#sam selvon

[quotation--marks]

Many nights he went there before he get to know how to move around the city, and see them fellars and girls waiting, looking at they wristwatch, watching the people coming up the escalator from the tube. You could tell that they waiting for somebody, the way how they getting on. Leaning up there, reading the Evening News, or smoking a cigarette, or walking round the circle looking at clothes in the glasscase, and every time people come up the escalator, they watching to see, and if the person not there, they relaxing to wait till the next tube come. All these people there, standing up waiting for somebody. And then you would see a sharp piece of skin come up the escalator, in a sharp coat, and she give the ticket collector she ticket and look around, and same time the fellar who waiting throw away his cigarette and you could see a happy look in his face, and the girl come and hold his arm and laugh, and he look at his wristwatch. Then the two of them walk up the steps and gone to the Circus, gone somewhere, to the theatre, or the cinema, or just to walk around and watch the big life in the Circus.

Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The Lonely Londoners | Author: Sam Selvon | Publisher: Penguin (2021)

[valsedelesruines]

“Things does have a way of fixing themselves, whether you worry or not. If you hustle, it will happen, if you don’t hustle, it will still happen. Everybody living to dead, no matter what they doing while they living, in the end everybody dead.”

- The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon 

[ippokampos]

shoutout to 3rd year university student me who enrolled at a specific contemporary english literature course, took the novel the prof gave out for free for the mandatory reading, and never set foot on the classes nor sat the exam ever.

[sealochs]

oh can I be nosy about the jazz readings? (disclaimer: I discovered I loved jazz through a MA module on music and literature which had Woolf’s “The String Quartet” and The Waves back to back with Toni Morrison’s Jazz and I cannot recommend the experience enough, amazing works to pair together)

yes, of course you can! literally i only went looking for some readings to give myself an informed background for a comparison i want to make between a description by gerald brenan of bloomsbury conversation evenings & early 20thc jazz, but everything i read directed me to at least three more things as is always the way. so far i've looked at :

for overview, emily j. lordi's chapter on 'jazz & blues modernisms' in the cambridge companion to the american modernist novel (2015); and jed rasula's earlier chapter on 'jazz & american modernism' in the cambridge companion to american modernism (2005)

from there, i've gone to: a chapter on jazz in genevieve abravanel's americanizing britain: the rise of modernism in the age of the entertainment empire (2012); tyler stovall's chapter on 'black modernism and the making of the 20th century' in afromodernisms: paris, harlem and the avant-garde (2013); an article by bethan jones on literary legacies of 1920s jazz in the yearbook of english studies 50 (2020); rob wallace's improvisation and the making of american literary modernism (2010); and ingrid t. monson's saying something: jazz improvisation and interaction (1996).

today, i still need to look at: paul berliner's thinking in jazz: the infinite art of improvisation (1994); alfred appel's jazz modernism (2002); catherine parsonage's the evolution of jazz in britain (2005); hilary moore's inside british jazz (2007); and craig werner's playing the changes: from afro-modernism to the jazz impulse (1994)

& that sounds like a wonderful pairing, & a brilliantly structured ma module! part of the reason i've let myself read so much for what will likely be one (1) footnote is that i'm also teaching t.s. eliot's the waste land, sam selvon's the lonely londoners and jackie kay's trumpet this semester, so deepening my understanding of the relationships between jazz and modernism and literary forms seems like a good idea (plus i love jazz & i've been writing solidly for a few months, so taking a reading reprieve to delve into something i'm interested in has been lovely)

[ubu507]

What is all this, what is meaning of all this, all these things that happen to people, the movement from one place to another, lighting a cigarette, slipping a coin into a slot and pulling a handle for chocolate, buying a return ticket, waiting for a bus, working the crossword puzzle in the Evening Standard.

-- Sam Selvon

[haveyoureadthispoll]

From the brilliant, sharp, witty pen of Sam Selvon, his classic award-winning novel of immigrant life in London in the 1950s. In the hopeful aftermath of war they flocked to the Mother Country — West Indians in search of a prosperous future in the "glitter-city." Instead, they have to face the harsh realities of living hand to mouth, of racism, of bone-chilling weather and bleak prospects. Yet friendships flourish among these Lonely Londoners and, in time, they learn to survive.

