Kevin Macdonald's Life in One Day

A conversation I had with the outstanding Scottish film director Kevin Macdonald for The List magazine, in respect of Macdonald's new movie Life in One Day, is now online here.
One of the glories of Macdonald's work is that he can tell compelling stories that reach out to wide audiences without compromising the discerning, questing intelligence that informs his choices of what he does. For instance, he's not only an Oscar-winning documentary maker but also co-editor of a definitive source-book on documentary history, Imagining Reality. And though Life in One Day would seem as up-to-the-second and box-fresh as a documentary could be due to its association with and use of all the speed and facility that digital cameras and YouTube have to hand... still, Macdonald can speak easily of drawing inspiration from Humphrey Jennings' Listen to Britain and Nikita Mikhalkov's Anna From 6 to 18.
And then you look aside from the intimate marvels of Life in One Day to the mud and muscle and glorious scale of Macdonald's upcoming feature film The Eagle... This is quite some career in cinema taking shape, you'd have to say.

Possessions of Doctor Forrest: A cover! And a comradely mention

Over at Amazon my new novel is now properly attired for its upcoming debut on June 2 2011. Meanwhile the excellent Australian novelist and critic James Bradley, author of The Resurrectionist and a co-oarsman of mine on the Faber fiction list, was kind enough to mention Doctor Forrest in his picks from the prospects for 2011 (and also to cite Crusaders as 'one of the more striking debuts of 2008').

Return of the Bookhugger!

My so-called 'regular column' is back, as trailered, and another one will follow hard upon at some point this month, inspired by Jonathan Powell's excellent The New Machiavelli.
Just to elaborate on a point left hanging in the column, to do with batting technique. If my admiration for Kim Hughes and his style at the crease had carried over analogously to the England First XI of the time c. late 1970s-early 1980s, then my hero ought to have been David Gower, similarly blond of curl and insouciantly ready to show off his range of shots. And yet Gower always looked a bit too enamoured of himself, not even terribly bothered when dismissed. He seemed to think he was taken care of in this world, and sure enough he was proven right.
No, the man for me was Nottinghamshire's Derek Randall, whose international career was as supported by his fielding brilliance just as Mike Brearley's was by his captaining skills. Randall was a batsman of fidgety and erratic brilliance, a cheerful/'daft' fellow by repute (as in the photo, doffing his cap to Dennis Lillee after a bouncer - a trick Kim Hughes might have tried.) But Randall was also somewhat neurotic in habits and superstitions, always likely to drive his fans into anxieties of their own. He seemed to play entirely on instinct and confidence. When these were there, runs flowed. When absent... well, his feet could be leaden at the crease, and he was out leg-before without score probably more often than any other England batsman in history.
I'll remember and cherish him always, though, as below:

Hammered at the tills, from dawn to dusk

Having lately moved my fiction into the realm of the supernatural I suppose I ought to be more comfortable abiding in a place of darkness and desolation... And yet a shadow looms that I fear may engulf me - good God, all of us! And that is the rise in the general level of prices of goods and services, and the consequent erosion in the purchasing power of our money. Yes, inflation.
FT Alphaville brought me the grim, grim news today:
According to the Office for National Statistics, air transport, rising petrol, diesel, gas and food prices were the most significant drivers to the increase in annual inflation between November and December.
Transport: prices, overall, rose by 3.6 per cent, the largest ever monthly increase on record... fuels and lubricants where prices rose by 2.8 per cent, the largest increase for a November to December period since 1996...
Housing and household services: prices, overall, rose by 1.4 per cent, the largest ever increase for a November to December period. The largest upward effect came from gas where average bills rose due to some of the major energy suppliers increasing their tariffs in December 2010...
Food and non-alcoholic beverages: prices, overall, rose by 1.6 per cent, the largest rise for a November to December period on record. The upward effects within this category were widespread with the most significant coming from fruit and vegetables...
Obviously the trick is not to panic - stay under your own roof (if said roof you can afford), eat less healthy stuff and try to cook it with a naked flame, while drinking strong lager, which remains reassuringly inexpensive. Sleep with the candle lit, and maybe that will keep the wolf from the door...
Iain Martin of the WSJ, as often, frames it well: "The politics of this are thus highly dangerous for ministers. They are trapped, between an independent central bank that focused too much on narrow inflation targeting in the boom years and now says it doesn’t matter because higher inflation is just a blip, overextended debt-laden consumers who want interest rates low to keep their show on the road, and hard-pressed savers (many of them older, and likely to vote) who are being fleeced..."

