This book, James Joyce's 1916 quasi-autobiographical novel, was utterly sublime. I read the bulk of it on the coach to and back from Glastonbury last month* and oh my goodness that asterisk-comment was not intended to run on so long.
I should probably talk about the book.
It's about Stephen Dedalus (who also appears as an adult in Ulysses) as he transitions, over the course of several years, from childhood to youngmanhood, in ways stilted and tilted by his incorrigible aesthetic leanings - from Jesuit boarding school to Trinity College in Dublin, we see Stephen grow and become alienated from almost everything and everyone held in the suspension of normality - questioning his religion, his family, Ireland itself, finding clarity and solace only in the abstract constructions of philosophical and literary thought as he delves into books as his escape and his direction into the possibility of new avenues for life and thought. Exquisitely written, the stream-of-consciousness aspect that characterises Joyce's work is not as impenetrable as in other works, and so (other than semi-regular phrases in Latin) this works as a fairly accessible bildungsroman of the highest quality, bringing the reader squarely into Stephen's head as he tries to make sense of the world around him. There's really not that much I need to say. If you like incredible literature, you'll like this, especially if you yourself identify as an artist and have felt, growing up, like something of an outsider - there are passages that rang so deeply true with me that I was left feeling profoundly astonished at the sheer capacity for similarity in the turbulent chasms within each unique human self.
* Fitting, since Glastonbury last year was where my own budding intent to become an Artist was cemented in the strangest of ways. I'd been brewing my ideas for a novel, or possibly series of novels, for just over a month, and was toying with the idea of instead of trying to do a PhD and get into a political-economic think-tank after my Masters to just find a random day-job and focus on creative writing - and somehow, the core idea for the characters and story arcs that would eventually unspool into the eight (ikr) books I have since planned around it just fell, as if from nowhere, into my head, and it was there, in the Glade stage that Thursday afternoon, listening to a tune that I could neither remember nor remove from my head for the next four days, that I realised "well, okay, so that is what I am going to do."
This conviction was only bolstered two days later (strap yourself in, this is a long weird anecdote but I'm going to tell it anyway because why not) when I insisted on going to see Madness despite none of my friends wanting to. I have a tendency to wander off or just get separated from the group at festivals and on nights out, and if you lose your friends at Glastonbury (with a dead phone, a festival site the size of a small city, and two-hundred-thousand flamboyant revellers slowly grinding their way from fun to fun in six inches of squelchy mud like herds of migratory wildebeest) it's unlikely you'll find them again before it's evening-time and you're meant to be heading to Shangri-La - and so, when I was set on travelling to the Pyramid Stage while my crew remained at The Park, it was decided that a pair of friends-of-friends** would accompany me to make sure I got there and back without getting lost. However, they really annoyed me, exuding as they did a glib air of condescending snobbery and detached ungrateful poshness that was not at all in the spirit of Michael Eavis nor Madness nor whatever level of vibe I was on at the time, and so I hatched a plot to run away from them as soon as we reached the Pyramid Stage - and so, as we neared, one of my appointed guardians told me as one would an unruly toddler "okay now don't lose us or anything", then checked their phone, I seized my chance - and bolted. I ran as fast as I could (given wellies and deep sticky mud and dense milling crowds) for about thirty seconds, then stopped and laughed, realising, almost shocked, that I was alone - and had no reference points. Fortunately, these were plentiful - lots of people at Glastonbury take flags to help them find their tents or each other in crowds, and so I decided that as a reference point I would simply head towards whatever nearby flag resonated most with me - which as it turned out was a Yorkshire flag about a hundred yards away, but I never reached it.
Halfway there, I stumbled upon one of the most exuberant and refreshingly strange geezers I had ever (and still have ever) seen: a middle-aged man with tobacco-yellowed teeth and scruffy grey stubble, shiny black aviator sunglasses, a tweed flatcap with an unidentifiable feather in it, a heavy sheepskin jacket, a t-shirt which struck me as eccentric but sadly as of now I can't remember what was on it, a kilt, and sandals (at Glastonbury 2016 - as such, his feet and legs were caked thickly in wet and dry mud up almost up to his knees); he had half a spliff in his left hand, a can of Polish lager in his right, and was beaming like a maniac as he belted out the lyrics to Parklife (though he was not alone in this - they were playing it on the big speakers, as they do in between acts). I decided that this gentleman made a far better reference point than a mere flag, identical to the one flying proudly as a translucent second curtain in my window at home - this character was pure Glasto: he had an aura of ridiculous yet vaguely respectable straightforwardness about him. Anyway, we spoke for about twenty minutes, in which time I learnt that he was the manager of a furniture and household appliances warehouse in Bognor Regis - and that he was a self-proclaimed Madness mega-fan, having previously been a bouncer who'd lucked his way into working with the band for a stint in the 1980s.*** Then the band came on (he asked me, "where're your mates mate?" and I told him they didn't want to come and see Madness and he bellowed, "tasteless bastards!") and played as hilarious and heartwarming a set full of classics as I could have hoped for, my new acquaintance whose name I never asked for singing and skanking along with me and the tens of thousands of others present.