[justforbooks]

Lonely, as words go, is a bit of a loner. As the critic Christopher Ricks writes, it pleasingly has “only” one rhyme, and no real synonyms. After all, being alone and being lonely are quite different things. For all this, poets and writers, from Audre Lorde to Philip Larkin, have made much of loneliness, drawn to the challenge of bringing us close to an emotion whose very nature is to stay at a distance.

Some lonely renderings turn out to be a bit of a sham. Records show that when Wordsworth “wandered lonely as a cloud”, his sister Dorothy was strolling companionably beside him, and she liked the daffodils too. Thoreau’s standing as the poster-boy of solitude, living “alone” and “Spartan like” by Walden Pond, starts to unravel when one actually reads his book, which contains a hefty chapter on “Visitors”. (The fact that Thoreau’s mum probably helped out with his laundry has also – maybe unfairly – raised a few eyebrows.)

It is, of course, perfectly possible to feel lonely in the company of others. “Loneliness”, as Olivia Laing writes, “doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection”. Her Lonely City is a powerful account of the loneliness explored and expressed by writers ranging from Alfred Hitchcock to Billie Holiday, combined with Laing’s own experience as a “citizen of loneliness”: “I often wished”, she writes, “I could find a way of losing myself altogether until the intensity diminished”.

Loneliness may be a condition that’s tricky to categorise but it is also, in Laing’s words, “difficult to confess”. Indeed, loneliness’s favourite companion seems to be shame. One of the many beauties of Kent Haruf’s small-town love story, Our Souls At Night, is the way in which his heroine breaks this seeming taboo, surprising her neighbour with an unconventional proposal, not of marriage, but of a kind of lo-fi pyjama party. “I’m lonely”, Addie candidly states. “I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk”.

For some, such as Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant, loneliness is a lived atmosphere, a kind of chronic condition. For others, it comes from a tectonic shift – a sudden loss or bereavement. As Juliet Rosenfeld writes in her memoir, The State of Disbelief, the painful force of her husband’s death made her feel as if she’d been captured by an unseen captor: “I learnt quickly that to protest would make no difference, and choice-less, I submitted to this saboteur with no prospect at all of release or freedom. I believed for a long time that I would never feel differently. I felt a painful absence and loneliness all of the time.”

“We read to know we are not alone”, as C S Lewis famously didn’t say (the line belongs to his on-screen persona in Shadowlands). So it is a sad irony that books which might best provide company nearly didn’t see the light of day. Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness was banned, after its first publication, for more than 30 years, accused of promoting “unnatural practices between women”. Because of that judgment, many readers missed an encounter with the beauty of the novel’s prose, its tender account of the heroine as she reflects on her childhood home. She dreams of “the scent of damp rushes growing by water; the kind, slightly milky odour of cattle; the smell of dried rose-leaves and orris-root and violets”, and knew “what it was to feel terribly lonely, like a soul that wakes up to find itself wandering, unwanted, between the spheres”.

This sense of loneliness as a kind of between-ness, an uncharted territory, is movingly captured in Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel, The Lonely Londoners. This Windrush chronicle charts the trials of those arriving at Waterloo from the West Indies, as they struggle to navigate the “unrealness” of London. Selvon’s hero, Moses Aloetta, becomes, over time, the reluctant guide to this latter-day Waste Land. Selvon leaves us with Moses’s lyrical and allusive understanding of the city’s “great aimlessness”. Standing on the banks of the Thames, he conjures a vision of a world in which we are all, in the end, alone together:

As if … on the surface, things don’t look so bad, but when you go down a little, you bounce up a kind of misery and pathos and a frightening – what? He don’t know the right word, but he have the right feeling in his heart. As if the boys laughing, but they only laughing because they ’fraid to cry.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[devitalise]

HAPPY HALLOWEEEN IMO!!! 🧛🏼‍♀️🖤 I spy a new letterboxd link in your bio omg following asap!! movie critic era??? but ok back to biz : october roundup!! did you end up reading anything particularly spooky or compelling? are there any must-reads on your list for these final few months of 2023?

JUMPSCARE!! final months of 2023.. how did we get here. yeah i made a letterboxd!! not sure about critic but i've been playing moviegrid everyday and i love logging things so maybe i will become a cinephile one day... BUT let's get back to books it was a very good month! into the

october book wrap up

Girls Out Late and Girls In Tears by Jacqueline Wilson

finished this series early october! i had an absolute blast! perfect way to reignite my love for reading i'm definitely going to have more JW books as a reset point if i'm ever in a slump again.

