#anecdotage

[petermorwood]

"Quality Street" sweets - TIL that...

...despite this particular brand of sweets appearing in my childhood most often at Christmas, historic costumes worn by characters on the tins were NOT a part of the widespread "Dickensian Christmas" look which appeared so often on cards and packaging.

Instead it's because the characters and their Regency costumes were inspired by a play by "Peter Pan" author J. M. Barrie.

The play was called "Quality Street".

And the tins are collectibles.

*****

A Christmas-related appearance of the sweets was mostly coincidental, though the empty tin from one year did often appear at the next, full of home-made mince pies or even an entire Christmas cake.

Large, fairly airtight tins are useful that way, especially at trapping the spirituous exhalations of cakes made in mid-September and "fed" weekly thereafter with spoonfuls of brandy, or whiskey, or rum (sometimes all three, alternated) until it was time for the armour-plating of marzipan and royal icing to go on.

It used to be a common belief at home that opening the tin containing an un-iced cake near a naked flame at any time after mid-November was more than the opener's eyebrows were worth.

The eyebrow thing never happened, because it was one of those family fables, but I do remember bringing one such Quality Street tin down to Anne McCaffrey's house when I'd been invited to stay.

It contained not a Christmas cake but one of Mum's famed Chocolate Gateaux of Doom (my name for it, not hers), made specially for that visit and whose recipe, what with the plain-chocolate sponge cake and the apricot-cream filling and the double-chocolate ganache icing, required most of a bottle of cognac.

Since this cake didn't have the sealant-and-spackle cladding of marzipan and royal icing, it also required refrigeration to "keep it calm". My car didn't even have air conditioning, so in transit the cake got quite, er, excitable.

How excitable, we soon found out.

When Annie's stable manager sauntered over and popped the lid, expecting to find some nice Quality Street choccies, she was instead hit in the face by a near-visible cloud of booze vapour (a gin-ie, perhaps, even though no gin was involved) and reeled back with a cry of "Jaysuz, does yer mother own a feckin' distillery?"

Had she been smoking one of her habitual thin roll-ups at the time, our family fable might have been proved true after all...

:->

[petermorwood]

I've had bad beer and good beer, and I've had bad cider and good cider. which is why I'll never come down exclusively on one cide or the other.

Terminology note: "hard" is never applied to cider on this cide of the Pond, since by definition "cider" is an alcoholic drink.

The only time it's hard is if it's been left in the freezer too long, and even then (assuming the bottle hasn't burst) there's always some viable liquid remaining, which is seriously hard stuff though no longer really cider any more.

*****

Freeze distillation, as Discworld fans will know, is the means of making suicider, the basic ingredient for Nanny Ogg's (in)famous scumble.

This is then distilled again properly - or at least very carefully - with a still, either before or after the addition of what in the gin trade are called botanicals. Where Nanny is concerned they more properly might be called biohazards and are, in any case, A Secret.

*****

The closest thing to scumble I ever encountered was Apfelbrand distilled from the apple orchard behind - appropriately enough - the fire station in a German village.

There was a wine festival, all the traditional guilds - fishermen, woodsmen, firemen etc. - had stands selling food and drink, and much fun was had by all even though @dduane and I were asked more than once "but why are you here?"

(Because the festival had been recommended by the owner of the Gasthaus we were staying in, one village over, though our German wasn't up to that much explanation. "Für Essen, Wein und Fest!" did the job, especially with a big grin while hoisting whatever food or drink happened to be in hand.)

I was admiring one of the fire-trucks when I got chatting - in school-level English and German - to one of the firemen. When I cautiously mentioned my Dad had been a fireman during the (ahem) war, that was when the schnapps came out, for toasting my Dad, St Florian and firemen everywhere.

"Bekämpfen wir Feuer, nicht Menschen." (I'm misremembering, but it was something like "Let's fight fires, not people.")

I don't know if that stuff hadn't been diluted for bottling yet or was being kept full-strength for adding to Jaegertee, but either way it had a burn like Stroh 80 rum and was An Interesting - though eye-watering - Experience.

{$-P

Nanny Ogg would have approved.

hard cider was invented when someone decided to make beer that tastes good instead of bad

[petermorwood]

Given their reputation for stinging people, I wonder who exactly was the first person to ever discover that nettles were edible?

Another of those mysteries lost to time, like "who was the first person to eat an oyster?"

The oyster one almost certainly originated in "if hungry enough, people will eat anything", so maybe the same experimentation-through-necessity thing applied to nettles?

*****

There could also be an element of petty vengeance following a day of getting thoroughly stung.

Like the time in summer 1976 when I was briefly stationed at RAF West Raynham, and on one particular day off went canoeing along a river in Norfolk.

Inevitably I tipped the canoe and the easiest way to right it - I know about turning it over and sloshing the water out, but this was EASIEST, right? - was to swim, pushing the inverted canoe ahead, to the river-bank.

Summer 1976 was incredibly hot, so...

I was wearing just Speedos, Ray-Bans, sun-block and a boonie hat...

Which meant that discovering the lush green of the river-bank was a chest-high thicket of nettles, on both sides, with no breaks in sight...

Was Not Fun.

By the time I was back in my canoe and paddling away from that river-bank I was NOT a happy camper, and would cheerfully have unloaded a bucket of instant sunshine over every nettle on the planet.

*****

I can well imagine some glowing, tingling, itching prehistoric hunter-gatherer chucking a huge armful into boiling water with a prehistoric cry of "See how YOU like it!" and discovering shortly afterwards that the nettles:

Smelled good;

Were no longer stingy;

Tasted good as well.

There are plenty of recipes on-line for nettle soup, from simple to elaborate. Come spring, when the greens are young and tender, put on a pair of gloves and inflict some culinary vengeance of your own.

:->

*****

How someone discovered that nettles could be treated the same way as hemp and flax in order to create a weaveable fibre is another question. More experimentation, probably.

