Crace Craze

John, I'm looking back over the 459 Ward Six posts and am shocked that none of us have mentioned the work of Jim Crace. I am informed that it is pronounced as one syllable, although he is European, or at least British. I first heard about him from you, regarding Being Dead, whose protagonists are a dead couple in some sand dunes. It sounded like too much of a trick, at the time, and I avoided the book until after I found The Gift of Stones and read it on the train between El Paso and Charlottesville. The Gift of Stones is a pre-Bronze Age story about a family of stoneworkers and the sadness of progress. Or something. What grabbed me about the book was the dawning realization that it was written almost entirely in iambics. It scans.

The Devil's Larder is a book of short essays, mostly from fictional characters, about food and taste, written with a sort of sinister knowingness. I was surprised by this book, after reading a few novels. While still largely iambic, he allows in essays his sentences to play around more than in fiction, like Guy Davenport or Evan S. Connell. Like the best food writing, it's really about death.

Here's an excerpt. Scan it!

This afternoon, I thought I’d fill my time by making bread. My old wrists ache with tugging at the dough of what, I think, will have to be my final loaves. I tore a strip off for good luck, kissed it, put it on the window sill. I warmed the oven, greased the tins, and put the dough to cook on the highest shelf. Now I’m waiting at the window, with a smudge of flour on my lips and with the smell of baking bread rising through the house, for the yard to fill and darken with the shadows and the wings.

I haven't read Quarantine, because it's about Jesus, and I am wary of fiction that contains Jesus, having been raised around people who sneak a little Jesus or America into anything, like raisins in chocolate chip cookies, something they think is sweet and you would like, or perhaps need. Good sources inform me that I should put aside these assumptions and read Quarantine, and that it reads like Gift of Stones and The Pesthouse, all focused survival dramas in blasted zones.

The Pesthouse, Crace's most recent novel, is terrifying. I read this one on a train, too, the Sunset Limited between New Orleans and Palm Springs in June. The Sunset Limited is a good train for reading, because it is mostly stationary, stuck behind freight.

Here's the first paragraph of The Pesthouse:

Everybody died at night. Most were sleeping at the time, the lucky ones who were too tired or drunk or deaf or wrapped too tightly in their spreads to hear the hillside, destabilized by rain, collapse and slip beneath the waters of the lake. So these sleepers (six or seven hundred, at a guess; no-one ever came to count or claim the dead) breathed their last in passive company, unwarned and unexpectedly, without experiencing the fear. Their final moments, dormant in America.

Scan that, man. It begins, as epics properly do, with a trochee: EVryBODy DIED at NIGHT. and then another trochee: MOST were SLEEPing AT the TIME, the LUCKy ONES and so on, broken up every ten syllables or so to interrupt the rhythm, to keep you from noticing.

It's mastery, simply.

Beatles Books

Rhian can attest to my inexplicable and undying affection for rock and roll documentaries--I've made her sit through about half a dozen. It's not the music that gets me--though I often like it--but the spectacle of (usually) four (always) arrogant (traditionally) men, desperately trying to get along with one another for years on end. As a portrait of group creativity and its pitfalls, these movies are instructive indeed.

It's amazing the Beatles lasted as long as they did, but because they did, we can spend our entire lives reading books about them, if we wish. Two recent ones are standouts, though--Geoff Emerick's Here, There, and Everywhere, and Recording the Beatles, by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew.

The former is an as-told-to memoir by the head engineer on the late Beatles sessions; Emerick started in at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road) when he was 16, and found himself behind the mixing board, recording Revolver, before he was out of his teens. Emerick is responsible for a lot of the now commonplace, but then highly innovative, sound experiments that characterize the last few Beatles records; he invented many of the effects recording musicians take for granted today. The book is a very fast read--it's told in a direct, engaging style, and is packed with entertaining anecdotes. Emerick comes off as a regular bloke who happens to be brilliant at one specific thing, and it's this thing that makes him a witness to, and maker of, musical history. He doesn't have a lot of tolerance for moodiness--he loves Paul and never cared much for George--but he's otherwise a pleasure to be with for a few hundred pages.

The latter book, Recording the Beatles, is for geeks only. It explains, in exhaustive detail, every piece of equipment used on every Beatles recording, and offers up some major eye candy as well, in the form of glorious photographs, diagrams, and maps. The book is superbly written, is perhaps the best book about recording music, ever. Most surprising is the authors' meticulous examination of the culture of EMI--the heirarchy of its employees, what rules were broken (often by Emerick), and why. It's a unique portrait of a particular time and place.

Even as a physical artifact, Recording the Beatles is an amazing achievement--it's enormous, printed on heavy stock, and comes in a clever cardboard slipcase that mimics the boxes that used to house EMI's analog tape. It'll also run you a benjamin and, if you prop it open on your lap for more than an hour, you'll soon be writing checks to your urologist. It's worth it, though, if you're as big a dork as I am.

Book mystery

This morning I was thinking about the different names for the male organ and remembered when I first encountered the word "prick." I was about twelve, in the children's section of the public library, reading a book about a British boys' school. What stuck in my mind is a vivid scene in which some boys are holding a race in the bathroom, naked, trying to see how far they can carry a slipper on their "prick."

Though now it occurs to me that the setting might not have been Britain at all, and the word might have been "peter."

I associate this memory very strongly with the Newbery awards section of that library, but I've scanned through the lists of Newbery winners and none seems to be this book. In those days, though, I was likely to sneak books from the adult section and take them back to the children's where I could read them out of eyeshot of the vigilant librarians.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?