Literature

Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (1894)

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As a child of the six­ties, I was exposed to that great 1967 Dis­ney clas­sic, The Jun­gle Book; I remem­ber being tak­en to the cin­e­ma to watch it and at the end, as the cred­its rolled, I begged to stay and watch Mowgli, Baloo and Shere Khan all over again (I seem to remem­ber we’d been a bit late and missed the first few min­utes so I built my jus­ti­fi­ca­tion upon that; it didn’t work). Mean­while, at school, a copy of the book on which the film was based was a sta­ple of the class book­case: Rud­yard Kipling’s The Jun­gle Book. Most of the short sto­ries must have been read out to us at one time or anoth­er but one in par­tic­u­lar stands out in my mem­o­ry: the tale of Rik­ki-Tik­ki-Tavi.

Rik­ki-Tik­ki-Tavi, so named for his chat­ter­ing vocal sounds, was a young Indi­an grey mon­goose who befriends an Eng­lish fam­i­ly resid­ing in India. He gets to know the oth­er crea­tures inhab­it­ing the gar­den and is warned of the cobras Nag and Nagaina (names per­haps inspir­ing J K Rowl­ing to choose, years lat­er, the name Nagi­ni for Voldemort’s snake), who are angered by the human fam­i­ly’s pres­ence in their ter­ri­to­ry and seek to kill them

Accord­ing­ly, Nag enters the house­’s bath­room before dawn to kill the humans, but Rik­ki attacks Nag from behind in the dark­ness. The ensu­ing strug­gle awak­ens the fam­i­ly, and the father kills Nag with a shot­gun blast while Rik­ki bites down on the hood of the strug­gling male cobra. The griev­ing female snake Nagaina attempts revenge against the humans, cor­ner­ing them as they have break­fast on a veran­da, but again Rik­ki saves the day, pur­su­ing Nagaina to her under­ground nest where an unseen final bat­tle takes place. Rik­ki emerges tri­umphant from the hole, and ded­i­cates his life to guard­ing the gar­den.

The sto­ries in The Jun­gle Book were inspired in part by ancient Indi­an fable texts such as the Pan­chatantra and the Jata­ka tales, and indeed there is a sim­i­lar mon­goose and snake ver­sion of the Rik­ki-Tik­ki-Tavi sto­ry found in Book 5 of Pan­chatantra. Kipling’s “beast tales” were thus the revival of an old tra­di­tion, with Kipling’s own spin gleaned from his expe­ri­ences grow­ing up in India for the first five years of his life (and with a hearty dol­lop of aban­don­ment issues, per­haps, after Kipling was sent back to Eng­land for an unhap­py peri­od, but that’s anoth­er sto­ry). Here are the open­ing lines to the sto­ry.

THIS is the sto­ry of the great war that Rik­ki-tik­ki-tavi fought sin­gle-hand­ed, through the bath-rooms of the big bun­ga­low in Segowlee can­ton­ment. Darzee, the tai­lor-bird, helped him, and Chuchun­dra, the muskrat, who nev­er comes out into the mid­dle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice; but Rik­ki-tik­ki did the real fight­ing.

He was a mon­goose, rather like a lit­tle cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His eyes and the end of his rest­less nose were pink; he could scratch him­self any­where he pleased, with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use; he could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bot­tle-brush, and his war-cry as he scut­tled through the long grass, was: “Rikk-tikk-tik­ki-tik­ki-tchk!”

One day, a high sum­mer flood washed him out of the bur­row where he lived with his father and moth­er, and car­ried him, kick­ing and cluck­ing, down a road­side ditch. He found a lit­tle wisp of grass float­ing there, and clung to it till he lost his sens­es. When he revived, he was lying in the hot sun on the mid­dle of a gar­den path, very drag­gled indeed, and a small boy was say­ing: “Here’s a dead mon­goose. Let’s have a funer­al.”

“No,” said his moth­er; “let’s take him in and dry him. Per­haps he isn’t real­ly dead.”