'No tears in baseball!'

My monthly Bookhugger column will resume next week after a short and unplanned winter break, and I’ll be writing about a fascinating biography of the former Australian cricket captain Kim Hughes: a dashing batsman in his day but, sadly, remembered more for the tears he shed at the press conference where he resigned the captaincy after his team took a pasting off the invincible West Indies side of 1984.
Boys don’t cry, as they say generally, and I guess Australian boys in particular are made to fear reprisals and eternal scorn should they succumb, not least when the matter in hand is sport. It’s a mite more acceptable/manly, I think, to shed a small tear in victory than in defeat – even to let go with the full waterworks, like Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins after the 1982 world snooker final. Or if, say, some staunch veteran colleague is hanging up his boots or hearing his last hurrah – in which case a fella on the field or in the stands could be permitted to look a little dewy round the eyes. But the idea that as a brawny sort of a sportsman you might be really and truly upset about something bad that’s happened... Jesus mate, you might as well walk yourself round to the Ladies’ Room for a session with the powder-puff, before your comrades or the team’s supporters drive you there with burning torches.
One alleged exception to this rule is Paul Gascoigne, whose desperate, blinking, red-eyed blubbing following his yellow card in the semi-final of Italia 1990 was widely felt to speak for the feelings of England fans as they contemplated a quite colossal disappointment.
For me the most utterly wrenching instance of a sportsman’s visible distress is without doubt Pete Sampras’s wracked effort to play the fifth set of his 1995 Australian Open quarter-final against Jim Courier, the tears streaming down his face even as he prepared to serve. His coach Tim Gullikson had been diagnosed with four separate brain tumours that week, and Sampras had been running daily between the tournament venue and the hospital. In the match, having gone two sets down he fought back to level, whereupon some airhead in the crowd thought it a considerate exhortation to yell, ‘Come on Pete, do it for your coach...’
The story is told in the documentary excerpt below, and watching Sampras wrestle with it , even now, is highly affecting. The highest level of individual sport is a lonely, intense, super-concentrated universe with scarcely an inch of space for error of weakness. I had though Sampras overpoweringly dull, if brilliant, as a player, and so hardly thought of him as a person, but post-1995 I became his keenest fan, the revelation of his deep feeling helping me belatedly to see him as the supreme athlete and competitor he undoubtedly was.

Our Best-Loved Authors... and Prospects for Books in 2011, Mine Included...

