Wow - just listened to
Wow - just listened to a muchly inspiring show on Radio 4 - With Great Pleasure, favourite readings picked by Sir Christopher Frayling, Rector (or was that Rektor) of the Royal College of Arts.
Take one step back - before I turned the lights out and the radio on, I was reading from Matthew Parris’s autobiography “Chance Witness”. Parris is one of those rare people who comes across as completely frank in everything that he writes, and as such I respect him a lot and enjoy his writing - so I was interested when I found out recently that he’s Lester’s cousin. Lester’s dad then said he would lend me the autobiography (he generally praised the book to me, amid mumblings of excuses that he found it “rather too confessional” and wished that Matthew didn’t bang on (oo-err) about his homosexuality quite so much). Anyway, I was reading about Parris’s childhood years in Cyprus and Africa… and as ever when I read about peoples’ childhoods, parts of my own early life that have long been submerged come back to me with sudden clarity. And this set the scene for my listening.
Frayling grabbed my attention by starting with some classic Molesworth from Down With Skool - I’d almost completely forgotten the Molesworth books, but when I was 9 or 10 I loved them yet never quite “got” them - they were so clearly of a previous age, with slang that meant nothing to me and practices now quite outdated, but also they weren’t like books that you read from beginning to end. I loved the fact that you could sit and read page after page, or just dip in to find one funny bit, and I think for that reason they used to live by my bedside for ages unlike “story” books which would last a night or two and then be thrown aside for the next good read.
The excerpt related to French teachers, and I didn’t catch very much of it, but here’s some more classic Molesworth found online which any fule should kno:
a) the russians are roters
b) americans are swankpots
c) the french are slack
d) the germans are unspeakable
e) the rest are as bad if not worse than the above
f) the british are brave super and noble cheers cheers cheers.
Next came some Italo Calvino reminiscing about a childhood obsessed with cinema. I was recently lamenting the fact that I have no golden (should that be silver?) memories of film from my youth - I’d been listening, post-Joe Strummer’s death, to The Clash’s Combat Rock for the first time in 18 years, and was thrilled to find that Death is a Star still made my spine tinglier than any other song. And I realised for the first time that the lyrics are about cinema nostalgia - about being caught up in films that show events that make your spine tingle, not about the spine tingling events themselves.
So lying here, listening to the radio, I searched for some cinema nostalgia of my own - and I dug up a little, albeit candy-coloured 70s spangles, no silver screen for this phantom. Well… p’raps that’s not quite true. There was the 10p childrens’ Saturday morning cinema show at the Odeon - the same format every week - an episode of Flash Gordon, no less gripping for being 40 years old and black-and-white, followed by some Looney Tunes, an old guy who would walk around the auditorium playing “When the Saints go Marching In” on his trumpet, Roy Castle-style, and something by the Childrens’ Film Foundation which was always (a) boring as hell and (b) scary because the kids in it always did things which had me hiding my head in my hands muttering to myself “no… don’t do it… it’s all bound to go wrong… you’ll get killed/kidnapped by the ugly guy/beaten up by the local bully/caught by a grown-up” (I was then and still remain one of the biggest cowards I have ever known). Actually, I’m sure there was something else, some main feature that made it all worthwhile. Or perhaps I just went along for the cartoons.
One time I turned up without my 10p - can’t remember quite what happened, perhaps my Mum dropped me off in a rush and left before I could ask for it, or I lost it on the way there or something. I’m not sure what the outcome was either - perhaps I was allowed in after all, I certainly don’t remember walking the streets of Twickenham for hours until my Mum found me - but I certainly do seem to remember having a long and incredibly stressful argument with the woman on the door. What did she think I, a child of about 7, was doing - pretending I’d lost the money so I could sneak in for free? Come on! I just told you what I coward I was/am. Actually, come to think of it I think I did sneak in when her back was turned. Perhaps not so cowardly after all. Yeah… dunno whether this is false memory coming out, but I do remember sneaking in and feeling a warm glow of succesful subversion for the whole afternoon.
Other than that… I think my first films were Herbie ones… Herbie goes to Monte Carlo, Herbie Rides Again, that kinda stuff. I think one of them we only got to see halfway through, because Hannah was sick and we had to leave. God, I loved that clever little car though.