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

i still don't know my thoughts on this idk i'm not very good with words like that. i think this is very cool and intriguing and i enjoyed reading it! the supernatural and horror elements were really original to me and i think it being a short novella paid off.

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop

short French read. some of the repetitive stylistic and linguistic choices did wear a little thin on me around the halfway mark, but i was willing to just bear with it because the book is so short. ghoulish, i think. interesting threads on colonialism and war that i think are very apt. horrific in a depraved human nature kind of way

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

oh. OH! yeah! this was fantastical and gory and soooo eerie and i loved it! one of my top 2023 reads. really well researched and fleshed out historical references and the character work was so exceptional to me. this moved me in a way i wasn't expecting

The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon

neat! i think this is really important as a piece of literature documenting the camaraderie and community Black West Indian men were creating for themselves in London as part of Windrush. it was comedic and real and it's just. i don't know because my family didn't settle in London post-war, but there was so much that was so close in terms of familiarity that resonated with me. great read.

currently i'm reading Small Island by Andrea Levy and i think it's interesting to see the contrast in how she's written about Windrush. not to say Selvon didn't acknowledge the racism and hardship, but it takes a complete backseat in TLL and is secondary to the rest of the book whereas it's the focal point in Small Island. something to be said about how being Black in England is as hard as it is joyful. only around 60% in but very much enjoying

rest of the year reads

i'm actually not too sure! i have a few more Black British books i want to get through but now that i've hit my reading goal (woo!) i'm just trying to take it easy continue seeking a diversity of stories and authors you know how it goes

[quotation--marks]

It have people living in London who don't know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don't know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers. Them rich people who does live in Belgravia and Knightsbridge and up in Hampstead and them other plush places, they would never believe what it like in a grim place like Harrow Road or Notting Hill. Them people who have car, who going to theatre and ballet in the West End, who attending premiere with the royal family, they don't know nothing about hustling two pound of brussel sprout and half-pound potato, or queuing up for fish and chips in the smog. People don't talk about things like that again, they come to kind of accept that is so the world is, that it bound to have rich and poor, it bound to have some who live by the Grace and others who have plenty. That is all about it, nobody does go into detail. A poor man, a rich man. To stop one of them rich tests when they are going to a show in Leicester Square and ask them for a bob, they might give you, but if you want to talk about the conditions under which you living, they haven't time for that. They know all about that already. People get tired after a time with who poor and who rich and who catching arse and who well off, they don't care anymore.

Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

[shaunmg0007]

what are some of your spring/summer wishlist items?

I’m currently in the process of switching things up so this is to name a few:

Wooden hangers for my wardrobe 

Ganni Paloma x melange rib sleeveless dress 

A good lip balm

A well fitting plain white t-shirt  

Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon 

A new job 

Green Adidas track bottoms 

Paloma Wool No. 2018, 1396 and 1770 trousers 

[thelibraryiscool]

(some of) my top books of 2022: prose edition

Last year I made a post with some of my favorite books, using first lines and bullet points. This year I read about twice as many books, so this certainly won’t cover all of them, but it’s a selection -- and I’ll make a separate post for the poetry.

1. Almond by Won-Pyung Sohn (trans. Sandy Joosun Lee)

I won’t tell you whether it has a happy ending or a tragic ending. Because, first of all, every story becomes boring once the ending is spoiled. Second of all, not telling you will make you more engaged in this one.

you should read it if you like:

coming of age novels

thinking about what makes humans human

delicate character development

2. The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon

One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train.

you should read it if you like:

novels about city life

vibrant prose

thinking about the immigrant experience

3. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (trans. Stephen Snyder)

I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first -- among all the things that have vanished from the island.

you should read it if you like:

stories of loss and memory

elegant allegory

books that leave you with a haunted, desolate feeling

[note: this was my first book of the year, and i kind of worry that’s why 2022 went the way it did...]