*****

And now, for some reason, I've got an overwhelming desire to scratch...

[literaryvein-reblogs]

One Poem a Day: September

"beautiful" words related to September for your next poem/story

September - ninth month of the Gregorian calendar. Its name is derived from septem, Latin for “seven,” an indication of its position in the early Roman calendar.

Apple-polish - to use flattery or the doing of favors in order to win approval especially from a superior

Anecdotage - the telling of anecdotes (i.e., a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident)

Ardency - depth of feeling

Auburn - of a reddish-brown color

Autumnity - quality or condition characteristic of autumn

Bucolic - of, relating to, associated with, or typical of open areas with few buildings or people; idyllic

Cathexis - investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea

Ceres - the Roman goddess of agriculture

Churn Supper - a feast at the end of the hay harvest

Cider - fermented apple juice often made sparkling by carbonation or fermentation in a sealed container

Cornucopian - being more than enough without being excessive

Demeter - the Greek goddess of agriculture

Effulgence - radiant splendor; brilliance

Estivo-autumnal - relating to or occurring in the summer and autumn

Felicific - causing or intended to cause happiness

Fête - a lavish often outdoor entertainment

Gemütlich - agreeably pleasant; comfortable

Georgic - a poem dealing with agriculture

Harvest - the season for gathering in agricultural crops

Hearthstone - the place where one lives

Husbandry - the cultivation or production of plants or animals

Moon (away) - to spend in idle reverie; dream

Odeum - a small roofed theater of ancient Greece and Rome used chiefly for competitions in music and poetry

Prosaic - being of the type that is encountered in the normal course of events

Reposeful - of a kind to induce ease and relaxation

Rubicundity - ruddy (i.e., having a healthy reddish color)

Sapphire - a gem variety of corundum in transparent/translucent crystals of a color other than red; a deep purplish-blue color

Surfeit - an intemperate or immoderate indulgence in something

Torridity - parched with heat especially of the sun; hot

Victual - to supply with food

Sources: 1 2 3 ⚜ More: Word Lists

If any of these words inspire your writing, do tag me or send me a link. I'd love to read your work!

[edflet]

The book is called The Good, the Bad and Me: In My Anecdotage

[petermorwood]

This is excellent advice for the treatment (or apparent maltreatment, in linen's case) of natural fabrics.

Here's some additional info based on personal experience over many decades and numerous ways of doing laundry from ancient (well, early 1960s) to modern.

Wool. A splendid outer layer, since rain sits on rather than soaks in, but needs care when washing, and even more when drying. Don't wash a woollen garment on Hot, and definitely don't dry it that way. If you do, your favourite woolly pully will shrink to something for a child, and a child's woolly pully into something for a doll. I have done this, and it was not well appreciated except, way way back, by my small sister and presumably by her nattily pullovered favourite doll.

Cotton. Will indeed shrink a bit after washing and drying, but fortunately will stretch again during wear. Can be washed very hot to get rid of Those Annoying Stains, and by Very Hot I mean boiled. It'll still stretch back - eventually - and although sometimes uncomfortably snug during the stretching process, will nevertheless be nice and clean.

Silk. Usually expensive, so accordingly laundered with probably more care than it needs, since this is a fabric once used (in many layers, granted) as armour. Does Not Chafe, which is why it was worn as scarves by fighter pilots who had to keep turning their heads in case of The Hun In The Sun. "Silk hiding steel" is appropriate, because a lady with a Hermés (not "an 'ermes", you pronounce the H) silk scarf and something to weigh it with is not as unarmed as she seems.

Linen. The 600lb gorilla of the fabric world, only bettered by hemp. Can have a weave tight enough to carry water without dripping - especially after the weave soaks and swells - and a tensile strength enough to carry pounds and kilos of it. (You can still buy collapsible "canvas" - usually linen or hemp - buckets...) @dduane and I inherited a lot of Irish Linen from my Mum, some still in original boxes with original washing instructions. Those instructions were, more or less, "rub soap into stubborn stains, scrub thoroughly and boil until clean".

Where linen and hemp fabrics are concerned...

*****

Even though she had a succession of increasingly modern washing machines, Mum also had and occasionally used - or more accurately supervised my use of - some quite old-fashioned laundry equipment.

Linens with stubborn stains were indeed scrubbed thoroughly, using a block of hard soap then a washboard, and an impressive abs workout it was...

Then the scrubbed stuff was boil-washed in Mum's washing machine (which could reach a genuine 100°C rolling boil) before being rinsed, passed through the mangle (or wringer, more in this post) and pegged out on the washing-line to dry.

*****

As i hunted up illustrations I (re-)discovered a Terry Pratchett Discworld connection. Remember the "copper stick" used by Granny and Nanny to summon the demon in "Wyrd Sisters"?

"What are you going to try?" said Granny. Since they were on Nanny's territory, the choice was entirely up to her. "I always say you can't go wrong with a good Invocation," said Nanny. "Haven't done one for years." Granny Weatherwax frowned. Magrat said, "Oh, but you can't. Not here. You need a cauldron, and a magic sword. And an octogram. And spices, and all sorts of stuff." Granny and Nanny exchanged glances. "It's not her fault," said Granny. "It's all them grimmers she was bought." She turned to Magrat. "You don't need none of that," she said. "You need headology." She looked around the ancient washroom. "You just use whatever you've got," she said. She picked up the bleached copper stick, and weighed it thoughtfully in her hand. "We conjure and abjure thee by means of this—" Granny hardly paused – "sharp and terrible copper stick."

It's one of these, not made OF copper but meant for use IN a copper.

Mum had one, originally Granny's, which kept getting pinched to play the role of sword, baton or whatever, though its official purpose was to stir, untangle and finally remove laundry which had been boiled in a "laundry copper":

This one shows how it straddled two gas jets, but Nanny Ogg's copper had a fireplace space under the actual cauldron (though in summer she used it as a beer cooler).

