Slenderfire-blog - A Slender Fire

Hi! You don't mind playing a game with me?

If you could ask each Beatle only one question however without any consequences what would you ask them~?

Hi!!! Sorry I took a while to get to this, what a fun ask!!!!

I am presuming they will tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (including things they maybe actually forgot in the meantime).

This is very hard, because of course I'm nosy about specific historical facts.

So, here are my thoughtful, more open-ended questions that I think would lead to something pretty insightful:

Ringo: How have your feelings on the Beatles breakup changed over the years and did Get Back have a specific impact?

George: What role has forgiveness played in your relationships and how do you feel about your willingness to forgive?

John: How do you reconcile your need to be authentic with the inherent performance of fame?

Paul: What are you most afraid could happen to your legacy once you're no longer with us?

And here are my kneejerk "EXPLAIN THIS!!!!"-type questions. Imagine me throwing a chair before yelling these. (also I avoided questions where the answer might depress me too much or that presume things I'm not actually sure about lol)

Ringo: What happened that one time on tour you went on some sort of bender and were maybe suicidal? :(

George: The Maureen affair. Please Elaborate.

John: What was going through your mind when you told Hunter Davies you slept with Brian in Barcelona?????

(still hoping Davies' archive might give me some clue regarding this one, once it becomes available....)

Paul: I Demand Your Actual Unfiltered Yoko Take, Sir.

'An empty theatre is a promise unfulfilled'

speakingofcake's photo on Instagram

New fic: Under his carpet

Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990. Chapter 1 of 5 posted.

Plinda fans/Paul superfans dni (JOKING! No sugarcoating, but not a hatchet job on either. Most of it is based on fact, but plenty is invented - speculative fiction an' all that.)

While not shying away from the darker sides of the marriage, this story is primarily intended as a character study about flawed individuals, none of whom are villains. It also explores the tension between visually appearing liberated, as many Boomer women did, and the reality of their domestic lives. A tension which is still relevant today.