After they finished, I turned to him and said that I needed to go and find my friends, and wished him an excellent remainder of the festival - he asked me if I had a spare cigarette before I went, which I didn't think I had, but remembered I had earlier forgotten that I was looking after a packet of Camels for a female friend who had no pockets, and found it crumpled at the bottom of my tote bag, with only a single slightly-bent cig left. "Last one!" I said, fishing it out and handing it over, adding without much thought, "that's poetic innit?" At this, he raised his shades onto his cap and crinkledly squinted at me with fisherman eyes, almost regarding me with suspicion, and asked, "are you a poet?" to which I replied, "no,"**** confused, and he said, through a mouthful of cig-butt as he struggled to light it in the wind, "well you fucking should be kid, you've got the, the, whatever it is," at which I laughed, thanked him, and upon then returning to The Park found my friends surprisingly easily and made absolute mincemeat of trying to recount the story, fresh as it was, to them.
This conviction was only bolstered two days later (strap yourself in, this is a long weird anecdote but I'm going to tell it anyway because why not) when I insisted on going to see Madness despite none of my friends wanting to. I have a tendency to wander off or just get separated from the group at festivals and on nights out, and if you lose your friends at Glastonbury (with a dead phone, a festival site the size of a small city, and two-hundred-thousand flamboyant revellers slowly grinding their way from fun to fun in six inches of squelchy mud like herds of migratory wildebeest) it's unlikely you'll find them again before it's evening-time and you're meant to be heading to Shangri-La - and so, when I was set on travelling to the Pyramid Stage while my crew remained at The Park, it was decided that a pair of friends-of-friends** would accompany me to make sure I got there and back without getting lost. However, they really annoyed me, exuding as they did a glib air of condescending snobbery and detached ungrateful poshness that was not at all in the spirit of Michael Eavis nor Madness nor whatever level of vibe I was on at the time, and so I hatched a plot to run away from them as soon as we reached the Pyramid Stage - and so, as we neared, one of my appointed guardians told me as one would an unruly toddler "okay now don't lose us or anything", then checked their phone, I seized my chance - and bolted. I ran as fast as I could (given wellies and deep sticky mud and dense milling crowds) for about thirty seconds, then stopped and laughed, realising, almost shocked, that I was alone - and had no reference points. Fortunately, these were plentiful - lots of people at Glastonbury take flags to help them find their tents or each other in crowds, and so I decided that as a reference point I would simply head towards whatever nearby flag resonated most with me - which as it turned out was a Yorkshire flag about a hundred yards away, but I never reached it.
Halfway there, I stumbled upon one of the most exuberant and refreshingly strange geezers I had ever (and still have ever) seen: a middle-aged man with tobacco-yellowed teeth and scruffy grey stubble, shiny black aviator sunglasses, a tweed flatcap with an unidentifiable feather in it, a heavy sheepskin jacket, a t-shirt which struck me as eccentric but sadly as of now I can't remember what was on it, a kilt, and sandals (at Glastonbury 2016 - as such, his feet and legs were caked thickly in wet and dry mud up almost up to his knees); he had half a spliff in his left hand, a can of Polish lager in his right, and was beaming like a maniac as he belted out the lyrics to Parklife (though he was not alone in this - they were playing it on the big speakers, as they do in between acts). I decided that this gentleman made a far better reference point than a mere flag, identical to the one flying proudly as a translucent second curtain in my window at home - this character was pure Glasto: he had an aura of ridiculous yet vaguely respectable straightforwardness about him. Anyway, we spoke for about twenty minutes, in which time I learnt that he was the manager of a furniture and household appliances warehouse in Bognor Regis - and that he was a self-proclaimed Madness mega-fan, having previously been a bouncer who'd lucked his way into working with the band for a stint in the 1980s.*** Then the band came on (he asked me, "where're your mates mate?" and I told him they didn't want to come and see Madness and he bellowed, "tasteless bastards!") and played as hilarious and heartwarming a set full of classics as I could have hoped for, my new acquaintance whose name I never asked for singing and skanking along with me and the tens of thousands of others present.
After they finished, I turned to him and said that I needed to go and find my friends, and wished him an excellent remainder of the festival - he asked me if I had a spare cigarette before I went, which I didn't think I had, but remembered I had earlier forgotten that I was looking after a packet of Camels for a female friend who had no pockets, and found it crumpled at the bottom of my tote bag, with only a single slightly-bent cig left. "Last one!" I said, fishing it out and handing it over, adding without much thought, "that's poetic innit?" At this, he raised his shades onto his cap and crinkledly squinted at me with fisherman eyes, almost regarding me with suspicion, and asked, "are you a poet?" to which I replied, "no,"**** confused, and he said, through a mouthful of cig-butt as he struggled to light it in the wind, "well you fucking should be kid, you've got the, the, whatever it is," at which I laughed, thanked him, and upon then returning to The Park found my friends surprisingly easily and made absolute mincemeat of trying to recount the story, fresh as it was, to them.
** I hope they're not reading this. They probably aren't.
*** This was quite a revelation. I asked him, "what's Suggs like to work with? I bet he's a reyt character!" and he made a noise that sounded like a pig coughing that was probably intended as an affirmative chuckle, and said, "yeh, yeh he is, a proper laugh."
**** This is no longer strictly true, of course - and though since starting writing poetry I have felt it to be a fairly organic process, not triggered or catalysed by any particular event or experience, this is such a good anecdote that also happened to happen before I properly started writing that I may as well claim ownership of it as my Poet Origin Story.
No comments:
Post a Comment