They took him into the house, and a big man picked him up between his fin­ger and thumb and said he was not dead but half choked; so they wrapped him in cot­ton-wool, and warmed him, and he opened his eyes and sneezed.

“Now,” said the big man (he was an Eng­lish­man who had just moved into the bun­ga­low); “don’t fright­en him, and we’ll see what he’ll do.”

It is the hard­est thing in the world to fright­en a mon­goose, because he is eat­en up from nose to tail with curios­i­ty. The mot­to of all the mon­goose fam­i­ly is, “Run and find out”; and Rik­ki-tik­ki was a true mon­goose. He looked at the cot­ton-wool, decid­ed that it was not good to eat, ran all round the table, sat up and put his fur in order, scratched him­self, and jumped on the small boy’s shoul­der.

“Don’t be fright­ened, Ted­dy,” said his father. “That’s his way of mak­ing friends.”

“Ouch! He’s tick­ling under my chin,” said Ted­dy.

Rik­ki-tik­ki looked down between the boy’s col­lar and neck, snuffed at his ear, and climbed down to the floor, where he sat rub­bing his nose.

Rik­ki-Tik­ki-Tavi book cov­er
Rud­yard Kipling
Poetry

John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827)

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Not every­one is an expert in Roman­tic poet­ry (and nei­ther am I, though I con­cede I’m no slouch) but if I were to ask you to name “the big six” poets of the Roman­tic era (late 18th to mid-19th cen­tu­ry), I bet you’d stand a fight­ing chance because they almost fall off the tongue: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Blake, Shel­ley, and Keats, right? There’s anoth­er poet from the era, how­ev­er, who nev­er rose to the majesty of the afore­men­tioned giants, but who nonethe­less is now regard­ed as a major tal­ent: the “Northamp­ton­shire Peas­ant Poet”, John Clare.

Unlike some of his con­tem­po­raries, John Clare didn’t have the where­with­al to lounge about on the Span­ish Steps in Rome (Keats), swim the Helle­spont (Byron), or swap ghost sto­ries around the fire at a vil­la by Lake Gene­va (Shelley…oh, and Byron again), because he spent his life as an agri­cul­tur­al labour­er, pot­boy, and gar­den­er, and nev­er left the coun­try.

Born in Help­ston in Northamp­ton­shire in 1793, John worked as a farm labour­er with his father from being a young boy onwards. The farm and the nature per­me­at­ing his sur­round­ings pro­vid­ed his inspi­ra­tions; this was where he found his voice and began writ­ing poems and son­nets. In an attempt to stave off his par­ents’ evic­tion from their home, John offered his poems to a local book­seller, who in turn sent them off to the pub­lish­ing firm who had already pub­lished the works of one John Keats. The rur­al aes­thet­ic appealed and thus, these suc­cess­ful col­lec­tions of poems were spawned: Poems Descrip­tive of Rur­al Life and Scenery, The Vil­lage Min­strel and Oth­er Poems, The Rur­al Muse, and the col­lec­tion I own: The Shepherd’s Cal­en­dar.

Whilst Clare’s ear­li­er poems speak of the har­mo­ny and beau­ty of nature in the Eng­lish coun­try­side, his lat­er work bemoans the great changes to the envi­ron­ment and soci­ety brought about by the Enclo­sure Acts. These wiped out a whole way of life by abol­ish­ing the open field sys­tem of agri­cul­ture which had been the way peo­ple farmed in Eng­land for cen­turies. The own­er­ship of the com­mon land was tak­en from them and the coun­try­side was dec­i­mat­ed as new­ly-unem­ployed coun­try folk flowed into the towns to par­tic­i­pate in the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion.