The city of memories: Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria

If one of the novels in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet were submitted to a publisher today, it probably wouldn’t make it past the receptionist. A great, sprawling meditation on the tangled loves and confusing lives of a group of wealthy, privileged eccentrics living in 1930s Alexandria, the two I’ve read (Balthazar and Justine) break just about every rule in the creative writing book. The plot, as much as there is one, meanders aimlessly, all the characters speak in an identical voice that exactly mirrors that of the narrator, the prose is laden with archaic terms and classical allusions, and the mood of relentless intensity never lets up. Yet the novels are captivating in a way other, better-written books are not, because even though they present us with one writer’s idiosyncratic version of reality, that reality is presented with utter conviction and sincerity. Durrell himself was fully aware of what he was doing, as the note at the beginning of Balthazar reveals. In it, he explains that ‘modern literature offers no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition. Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. These four novels follow this pattern.’ In the postmodern age, such grandiose ambition might seem incredible, but Durrell was not being an egomaniac – he was simply following the themes of early 20th century modernism, in all its forms, when many still believed that art and literature could change the world. He acknowledges himself the outdatedness of his ambition, even as early as the 1950s (Balthazar was published in 1957): ‘These considerations sound perhaps somewhat immodest or even pompous. But it would be worth trying an experiment’ I have always found that the greatest artists are the ones who succeed in drawing you absolutely into their world, who weave such a compelling spell with words or music or images that even the flaws in the work become an essential part of it. Other great artists can present you with a perfectly achieved idea or object, to be consumed in the exact moment it is seen in and executed with the flawless precision that comes from years of work. Paul Klee, Philip Larkin and Stevie Wonder are examples of this kind of artist, and they and their kind are essential and great. But there is an especial wonder in being drawn into a fully realised artistic world, and it take a very different kind of artist to do that – the kind that writes a four-volume novel about one city and a few of its inhabitants. Evoking place is a key obsession for many novelists, and Durrell succeeds magnificently. Alexandria – a long-disappeared Alexandria – seems to breath from the page as he lovingly describes the moods of its harbour waters, the smell of the streets, the faces of diplomats, policemen, Bedouin and barbers, the wind swelling the curtains of the narrator’s tiny room, the sweep of coast and silent deserts outside the city walls. The characters live vividly, even though they all speak in the narrator’s voice – in fact that is part of the spell, as the quartet is telling the story of one man’s experience of a place and time. Wordy, humourless and intense, the characters should be insufferable, but Durrell’s longing eye lights on a hundred and one idiosyncracies and tiny mysteries that makes them all live and makes you care what will become of them. I say ‘longing’ because though the central theme of the quartet may seem to be the course of a love affair, in fact it is about memory and the almost painful longing that writers have to preserve long-distant times and feelings in prose that will bring it all back to life, rather than condemning it to a dry death on the page. Many times throughout the books the narrator makes reference to the continual struggle of the artist to catch a place and a time, and the act of love required to hold that form permanently. It’s love that inspires this kind of writing, not just romantic love, but love of existence. The unequal city with its countless tales of poverty, misfortune and unhappiness is presented with a loving eye that doesn’t want any part of it to be forgotten. It’s this loving capture of a personal version of reality which brings the work of Henry Miller to mind. Durrell greatly admired Miller, but though they shared the same all-encompassing eye Miller’s approach was much more rough-and-ready, not just in his sexual explicitness, but in his harsher assessments of the people around him. However, in Tropic of Capricorn, he evokes New York in the early 1920s with the same vividness that Durrell does Alexandria, taking the same joy in every beautiful and hideous aspect of the city. This is the great value of fiction – when written by a person consumed with longing for a place and time, it gives us a kind of completeness of vision that could never be provided by a straight-up factual account. We read non-fiction to find ways to change the wrongness of the world, we read fiction to balance that quest and find a fully realised version of reality. Much of this is a matter of taste – plenty would find Durrell’s intensity impossible to read, and there’s no denying that the novels have pretentious passages. The focus on the lives of the rich and idle, and their various hangers-on, is not exactly all-encompassing, even though just about every part of Alexandrian society features in some way. But if Durrell had ever adapted any of his content to suit a greater number of readers, or provide a more fully-rounded version of the story, the spell would immediately have been broken, because the sincerity would be gone. For any who do start the novels and find the first few pages heavy going, my advice would be to give it time to work its magic. As a postscript, I generally am not very interested in books about fading aristocracy – ‘Big House’ novels leave me cold – but between this quartet and the wonderful, little-known novel Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali I have developed a compulsive fascination with the former aristocracy of Egypt: the French-speaking Coptic community. Perhaps the heterogenuity of the world they lived in, as opposed to that of the aristocracy of England and Ireland, has something to do with it.

Too good to be true?

The Riace Bronzes

A recent episode of the Bettany Hughes series, The Ancient World, entitled ‘Athens: The Truth About Democracy’, covered the history and development of that unprecedented experiment in direct, representational democracy in 5th-century Athens. As expected, the show covered the astonishing achievements the Greeks made in art, drama and philosophy. Interestingly, Hughes pointed out that these achievements actually coincided with the period in which pure democracy was beginning to decline, eroded by the dominance of Pericles and the dragged-out nightmare of the Peloponnesian War.

Among the most notable achievements was the abrupt evolution of Greek sculpture from the stiff, Egyptian-like figures of the kouroi to the astonishing dynamism and realism of the Discobolus and the Riace Bronzes. The suddenness of this evolution and the perfection of the resulting art seems to be in keeping with the rest of the ‘Greek Achievement’, but an English sculptor has a different theory. Nigel Konstam, interviewed by Hughes in the programme, thinks that the lifelikeness of these sculptures is just that – namely that they were made using plaster casts of live models. He demonstrated how this could be done in his workshop, where a number of sculptors smeared plaster over a carefully positioned, suitably muscled male model.

