ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017

Of course, this was during the Sinister days.

Not that I was on Sinister or knew of its existence, but I must have sensed its presence across the Atlantic.

What's the connection? I don't know b&s too well

I started in on Lanark v skeptical and still think the second part drags a bit but the back half is so so great.

No connection other than being Scottish, as far as I know.

I read Lanark in a malarone fug in a hut in Senegal. No Belle and Sebstian was consumed.

Lanark is way too weird to be compared with B&S. It also has one of my favourite book covers

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/cf/49/cc/cf49cc215e3112125ba79a717e80cf42.jpg

idk there is a shared repressed, artsy Scottish gloom in common

lanark is more the second half of 'the red thread' imo

Shakey otm

Gray is a precursor of B&S as a voice of art school Glasgow, but by about 40 years - he started writing that book in the 1950s.

There was ultimately supposed to be a genuine connection as he was set to do some kind of illustration for them but I can't now find reference to it. Also a member of B&S played in the stage version of LANARK, this decade. There is a general parallel in their becoming West End icons and also, I think, agreeing about Scottish independence (as do Deacon Blue, Hue & Cry, et al).

The Real Glasgow sections of LANARK have some relevance to B&S or any other subsequent vision of Glasgow but I don't think the resemblance in tone is very close.

The SF / Fantasy / Gothic sections, I think there is still less connection.

Overall - of all the things Gray has done, I'm not sure that LANARK is the closest to B&S.

I always wanted to like the book a lot but found it actually very stodgy to read, except the Prologue (?) 3/4 of the way through which I thought the most dazzling section.

Actually the Gray work that IS closest to B&S is his Hillhead mural.

http://www.sadlergreen.com/_images/_versions/l/164.jpg
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-19612581

I wanted to read Lanark because I thought it would be about a wonderful fantasy Scotland where Belle and Sebastian don't exist

I agree that Lanark is kinda stodgy. I loved the section with the mural, but the Kafka/sci-fi bit felt interminable.

Ward Fowler: it is -- a Scotland prior to c.1981.

Thank you Pinefox, I was being a wee bit cheeky, as they say up here.

Actually, I have been trying to think of other Scottish performers who seem closer to A Gray than B&S, and the nearest person I could think of was Ivor Cutler.

I'm reading Darian Leader's Stealing the Mona Lisa, which is a kind of avuncular take on Lacanian views of art. It's taken a while to get going, and there's a LOT of passive/subjunctive mood waffle, but it's hitting it's stride and slowly pulling me in.

Xp Long Fin Killie?

Cutler without doubt! Very close.

But I think there is a tendency for a great swathe of 'Scottish alternative artists' to get rolled together, either by themselves or by others -- so eg: I am sure that B&S will have talked about Cutler (maybe even collaborated with him somewhere), and Edwin Morgan --so it all gets implicitly connected.

For that matter I'm sure that Deacon Blue (who were not so Alternative) repeated Gray's most famous slogan re 'the early days of a better nation' on a record sleeve.

Cutler and B&S both on this record.
Will stop now and remind myself that this is ILB not ILM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colours_Are_Brighter

Thanks for following up so diligently on my derail, the pinefox:) If you want to keep it ILB, you could talk about Gray contrasted with Muriel Spark- TS Glasgow vs. Edinburgh- although perhaps that is a too facile, classic New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure Section-style comparison.

James Redd -- the thing there is: I get how Spark is Edinburgh / Morningside ... but I don't really get how Gray is Glasgow in a directly contrasting way. The big contrast would surely be Spark vs Kelman (or Leonard or Torrington) - the really gritty working-class-tenement writers -- rather than Gray's tendency to fancy, whimsy, Gothic, history, etc.

(this has always been a general point for me - I get that Gray and Kelman and Leonard are pals and have similar politics -- but I don't see the literary, stylistic, generic link between Gray and the others)

In fact this would lead back to the B&S idea in that eg: Kelman = gritty Govan and Gray = whimsical Hillhead -- more the B&S world / era.

Or put another way: Gray, unlike Kelman or Leonard, is the great writer of the *Glasgow School of Art* - maybe you can draw a contrast with something in Spark, but it doesn't feel like a traditional Glasgow vs Edinburgh contrast. Maybe it's a more interesting contrast.

The Art School side is partly why Gray seems to link forward to B&S, perhaps via 'The Postcard Scene' et al.

The other B&S connection (so I am now confirming your original idea) is religion -- LANARK describes, very autobiographically as I recall (cf A LIFE IN PICTURES), a long period of painting a mural in a church, which is very Stuart Murdoch.

years ago i gave a copy of "the fall of kelvin walker" to my friend bill as a bday present (glasgow born and bred, was briefly in a band w/pat kane, who he has little time for)

bill said it was MUCH TOO PROTESTANT and he was unable finish it

that is my helpful anecdotal contribution to this chat

The Art School connection also tends to make me connect Gray back to Mackintosh - but I don't know that Mackintosh was a writer.

The origin of Kelvin Walker, according to the pinefox:

https://flic.kr/p/8T1Aqy

"I wanted to read Lanark because I thought it would be about a wonderful fantasy Scotland where Belle and Sebastian don't exist."