The hurt was deep, and in fact Clare found it increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to cope with life, and he sad­ly descend­ed into depres­sion and men­tal ill­ness, even­tu­al­ly spend­ing many years in an asy­lum. Whilst there he wrote the poem I Am! which is a win­dow into his men­tal strug­gles and a stark con­trast to his hard-work­ing but hap­py hey­day. Here’s a poem from the lat­ter peri­od, Spring, with I Am! fol­low­ing…

Spring

Come, gen­tle Spring, and show thy var­ied greens
In woods, and fields, and mead­ows, by clear brooks;
Come, gen­tle Spring, and bring thy sweet­est scenes,
Where peace, with soli­tude, the loveli­est looks;
Where the blue uncloud­ed sky
Spreads the sweet­est canopy,
And Study wis­er grows with­out her books.

Come hith­er, gen­tle May, and with thee bring
Flow­ers of all colours, and the wild bri­ar rose;
Come in wind-float­ing drap­ery, and bring
Fra­grance and bloom, that Nature’s love bestows–
Mead­ow pinks and columbines,
Keck­sies white and eglan­tines,
And music of the bee that seeks the rose.

Come, gen­tle Spring, and bring thy choic­est looks,
Thy bosom graced with flow­ers, thy face with smiles;
Come, gen­tle Spring, and trace thy wan­der­ing brooks,
Through mead­ow gates, o’er foot­path crooked stiles;
Come in thy proud and best array,
April dews and flow­ers of May,
And singing birds that come where heav­en smiles.

I Am!

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends for­sake me like a mem­o­ry lost:
I am the self-con­sumer of my woes—
They rise and van­ish in obliv­i­ous host,
Like shad­ows in love’s fren­zied sti­fled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the noth­ing­ness of scorn and noise,
Into the liv­ing sea of wak­ing dreams,
Where there is nei­ther sense of life or joys,
But the vast ship­wreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dear­est that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath nev­er trod
A place where woman nev­er smiled or wept
There to abide with my Cre­ator, God,
And sleep as I in child­hood sweet­ly slept,
Untrou­bling and untrou­bled where I lie
The grass below—above the vault­ed sky.

John Clare
Art

James McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (1871)

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With Mother’s Day immi­nent it seemed appo­site to take a look at an image that has been endur­ing­ly asso­ci­at­ed with moth­er­hood, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the US, since the Vic­to­ri­an era: the famous Whistler’s Moth­er. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was an Amer­i­can painter, based pri­mar­i­ly in Eng­land, and a lead­ing pro­po­nent of “art for art’s sake”, that cre­do which con­sid­ered art to have intrin­sic val­ue quite sep­a­rate from any moral or didac­tic func­tion. He was all about tonal har­mo­ny and saw par­al­lels between paint­ing and music, even enti­tling many of his paint­ings as “arrange­ments”, “har­monies”, and “noc­turnes” — his Whistler’s Moth­er is only col­lo­qui­al­ly so-called and was real­ly called Arrange­ment in Grey and Black.

The sub­ject of the paint­ing is, unsur­pris­ing­ly, Whistler’s moth­er, Anna McNeill Whistler, who was liv­ing with the artist in Lon­don at the time. The sto­ry goes that Anna Whistler was only act­ing as a sub­sti­tute because the orig­i­nal mod­el couldn’t make the sit­ting, and although Whistler had envi­sioned his mod­el stand­ing up, his moth­er was just too uncom­fort­able to pose upright for long peri­ods of time so insist­ed on sit­ting down.

The work was shown at the 104th Exhi­bi­tion of the Roy­al Acad­e­my of Art in Lon­don in 1872, after nar­row­ly avoid­ing rejec­tion by the Acad­e­my (a bone of con­tention for Whistler for many years after). It seems that all these weird ideas Whistler held about “arrange­ments” and so on just didn’t sit well with the stuffed shirts of the Acad­e­my, and they insist­ed on adding an explana­to­ry adjunct, “Por­trait of the Painter’s moth­er”, to Whistler’s title. Whistler even­tu­al­ly sold the paint­ing, which was acquired in 1891 by Paris’s Musée du Lux­em­bourg and  is now housed in the Musée d’Or­say.

