Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

"Let me in, Heathcliff.

I died, and you stopped living

But let my Cathy go."

And seeing as it's Friday, let's take a sideways look at Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights, which she wrote when she was just 15 years old. And, by the sounds of things, having only read the first 15 pages, but who cares.

Of course EVERYTHING sounds better performed in the style of a Northern working men's club singer. With ukuleles. It's an acknowledged fact.

The Three Sisters

The Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov

Dreaming of Moscow

Makes life pass by unnoticed.

Did you hear the gun? 

Not a novel, nor a doorstop, but certainly a classic.  One which I didn't get the first time round though. My first experience of Chekhov was a pained student production directed by an old lag with too many ideas and actors with too little experience. 

Needless to say I didn't see the point of it and said so to a lecturer in the drama department.  A very grand, poised former opera singer who replied with one of the wisest things I've ever heard about literature.  "Ah yes," she said, "I think you can only appreciate Checkhov once you're old enough to have something to regret."

That's the thing about universities.  They get you in young and attempt to stuff your head with older people's thoughts.  Sometimes they don't fit.  But that doesn't mean they won't in time.

Nico

Nico

Frozen borderlines

Wrap a tourniquet round all

Tomorrow's parties.

Temporarily interrupting normal service to post this



The incomparable, beautiful and inscrutable Nico singing Frozen Borderline at the Library Theatre in Manchester. She'd come a long way from The Factory by the 1980s, at which point she was living a smack addicted half-life in North Manchester. Years before the IRA performed open heart surgery on the city, of course.

She came to a sad, early end, did Nico. James Young, a musician who fell into being her tour pianist, again sometime in the 80s has written a witty, moving memoir, Songs They Never Play On The Radio, about her last years.

Mind you, this seemed to be the way with Warhol's muses. He picked them for their glamour and unpicked and flattened it, just like he turned Marilyn Monroe into two dimensional blocks of colour. Beautiful girls and boys made vague and ugly by drugs or overexposure

The Andy Warhol retrospective, Other Voices Other Rooms, at the Hayward has an oddly similar effect. It spreads a scant talent too thinly over a sizable exhibition. His main contribution to 20th century art may have been to remove overt emotion from art, but that doesn't mean his work lacks jealousy. The many photographs of him in drag, or makeup, or both, scream with envy.

What was Nico to Andy? A mini-Edie Sedgwick? Perhaps, but she, unlike the poor little rich girl, at least managed to escape him with something of herself in tact. Incidentally, if you must see Factory Girl, a biopic so hackneyed that it's almost a masterpiece of kitsch, they get her totally wrong. She may have been a model but she was no Heidi Klum.

Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary, by Gustav Flaubert

Poor Emma. So bored,
Except for sex and shopping,
While the bills mount up.

I read Madame Bovary for the first time this year. It was an odd experience.  Instead of the tragedy fans of the novel that led me to expect, I got cool observation of materialistic stupidity. Telling reading in a 'credit crunch'.

And what a difference 150 years make.  In 1856 Emma Bovary's search for self-fulfilment in men and pretty clothes made her a dupe for the loansharks and a suicide.

Now she'd be Carrie Bradshaw.  

Starting easy

Hell, no.

Seven books, more than a thousand pages long, French and, above all, dense. 

A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), by Marcel Proust

Lime tea and biscuits

Bid Marcel's past to blossom

Time regained, elided.

Is reading the new snacking?

You'd think so if you went to Borders on Oxford Street.

Thousands of books, and not one of them was Anna Karenina.  One copy of Crime and Punishment and the Penguin classics looked like they'd been put through the Shredder.

What's with the new Penguin Poular Classics cover design anyway?  Chartreuse was last year's colour.

Anyhow, irritation can be inspirational.  If we can only speak in soundbites, why can't books do it too?  Especially the big, scary ones people claim they're too busy and tired to read, even if there's always time for shredding your nerves on X-Factor.  And small can be beautiful.  The haiku is just as beautiful a form as the epic.

So we're smashing the two together in this blog.  The great classics of world literature turned into haikus.  Not necessarily to tell their stories (War and Peace in 17 syllables anyone?) but more to evoke something of their spirit.  The bits that might actually make you want to read them.

See what you think...