These cauldrons were still called "coppers" even when more cheaply made of iron. It's another instance of how vacuum cleaners became "hoovers" and sticking-plasters became "band-aids" etc., etc., no matter what brand they really were.

"Boil", however, wasn't a figurative term. It meant what it said, and those thoroughly scrubbed linens (cottons, too) would bubble merrily for quite a while "until clean".

Coppers were also used for cooking, with perhaps the most famous literary instance being chez Cratchit in "A Christmas Carol":

“A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastry-cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding!"

Mum initially had a separate electric boiler - IIRC it was Burco brand, which still makes much smaller boilers for catering, though ours was never used for anything except laundry - but mostly I remember the boil being done in her washing machine.

More modern machines only go to 90-95°C, sometimes just 60°C, but when her Hoover was running at full belt, things got as lively as any pot on a hob even before the agitator started churning. Never mind closing its lid to avoid mess, when a boil-wash was taking place that lid was also a needful safety precaution against scalding splashes.

*****

Removal by copper stick was superseded by use of tongs, and Mum had a set just like these...

...though I don't think hers had such an apt name.

Stirring with the copper stick was replaced by washing with a posser, which pumped up and down, or a washing dolly, which rotated.

Both actions have been replicated by washing-machines, and though variants of the dolly rotation became almost standard in tub washers, the posser did appear in an early 20th-century hand-operated machine...

...as well as the Frigidaire "Jet Cone" washer...

...whose action, TBH, reminds me of certain non-laundry gadgets I saw many years ago in The Pleasure Chest on Santa Monica... :-P

Modernised possers or even original designs are still available today.

*****

Whenever you read in stories about avoiding trouble with laundresses, those devices along with scrubbing, wringing out and cranking mangles are why. Regular workouts with laundry equipment gave them the sort of muscles nobody wanted to provoke.

*****

I've already mentioned "A Christmas Carol" and, given the time of year (posted 22nd December 2024) this ought to end with another one, so...

As shepherds washed their socks by night, All seated round the tub, A bar of Sunlight soap came down And they began to scrub...

You're welcome.

:->

Here, a cheater course on caring for natural fibers!

1. Wool. Treat it like it has the delicate constitution of a Victorian lady and the conviction that baths are evil of a 17th century noble. (If I get in WATER my PORES will OPEN and I will CATCH ILL AND DIE.)

2. Cotton; easygoing. Will shrink a bit if washed and dried hot.

3. Silk; people think it’s like wool and has the constitution of a fashionably dying of consumption Victorian lady, but actually it’s quite tough. Can be washed in an ordinary washer, and either tumbled dry without heat or hung to dry.

4. Linen; it doesn’t give a shit. Beat the hell out of it. Historically was laundered by dousing it in lye and beating the shit out of it with wooden paddles, which only makes it look better. The masochist of the natural fiber world. Beat the fuck out of it linen doesn’t care. Considerably stronger than cotton. Linen sheet sets can last literal decades in more or less pristine shape because of that strength.The most likely natural fiber to own a ball gag.

[petermorwood]

Microwave Sponge Cake (eventually)

Long ago, @dduane and I had a Whirlpool combi microwave - micro, grill, fan oven - and It Was Great, big enough to use as a proper oven when what needed cooked in a proper oven was small enough that powering up the big proper oven in the cooker was a bit much.

Still with me...?

IIRC it was one of those Christmas presents where Mum, ever-practical, told us; "get yourselves something really useful but not too expensive (I did say practical!) and I'll go halves."

In 2016, after something like 15 years of pretty-well daily use for one thing and another, the old thing expired by stages, micro first, grill second, oven last - it made great bread up until the end - and went to recycling heaven.

*****

We couldn't find a one-for-one replacement (we needed a free-standing counter-top appliance, everyone was selling built-in), so until once was available (optimism) we bought an ordinary microwave.

NB, this and its successors were only used for ordinary microwave things like reheating, defrosting and dealing with freeze-cook stuff. They got nothing like the amount of use of the old combi, mostly because of being incapable of doing a lot of it. As things turned out, this didn't help much.

About eighteen months later, we had to buy another. If a microwave's enamel interior develops a crack (to this day I don't know how), moisture gets in, rust begins and the enamel pulls off the bare metal. That's when you get "sparking".

This demo is deliberate; believe me, when it's unexpected it's even worse.

A private welder show or lightning storm at the end of the kitchen counter when all you want is a hot cuppa is distinctly unsettling. Also, it's only going to get worse, and we could imagine - boy, could we - what "Much Worse" might look like.

To the recycle dump!

(NB, micros with stainless steel interiors don't seem to do this, probably because they're already tuned to deal with the bare metal.)

The replacement, another ordinary micro, Just Up And Died after eighteen months and, guess what, the quote for a check-up and replacements-if-required was as much as the price of a new one.

(Inkjet printers seem to operate on this principal too.)

To the recycle dump again!

We got a third new one (which BTW is still running just fine, because it's been downgraded to Extra, read on), totalled up what we'd spent on ordinary microwaves, said a few well-chosen words about planned obsolescence and the "Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Economic Inequality" and got ourselves a pre-pay credit card whose top-ups were dedicated to Get A Combi Again.

We didn't bother with GACA baseball caps.

That would have been silly.

I don't know if these cards exist in the USA; we treat them as the modern version of a piggy-bank...

...except that to get at the money you need two people acting in accord.

*****

And in 2021 we got one.

Okay, this next bit is going to read like an ad.

It isn't, because the appliance is discontinued. (Whirlpool FINALLY do something similar but not identical.) It's just enthusiastic users discovering there's even more to a gadget than expected.

*****

The New One even bigger than the old one, which had 28 litres capacity; the new one was 33 L (was .99 ft³, is now 1.16 ft³). In non-tech terms, wow, More Room To Cook In.