If all proceeds according to plan then I will have two books published into stores during 2011. My novel The Possessions of Doctor Forrest, now in bound proofs, is set fairly squarely for June, and the revised/updated edition of my Sean Penn: His Life and Times will follow in the autumn, subject to Mr Penn’s movements about the globe and also, I suspect, the international release schedule of Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place. By any measure this double publication is a pleasing prospect for a writer, albeit with attendant/irreducible anxieties. A book is like a small child in some respects, you push it out into the world and hope that a goodly few people – someone, at least! – will take a shine to it. But I’m very thankful for what I’ve got, be assured. The making of books contains its own profound satisfactions, so long as one feels content that the final text represents what one actually intended to write. (I will never forget sitting with my then editor in 1998 as he and I turned admiringly in our hands the first copy off the presses of what was my first book, Alan Clarke. ‘Better than a PhD, eh Richard?’ he said to me with a grin. And there was no doubt in my mind.)
Of course, the high privileged gleam one might see across the surface of one’s own published endeavours can easily lose its sheen in the event of a sluggish take-up from book-buyers, or a disparaging review that people actually read. All the more reason why one must first make sure to please oneself: you never can be certain anyone else will show to your party, so you may as well enjoy a quiet moment to yourself.
In terms of making the reading public aware of these forthcoming publications: the Penn book will likely be linked, as I say, to whatever Sean is doing this year, and I expect to be running a long exclusive interview with the great man in the Telegraph newspaper come late summer/autumn. With Doctor Forrest we will just have to see what the readers of those early proofs think to it, though already I've been encouraged by the outcomes of submissions made for film/television rights and to foreign language publishers – news to follow as it’s all confirmed. But before this month is out I expect to be launching a new blog devoted solely to the novel, www.drforrest.co.uk: what I hope will be a sort of grand Gothic concordance celebrating the sort of literary/filmic/mythological darkness that informed the novel.
In such ways and by such means one tries to deliver one’s letters... The future of the book as a physical object/commodity is of course a much debated matter now, e-reader sales being tracked with particular zeal this Christmas. The user-friendliness of the new touch-screen systems has made a dent, it seems to me, in the formerly staunch cadres of readers who insisted they would never give up on printed books (or at least never fall in love with squinting at words on a screen.) The future does seem to work, though, and one might say that a text is a text, its merits integral however it is consumed. But I intend to treasure every minute of my stuff being printed and bound between covers for as long as that process is viable.
There’s a very commonsensical reason why reports of the book’s demise continue to be exaggerated, and that is the gift impulse that Christmas elevates to fever pitch. As a friend of mine opined recently, if there were no more physical books what on earth would you give as a present to those friends of yours who don’t do fragrance? There has to be something chunky and wrappable to be put into hands on the special occasion. Hence, it seems, the regrettable failure of the Rubberbandits to withstand the X-Factor’s drive to #1 in Ireland over Christmas: evidently the Bandits sold a stack more downloads than Simon Cowell’s lackey, but their CD single just wasn’t in enough stores, whereas Whatsisface’s was everywhere, and with a picture on the sleeve.
However, as the dogs in the street know, the success of the Book-as-Gift is near-wholly dependent upon that picture on the jacket, and whom it depicts: hence, as the Bookseller reported today, “Jamie Oliver scored the final number one of [2010] with Jamie's 30-minute Meals easily outselling the second-placed title Michael McIntyre's Life and Laughing… Both McIntyre and Stephen Fry received sales boosts in the final week…”
I haven’t ‘read’ (or, rather, cooked from) one of Jamie’s books in some years, partly because his TV shows have declined in interest sharply of late. (I hazarded upon his 2010 Xmas Special, saw him sitting down in matey fashion with Jonathan Ross, and dived for the remote.) By contrast, to speak of another bestseller, Nigella Lawson keeps doing the same voodoo, sashaying fetchingly around a soft-focus West London as if she were not actually married to Charles Saatchi, whipping up yummy dinner-party-grade stuff in her kitchen with a requisite number of slatternly from-a-tin shortcuts. I won’t gripe, though, since her How To Eat, given again to my wife this Xmas after our last copy got pinched, is really excellent. And even as I was tutting over a repeat of her telly show one Saturday morning before Christmas, I was suddenly gripped to watch her whip up a blinding-hot green chilli salsa that she claimed to favour for cocktail hour round her place (or what, round mine, is the kids-abed moment when I crack a beer...)
So it’s no mystery to me why these authors have readers – though to these eyes Michael McIntyre’s stupefying success still has the feel of witchcraft or sorcery about it. But, in the manner of Dr Faustus and of Dr Forrest, I shall be practising hard at spells of my own in 2011.

Did the movies get tired or was it me?