4. The Stone Face by William Gardner Smith

He leaned forward on the edge of his seat, his chin in his palms and his elbows on his knees, rocking imperceptibly to the movement of the train. It was evening, and in the fading light beyond the window the flat green-and-brown French farmland hurried by. He found his lips almost forming a prayer; not in words, not to a God, but in an emotion reaching out to the earth, the sky, to the world in general.

you should read it if you like:

books that face head on the question of our duty and responsibility to fight for a more just world

nuanced, empathetic explorations of people and relationships

powerful, vivid prose

5. The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson (trans. Thomas Teal)

It was an ordinary dark winter morning, and snow was still falling. No window in the village showed a light. Katri screened the lamp so she wouldn't wake her brother while she made coffee and put the Thermos beside his bed.

you should read it if you like:

quiet, understated books

seeing unexpected human connection

books that inhabit nature and the seasons

6. Faithful Place by Tana French

In all your life, only a few moments matter. Mostly you never get a good look at them except in hindsight, long after they've zipped past you: the moment when you decided whether to talk to that girl, slow down on that blind bend, stop and find that condom. I was lucky, I guess you could call it. I got to see one of mine face-to-face, and recognize it for what it was.

you should read it if you like:

long-buried secrets

characters haunted by the past

some really messy families

7. The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh

There was only one person in the food-stall who knew exactly what that sound was that was rolling in across the plain, along the silver curve of the Irrawaddy, to the western wall of Mandalay's fort. 

you should read it if you like:

sprawling multi-generational tales

intricate, atmospheric historical novels

thinking about the complex entanglements of people and events within history

8. I Wonder as I Wander by Langston Hughes

When I was twenty-seven the stock-market crash came. When I was twenty-eight, my personal crash came. Then I guess I woke up. So. when I was almost thirty, I began to make my living from writing. This is the story of a Negro who wanted to make his living from poems and stories.

you should read it if you like:

literary memoirs

a way of approaching things with humor

seeing the 1930s across europe, asia, and the US brought vividly to life

9. Night and Day by Virginia Woolf

It was a Sunday evening in October, and in common with many other young ladies of her class, Katharine Hilbery was pouring out tea. Perhaps a fifth part of her mind was thus occupied, and the remaining parts leapt over the little barrier of day which interposed between Monday morning and this rather subdued moment, and played with the things one does voluntarily and normally in the daylight. 

you should read it if you like:

careful psychological studies

stories of 20-somethings figuring out their feelings

prose that flows like butter

10. Noon, 22nd Century by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Когда рыжий песок под гусеницами краулера вдруг осел, Петр Алексеевич Новаго дал задний ход и крикнул Манделю: «Соскакивай!» Краулер задергался, разбрасывая тучи песка и пыли, и стал переворачиваться кормой кверху. [When the orange sand under the crawler’s tracks suddenly subsided, Pyotr Alekseevich Novago backed up and shouted to Mandel: “Hop off!” The crawler shuddered, tossing up clouds of sand and dust, and began to turn stern-up.]

you should read this if you like:

hopeful sci-fi

stories about friendship

thinking about humanity’s first steps towards alien encounter

[note: this is available in english as a pdf online, i’ve checked]

looking back, are there any running themes? perhaps whether humans are by and large good, or when they are capable of goodness. finding connection, sometimes against great odds. an even mix of stories about leaving home and stories about staying there. covers that have people on them?

stayed tuned for pt. 2: poetry edition!

[witchyfashion]

As the smoky dark sweeps across the capital, strange stories emerge from the night. A séance reveals a ghastly secret in the murk of Regent’s Canal. From south of the Thames come chilling reports of a spring-heeled spectre, and in Stoke Newington rumours abound of an opening to another world among the quiet alleys. Join Elizabeth Dearnley on this atmospheric tour through a shadowy London, a city which has long inspired writers of the weird and uncanny. Waiting in the hazy streets are eerie tales from Charlotte Riddell, Lettice Galbraith and Violet Hunt, along with haunting pieces by Virginia Woolf, Arthur Machen, Sam Selvon and many more.

https://amzn.to/3XIwj8y

[readingdiary]

…

NOTES 11/5/23 - THE LONELY LONDONERS - SAM SELVON

*****

[authorsreport]

An analysis of yet another masterpiece The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon:

The novel strengthened my belief that the use of fancy words and high vocabulary is not necessary. The story didn’t follow the regular grammatical format as the narration was based on the Caribbean dialect.

Yet it was so convincing and became the bestseller of that time.

The novel covers themes of deception and illusion. It imparts the philosophical knowledge that what we hear is not always true.