well. I said I’d try. At my age how can I get started? I can’t carry a tune, I don’t play an instrument, and I’ve never sung before. I was already 40 at least by then. “There’s one way you can help me.” And he said, “Anything, what is it?” “Are you going to have tributes on your sleeve, put me on the record jacket. Say, ‘Even the legendary Kenny has come out of retirement to praise Leonard Cohen.’” I figured that people who respond to this kind of thing are not exactly scholarly. He promised he would put this on the record cover. Months went by. I never heard from Leonard. I did receive from him this big rectangle, his record. On the cover was this girl (I don’t know if she was 14 or 40) rising from flames, somewhere in between, and on the back was Leonard, his lyrics, and no tributes. And no Kenny, and that was the end of another career, another attempt to become rich.'

Sounds of the Suburbs

The soundscape of suburbia has changed a lot in the course of my sentient years. More noise from cars, obviously, and planes (helicopters, too, around here), and things like electronic alarms and garden power tools that didn't even exist a few decades ago. Also the lack of whistling on the street, the clinking of milk bottles, the clop of horses' hooves... But equally striking – and, for the most part, equally deleterious – has been the change in the sounds of suburban nature. Those conquistador corvids now are everywhere, and their calls are far from melodious: the harsh cackles of magpies and jays, the raucous cawing of crows, the... actually I'll let the jackdaws off, I rather like their way of talking. All of these are birds that used to live in the country and rarely venture into town, but now they are dominant suburban species, and in terms of decibels exceeded only by the flocks of Ring Necked Parakeets that are constantly flying over, squawking at ear-splitting volume. These birds were, until quite recently, confined to a few colonies of escapees – or to the bird cages where they belong. Now they are everywhere, at least in southeast England. And another bird that in my boyhood was unheard of but is now ubiquitous, the Collared Dove, can hardly be commended for its (incongruously grating) call.  A good thing we still have the reliable cooing of wood pigeons all through the summer and beyond, and blackbirds singing beautifully into the evening. And one newcomer to suburbia, the now very abundant Goldfinch, makes a pretty, silvery sound.
  Overall, however, it's been a story of the loss of garden songbirds and their melodies – chaffinch, bullfinch, greenfinch, song thrush – and their replacement by cacophonous corvids and other makers of suburban noise. And what makes matters infinitely worse in my garden is the hideous din kicked up by those verminous tree rats we call Grey Squirrels. It took me a while to isolate this sound – I thought it was some peculiarly nasty variant of jackdaw or jay – but now I know: it's the 'squirrels' expressing their implacable aggression with their narrow but relentless, and relentlessly ugly, repertoire of angry chittering and furious repetitive scolding, on and on and on. If ever we needed another reason to hate these hugely destructive pests, here it is.
 But let's end on a positive note. A suburban bird we still have, thank heavens, is the swift (whose screaming call is not pretty, but has a rare evocative beauty all its own), and there's an excellent, and uncharacteristically short, piece on these wonderful birds in the London Review of Books. Here's the link... 

Robert Hunter RIP

Sorry to hear of another Grateful Dead death – lyricist Robert Hunter, who died on Monday, aged 78. Hunter (who, according to Wikipedia, was born Robert Burns) wrote lyrics that were sometimes not easily distinguishable from drug-soused drivel (did Dark Star really need words, let alone those ones?). But – and it's a big but – on the other hand – and it's a big hand – Hunter gifted the world the glorious Ripple, and Brokedown Palace, Box of Rain, Casey Jones, Friend of the Devil, Sugar Magnolia, Uncle John's Band, and this anthem of its strange times...

Efts

I met some efts the other day. They're young newts, at that stage in life when they look like large, slim tadpoles, but with feathery external gills as well as little fore and hind legs. We came across them in the local nature reserve, where a conservationist was doing some pond dipping, netting a wonderful array of wriggly little aquatic creatures, including freshwater shrimps, tiny fish, damsel fly nymphs, leeches (which don't wriggle but have their own, rather sinister way of moving) – and, yes, efts. Apparently this is the accepted zoological term for larval newts, though it used to be what everybody called adult newts, until the word started to die out some time in the 19th century. I was quite sure it occurred in Shakespeare (Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth?), but no, it seems not. One dictionary cites the use of 'eft' in the unlikely setting of A Spot of Ink (Une Tache d'Encre), the autobiography of the early 20th-century French novelist René Bazin (presumably in translation) –
'From time to time out of the depths of those submerged thickets an eft darts up.'
A rather lovely sentence, I think.

McEwan Goes Satirical

Our greatest living writer, Ian McEwan, is rightly famed for his legendary sense of humour and his wholly original and profound take on contemporary politics, so naturally one can hardly wait to read his new 'satirical novella' about Brexit (he's against it, I was startled to learn). It's called The Cockroach, and its big idea is a reversal of Kafka's Metamorphosis: a cockroach wakes up one morning and finds that he's been transformed into – wait for it... – the Prime Minister of pre-Brexit Britain (a 'modern Pericles', no less – who could he be thinking of?)! Only it's not Brexit that's dividing the country but the deep division between Reversalists and Clockwisers. Reversalists believe in a transparently absurd economic theory in which employees pay employers, retailers pay people to take stuff away, cops hand speeding motorists £50, etc – and, guess what, they've won a referendum! What to do?
Needless to say, this great publishing event earned McEwan an admiring interview on the Today programme. Happily I missed most of it, but heard the great man mocking the notion of sovereignty, which he clearly did not understand. No surprise there. 

Valadon

Born on this day in 1865 was the painter Suzanne Valadon. She is an intriguing figure, who came into the art world by the unusual route of being an artist's model – that's her in Renoir's famous Dance at Bougival (above). Born into poverty, Valadon began modelling at the age of 15, and at 18 gave birth to a son who himself became a successful painter, Maurice Utrillo. She never attended an academy but learnt how to paint by observing the methods of the artists for whom she posed – especially Degas, who, impressed by her early drawings and paintings, befriended and encouraged her.
  Like her near namesake Felix Vallotton, she was never seriously part of any school, and her work resists easy classification.

Her nudes and portraits, painted with a clear strong line and the special insights of a former model, are strikingly honest and direct, if sometimes awkward and  rarely elegant.

 She also painted some lovely still life and flower paintings, drew well, and was prolific throughout a long career.

Valadon, whose life is notably well documented, has long been a subject of interest to feminist historians, so it's rather surprising there hasn't been a full-scale exhibition of her work in London (there have been many in Paris). Maybe one for the Royal Academy?