In my memory Christmas used to be quite definitively a time for exciting movie premieres on the telly: for checking the seasonal Radio Times keenly to see who was showing what and when. That all seems an aeon ago. Still, if you don’t see that many new films (and last year I think I saw about six) then you do get to catch up a bit over the holidays, for better or (usually) worse. From last year I remember the ghastly experience of catching the Miami Vice feature film – incredible high-end po-faced rubbish, its low point (or alleged romantic high-spot) the risible sequence of Colin Farrell and Li Gong power-boating over to Cuba so as to consummate their ‘passion’. This year’s flabbergasting post-prandial watch was the last Indiana Jones movie on the BBC. Are you actually telling me that Steven Spielberg directed that? And David Koepp wrote it, and Cate Blanchett wanted to be in it...?
Of course, you might riposte that I really ought to have been watching a film that was intended for grown-ups; and you would be right. Yet out of the half-dozen new movies I saw last year, probably the two I liked best were Sherlock Holmes and The Wolf Man – a grim return, not least for a supposed cinephile who belongs to a private society of Robert Bresson votaries. Still, these days one feels more and more worn out come nightfall... This Christmas I even sat through Terminator: Salvation on foreign-subtitled cable, just waiting and waiting for one good crunchy fight between Man and Robot. I had to wait the entire picture, and when it came it was the exact same fight as in Terminator, or Terminator 2, or the two of ‘em spot-welded together. Needless to say the irony of this discovery was entirely at my expense.
To speak of higher things, franchise-wise, The Godfather Part III was on Film Four tonight. When I edited the Ten Bad Dates with De Niro book a few years back quite a few contributors took a pop at this movie, including the Coen Bros, who claimed ("let’s not kid ourselves") that it was "not so hot." True, the things that are wrong with it are very obvious. But the things that are right are very right.

Goodnight Pete Postlethwaite

This was the first one I saw him in - saw it at Cannes in 1988, in fact: one of those screenings you don't forget. 'Will you have a drink with me, Dad...?' Good as Postlethwaite was, I'm not sure he was ever better.

My brother took this too... Magic! Happy Xmas, see you in 2011

The Rubberbandits: #1 in our hearts, no messin'...

This blog is a longstanding subscriber to Viz comic, believes that a little coarseness in humour can go a long way - can even be morally necessary - and so it has keenly supported the efforts of Limerick's Rubberbandits to beat the victorious X-Factor candidate to Christmas #1 in Ireland, courtesy of their quite delightful 'Horse Outside' record. Alas, today's Irish Independent brought grim news:
"It was always going to be a David and Goliath struggle and it seems the dark horses have lost. With this year's Christmas Number One to be announced tomorrow, it looks as if 'X Factor' winner Matt Cardle will take the top spot ahead of Limerick Youtube stars Rubberbandits. Latest figures reveal that Cardle has sold 33,281 copies of his debut single 'When We Collide' ahead of Rubberbandits' 'Horse Outside' with 13,533 purchases, both physical and download. Last night the gap of almost 20,000 units was described as "insurmountable" by one industry expert, but a spokesman for Rubberbandits claimed there was still everything to play for until shops closed this evening..."
It looks bad. But sure the battle's not done 'til it's done, right fellas? Or how else would the Irish Republic have been won...?

The elusive essence of 'Conradian'

Over there on Faber Finds I've written a post on Joseph Conrad, whose marvellous A Personal Record (1912) Finds has made available between covers. I didn't mention Conrad's political disposition, which I usually never fail to point out in a writer, whether or not I care. (But Conrad was, of course, a pillar of reaction, with a bleak view of general humanity. Still, to his great credit he didn't - much - let that get in the way of his stories or deface his characters.)
I do say that there aren't any good film versions of his novels, and I daresay that remains the case: I never saw Mark Peploe's Victory despite wishing to, but then the whole venture was widely reckoned to be waterlogged from an early stage. Anyway, it's better, I think, that great novelists be undefiled by hopeless films; and Conrad's artful, atmospheric prose has often left admirers with cameras quite at sea over how to replicate that quality in images. Even one so gifted as Christopher Hampton, who has spent a fair bit of time engaged with this very difficulty, hasn't been able to crack it, as you may surmise from the trailer for his version of The Secret Agent (below).

Momus: This charming man...

1988 probably isn’t rated a banner year in the history of culture but I don’t think I’ve ever since read as many challenging books, seen as many slightly risque foreign-language movies, listened to as many Central European string quartets as I did over those twelve months. It was all to do with being 17, and the early stirrings of avidity for all things arty, the slight vertigo you get in starting to understand the real depth and breadth of what’s already out there in the world.