In 1934, the US Post Office Depart­ment issued a stamp engraved with the por­trait detail from Whistler’s Mother, bear­ing the slo­gan “In mem­o­ry and in hon­or of the moth­ers of Amer­i­ca”. In that spir­it, this blog is writ­ten in mem­o­ry and hon­our of my own love­ly mum, and to moth­ers every­where!

Whistler’s Moth­er
Literature

Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950)

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A few blogs back I wrote about the fan­ta­sy world of Ursu­la K Le Guin and recalled the appeal of brows­ing the array of sci­ence fic­tion book cov­ers on the shelves at WH Smith’s. One of the giants of that genre – and one that I actu­al­ly went to the trou­ble of read­ing – was Isaac Asi­mov.

Born in Smolen­sk in 1920, Asi­mov was the son of Jew­ish par­ents who emi­grat­ed to the US in 1923, and the young Isaac was brought up in Brook­lyn, New York, where he helped his father run a sweet shop (a “can­dy store”, I sup­pose). It was there that he was first exposed to the clas­sic Amaz­ing Sto­ries mag­a­zines that his father also stocked, and he was soon div­ing into the fan­tas­tic worlds of Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe, and writ­ing short sto­ries of his own.

Although Asimov’s writ­ing career for many years played sec­ond fid­dle to his pro­fes­sion­al sci­en­tif­ic career (he became a lec­tur­er and pro­fes­sor of bio­chem­istry at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty), his out­put of sci­ence fic­tion was nonethe­less prodi­gious, and even­tu­al­ly the glut of ideas and the suc­cess of his writ­ing encour­aged him to become a full-time author. My expo­sure to Isaac Asi­mov came in the form of his Robot series, notably I, Robot, which my mem­o­ry tells me I inher­it­ed, rather than bought, prob­a­bly from my Uncle Geoff.

Asi­mov wrote 37 short sto­ries and six nov­els about robots and in fact had coined the term “robot­ics” in a 1941 sto­ry. He also came up with his famous and influ­en­tial “Three Laws of Robot­ics”:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inac­tion, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey the orders giv­en to it by human beings, except where such orders would con­flict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must pro­tect its own exis­tence as long as such pro­tec­tion does not con­flict with the First or Sec­ond Laws.

These Three Laws of Robot­ics, which Asimov‘s robots were sup­posed to obey, have resound­ed down the ages to the present day when the mod­ern pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence toys with the idea that those laws might be breached, as they clear­ly were in The Ter­mi­na­tor!

Here’s a selec­tion of book cov­ers that gave many an illus­tra­tor free rein to por­tray Asimov’s robot­ic world, and start­ing with the bril­liant Ter­mi­na­tor-like cov­er that I remem­ber hav­ing.

Isaac Asi­mov
Film, TV, and Theatre

Hugo Weaving in Bodyline (1984)

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A dra­ma about crick­et, at first sight, doesn’t smack too much of a great idea for tele­vi­sion. The des­per­ate pitch­ing of ideas by Alan Par­tridge to that pro­gram­ming com­mis­sion­er in I’m Alan Par­tridge springs to mind (“Mon­key Ten­nis”?). Well, how about a bril­liant, riv­et­ing TV dra­ma about crick­et that doesn’t even require you to be a crick­et fan to enjoy? If that sounds oxy­moron­ic, check out 1984’s Aus­tralian-made TV mini-series Body­line, telling the sto­ry of the 1932/33 Eng­lish Ash­es crick­et tour of Aus­tralia.

Stick with me.

First, the his­tor­i­cal set­ting: in 1932, the Eng­land crick­et team set sail to Aus­tralia to face an Aus­tralian team huge­ly bol­stered by one Don­ald Brad­man, who had come to Eng­land in the 1930 Ash­es and scored 974 runs with a bat­ting aver­age of 139.14. The Eng­land crick­et author­i­ties felt that some new tac­tics were need­ed to cur­tail Bradman’s extra­or­di­nary bat­ting abil­i­ty which threat­ened to be even more prodi­gious in the upcom­ing tour on his home turf.