Reading the figures was no help (to me, anyway) in visualising what a maw the thing had, but opening the door did that and no mistake.

I said something to DD about "bite radius"...

...and she instantly responded with "anyway, we delivered the bomb".

We're a quotesy household. ;->

BTW, The New One does a very good job on seafood, too...

*****

Since we got this, almost exactly two years ago, we've used it from reheating tea to roasting meat to making chilli / goulash / stew / curry (you can run the oven / grill separately or add simultaneous zaps of microwave for much less cooking time) to baking bread.

One of the best things about it is that when the set cooking time is done, the appliance switches off automatically. No risk of busyness, absent-mindedness or out-in-the-garden-ness ending in clouds of smoke, ruined food and possibly even worse.

As for breadmaking, it has a dough-rise setting which is a Time Machine, reducing a two-hour "doubled in size" rise time to about 35-45 minutes...

It also has the most reliable Defrost Butter setting either of us have ever encountered, turning a rock-solid butter brick from the freezer into something spreadable while never - to date - doing the "never mind a butter-knife, give me a spoon or a paintbrush" thing.

*****

However...

There's also a "Chef Setting" where there are some simple recipes. Here's the pastry page.

Basically, you assemble and mix the ingredients, input the correct settings and the machine does all the timing, heating and cooking.

We'd never used this until yesterday, when DD said, "Let's try the sponge cake..."

Yes, this post was entitled "Microwave Sponge Cake (eventually)..." and here we are...

We did all the measuring correctly and checked it by pouring the mixture into a baking container while on the scale, wondering betimes why the recipe says 900g, the ingredients total 925 and what actually poured into the container reads 906... Weird. Really weird.

Then we put the container into the oven, entered the correct code, and let things do what they were going to do.

A little later we discovered something else about the recipe besides a weight anomaly.

It didn't mention the required size of the container. Or or how much the mixture was likely to rise.

It rose...

Let's say more than we expected...

The fluted ceramic container used for baking this one makes it look like a Vesuvius cupcake; not quite a pyroclastic flow, but a lot of flow regardless.

Once it cooled we separated the sponge-cake from the escaped sponge in the same way as sculptors work with wood or marble - "Chip away everything that doesn't look like a cake" - and found that despite its misshapen looks, it tasted pretty good.

So today DD made another, this time using a larger container.

...and this time it stayed put until removed using the cunning base-and-lifting-straps of baking parchment.

It's not the loftiest or best-risen sponge cake either of us have ever seen (a smaller-diameter higher-sided container would probably deal with that) BUT if there's something needing sponge cake in a hurry - this went from cupboard ingredients to done and cooling in less than 55 minutes - that treatment seems to fit the bill.

We're now wondering what other secrets lurk in the simple recipe pages; falafel, quiche Lorraine, stuffed peppers, even Flammkuchen* from scratch.

(*Though I have my own views about Flammkuchen, mostly involving a plane flight...)

And we'll be paying a lot more attention to what size of dish we put them in. :->

[thatsmylog]

[saintlyspirits]

I was reading Eli Wallach's autobiography (The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage) and I saw this........

[things-in-old-books]

From The Anecdotage of Glasgow, by Robert Alison, 1892. (See also: this alternative account of the incident.)

Dr. James Jeffrey's Ghastly Galvanic Experiment

At the Glasgow Circuit Court in October, 1819, a collier of the name of Matthew Clydesdale was condemned to death for murder, and the judge, in passing sentence, as was the custom, ordered that, after the execution, the body should be given to Dr. James Jeffrey, the lecturer on anatomy at the University, "to be publicly dissected and anatomised." The execution took place on the 4th of November following, and the body of the murderer was taken to the college dissecting theatre, where a large number of students and many of the general public were gathered to witness an experiment it was proposed to make upon it.

The intention was that a newly invented galvanic battery should be tried with the body, and the greatest interest had accordingly been excited. The corpse of the murderer was placed in a sitting posture in a chair, and the handles of the instrument put into the hands. Hardly had the battery been set working than the auditory observed the chest of the dead man heave, and he rose to his feet. Some of them swooned for fear, others cheered at what was deemed a triumph of science. But the professor, alarmed at the aspect of affairs, put his lancet in the throat of the murderer, and he dropped back into his seat. For a long time the community discussed the question, whether or not the man was really dead when the battery was applied? Most probably he was not. For in those days, death on the scaffold was slow—there was no long drop to break the spinal cord,—it was simply a case of strangulation.

[antilagardelle]

The unfounded platitude that "Europe is so much better than America," consists primarily in misconstrued OECD data, and confirmation-biased anecdotage from touristic ventures to The Champs-Élysées and Saville Rowe. Little rests at the core of the assertion beyond the foreign appeal of cobblestone streets, fachwerk houses, and the general 18th century style of such cities as Copen Hagen, Paris, and Berlin.

[open-minded-skeptic]

When a man falls into his anecdotage, it is a sign for him to retire.

Benjamin Disraeli

[petermorwood]

A photo which also clarifies phrases like "getting your (add body part of choice) caught in the wringer"...

Deciding it was spelt Ringer or Wringer was never an issue in our house, because this contraption was always called a "mangle" (that's its Wikipedia entry) and wet clothes were "put through the mangle". The "getting your..." phrases also always involved a mangle.

"Wringing" something like a hand towel or dishcloth was done by hand, twisting them like a rope to get the water out.

From that there's "wringing your hands", "wringing someone's neck", "wringing information out of someone" or indeed just looking / feeling "wrung out".

"Mangled" in that same figurative sense usually implies a messy level of damage, whether to a person, a vehicle or, sometimes even an awkward attempt to speak a foreign language - "sprechen Sie botch"... :-P

*****

Mum actually had two mangles, one built onto a Hoover washing-machine rather like this one, into which It folded away for storage.

It was a very economical contraption - forget to put the lid on securely while it was running, and the water agitation was vigorous enough that besides the laundry inside, it would try to wash - or at least manage to drench - the floor, walls, ceiling and any nearby children, all at once.