When you’re that age, though, you need encouragement, someone to give you a lead to follow. In this way I’m reminded of Nicholas Currie, the Scottish-born singer-songwriter who has for 25 years now written and recorded and engaged in all manner of superior cultural production under the name of Momus. In 1988 I discovered his early albums Circus Maximus, The Poison Boyfriend and Tender Pervert; and for a boy who was studying Ancient History, imagining what Japan was really like, and beginning to alphabetise his Penguin Modern Classics... well, it was a revelation to discover a songwriter who knew how to mix high culture, esoterica/erotica and intimate personal confession with such well-turned scurrility.

I wrote Currie a number of fan letters to an address printed on the back-sleeve of Tender Pervert, all of which he replied to very patiently and amiably, and the effect of all my gauche questions for him was that he pointed me in the direction of an awful lot of good reading and looking and listening that was hitherto alien to me. Certainly it was at his suggestion that I read Gide and Bataille, looked at Picabia and Dix, heard Schoenberg and Jacques Brel and The Threepenny Opera.

In the summer of 1990 I made a pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Festival to see a rare production of one of Mishima’s modern Noh plays, directed, if I remember rightly, by the great Yukio Ninagawa. I remember how not particularly surprised – though very pleased – I was when I clocked that Momus was sitting in the row in front of me. (Even in the dark his profile was very distinctive.) I went up to him afterwards and said hello – something of a miracle, as all through my adolescence you could hardly get a word out of me without using pliers – and he was very pleasant, as you want people to be when you’ve admired them from afar.
Momus has kept on writing and recording and getting up to all sorts. He blogs at iMomus. In this interview on YouTube he gives an interesting account of his career against the shifting backdrop of independent music labels over the last three decades. The promo clip below is a rather Neil Tennant-ish number that was probably the closest Momus came to a hit record in the UK.

NUFC: Loveless Marriage, Divorce Too Expensive

Admirable professionalism from the Newcastle United team this weekend, carefully worded responses to media from Captain Nolan, and exactly the right response from the fans at the game – all the way to the final whistle and the segueing effortlessly from cheers for a top performance/three points to renewed jeers for that minty pair of toe-rags still squatting in the board-room of this club. The Match of the Day cameras kept looking for Ashley’s pie-eater grins, but the microphones must have been pointing the wrong way, i.e. not at the Leazes End. Memo to Ashley & Llambias: we wish most earnestly and urgently that you could live your dream, get shot of us and go catch your effing taxi. Yet you persist (like morons, really) in going quite the wrong way about making NUFC appear an attractive saleable entity. Thankfully there are some footballers at this club, many of them improved immeasurably under the management of Chris Hughton, and yesterday it was clear they were still playing for him. Moreover we were lucky it was Liverpool visiting: a club clearly in an awful lot of bother. Had it been Blackpool or Blackburn or Wigan, strangely enough, I expect we’d have lost. The next four games are looking tough, though, with Spurs and Citeh in the middle of the sandwich. Over to you then, Alan Pardew. Or ‘Sort it out, Curbishley’, as I believe some comic genius sat near the NUFC dug-out addressed the new ‘gaffer’ on Saturday...

Dovegreyreader, too, tips Doctor Forrest...

The estimable dovegreyreader wrote a very kind and considered notice on my Crusaders back in February 2008, and I'm pleased to (belatedly) catch up with the news that she's keeping the faith in my stuff, by way of her preview of a few 2011 fiction lists (amusingly headlined 'Reasons to be Cheerful about Publishing'...) in which she highlights The Possessions of Doctor Forrest (scroll down) amid the Faber schedule.
Picture above is, of course, of a forest - or a dark wood - or selva oscura, if you will...

High Passions at the Place for Lost Books...