Enter Dou­glas Jar­dine. Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty-edu­cat­ed, and from the upper ech­e­lons of British soci­ety, Jar­dine had been mould­ed to be Eng­land cap­tain from an ear­ly age. He had already toured Aus­tralia and had devel­oped an antipa­thy to the crowds there who had jeered him. And now he was lead tac­ti­cian on how to defuse Brad­man. With his fast bowlers Harold Lar­wood and Bill Voce, he devised “fast leg the­o­ry” bowl­ing – lat­er called “body­line” – which entailed deliv­er­ing the ball short and fast so that it bounced dan­ger­ous­ly towards the batsman’s body. When the bats­man defend­ed him­self with his bat a result­ing deflec­tion could be caught by one of sev­er­al field­ers stand­ing close by on the leg side.

The tac­tic turned out to be effec­tive: it seri­ous­ly dis­com­fit­ed the bats­men and Eng­land won by four Tests to one, but it cre­at­ed a furore that threat­ened to turn into a diplo­mat­ic inci­dent. The watch­ing crowds were out­raged and most com­men­ta­tors thought the tac­tics unsports­man­like, intim­i­dat­ing and down­right dan­ger­ous (who thought that it would be the Eng­lish to employ tac­tics that were “just not crick­et”?).

In the TV series, Dou­glas Jar­dine is played mes­mer­iz­ing­ly by a young Hugo Weav­ing (best known lat­er for his por­tray­als of Agent Smith in The Matrix and Elrond in The Lord of the Rings), who admirably cap­tures the arro­gance and cer­tain­ty of a born leader, and one who dogged­ly pur­sues his strat­e­gy against mount­ing crit­i­cism.

Let’s watch the self-assured Jar­dine dis­cussing Brad­man with his Sur­rey team­mate Per­cy Fend­er and oth­ers pri­or to the tour. He’s great to watch, and note also the love­ly cam­era work cir­cling him as he talks. One last word for the writer of the theme music for the series; the music is so emo­tion­al­ly mov­ing (see the sec­ond clip of the open­ing cred­its) that I thought at first they had bor­rowed a clas­si­cal piece from some­one like Pachel­bel but not so: cred­it to Aussie com­pos­er Chris Neal.

Hugo Weav­ing as Dou­glas Jar­dine
Poetry

Edwin Muir’s The Horses (1956)

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Despite being a nat­ur­al opti­mist, I have for some rea­son always been attract­ed by the genre of dystopi­an fic­tion, although I’m not the only one judg­ing by the endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of dystopi­an clas­sics such as Orwell’s sem­i­nal 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451, Mar­garet Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. The inspi­ra­tion inform­ing this genre comes from many and var­ied sources, includ­ing, just for starters, the rise of indus­tri­al-scale war­fare in the World Wars, the devel­op­ment of the atom bomb, total­i­tar­i­an­ism, AI and Big Tech, genet­ic engi­neer­ing, dead­ly virus­es, the sur­veil­lance soci­ety and cli­mate change. It seems we have a per­pet­u­al col­lec­tive curios­i­ty, and fear, about where our soci­ety might be going.

The genre extends to poet­ry, too; at school I became aware of this enig­mat­ic poem called The Hors­es, by Scot­tish poet Edwin Muir (1887–1959). Muir was born on the island of Orkney and had an idyl­lic child­hood which was cur­tailed in 1901 when his father lost the fam­i­ly farm and they had to move to Glas­gow. For Muir, this was a move from Eden to Hell: with­in a few short years, his father, two broth­ers, and final­ly his moth­er died in quick suc­ces­sion, and mean­while he had to endure a series of mun­dane jobs in fac­to­ries and offices.