The other mangle, probably the older of the two, was of all things an Acme just like this (it clamped onto a stand)...

...and as a kid who spent many happy hours in the Cartoon Cinema on Great Victoria Street - which as the name suggests ran a constant programme of Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies, etc. etc. - I always kept an eye open for our laundry mangle making an appearance to do something unnecessary to Wile E. Coyote.

I waited in vain, because though Acme supplied, and Wile E. got mangled by, falling anvils, explosive bird-seed and malfunctioning rockets, he never once got mangled by a mangle...

The phrase "to put [someone] through the wringer" is, of course, referring to a laundry wringer, a formerly popular but now little-used home appliance that looks like this:

It's easy to understand why being put through one would be an ordeal!

So here's the question I have: for the folks who just found out from this post what a laundry wringer is, and have been spelling it "through the ringer" all this time, what were you picturing when you said "ringer"?

[marginalgloss]

the straw boy story

Swimming to Cambodia is probably the most famous of all the monologues that Spalding Gray wrote and performed through his relatively brief career in the 80s and 90s. In print, it’s a short book of just over a hundred pages in which he mostly describes the small role he had in The Killing Fields, a film from 1984 about the genocide under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. By this time Gray had been acting and performing for some years, but he wasn’t a movie actor, and in his story here he does very little acting; the movie was shot in Thailand, where he seems to have spent much of his time bumming around, drinking and getting high, and watching in awe and confusion. 

Part of the monologue is a potted history of Cambodia itself, complete with a summary of America’s disastrous role in prompting the crisis; it is fairly scathing stuff, considering that this was published less than ten years after the Khmer Rouge occupied that country. Another part covers the production of The Killing Fields, which is replete with Ballardian overtones — the whole thing seems a strange exercise in hyperreality, involving as it does local refugees and Cambodian nationals who had themselves involvement in the original disaster. But mostly the monologue involves the author musing on the state of his career, the world, filmmaking, and life in general. 

It is, of course, a written document of a thing that was intended to be performed rather than read. Gray’s on-stage monologues were typically performed with him spoken behind a desk, with only a couple of props — paper and a glass of water — perhaps a map, or a record player or boombox, if the show demanded it. Inevitably elements would be added and removed as the performances went on. At the time that Gray was operating, he seemed to be doing something new and refreshing with performance. His arch, WASP-ish mannerisms gave it a familiar frame of after-dinner anecdotage, but it was something altogether richer and more nuanced. It was a combination of monologue as memoir, all mixed up with improv, stand-up and confessional. 

If we consider something like Krapp’s Last Tape as the apotheosis of modernism, then Spalding Gray might look something like a poster boy for postmodernism. Instead of sitting at a desk and tape recorder with nothing to say beyond near-wordless reminiscence, here is a man who does the same but with everything to say — all of it filtered through the lens of himself and refracted back at the audience, with every anxiety, every delight, every humiliation blown up to cartoonish size. Imagine a high-minded Seinfeld where everything mattered too much, rather than not at all. Imagine Kerouac with a conscience. In many ways Gray looks today like an early emblem of an art method where every aspect of one’s private self becomes fair game as a subject for public scrutiny, and for all kinds of artistic reproduction.  

How well this approach has aged is an interesting question, though it is ultimately somewhat irrelevant. Something chafes around the idea that some privileged white guy should travel to Thailand to take place in a reconstruction of a genocidal event and think: ‘yes, the most interesting thing going on here is me’. This is a cynical way of looking at it. But if Swimming to Cambodia was performed tomorrow, one wonders if readers would be so tolerant of the author’s dabbling in the Thai sex industry. Gray called his own work ‘poetic journalism’, and it’s difficult to imagine such a description being applauded by readers today, ever since the media starting getting seriously creative with the truth. Neither wry detachment nor unconstrained self-interest will suffice as artistic motivators. Better for our poets to be poets, and for journalists to be journalists; we’ve been stung by those who tried to do both.    

I used the word ‘irrelevant’ because Gray’s method is everywhere. It might even be the dominant artistic ethos of our times, particularly for the aspiring comedian or performer. There’s something of his work in the knowing style of Fleabag, which also began as an on-stage monologue. And consider podcasts, though it’s notable that those are mostly based around group conversations and special interests – YouTube and Twitch are better suited to the single-voice format. And there are still a few ‘storytellers’ at large; the most famous inheritor of Gray’s style is probably David Sedaris, though it would take too long to explain here why I find his work almost entirely unbearable.

The same ethos has crept into media culture at large. It seems like every week we celebrate a new personal essay which mingles the big issues of history and politics and gender with reminiscences of trauma or recollections of tragedy. The personal is political, so the political must start with the personal: sitting in front of a mic (real or otherwise), spilling one’s guts. Often selling one’s own work involves an effort of putting one’s personality out there first, and using that as a way to draw an audience to what you really want them to see. And this is perfectly fine, as long as one accepts the idea that you cannot expect to withdraw that personality at a later date and maintain the same level of profile. 

There can no longer be any clear divide between an artist’s public persona and their private life. And it is becoming increasingly hard to imagine a way of being that involves opting out of that aspect entirely. We are all setting out our little tables and chairs on the biggest stage imaginable, talking to ourselves, waiting for an audience that might never arrive.

[petermorwood]

I first read this book when I was about ten years old - a senior cousin's copy - and finding a scan on the Comic Book Plus website let me refresh memories long ago consigned to the furthest recesses of the Mind Palace (or in my case, Untidy Mind Attic).

Its stories are fairly typical Ripping Yarns, but I'd forgotten just how Keen On Sport "The Champion" was. The title alone should have warned me, because there are six annuals on the website, all full of Hearty, Keen and Sporty goings-on.