Konstam didn’t stop there, though. His ultimate piece of evidence was the soles of some of the Riace sculpture’s feet. The underside of the sculpted toes and soles are flattened at exactly the same point a live standing model’s would be – a detail unnecessary for verisimilitude, since the soles are invisible. It’s a persuasive argument, though it could just as easily be argued that Greek sculptors paid the same attention to detail on the invisible as the visible in their work. A more convincing proof for the argument came to me as I looked at the images of various statues, something that has often occurred to me while looking at Greek sculpture – namely, that the heads and bodies often seem notably different to each other., Even when the proportions are perfect, as they usually are, the bodies are so life-like as to seem to be breathing, while the faces are oddly generic – both male and female faces have the same long noses, pursed lips and round cheeks (incidentally the young Elvis had a perfectly ‘Greek’ face). It’s less conclusive than the soles-of-the-feet evidence, but this disparity strongly indicates, from an aesthetic point of view at least, that models with perfect bodies were used as moulds for both male and female Greek sculptures, while the faces were created from imagination. It’s not implausible that such ripped torsos would be plentiful among Athenian citizens – soldiers in the triremes spent up to 8 hours a day solidly rowing.

If true, this theory rather takes away from the idea that the Greeks were innovators in sculpture, but the thought doesn’t bother me. Their myriad achievements in just about every other field more than make up for it.

All aboard

A review of Thomas Keneally’s latest novel, The People’s Train. This review has also been published on Politico.ie.

Since the days of Margaret ‘There Is No Alternative’ Thatcher, many (if not most) people have accepted as natural that economic prosperity can only be achieved through a free-market economy that flourishes as speculators make it big on the international markets. Few governments in the West, despite their political allegiances, have made any serious effort to embrace a different system over the last two decades. Even in the midst of the current collapse, official response has been to attempt to return things to the previous status quo, and public response, while angry, remains largely inchoate.

In the current atmosphere, the sheer audacity of what the Russians attempted to achieve from 1917 onwards can look naïve at best, and malevolent at worst, especially with the knowledge of the later atrocities and failures of the Soviet regime. Drummed as we are today with the message of ‘there is no alternative’, it’s hard not to look at the Soviet experiment cynically, yet its core message – that not only is there an alternative, but that it can be achieved – was taken utterly seriously by many men and women whose standards of integrity still stand up today.

Evoking the sincerity of this belief and its potential to change the world is tricky business for any writer looking back through the miasma of 20th-century opinion, but Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s Ark, is more than qualified to take on the challenge. In his latest novel, The People’s Train (recently out in paperback), a Russian emigrant to Australia in the early years of the 20th century tells his story of organising strikes and fighting for workers’ rights in Brisbane, before the action moves to Russia and the heady countdown to the October Revolution. The Australian part of the book is presented as a memoir by Keneally’s hero, Artem (Tom) Samsurov, who gradually reveals the details of his journey down under; the perilous escape from a tsarist prison camp, treks across Siberia and journeys by boat through Japan and China. Artem is a committed revolutionary who believes nothing less than a complete overthrow of the capitalist system will be sufficient to bring equality to the world.

Keneally does a wonderful job of bringing this character to life; too often revolutionaries in fiction come across as either hysterical or dully obsessed with political theory, but Artem is portrayed as a thoughtful, self-aware man who nevertheless cannot and will not compromise on his ideals. He is utterly believable as a man of his time and milieu, and the conflicts he faces with his fellow emigrant Russians and with the radical female lawyer he finds himself in a complicated attachment with are entirely believable.

Australia’s labour history is not a well-known topic, but the Brisbane of The People’s Train is full of agitation, strikes, union meetings and corrupt police, and the feel of a country still trying to establish a conclusive identity is powerfully evoked. Indeed, the titular train is an idea for a worker-owned monorail serving Brisbane, conceived by one of Samsurov’s friends. It remains unbuilt, serving as a symbol for the ever-retreating dreams of the young radicals. Australia is represented in the Russia-set section of the book by Paddy Dykes, a young journalist with the Australian Worker, who asks many of the book’s crucial questions about the nature of revolution and what happens when theory meets reality.