Such a change in his life must have had pro­found effects on his future poet­ic works, although bal­anced by the hap­pi­ness that he even­tu­al­ly found when he met his wife, the trans­la­tor and writer Willa Ander­sen. He found great pur­pose with Willa and teamed up with her to trans­late the works of many notable Ger­man-speak­ing authors like Franz Kaf­ka. Any­way, although I haven’t read much else of Muir’s work, the poem that found its way into my school­boy hands nonethe­less stayed with me as a slight­ly dis­turb­ing piece of weird and prophet­ic dystopia right up to the present day.

The poem gets stuck in from the start:

Bare­ly a twelve­month after
The sev­en days war that put the world to sleep

So no mess­ing: we know where we are, we’re in a bleak, post-apoc­a­lyp­tic world…and then the very next line of the poem wastes no time by intro­duc­ing the hors­es of the title:

Late in the evening the strange hors­es came

There­after, fifty lines of an imag­i­na­tive con­cep­tion of what it might be like to be in a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic world…but with added “strange hors­es”! Of course, inter­pre­ta­tion of the poem and what the hors­es rep­re­sent, is entire­ly up to the read­er. A few years ago I wrote an elec­tron­ic sound­scape to catch the poem’s atmos­phere and to accom­pa­ny a read­ing of the poem. More recent­ly, I revis­it­ed this record­ing and noo­dled about with some images and footage and have set it to video, which I’d like to share with you here. I like to think I have cap­tured the mood of Muir’s poem and I hope he would approve!

Edwin Muir
Art

George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884)

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One of the great trea­sures in the trove that is London’s Nation­al Gallery is this mas­ter­piece of Neo-Impres­sion­ism, George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières. It’s actu­al­ly one of a pair of Seu­rat mas­ter­pieces, along­side A Sun­day After­noon on the Island of La Grande Jat­te (held at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go), with each sis­ter paint­ing depict­ing one side of the Seine riv­er and por­tray­ing the dif­fer­ent lev­els of French soci­ety that fre­quent­ed them in their leisure time: the wealthy soci­ety relax­ing at La Grande Jat­te and the work­ing-class res­i­dents hang­ing out on the left bank at Asnières.

The two paint­ings are lead­ing exam­ples of the tech­nique devel­oped by Seu­rat and known as pointil­lism, involv­ing the use of thou­sands of small, dis­tinct dots of colour and rely­ing on the abil­i­ty of the eye and the mind of the view­er to blend the indi­vid­ual dots into a fuller range of tones. The term was actu­al­ly first used in a pejo­ra­tive sense to mock Seu­rat (a reac­tion com­mon­ly expe­ri­enced by art pio­neers of course) but it stuck, and the tech­nique is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the hunt by artists in the 1880s for inter­est­ing new meth­ods.

Here, we’re focus­ing on the work­ing-class res­i­dents of the city. They line this pic­turesque spot by the riv­er as they enjoy the sun­shine. There are around five fig­ures in the fore­ground and down the bank we see oth­er peo­ple and boats in the back­ground, plus a cityscape behind that. All of the build­ings are low lev­el and don’t take too much atten­tion from the fig­ures near­est us. There are no trees (unlike at La Grande Jat­te where the bour­geoisie enjoy the shade) and the char­ac­ters are flood­ed with sun­light.

Seu­rat was just 24 when Bathes at Asnières marked his arrival into the art world. The paint­ings are mon­u­men­tal­ly sized (15 by 6.5 feet) and Seu­rat knew that size would need to be met with tech­ni­cal bril­liance and so he pre­pared very care­ful­ly with thir­teen oil sketch­es and ten draw­ings before embark­ing on the real thing. In the end, he achieved a stun­ning lumi­nos­i­ty and plen­ty of inter­est to hold the view­er’s atten­tion. Sad­ly, Seu­rat died at just 31 and so we will nev­er know what sort of direc­tion his style might have tak­en in the next decades.

