Another newsletter, for habitual writing.

Reading

I finished Adunis’ Songs of Mihyar the Damascene on the day of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Apparently a revolutionary work in the field of Arabic literature, up to the period in which Adunis wrote Mihyar, its heresy is wistful and crunchy all at once, windswept with a near-tectonic feeling of the body melding with the landscape. The Penguin version I read was translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and Ivan Eubanks, and Abu-Zeid has been very open in various fora about the strange journey his particular translation of the poems took to publication. This translation was a 16-year task that coincided with a separate translation by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard, whose beginning preceded that of Abu-Zeid and Eubanks’. Interestingly, Abu-Zeid mentions in an interview with ArabLit that Adunis has consciously cast himself before as an Arabic Nietzsche, which put the collection in a fascinating new light after I had zipped through it. Adunis’ heterodoxy, again reportedly revolutionary even syntactically for Arabic poetry, comes across as liberating, even spiritual in its own right. A great deal of the collection is first-person, an act of seeing oneself in the curvature of the earth and its attendant natural terrors. “I have no limits, I have no final shore”, he writes. Not only dignity, but proud temerity.

I had also been pre-reading several apparent contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature, a weird institution, but one that has been on a hot streak recently. Gerald Murnane, bookies’ favourite before Han Kang took the medal, has been keeping me company in the occasional time before sleep with his Collected Short Stories from publisher & Other Stories. Like Adunis, Murnane has a feel for the landscape of the body and his Australia: in ‘First Love’, the slope of Mount Macedon sits level with his face in the train compartment from which the narrator writes a study of a spatial past that does not exist. Murnane’s prose is often lauded for being unaffected and straight-laced. It sometimes carries a similar cadence to children’s nursery rhymes or a mnemonic, a Seuss-like repetition that yet masks complex internal worlds with studied histories. In the collection’s very first story, ‘When the Mice Failed to Arrive’, Murnane writes as a school teacher beset by feelings of guilt for failing to fulfil a promise to his nine-year-old students, for whom he expresses a repressed, almost incidental erotic desire. In another, ‘Stone Quarry’, Murnane builds an internecine, obtusely funny creative writing retreat in which communication between members must be buried beneath layers of literary obfuscations shared amongst the writers in the Waldo Group. A glance freighted with meaning cannot be acted upon in conversation, but externalised and buried in the fertile peat of fiction, to the point where it cannot be unambiguously deciphered, lest members be ejected from the Group.

As part of this Nobel Prize preparation, I also read Can Xue’s Frontier. Can Xue has been odds-on favourite for several years, thus killing her actual chances of winning. Bookies’ wisdom, forum-based speculation and perennial Nobel bridesmaids didn’t produce, at least not in my trawling, any mention of actual winner Han Kang. Can Xue, on the other hand, appears to be taking her place alongside Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, forever outside the Swedish Academy, perhaps looking in, or perhaps in one of her exquisite dreamworlds. As I expand upon below, Can Xue’s book coincided unexpectedly but nicely with my long-overdue rewatch of Lost. Similarities are surprisingly abundant. In both works, an ensemble feels its way through unfamiliar dynamics in a consciously generic location rife with logical anomalies - Pebble Town and The Island, respectively. Purgatorial and weird, both locales feature an omniscient, sinister organisation modelled off company towns, but imbued with a sci-fi mystique. And in both, the promise of transformation burrows its way into the conflicted psyches of each work’s characters, testing their capacity for adaptation. In Can Xue’s case, of course, the mystery of Pebble Town is congruous with the riddles of her prose. She will often write in purely and externally descriptive terms, then push in for a jarringly subjective and sudden feeling of discomfort or joy, or a thought taking hold of a character seemingly at random. The prevailing theme, like in Lost, is not one of menace but of curiosity, albeit without the TV show’s End of Genre playfulness with video game, point-and-click mechanics. Can Xue’s scenes play out as clashes between objective and subjective prose that match the struggle between habitual and surreal taking place in Pebble Town. If she ever wins the Nobel, it will have been worth the wait.

Finally, I let myself sink into the quagmire around the Budget with some helpful pre-reading from Brett Christophers on Rentier Capitalism, which rather succinctly lays out the siphoning off of all the money the government supposedly doesn’t have. Economist Stephanie Kelton reminds us a government deficit is someone else’s surplus; Christophers explains who that might be right now: I don’t know about you, but it certainly isn’t me.

