Well, I just finished James Sallis’ Bluebotle yesterday, and it might be the fever of this flu bug, or it might not, but right now James Sallis seems like just about the greatest writer in the world. Lawrence Block, whose Matt Scudder seems just about the only serial character up there with Lew Grifffin, said once that Sallis’ New Orleans is ‘darker than noir’ and he’s got a point if Bluebottle is anything to go by. Sallis writes with all the honed perfection of the best noir writers, and isn’t afraid to make his references clear, as throughout Bluebottle at the very least his astonishingly painted character Griffin quotes lines from Chandler and Himes, amongst others. So that in the end Bluebottle is about books themselves as much as anything else; is about how immersion in books can be a lifesaver, or a life-breaker: you take your choice and you live it as you take it, after all. I can’t wait to immerse myself in the other Lew Griffin novels, another new obsession to take me through time.




posted by duke harringay at 6:30 PM

Don’t criticise what you can’t understand


Of course someone had to go and make a joke about turning the lights off in the staffroom this morning. I dare say it’s a joke being repeated in many workplaces the land over. And why? Because Martin Creed has won the Turner Prize with his piece ‘the lights going on and off’.

Now, I happen to like Creed’s work because I think it refreshingly leaves us space to think and dream instead of insisting on literal readings, but that’s beside the point really, because people’s responses this morning made me think, not so much of how I like Creed, but how much I like the annual ceremony of the Turner Prize. Not that I watch it on the telly, mind, or follow it in the media at all. I don’t really have time for that, too busy reading another Jim Thompson novel or something, but… but here’s the thing: I love seeing and hearing people’s reactions to the Turner Prize much more than I love the thing itself.

I think it’s just great that in a time of supposed media literacy, where many will declare themselves to have an interest in ‘Art’ (they have a Monet print on the wall, after all, perhaps even a Warhol book on the coffee table, Maybe they've even been to the Tate Modern), there is Art that will confuse them, will make them rear their heads in outrage. They just love being outraged. And I love to see them being outraged, because it makes them look so dumb. It makes them look so dumb not so much because they criticise what they can’t understand, but more because they refuse even to make the smallest effort. I had many people ask me this morning what Creed’s piece was ‘all about’. I had many people ask me this morning if it thought that it was ‘Art’. Well, of course, yes, to the second question, and, uh, well what do YOU think it’s about as an answer to the first. Of course they haven’t a clue. And that would be fine if it was a case I haven’t a clue but I’m willing to think about what my response might be, or ‘actually there’s much better things I could be doing with my time, like reading another Jim Thompson novel thank you very much and why did I get so uptight about it in the first place anyway?’ If that made sense at all.

For the record, Creed’s piece makes me think of the importance of rhythm to our lives, in both positive and negative ways. It makes me think of ceremony, of reflection and of peace. It makes me think that there’s not much to the piece, and what of the other people here experiencing the work, and who are they exactly, and what do we have in common if anything, and do I really think the cheekbones on that man in the leather jacket are too gorgeous to be allowed? I think of the breaking down of systems, of how electricity failures cause the lights to go off and then on again when the system is full of power once more. I think of SoCal and the windmill farm in the Coachello valley just outside Palm Springs, and I think of Milo reflecting on the same farm in Bordersnakes. I think of hospitals and being wheeled on a gurney with my lungs bruised and my arm sliced up, how the lights flash past and they seem to go on and off, although I know they don’t, it just SEEMS that way. I think… I think, why the hell can’t anyone else think of their own things instead of expecting someone else to think for them?

I think Thank God for the Turner Prize.


posted by duke harringay at 7:15 PM