New Voice

Towards the end of his follow-up to The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer Simon Gray mentions going to see a film called  Look at Me, “the idiotic title of the French film Comme une image”.  He goes on to describe this “freak of a film, full of intelligent and civilized people behaving to each other as such people frequently behave to each other, egocentrically, thoughtlessly, narcissistically, with mainly accidental but sometimes deliberate cruelty, all of them perfectly observed in their smallest reactions…”.  I’ve seen the film in question, and he’s right, and justly celebrates the “everyday sort of treachery” that forms the basis for a “marvellously painful moment” in the film.  (continue reading…)

In my last post I mentioned Lars Von Triers, and the hostility his films provoke. Bryan Appleyard, in last week’s Sunday Times, went on at length about how provoked he was by Antichrist. What quite provoked Appleyard’s hostility was a little difficult to pinpoint – he didn’t like the explicit violence, the nastiness, and he wasn’t sure whether or not it should have been given its 18 uncut rating, as he isn’t quite sure about the whole rating thing. But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the violence that left him “insensate with rage,” although he spent quite a bit of the article talking about the violence and nastiness. (continue reading…)

…on a Monday, this week. I thought, when I started to write, that I was done with work, and I am, for the moment, in a moment. I thought that I had done work to the death, but its relationship to literature is fertile ground for discussion – since I’ve started writing about it people have been mentioning books that deal with work, or writers known for their relationship with work, especially with means-to-end work. Someone mentioned Flann O’Brien, like myself a civil servant, and a man whose literary output would put one to shame. That he had time to squeeze in so much writing – the journalism and ficiton – between work and prodigious boozing (although he was a civil servant at a time when you could combine the working and the boozing, saving some time at least) is amazing and admirable. (continue reading…)