Bathers at Asnières
Literature

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (1957)

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Back in late 1987 I set off back­pack­ing around the world for sev­er­al months, a most amaz­ing expe­ri­ence that I could write a lot about but won’t as the point I want­ed to make was that trav­el­ling presents a mul­ti­tude of oppor­tu­ni­ties to read books. In the back of the jour­nal I was keep­ing, I list­ed all the books that I had been read­ing along the way, on bus­es, in hotel rooms, and on the beach, and it’s inter­est­ing to me to review that list as I peruse it now. I’m quite impressed: I see some clas­sics of the dystopi­an genre (Orwell, Hux­ley, Kaf­ka), some great Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture (Hem­ing­way, John Irv­ing, Joseph Heller, Kurt Von­negut), some stars of Brit Lit (Gra­ham Greene, G K Chester­ton, John Fowles, William Gold­ing), and of course there had to be a clas­sic about trav­el and freedom…and that clas­sic was Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.

On the Road was based on Kerouac’s trav­els with his bud­dies across the Unit­ed States in the late 1940s. Being a vora­cious writer, Ker­ouac had chan­nelled reams of stream-of-con­scious­ness nar­ra­tive (he called it “spon­ta­neous prose”) into mul­ti­ple note­books and then spent a three-week peri­od in April 1951 copy­ing them all out into one long reel of writ­ing; it would even­tu­al­ly be pub­lished in 1957 and become one of the great Amer­i­can nov­els of the 20th cen­tu­ry, the crown­ing glo­ry of the bur­geon­ing Beat move­ment.

The nov­el is a roman à clef, mean­ing that, whilst its sto­ry and char­ac­ters rep­re­sent real events and peo­ple, it is writ­ten with a façade of fic­tion, and his bud­dies (William S. Bur­roughs, Allen Gins­berg, Neal Cas­sady, them­selves key fig­ures of the Beat Gen­er­a­tion) appear as fic­tion­al char­ac­ters, with Ker­ouac him­self cast as the novel’s nar­ra­tor Sal Par­adise. The plot is cen­tred around sev­er­al road trips that the pro­tag­o­nists under­go, and the chaot­ic adven­tures they expe­ri­ence.

The nar­ra­tive is full of Amer­i­cana which appeals to my roman­tic side (indeed, it was the image of the Wichi­ta lines­man in my last blog that got me think­ing about On The Road in the first place). We read about long roads and high­ways, Cadil­lacs and Ford Sedans, cheap motels and Skid Row, night­clubs and bars, jazz and poet­ry, drugs and bor­del­los, and along the way get acquaint­ed with for­ties New York, San Fran­cis­co, New Orleans, Chica­go and St Louis and a myr­i­ad oth­er towns and cities of Amer­i­ca.

Although my own trav­el jour­nal remains lit­tle more than a log of events, of inter­est only to me, Kerouac’s jour­nals turned into a tour de force of lit­er­a­ture and a fas­ci­nat­ing insight into Amer­i­ca’s coun­ter­cul­ture.

Jack Ker­ouac
Music

Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman (1968)

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Glen Camp­bell start­ed his career as a gui­tarist with the Wreck­ing Crew, that loose col­lec­tive of ses­sion musi­cians that con­tributed to thou­sands of stu­dio record­ings in the 1960s and 1970s (and who were also Phil Spector’s de fac­to house band). The list of artists whose record­ings he played on is a who’s who of the Amer­i­can six­ties music scene (he was best mates with Elvis, too), and all this was before he became a suc­cess­ful solo artist in his own right. His first real hit, in 1965, was a ver­sion of Buffy Saint-Marie’s Uni­ver­sal Sol­dier, and in 1967 he scored hits with Gen­tle On My Mind and By The Time I Get To Phoenix.