Watching

Lost was a show I knew an insane amount about before ever watching it. Aged 13, I was obsessed before even seeing a single frame of the show. The premise was magnetic, the mechanics undeniable. 20 years after it first aired, at its best, it is probably perfect TV: thinking in the long-term, playing with its canvas, as comfortable waiting for a well-earned payoff as it is staging individual dramas. It really is a journey-not-destination show. My fiancee, who has never seen it, remarked recently that no other show has made her gasp this often, this genuinely, ever. And, of course, it’s hard to watch it now and not be amazed by how, even as it really embodies the platonic ideal of televisual drama, its actual visual sense is astounding. Lensed by brilliant eyes like Larry Fong and Michael Bonvillain, frames are often dominated by rich greens, warm oranges, murky browns. Calling it cinematic would be to deny just how much it offers a brighter path for such a decadent medium as TV, but its sense of composition and rhythm has been missing from much of what came after, perhaps because there haven’t been - could never be - any real successors to it. Even its actual creative follow-ups - Fringe was a major-key X-Files re-jig for JJ Abrams, The Leftovers a slower burn for Lindelof - couldn’t quite match it.

I mentioned End of Genre above, a concept I’ve been stewing over for a minute. In my teaching work, I’ve noticed multiple Media Studies specifications making reference to “the dynamic and historically contingent nature of genre”, even at a secondary school level. Whilst I don’t think exam boards are quite in tune enough with someone like Frederic Jameson (RIP) to have concluded that capital’s slow disintegration has meant that genre is fragmented to the point of absurdity, it seems undeniable that the replicable mechanics of genre convention are, if you will, a corpse to be scanned. In Lost’s case, the show couldn’t resist cannibalising spiritually resonant sources like Lord of the Flies, point-and-click games, John Carpenter, adventure serials, nuclear-era conspiracies, New Age whatsits, and Hideo Kojima games (on that last one, a high-angle shot from season 2 episode ‘Maternity Leave’ staring down into a new Dharma station (a new level?) is compositionally almost identical to the final shot of Metal Gear Solid disc 1!)

The effect is one of characters trapped in a terrarium of 20th-century genre mechanisms: sprung traps, locked doors, minigames and puzzles, weapon inventories, unseen enemies, scientific testing, videotape surveillance, microfilms. All the while, the show consciously uses this non-space as its own blank slate for the characters to regrow inside, yet without blunt dramatic incident foregrounding traumas escaped that would pervade any equivalent show made today. At the opening of ‘What Kate Did’, this lost (!) ethos is demonstrated in such simple terms it made me exclaim, “It’s so simple! You don’t even need dialogue!” Jin comes out of his tent, followed closely by Sun, who hugs him tight in a beautiful dolly around the pair, reunited after several episodes apart. Jin glances sideways, catching Hurley’s mischievous eye. Hurley gives him a thumbs-up. Pathos and humour, all done with elegant visual language, and not a word. When did we lose our way?

I’ve heard Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge questioned for not bashing enough heads. I do believe genre cinema has indeed been captured by a certain type of consciously level-headed, liberal filmmaker, thrown into a feedback loop of its own history but with more lateral tracking and slow zooms attractive to a selection of boutique distributors - Netflix, NEON, A24, etc. Saulnier is hardly innocent of this, but Rebel Ridge couches its non-lethality (for the most part) in its milieu quite convincingly. The anchor for Aaron Pierre’s character is the pragmatism undergirding the performance from scene one, an obviously jacked up traffic stop that robs Pierre’s Terry of the $30,000 needed to post his cousin’s bail and get them on the road to the good life. His choice not to, as it were, Firebomb the Walmart is well-tuned and perfectly believable, which makes the film’s actual turn towards a more “complicated” liberal outlook even more jarring, a last-minute swerve that neuters the movie. Otherwise, it’s fairly taut stuff, a rat-run through a kind of legal-moral framework of deals fulfilled and debts owed.

