Extracts from Levona

history and the way in which it is replayed / for us all to exceed / what has been known before / there are no archetypes other than those we self-erect / else the mind is merely an empty vessel / no more than birds reacting to their imperative / and we are builders /yes to that / a nest is one kind of home / there are others / best look at ourselves in this light / as secure in our parasitism / feeder birds on the hives of the old dead / that we know / more than this / we do know more than this / no more than this we know / sleep / each night create a new paradigm / we could do this but choose otherwise / a pass at an attempt and then revert to type / mental type / as long-lived in us as blood type and perhaps equally unchanging unchanged unchangeable / die given the wrong transfusion and so ever more must conform to the way / but there are antibodies of the mind strange mutant thoughts and ways of thought as there are with blood / the race requires it / can genius be ever predicted no nor ever last long for the mutant is much like the survivor of an epidemic / lucky but untypical / and then attempts to distil like clutching air / there are mechanisms that can attempt such subtlety but can the essence be taken unattached from the vessel that lies functional and unknowing / would without what it contained be worth less than the empty / for such are contradictions / beauty and the moment taken to appreciate beauty / the limits of eyes and the wonder of the iris / cornea / we find the medical terms seductive and compassion is easier for the doe for the soft or the half sentient / but what makes us not animals is not just the ability to fleece each other not just our cut and thrust in a world that values such / but us / non-autistic / aware of time passing / gone / and to be played / if this is a game then it is the game that is the counterfeit not the life / which is what we see in it where we cheer is emotion and how and who with and the hand slipped next to that which you most want / for that also / blood / are we not brothers you and I / sisters / lovers / and lovers are we not a better judge of thought than not lovers / nor is this an attempt to push back the flesh / decay / it is better to find essence where nothing can intervene / we have to approach vacuum / understand it / let in not that which contaminates and then we may know peace / even for a little while know pieces of the puzzle but the picture eludes for what if we are stood in the wrong place and the universe spins out from us and our perspective / only science does not deny this / only religion and where does the religion spin from / our consciousness and our weak bodies / long on skin and hair that stretches all ways in deep thought / yet not even sentient / ballsy thoughts of the hard woman / too long as the seduced and not with the will yet to seduce herself / is she attempting to go in and read or understand the brain of others / not easy nor wise / better read the flesh curve and expect its messages to be all outcomes / red is her colour of hair / but it is a red that I make of colour my own / like a dye or a colouring / a faking of perspective / in the tiny ways in which we react we do this and yet put together over time you ask me how is it that I lie / how is it that I cannot be truthful with you and how is it that our truths differ and there is a falling and breakdown between truth and understanding / this is the speck of dust that becomes the universe I say and the universe that becomes the speck of dust

The Girlfriend Who Got Me Into Mazzy Star by Adrian Slatcher

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Debuts of innocence and experience, truth and lies

I've read two debut novels this week; however one of those was Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road", written before I was born. It's a very readable novel, and having recently written a novella about a disintegrating marriage, it was fascinating to read a successful novel on the same subject, but in a different age, and from a different place. I'm not sure that its a "classic", though it certainly deserves its rediscovery. Its a dark book, almost overlaying a noir sensibility over middle American lives. The three act structure and the subject matter and setting do remind me of plays such as "All My Sons" and "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?", but Yates is novelist, not playwright, and he gives us an interior monologue which achieves a psychological depth that explains its current popularity. When I say its not a "classic", its more that it feels quite familiar to me; reminding me of Cheever, Updike, even Evan Hunter. The America of the fifties salaryman is so familiar to us from television, that the novel does seem to be of its time and place. Its a contemporary novel from just before the modern America really begins, but its themes of family, work and love are universal.

What goes without saying is what an adult novel it is. Both Frank Wheeler and his wife April are mature characters. We meet them not at the beginning of their struggles to "fit in" but at the end, as their hopes and expectations bump up against the narrow life that they live. Not for the first time I was reminded how few contemporary novels seem comfortable with writing about mature lives, or real problems. Partly I think its because we live in safer, securer times, yet its rare - in English fiction at least - to find a writer addressing such issues. Perhaps McEwan of late, but that's all that comes to mind.