I've posted more than once that Organised Sport was at the bottom of any list of Things I Liked To Do. In particular I detested the compulsory variety inflicted at Big School, which started happening when I was about eleven and made recollections of Jim's jolly-good-stuff annual increasingly sour.

A lot of the stories are pure sport, but several others have their sporting angle jammed into action-adventure yarns of completely non-sport-related genres, often with all the subtlety of a square peg put into a round hole with a sledgehammer.

For instance, "Rockfist Rogan of the RAF", hero of World War Two air-combat stories, was better known in his story universe as a boxer than as a fighter pilot.

Despite this, illustrations of aircraft were spot-on - as here, a Mosquito FB Mk VI with Dornier Do.217s overhead and a nosed-over Typhoon Ib in the background, or Spitfire Mk IXs defending B-24 Liberators against Messerschmitt Me.163 rocket fighters (though from the text description they should have been Me.262 jets. Oh well.)

If readers of "The Champion" were anything like readers of the war comics I used to read, the editor would have got a lot of disapproving letters if those illustrations weren't accurate. I might have sent one myself about the Messerschmitt error.

At least I might have done if I'd been of letter-writing age, rather than not yet born...

The Rogan stories aren't the only example of Sport In Unexpected Places. There's "Cap' Dan, the Sporting Pirate" (snrk), "The Racing Rajah", "The Sporting Mountie", "Johnny Fleetfoot the Redskin Winger" (rolleyes) and "Kog's Amazon Marathon", which reads like "Apocalypto" remade with a cast of Keen and Sporty English schoolboys.

And, thanks to how language and attitudes have changed, one story nearly sent a spray of tea across my monitor.

I don't think either the title or the plot would work very well today...

:->

[kalluun-patangaroa]

Afternoon Delight: Brett Anderson Interviewed

by Tariq Goddard

The Quietus, 3 October 2019

Tariq Goddard sits down with Suede frontman, Brett Anderson for a frank talk ahead of the publication of Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, the second volume of the singer's memoirs

Portrait by Paul Khera

Coal Black Mornings, the first volume of Brett Anderson’s memoir, was a haunting and unusual addition to the genre, eschewing the devices and gimmickry that are the principle selling points of a rock star confessional, for a harrowingly reflective and thoughtful overview of his early years. Anderson took the reader back to a time before the music, to the experiences that informed the songs, albums, and eventual career trajectory, and in doing so, circumnavigated the years of his triumph during which he rose to public prominence and critical acclaim.

His onus on the creatively formative period that preceded success, the tender portraits of his family, particularly his complicated relationship with his father, a man who may have wished he had the life his son had, and the recollections of an England that has vanished so completely as to no longer be a place, offered a more unique and heartfelt history than the celebrity tittle-tattle fans might have thought they wanted. To do anything comparable with the second volume, a story Anderson vowed not to tell, would at once be easier for him - his material would span the glory days of his career - yet harder, for how could the tenderness of the first book survive grubby contact with the reality of wild adulation and Britpop, a “movement" he admits to despising?

Perhaps to his own surprise Volume II, Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, strikes the same ruminative notes as the earlier volume, again subverting convention and expectation to avoid cliche and disappointment, written in the vulnerable and careful voice of its antecedent. Instead of dishing up insider gossip, Anderson mentions none of his rivals or contemporaries by name, assiduously sticking to the frequently scorned advice of “if have nothing nice to say, I say nothing”. Portraits of associates, friends and ex-friends are generous, forensic but fair, and there is no attempt to airbrush or underplay anyone else’s role in contributing to Suede’s imperial phase.

Knowing that the man he became in this second volume is not as sympathetic as the youth he was in the first, Anderson goes on to slay the most prominent elephant of all, himself, through pages of literary flagellation few writers could self-administer uncoerced.

Driven by the desire to work out what really happened to him, Anderson’s writing follows an unashamedly conceptual arc (“archetypes”, “convergence theory” and “postmodern play of mirrors” all appear on a single page), constituting a historical inquiry into the motives and processes that lay behind his best and worst work, by way of remorseless self-analysis, painful descriptions of how others must have seen him, and an attempt to grasp why we all think we are right at the time. The light shed and insight shared in these two volumes places them in the same covetable space as Springsteen’s Born To Run or Dylan’s Chronicles, and would be worth cherishing even if Brett Anderson was the reason why you never liked Suede in the first place.  

Musicians often write books to sustain and propagate a persona that they have developed over a career, not deconstruct one in a spirit of enquiry. This book reads like it was written by that hidden aspect of yourself that wrote the songs in private, and not the public alter ego we saw perform them…

Brett Anderson: Absolutely, that is the main premise of the book, that it wasn’t going to be written by the Brett Anderson persona but whoever the real person behind it was. The reason why Coal Black Mornings ended where it did was because my public persona didn’t exist then, and I deliberately stopped the story before it had been formed. What I didn’t know was whether I could actually write another book in that same voice I had developed in the first, dealing with the next period of my life, and not drift into public persona I had created by then. It was a massive conundrum for me, as people might be familiar with the events and that version of me, and expect something consistent with that, while I knew I wanted a more personal and interesting story, told in the natural voice of the first book.

There is something I want to be clear about though, this thing with the persona we’re talking about is that it wasn’t necessarily false in the way people understand that to be. I wasn’t just the man behind the mask manipulating people’s view of me, because to inhabit a persona you have to believe in that persona too. Looking back it’s possible to wonder how much of it is really yourself, as it is you and not you at the same time, but all of it still comes from you. You are the one doing it. I mean, everyone manufactures personas all time. People in the public eye simply amplify the process, and the lens of the media then helps magnify and distort the original amplification. The “you” that sits down and watches TV with your family is very different from the “you” sitting here now, but that doesn’t mean that your public self is some Svengali like manipulation of reality. The persona you decide to project says as much about who you are as your private self does. And it was only through growing up, growing up and not giving up these past eleven years, and having kids who you can’t fob off with a persona, that I went through the slow and painful process of taking apart the nuts and bolts of what mine was made of.