The Australian story is more engaging than the Russian; the familiarity of the story of the Russian Revolution leads to a slightly rushed narrative in the second part of the book that isn’t helped by various brief, cameo-like appearances by historical figures. However the pace recovers at the end; the momentous events of history are mirrored by equally turbulent upheavals in the minds of the central characters, with a last line that will take its place among the great endings of fiction.

Keneally leaves the question open as to whether the failure of the Soviet project was due to corruption of the original ideal, or whether the seeds of tyranny lay within it from the beginning. His characters are telling their story as they see it, nothing more. In an age where this period tends to be either glamourised or subject to revisionism, Keneally has succeeded in conveying what it was actually like to live during this unforgettable time.

One of the best historical novels of the year.

The People’s Train by Thomas Keneally

Sceptre, August 2010 (paperback)

£7.99

what is it with dezo hoffman and taking the most erotic photos imaginable of beatles. see also: the smoky hazy sleepy paul in paris 64 pics that john supposedly owned. also a p hot one of george from the same shoot

John Lennon backstage at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, England | 4 April 1963 © Dezo Hoffmann

"At first neither John nor I liked this picture because it was contradictory to his tidy image. But his expression and the lighting were so good that we ended up liking it. It seems to sum up John at that time." ~ Dezo Hoffmann

from Paul's self-interview with the McCartney I release.

He had the first two lines of 'Every Night' for "a few years"? D: D:

For reference, those two lines are:

Every night, I just want to go out Get out of my head Every day, I don't want to get up Get out of my bed

Source: The Longest Cocktail Party by Richard diLello

With The Chants (in all, comprised of Joe Ankrah, Eddie Ankrah, Edmund Amoo, Nat Smeda, and Alan Harding) and Little Richard, backstage at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton on October 12, 1962. Photos by Les Chadwick.

“[Joe Ankrah noted] ‘It was bad enough that the modern moods [racism] never gave a black group a chance, but if not for Paul and his friends, we would have never stayed together… In fact, I think that meeting the Beatles changed the direction of my life.’ Ankrah also makes it clear that, in a sea of intolerance, Paul and the Beatles stood out, and stood up for him and his bandmates. ‘They were very cool guys, and meeting them gave us a look at real opportunity.’ […] [T]he Beatles, surrounded by postwar racial and religious bigotry, went against the grain and gave a black group a break, even was they were pursuing their own dream. […] ‘Could I have imagined a future like that? Who could? But, looking back, I knew they had something special, and a level of compassion that was truly unusual for a band on the move.’ - Joe Ankrah [of The Chants], Beatles friend whose band was pushed through racial barriers by the boys” - When They Were Boys by Larry Kane “They went ‘apeshit’ when we started to sing. I can still see George and John racing up to the stage with their mouths stuffed with hot dogs or whatever. The invitation to make our Cavern debut was given as soon as we finished ‘A Thousand Stars’ for them. They insisted we perform that very night. Everything happened completely spontaneously from that point. The Beatles themselves offered to back us when we told them we’d never worked with a band before. We then rehearsed four songs with them and then we ran home to tell all and sundry that we had ‘made it’!” When Brian Epstein arrived at the Cavern that night he refused to allow the Beatles to back us, but they collectively persuaded him to change his mind – and when he heard us he invited us to appear on many subsequent appearances with them.” - Eddie Amoo, Mersey Beat via TriumphPC “When the Beatles became big they were great about us. They went round telling everyone we were great, and when they were on Juke Box Jury, they played our record ‘I Could Write A Book’ and the Beatles raved about it and voted us a hit!” - Alan Harding, Record Mirror, June 25, 1966