Its difficult for a debutant - a young writer particular - after all what life is their to write about. James Scudamore's "The Amnesia Clinic" I picked up after his second novel "Heliopolis" has been longlisted for this year's Booker. If its anywhere near as good as the debut, it should make the shortlist. Set in Ecuador, its a story about stories, clearly owing a debt to those South American fabulists such as Borges and Marquez, but with a down-to-earth feel that you'd expect from an English writer. Anti, the narrator, is an English boy in Ecuador, who becomes friends with Fabian, a local boy who lives with his uncle, and doesn't talk about what happened to his parents. Like McEwan's "Atonement", its about how children - the boys are 15 - can make decisions that have catastrophic consequences; because of what they see, how they interpret it. The stories in the novel are very much of the shaggy dog variety, and I think, in less capable hands, the novel could have come across as too faux for its own good. Yet because we are seeing the story through the narrow perspective of an English boy, its probably the right decision. Unlike Diaz's "Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" where "stories" seem more real than the horrible truth of the Trujillo regime, here the stories are like clothes used for dressing up. Anti and Fabian even have a formula for puncturing the myths of their stories, by asking "what would a really unimaginative person think."

When you are child, of course, your parents tell you off for "telling tales", as story becomes a synonym for lie. Its strange how often it comes up in contemporary fiction - because here the stories have tragic consequence, surely an odd moral for a novelist (a writer of stories!) to be giving? - and I think its partially because of that discomfort with maturity. Yates in "Revolutionary Road" has both Frank and April living a lie, or worse, believing each other's story to the point that the lie and the truth are inseperable. Only the novel's medically insane character, John, gets to speak, rather than think the truth. In the Scudamore novel I'm minded most often of Thornton Wilder's wonderful "The Bridge of San Luis Rey", where the stories are the truth - and you uncover the story of a man's life, to find his destiny. "The Amnesia Clinic", as the title perhaps suggests, is far more playful. Its also looking at memory, and how we give ourselves stories to help us remember, or to help us forget.

For debut novelists today, there does seem to be a desire to write from a position of innocence, rather than experience - whether a child as in "The Amnesia Clinic" (or Catherine O'Flynn's excellent "What Was Lost") or an adult with something missing, such as Annie as Jenn Ashworth's "A Kind of Intimacy". Experience, it seems, can wait.

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Ceefax

100 Home.
200 City Pages.
302 Football.
339 Fixtures and Tables.
400 Weather.
440 Flight Arrivals.
528 Top 40 singles.
555 National Lottery.

Paul Weller - Studio 150

The cover version album tends to cover a multitude of sins: writers block; contractual obligation; homage to heroes; marking of time; appealing to a new market. And usually, its only the fans who are willing to indulge the singer who records them. So its perhaps surprising that "Studio 150" is my first Paul Weller album. Sure, I've the best ofs - both of the Jam and the Style Council - but Paul's particular blend of earnest passion and gritty realism has never been a particular favourite. That said, at his best - the acoustic ascerbicness of "That's Entertainment" or the punch-drunk soul of "Walls Come Tumbling Down" - his passionate everyman figure tugs on my heart as much as anyones. "Studio 150" is a minor key triumph then - for Weller gets a chance to cover songs and singers that must have influenced some of his least expected moments. For a punk rocker he's always been primarily a white soul singer in the Steve Marriott style; and so even if his voice is occasionally pushed to be much more than a half-decent pub-singer, there's a conviction to his tone, and an authenticity to the arrangements that lifts the album well above karaoke. A well chosen cover version can lift even the dimmest live show. An exemplary band excels on the more soulful material - Aaron Neville's "Hercules" and Gil Scott Heron's "The Bottle" - even if he can't quite match the originals. More intriguing, the two disco numbers, Rose Royce's "Wishing on a Star" and Sister Sledge's "Thinking of You", are real standouts - proving that his Style Council peak, "Long Hot Summer", wasn't that anomalous a record. Of course, snobbishness aside, these are all great songs, but ones that aren't as necessarily wedded to a particular artist. The achilles heel of most covers albums are the attempts to cover the bases - usually the Dylan-Beatles-Stones access. Here we get only one attempt at the triumvirate, "All Along the Watchtower", which in this version is neither Hendrix or Dylan. "Birds" - the exemplary Neil Young track from "After the Goldrush" is one of my all time favourite songs and though his version is no failure, its more jaunty pace doesn't turns it halfway to gospel hymn rather than ascetic lament, and it doesn't match Kathryn Williams take on it from her "Relations" album (also from 2004.) So, a Paul Weller album for people who don't particularly like Paul Weller? It could be that.