I caught a few titles from the London Film Festival. Alain Guiraudie continued to follow his own path in Misericordia, a rather difficult film to summarise. I think what makes him so fleet as a filmmaker, though, is an insistence, a genuine conviction to stacking implausibility upon implausibility until it becomes habitual. Carson Lund’s Eephus was hardly unrelated in the realm of quotidian repetition, although this was, by contrast to Guiraudie, exactly what I expected: relaxed, time-sensitive, Linklater on a downer and without one eye pointed towards Tinseltown. Fire of Wind was the real find, though. Marta Mateus thanks Pedro Costa in the credits of this one. See if you can spot the throughline: a group of vineyard workers leave work as a young employee accidentally irks a bull that causes the workers to race up into the trees. There, they reminisce in starkly lit, reflector-heavy singles and doubles about their lives as labourers and the history of Portugal, which comes to life around them as the bull continues to flail wildly. This isn’t mere transplanting of Costa’s style, but that debt to the GOAT is no small part of why Mateus’ movie is so great.

Listening

I spent a good few hours on my birthday trawling South-East London’s record stores for oddities and gems, and found some worthwhile bits and bobs. I picked up Big Country’s first record, a seminal record for my mother whose trip to see the band as a teenager was her first live gig. The opening number especially is truly special: spacious, jangly, but possessed of a Celtic grandeur that makes it decidedly Uncool amongst the more cosmopolitan New Romantics of the time.

Also of interest: Urban Legendz #5, artist unknown. This double A-side was hidden away in the 12”s at Sound Vinyl, Crystal Palace and it is killer. The first side, ‘Got Some Teeth’, is a speed-techno jam remixing Obie Trice, but the second side is especially great, chopping the Amen Break at a tempo just a bit higher (and therefore better, of course) than most DnB stuff from what I can only assume is its time: there is no release date in the small morsels of information I’ve found online, but the actual disc and case looks pretty busted. All the same: a find.

Over the road at Lovebeat Records, tucked away at the edge of Haynes Lane Market, I picked up Svida’s Freerider EP, which has a great A-side reminiscent of Perlon’s microhouse blips and gurgles (Thomas Melchior especially). And at the Books and Record Bar in West Norwood, perhaps the most appropriate name for any establishment in London outside of The Shard or The Gherkin, I found a Tsunami album, which was recently repressed by Numero Group, but here appeared an original or at least older pressing.

Fennec’s last volume in his Nice Work series dropped the day before my birthday, providing some beautiful walking music between record stores. Of the three volumes, all EPs of four tracks each, this is probably top-down the best one: scratchy, deep, funky house, often built around simple piano licks lifted from the esoteric corners of Fennec’s record collection. Fennec was inspired to do the series by a 1985 book by David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear. In it, the two writers discuss the idea that art is actually a common, everyday thing, that all art not “Mozart-like” (because who is really like Amadeus himself?) is in some sense within everyone. The introduction states that the book “is about what it feels like to sit in your studio or classroom, at your wheel or keyboard, easel or camera, trying to do the work you need to do”. The killer simplicity of Fennec’s work over these three volumes has spoken to this ethos in an inspiring fashion similar to the feeling I get when watching Laida Lertxundi’s short films, or looking at David Hockney’s paintings. It’s the idea that art simply has to be made, as a matter of course: that it is a labour, a work, as well as all the rest. (I wrote about this once.)

In other new releases, the headlines have been a new album of guitar jams from Joshua Chuquimia Crampton; Taikuh Jikang’s brilliant Bird; basically anything new from GIDEÖN, but especially his Liturgies EP; Chat Pile!; another set of huge, mineral trance tracks from Kelly Lee Owens; earworm-y IDM on Gábor Lázár’s Reflex; a great return from Moin; and the incredible debut from ML Buch compatriot (that’s how you know it’s good), Molina.

I also caught myself being curious about the second brat redux from Charli XCX after I saw Bon Iver was on the remix of ‘think about it all the time’, but was pretty turned off by the whole thing even from the opening track. What makes Charli Charli is how much she can command an uncluttered space: perhaps the key reason the early stuff feels so limp is it overproduces a very charismatic, vocal fry-laden star, who sounds best on a soft autotune with perhaps five elements at most surrounding her. My fiancee finds a lot of her music overstimulating; fair enough. But it’s the sounds themselves, rather than how much they outnumber their emcee, that are so abrasive and current. Doing something as silly as, say, slowing down ‘mean girls’ or adding more Stuff to ‘club classics’ feels perfunctory.

Taking care of

We got a cat. He is a silly baby. I love him.