Then there was Star Wars - that wasn’t so much a film as a way of life. I got huge kudos (in my own mind, at least) from the fact that my dad went to see some kind of industry preview a few weeks before it was released, and I was the first in our class to get Star Wars excitement, I spread the word like an Aussie Jedi. The film, of course, was the best thing ever to happen, only midly dulled by the fact that the Star Wars figure I owned was Ben Knobi in his boring brown flares, brown vinyl cape and retractible (it hid inside his hand) light sabre. Hannah had R2D2, which was far more interesting because it had all different coloured bits on it, and I think the head clicked when you turned it (the action on Knobi’s light sabre was most unrewarding).
Then there was James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me (until a couple of months ago, the only Bond movie I’d ever been to see in the cinema) with accompanying white Lotus Esprit (now there’s a real toy, probably the best of my entire childhood, with its retractible fins and four firing red missiles. Unfortunately, I played with it mostly at the nursery where my Mum worked, and where I hung out after school. The rug there had a habit of shedding bits around the axles, and at the same time the missiles could only be lost a certain number of times before they were never found again. The design of that car inspired me for years to come - I ended up writing a story about a spider secret agent who drove something very similar but with a camoflague paint job, and when I went to secondary school I even made a motorised version of the spider’s car for a design technology project). I think I saw The Spy Who Loved Me on the same day as a Pink Panther film (Return of… Revenge of… I dunno which) and my friend (Jason Hallett?) and I were amazed that the Pink Panther film was a U certificate and the Bond an A - OK, so the Bond probably had more double entendre (then again, probably not), but the to-die-for female Russian spy in the Pink Panther film was virtually naked at one point… our eyes were almost on the floor!
Back to the Radio 4… there was some Shakespeare next. Odd one out. I’ve never really been a big Shakespeare fan - the speech-processing centre of my brain doesn’t work fast enough to translate archaic stuff into something meaningful, although I have to say that this time it came close, and a couple of verbal runs dazzled me with their cleverness.
And the Poe… The Raven. Now, a confession, I’ve never read The Raven (no, not even that version that I just linked to). But I do have very unclear and at the same time very pervading memories of some kind of Raven parody from my childhood. Frayling mentioned a version by Mad Magazine, and I did used to have a huge pile of Mads from, I think, the mid 60s, so perhaps that’s where I know it from. Wherever it was I became acquainted with it, it casts a huge brooding, I guess you could say Poe-esque, influence over me. I just have to hear a line of that poem and everything fills up with some kind of cobwebby gothic fuzz from distinctlty remembered childhood. Chilling, but in a savourable way.
Oh, The Raven also relates to one of my earliest computer experiences. Shortly after I started typing in programmes on the Grey Court school’s one Research Machine computer, back in 1980, I was given a book of BASIC games for Christmas. I lived that book for a year or so - I can still smell its pages and match to pantone-precision the yellow cover. And I remember that among the Hannurabis and Checkers and Valley of Adventures (some of which worked on the machine we had, some of which didn’t - you generally had to type in a couple of hundred lines of code and hope for the best - and the whole thing was very American and Commodore… or was it Apple… biased) there was a computer poetry program, that spouted out as many lines as you could care to choose in the style of The Raven. All very nice, except I wasn’t too sure at the time what it was imitating.
Next came some Angela Carter - OK, hardly a childhood memory this, but The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is one of the two books (the other being M John Harrison’s “Viriconium Nights”) that have had the most lasting emotional impact upon me as an adult. It was the book that Gill introduced to me as her favourite ever, just as I introduced her to Viriconium Nights, and I read it in a somewhat euphoric state and am still transported to another parallel when I think of it. And hearing this brief reading from The Bloody Chamber reminded me just how incredible a writer Carter was - able in less than a sentence, less than a fraction of a sentence, less than a word sometimes, to conjure up the most pungent sensual images and realities. Incredible, I have no idea how in the world she could be so economical and yet so baroque. It also reminded me that there’s still a lot of Angela Carter that I haven’t read, and I really ought to (though… savour it, one drop at a time perhaps).
Finally a couple of poems which didn’t have any past resonance - some WB Yeats, which was beautiful and moving (perhaps aided by my already heightened emotional state) and the very brief Come to the Edge by Christopher Logue which resonated with thoughts that have been massing in my mind of late (also prompted by a passage in the Matthew Parris book) that if I want progress, experience, excitement, change, then I really ought to force myself into things more often, throw myself off the edge once in a while.
Like I said, wow.