The book does come up short on after dinner speaking anecdotage. Although it is often very funny, it doesn’t seem to see its function as to amuse, does it?

BA: No, not at all. The book is a search into what happened to me in those years of success and fame, and what effect that had on me as a person, not a parade of all my achievements, where I ask the reader to look at me and love me. Like the first book, I used my writing as a sounding board very like therapy, and used the questions I was asking of myself to work out my own shit.

Portrait by Pat Pope 

Notes from therapy don’t normally make for very interesting reading though…

BA: They don’t, and I knew I was running a risk. In one of my favourite reviews of Coal Black Mornings the reviewer writes, having given it two or three stars out of five, I’m not sure which is the more dismissive number, ‘this book is very well written but the big problem I had with it in the end is it is all about him, him, him!’ Well of course it is, it’s a memoir! Memoir has to take the risk of being indulgent to work.

But for a memoir, I found you very impatient with your own perspective. There’s very little self justification or score settling, often it’s like you’re trying to establish something very close to historical objectivity? Even though you keep saying that it is impossible to do that.

BA: I realise I wanted to know everything that was going on around me at that time, that wasn’t just me or to merely repeat or excuse how I saw things then. And I really didn’t want to fall into one of the lazy tropes of the genre which is just to sit there and slag off other bands. There is a vitriol in there, but I apply it to movements and features of the period, not individuals, partly because I know how the media works now. As soon as you slag off a name, that’s all your book becomes, and you lose all control or ownership of context, and simply end up as a line in a feature in quotes of the year. A memoir is about context, a complex tapestry, not a motormouth series of quotes, and you don’t want to lose that by being petty or boring, or revisiting past rivalries. I mean, who cares who ticked me off? The crazy thing is that there are people who want you to name names and write that kind of book, but I wasn’t prepared to.

But readers are more used to engaging with a work of that kind, aren’t they, who blew coke up whose arsehole?

BA: Absolutely, but the books that do that are the same story with the names changed, you know, the amusing band shenanigans, all the japery, the dirt, all of it is essentially the same tale every time. But that is the expectation, and to be honest, critics can be just as predictable. I’ve had reviews saying that Coal Black Mornings was really good but who was it really for, as it doesn’t sit comfortably in the genre they think it is supposed to be in. But for me that’s a good thing. It’s meant to be more ambitious and about trying to get to the bottom of things and to understand life. Basically the opposite of a series of oft repeated anecdotes. The anecdotes that I have included are the things that are important to me that no one else could have ever known about, because they were purely personal or because sometimes there was simply no one else there to observe them. Whether it’s the beautiful girl who comes up to me just to tell me my band are shit, or the cheese and pickle sandwich I took with me on my first flight to America, these were the things I wanted to share so that I would know they had really happened. You know, the strange and quirky little things that give your life back to you, as they thread in and out of the story everyone else thinks they know…

You are hard on yourself in the book, but you are also very hard on your own music, which from a fan’s point of view might be tough to take. Reading that you have never rated your most successful singles, or that people’s favourite songs had working titles like 'Pisspot' and 'Sombre Bongoes' for example…

BA: Yeah, 'Stay Together', 'Electricity', the Head Music title track, and 'The Power', yeah, I take the sword to them all, but I had to be that self critical in order to be convincing. If I just sat there saying, “I’m a fucking genius and everything I have done is brilliant” anything else I would say would carry zero weight! Especially if I then want to go on and talk about the songs I really do still love, 'Heroine', 'Killing Of A Flash Boy', 'Sleeping Pills', the list goes on. It’s all part of subverting the myth of the god given seer, like the bit where I talk about myself honestly as a musician and admit that I am not a particularly talented one, but what I do have is that I just don’t fucking give up.That admission for me was a moment of truth, it just isn’t what most musicians say, and so another attack on the supposed elegance of my persona. But in the same way I view myself at points in my past as a different person, I see some of those songs as written by a different person, and that is why the flaws so easily reveal themselves to me. As for being hard on myself, again, I had to be. My mistakes were entirely my own and no one else’s fault, certainly not the fault of any childhood trauma or external stuff, and I needed to take responsibility for that. My descent into hell came from being romantically attached to the notion of the artist as a genius that accepts no limits or boundaries, it was that simple.  

Do you think the experience of the relatively fallow and low periods in your career helped you develop the sensibility and humility with which you wrote this memoir? That continual and unbroken success may have robbed you of certain insights that disappointment helped provide?

BA: Yes, the end of the band meant I was able to jump off the bandwagon I had been on and develop a different perspective. Those were key years for me as an artist, that I had to have away from Suede, before we came back again. Experiencing struggle and failure, having had success, was crucial for me. I loved making solo records but it did start to feel like a bit of a vanity project as you do need an audience, and there is a certain point where if you drop below a particular level, you begin to wonder whether it is still worth doing. The work may still stand up, but if there’s just a select group you are appealing to, buttressed by family and friends, you can feel like the basic relationship you need with an audience, in order to create, is breaking down. And with having a family too, I thought I couldn’t afford to go on like that anymore. A performance, a book, a song, all these things require an audience, it’s a plea, you are projecting your voice out there and you require an echo in return. Otherwise you’d just stay in your own room and write for yourself, which is what some artists claim to do, but it’s an attitude I have never shared. Because half the point of creating anything is the reaction. I’ve never understood the cliche of the artist that only creates for themselves and never reads their own press.

You have to be Kafka to really not care what happens to your work. Most artists hope for perpetual immortality, on their more modest days.

BA: But did even Kafka really not care though?

He did leave his work with his best friend and literary executor to destroy.

BA: Exactly, his best friend and literary executor! Interesting that he chose a man who thought he was genius for that task! If he really felt that way he should have given everything to someone who really didn’t give a shit about him or his work.