I read Lanark well before Belle and Sebastian did exist, which makes that sentence jar a bit.

Like Pinefox I wanted to like it but didn't much. Belle and Sebastian are even more completely not my thing, but for very unrelated reasons. Not that I know much about B&S, but I do own at least one barely played album. Before reading this thread it would never have occurred to me to connect the two.

everything scottish is the same

https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-02/23/8/enhanced/webdr08/enhanced-32054-1424697475-5.png

B&S are my thing.

It is true that as there are only 5.3 million people in Scotland, in a relatively small space, in theory they could be more the same than other things eg: the populations of China, Russia or the US.

But I doubt that Scottish people would accept that view.

Mark is that your idea of "the B&S aesthetic" ?

there is no aesthetic it can't illustrate

http://cheapsurrealism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/kul.jpg

I have started reading Junkie by the noted non-Scottish author William Burroughs.

http://cheapsurrealism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/kul.jpg

All this scottish chat makes me wish the once-great Canongate Classics series, full of great scottish lit, was still a going concern

http://cheapsurrealism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/kul.jpg

Reading Giovanni's Room, which is beautiful and heartbreaking. I'd not read any Baldwin in a while, and I'd forgotten how mannered and 'European' his sensibility is - albeit a Europe refracted through Henry James: the exaggerated, almost sacred, sense of the minutiae of communication, the precision of each paragraph (despite the savagery and chaos of what is often being described), the elegance. And I'm totally conscious of my age as I read, and how young Baldwin was when he wrote it - at times, by dint of age alone, I feel like a seedy voyeur like Jacques or Guilliame.

was on a bit of a tiresome walk round a park with my brother and his wife, but passed a second hand bookshop along the way, all paperbacks one pound. found a collection of peter reading's first three books of poetry - diplopic, C, Ukulele Music. Sitting in a pub enjoying the caustic violence and wit set in a sort of deep pastoral (in itself bloody and sexual).

"kiddies" are "(sinister dwarfs, next issue's parricides)". skinheads throw 280 million year old fossilised desert at nesting kittiwakes - that desert in itself an unpleasant compression:

Arid hot desert stretched here in the early
Permian Period - sand dune fossils
are pressed to a brownish bottom stratum.

arid hot desert - sand dune fossils - brownish bottom stratum

labouring trochees + guttural speech of birds - "'uk-uk-uk and a plaintive 'ee-e-eeh' - and teens - 'Gibbo, gerrofal getcher yaffuga'.

Junky was short, reportorial, but artful. By artful, I mean to say it is one of those books that appears utterly straightforward and gives the impression of almost guileless simplicity, while being based in decades of thoughtful observation and a fully developed philosophy of life.

I am now reading Sagas of the Warrior-Poets, an anthology of five brief Icelandic sagas, where the main character is a skald.

I finished I Love Dick, which I really enjoyed and wish I had read a long time ago. Funnier than I'd expected and was very well executed, imo (I think it's irritating-ness, mentioned upthread, is deliberate or at least she's very self-conscious of it - whether or not that excuses it I guess depends on your taste). I do wonder, if the show indeed continues, how it would carry on. Would have been interesting to read when it was first published ('97?) and its novelty (in tone, if not form) would have been better appreciated. I'm definitely going to pick up 'Torpor', her 'prequel' of sorts to ILD, soon.

Also read a few stories by the early 20th century Chinese writer Lu Xun (from this collection https://www.amazon.com/Real-Story-Other-Tales-China/dp/0140455485) which I liked, though fear I missed quite a bit due to a lack of knowledge of Chinese history. As his "Diary of a Madman" story would suggest, he writes in a Gogol-ian (Gogol-ese?) tradition (Kafka-esque too, avant la lettre) with what seem to be heavily allegorical strands running through.

Started Paul Beatty's the Sellout which has been literally laugh out loud funny. I'm not sure if he can sustain the comic momentum and riffs over the course of the novel (am about 60 pages in, now), but I'm really enjoying it so far. Great one-liners and set-pieces. Funniest book I've read in a while.

i really liked kraus' aliens and anorexia, maybe even more than ild

Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy. According to the introduction by Rachel Cooke, "The finding of a voice for the book - and it is a remarkable voice - Dundy credited to her friend the novelist Henry Green. At their lunches together, she made is her business to make him laugh. 'I began to recognise that I was hearing a voice that was me but that wasn't me', she wrote in her 2001 memoir Life Itself! 'It was a voice Henry gave me, yet I'd heard it before. But never this clearly. It let me play the screwball again.'"

Sample sentence that made me laugh: "I said casually, 'I saw this stinking little Art film last night. All about the simple life on a barge up and down the Seine. How about that? Not a bad idea.'"

dundy wrote a good book abt elvis and his mom iirc

I thought I'd give BEE another go. I read "Glamorama" a few years ago and I remember it being annoying.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41i4iaoq%2BsL._SX328_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I noticed once more that the authors of Icelandic sagas are generally very specific and detailed about wounds inflicted during battles, including all the particulars of the weapon used, the site of the wounds, the extent of damage, and the type of blow which inflicted the damage. Just as medieval European court poets always lavished a lot of attention on the dress of the knights and their ladies. In each case, it is an exact reflection of their audience's keenest interests.