I've been serially unfaithful to this blog over the last few weeks: it's the charm of novelty, I regret to say. The thing with Twitter has been cheap and easy and, in my defence, everybody's doing it... But closer to the Things We Do for Love has been my developing commitment to The Place for Lost Books, the Faber Finds blog. It's certainly more than a one-time thing as far as I'm concerned. That's why I've posted lately on subjects as varied as Tolstoy's eminence, Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood', the eerie appeal of J.Sheridan Le Fanu, and F.R. Leavis's place amid the intellectual feuds of Cambridge English. I consider all this to be meaningful labour, moreover it's an outright pleasure to have a remit to write about such subjects, with the Faber Finds list offering all the riches it does. And I could affirm all of this by appending a picture of George Eliot, say, to this post - bearing in mind that Eliot is one of the few English novelists who might be compared to Tolstoy, and that Leavis wrote with particular distinction on Middlemarch. But instead, I'm going with this pic (above) of the recently deceased and sadly missed Ingrid Pitt, one of whose finest hours came in an otherwise disreputable Hammer Films version of Le Fanu's 'Carmilla', of which more in the Le Fanu post above. I'm all for the high road, you understand, but sometimes the low one also gets you there, or thereabouts...

My brother took this...

Splendid, isn't it? Feels like it could be Moscow or Helsinki or Stockholm, right? In fact it's the Market Road estate in Holloway, London. Full story here.

Bookmunch tips Doctor Forrest...

My morning is made, because the Bookmunch site has given a generous nod to The Possessions of Doctor Forrest in its politely-titled '50 Books You Might Want To Read in 2011':

"After blowing us all away a couple of years back with his David Peace-esque political novel, Crusaders, Richard T Kelly is changing his game with The Possessions of Dr Forrest which promises to be a spine-tingling modern Gothic fable that mashes up two of our favourite doctors, Jekyll and Faustus. Am giddy about this one…"

Thanks very much, I'm giddy and all, not least on getting a mention in the company of Foster Wallace, Mistry and others.

(The image herewith is Egon Schiele's Semi-Nude Girl, Reclining, a print of which hangs on the wall of Dr. Forrest's octagonal bedchamber... It's that sort of novel...)

Blair/Hitchens & 'the heart of a heartless world...'

The public debate staged in Toronto last night between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens on the issue of whether religion is 'a force for good in the world' appears to have been won quite decisively by Hitchens. The New Statesman kindly offers a transcript in 3 parts. I consider these to be The Best Bits:
BLAIR:
- "What I say to you is at least, look, what we shouldn't do is end up in a situation where we say, we've got six hospices here, one suicide bomber there - how does it all equalise out? That's not a very productive way of arguing this..."
- [On what is 'the point' of religion] "Stimulating the impulse to do good, disciplining the propensity to be selfish and bad."
- "...if you are a person of faith, it's part of your character, it defines you in many ways as a human being. It doesn't do the policy answers, I am afraid. So as I used to say to people, you don't go into church and look heavenward and say to God, 'Right, next year, the minimum wage, is it £6.50 or £7...?' Unfortunately, he doesn't tell you the answer. And even on the major decisions that are to do with war and peace that I've taken, they were decisions based on policy, and so they should be, and you may disagree with those decisions, but they were taken because I genuinely believed them to be right."
HITCHENS
- "Religion forces nice people to do unkind things, and also makes intelligent people say stupid things."
- "The cure for poverty has a name, in fact. It's called the empowerment of women…Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has."
- "...there's a sense of pleasure to be had in helping your fellow creature. I think that should be enough, thank you."
And gentlemen, thank you.

Faber Finds: Robert Aickman

In my new day-job as overseer at the print-on-demand/ebook reviver of 'lost'/classic books known as Faber Finds, I've begun blogging on some of the treasures Finds has been restoring to readers, and today I addressed an author who's dear to me: Robert Aickman. If you don't know his work, and you're ready to be greatly unnerved, then all I can say is that a luxurious darkness awaits you...

Eurozone: "Struggling a bit, aren't they...?"

The two-handed satire of John Clarke and Bryan Dawe is new to me, but on this evidence - a skit on Eurozone debt in the style of Mastermind - I'll be looking out for it from now. (The Oz accents, I admit, add greatly to the pawkiness of the humour.)