Contingency and chance is one of the big themes of your book. One of the very few contemporaries you name, and then very affectionately, is Loz Hardy of Kingmaker whose fortunes you contrast with yours. You seem to be asking did you succeed, and he fail, because of the hidden hand of destiny, Darwinian necessity and artistic merit, or has the whole of your and his career been the most monstrous fluke?

BA: I thought long and hard about whether to involve Loz in any of this, and there is a part of me that felt bad about it, and so I tried to be sensitive in how I talked about him, as I have warmth for him and always really liked him. But I had to include him. We were thrown together by the Melody Maker’s “dog shit and diamonds” piece, a gladiatorial contest they set up where we were used as symbols for different musical and aesthetic tendencies, and there was no way for me to explore the questions I wanted to if I ignored that. The fact is Kingmaker did not go onto achieve success, but I hope I didn’t trample on them when I refer back to that point where we found ourselves in the same place. I genuinely wanted to work out whether things happened for us in the only way they could have, and if you can judge your own worth on the basis of success, as the ultimate criteria, or if it is all down to chance in the end.

You go on to say that the neglect of great art makes you wonder whether it is all chance, however much it might suit you not to think so…

BA: Exactly, look at Echo And The Bunnymen for fuck’s sake! They’ve made amazing music but why aren’t they then given the prestige they deserve, whereas so many of their less talented contemporaries fill up stadiums at the drop of hat? How can you resolve it? It’s unresolvable! But I think you need to believe in destiny wholeheartedly to make it at anything, and it is easy to when everything is going right, you know “my success is my destined birthright!’, but then how can you have any framework or belief system left if you embrace destiny and then fuck up? You’d be complicit in your own fall. Even then though, you can make failure work for you, and realise the fuck-ups were necessary too, and that you learn from them and they therefore feed your future successes, so you’re kind of led back into destiny again. The thing is if you are happy with where you have got to in life, and looking at things from a place of satisfaction, then you literally can’t really regret anything, as the fuck ups are part of the journey that led you to where you are, and are as easily as important as the successes.  

Photograph courtesy of Phillip Williams 

You make a number of complimentary references to the old music press in the book, even when they turned on you, which is rare for a musician…

BA: God yeah, we’re culturally less well off for their folding, don’t you think so? That whole Punch And Judy journalism and playground tribalism produced so many great bands and so much great discussion no matter how ugly it got. Those papers were like a music factory. A lot of modern music writing, with some very obvious exceptions that I love, is too dry and balanced. Growing up to a point where you can’t be violently partial means you lose something of the enthusiasm and passion that draws you to music. Music writing needs to be a little bit impetuous because music is impetuous. It’s easy to think it was all divisive and unnecessarily nasty, but it needed to be, that was its job, which encouraged it to issue challenges and be creative in its own right too. Which was great, providing they were saying nice things about us!

How has the creative process changed for you now that you are no longer committed to releasing album after album in quick succession, a process you say that led to the creation of some inferior work; does that easing of pressure and allowing of material to gestate compensate for what is lost, which is that in the old days you didn’t know what was going to happen next, and that every new record might yet change your lives with as yet unimagined success?

BA: There’s a trade off. The eventual realisation that you are not part of the mainstream anymore, as we clearly no longer are, does give you the freedom go to interesting places you could not always have gone to before. For me now the concept of a record has to be very strong to act on it, and I won’t start writing simply because it is time to release a record again. For example, the material and ideas I thought would be perfect for A New Morning, were actually followed through on and became The Blue Hour sixteen years later. Trying to carry them into the songs I was writing at the time, and make a record about the darkness of the countryside when you want your songs to be rotated on Radio One, was never going to happen. And that’s one of the beauties and consolations of being set adrift from the mainstream, which is that you really don’t need to worry anymore about a particular kind of career path anymore. We’re never going to latch back onto the mainstream again, I know that, because we could make the greatest record we’ve ever made, or has ever been made, and we would still never be on Radio One again. And I’m fine with that now. I am a 52-year-old man, do you know what I mean? Age has got to give you something, because otherwise there is a part of you that might never get over what it has to teach you.

You plot your changing relationship with your fans from a high of believing you were in it together, to the low of seeing graffiti left on your street with directions to your house and a request to kill your cat. The lesson that fans live for you when they should be living for themselves, and that you should be living for yourself and not them, seems hard earned on both sides, particularly as you write about how much you owe them for putting you where you wanted to be in the first place.

BA: It’s a fascinating process with fans, you were there in the early days, and you know that insane dynamic where the fans are still part of the experience. We used to hang out with you guys and it was like being with your mates where you share the same passions and interests, but then you get to that point in a band where the doors come down, and there is a separation where you find yourself either being mobbed by people or sitting on your own in an empty dressing room with no in-between. Life becomes polarised between these two extremes, and it is unavoidable because it is built into success, and so to some extent, is no more than what you wanted and signed up for, but there is that lovely point when you first start when the people who follow you aren’t an abstract, “the audience”, but friends, and there is something special about those days I wanted to capture in the book. Because those days were really important, one of those lovely periods you can never have back or go back to again.

After that you become public property, where you have an image you keep up to avoid disappointing people, and where everything you say is taken at face value. Like the story you mention in the book where I forget that I asked a couple of fans to come back to my house in two days time, only to be polite, then completely forgot about it, and ended up instigating a campaign of abuse against myself…

I understand the danger of taking rock stars at their word. In early 95 I bumped into you at the Severn Bridge Services and you told me that I should join you in Watford in a week, where you would meet me outside the venue and let me into a gig!

BA: Oh no, you’re joking…what an invitation! My God, and did I do it?

I would love to have said you did! I still got in, so no hard feelings.

BA: I’m so sorry! What you’ve got to understand is that in a band when you meet someone at the services you always want to leave the conversation on a high note, to contrast with the surroundings, hence the Watford Colosseum! I just hoped that you wouldn’t believe me and would realise that in the end it was all just…words!

Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn is out now via Little Brown