That last song was writ­ten by Jim­my Webb and, buoyed by its suc­cess, Glen Camp­bell had phoned Webb and asked him if he had any oth­er “geo­graph­i­cal” songs to fol­low it up. He hadn’t, but he wrote one any­way: Wichi­ta Line­man. Web­b’s inspi­ra­tion for the lyrics came while dri­ving west­ward on a straight road through Washita Coun­ty in rur­al south-west­ern Okla­homa. Dri­ving past a seem­ing­ly end­less line of tele­phone poles, he noticed in the dis­tance the sil­hou­ette of a soli­tary line­man atop a pole. In Webb’s own words:

It was a splen­did­ly vivid, cin­e­mat­ic image that I lift­ed out of my deep mem­o­ry while I was writ­ing this song. I thought, I won­der if I can write some­thing about that? A blue col­lar, every­man guy we all see every­where – work­ing on the rail­road or work­ing on the tele­phone wires or dig­ging holes in the street. I just tried to take an ordi­nary guy and open him up and say, ‘Look there’s this great soul, and there’s this great aching, and this great lone­li­ness inside this per­son and we’re all like that. We all have this capac­i­ty for these huge feel­ings’.

Webb deliv­ered what he regard­ed and labelled as an incom­plete ver­sion of the song, warn­ing that he had not com­plet­ed a third verse or a mid­dle eight. Camp­bell soon nailed the lack of a mid­dle eight sec­tion with some of his Wreck­ing Crew pals (adding a bari­tone gui­tar inter­lude as well as the orches­tral­ly arranged out­ro known to British Radio 2 lis­ten­ers as DJ Steve Wright’s theme music!). Webb was sur­prised to hear that Camp­bell had record­ed the song when he ran into him:

‘I guess you guys did­n’t like the song.’

‘Oh, we cut that’

‘But it was­n’t done! I was just hum­ming the last bit!’

‘Well, it’s done now!’ ”

And what a love­ly song it was, too!

Glen Camp­bell
Art

William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Bacchante (1894)

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The art world is a fun­ny old fish when it comes to “what’s hot and what’s not” and it was ever thus; unless you’re a bolt­ed-on, world-renowned big name like your Rem­brandts and your Van Goghs, you might find your­self in or out of fash­ion. Take William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). Many peo­ple out­side (and prob­a­bly inside) of France have nev­er heard of him, and yet he was one of France’s pre­em­i­nent aca­d­e­m­ic painters in the lat­ter half of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.

Bouguereau exe­cut­ed some 822 known paint­ings dur­ing his career, often por­tray­ing quin­tes­sen­tial­ly clas­si­cal and mytho­log­i­cal sub­jects: Cupid and Psy­che, the Birth of Venus, nymphs and satyrs and so on, as well as a large body of slick reli­gious works, pas­torals, and coy­ly erot­ic nudes. His por­traits were ren­dered with near-pho­to­graph­ic verisimil­i­tude and with a con­sum­mate lev­el of skill and craft. Giv­en that a high per­cent­age of his works are life-size, it is one of the largest bod­ies of work ever pro­duced by any artist. So what went wrong?

Well, Bouguereau rep­re­sent­ed the “old guard”, an uphold­er of tra­di­tion­al val­ues and indeed one who con­trived to exclude avant-garde work from the Salon ( the offi­cial art exhi­bi­tion of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris). Cézanne once expressed regret at being reject­ed by the ‘Salon de Mon­sieur Bouguereau’. In oth­er words, he was a dinosaur and des­tined to be over­shad­owed by the Impres­sion­ists and the mod­ernists of the dawn­ing new cen­tu­ry; his rep­u­ta­tion sank after his death and for many years his work was regard­ed as irre­deemably passé. He has, how­ev­er, recent­ly achieved some­thing of a reha­bil­i­ta­tion, and these days his works fetch huge prices at the auc­tion room. Quite right too, he was bril­liant.

A rep­re­sen­ta­tive work is this 1894 piece, Bac­cha­nte. A bac­cha­nte was a priest­ess or fol­low­er of Bac­chus, the god of wine and intox­i­fi­ca­tion, and, whilst in the Greek myths they are often depict­ed as wild women, run­ning through the for­est, tear­ing ani­mals to pieces, and engag­ing in oth­er acts of fren­zied debauch­ery, Bouguereau here choos­es to por­tray his Bac­cha­nte ‘before the par­ty’!

 

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