* (restored)
—-
you
masochist
hazy transactions
in the dark
an amateur
is all you are
to spend
most of your life
forgotten
to fit in nowhere
to be a permanent exile
to be ‘intensely ironic
and therefore
intensely difficult’
to wind up
in one of the dullest places
under heaven
to be as much monster
as victim
events and experiences
repeat themselves
split into selves
eyes overcast
on a shrouded sea
of regret
She’s perfect if you’re alone, disenfranchised, dislocated, devolving, displaced. Because she could write it clearly, she could transmit it down the wire. Her stories are pure melancholy, the beauty of pure pain. What you put yourself through. She wrote the beauty of the THUD, the reality drop of emptiness when you want to shroud it in a dream. If they had a taste, they really would be the darkest chocolate, verging on bitterness.
Anyone who knows her work knows how a Jean Rhys novel or story will end. There are no happy endings, ever. The heroine is defeated and fully aware of it before, during, and after. And she rarely fights back, or does it when it’s too late. She’s naive, or deliberately ignorant. She’s irreparably damaged, a horror.
I promised Dennis this Day more than a year ago. And every time I began it, I had to stop almost immediately afterward. It was never right. My point was, I wanted to compel people to read Rhys who’d never heard of her before. I could never do right by her work, it seemed. And I still haven’t, either. But I’d made a promise to finish this. I wanted to try, because I hate broken promises. They look shitty on everyone.
There are some fantastic studies of Rhys. I don’t want this piece to mimic them, although I’ve read them and they’ve helped to clarify some of my own unfinished bits. There’s also a good biography of her, and an incomplete autobiography. You can read them, if you find she catches hold of you.
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Rhys was very much like the heroines of her novels and stories, but to say that every story and novel that she wrote was completely autobiographical is inaccurate. What is true: She was a failed vaudevillian dancer and clothes model whose affairs and marriages all ended badly. She was the daughter of white Welsh colonialists, who grew up in Dominica and who endured reverse racial discrimination from the native Dominicans, who she’d hoped might embrace her more warmly than her own family did. She spent nearly all of her adult life barely scraping by. She was Ford Madox Ford’s lover, the third person in a twisted ménages a trois created between Ford and his common-law wife, the painter Stella Bowen. What is also true: All of these aspects of her life are either key features or plot lines in her work.
What is not completely true: She learned from her mistakes and her novels were a way of refining herself, protecting herself. She never really learned, and whether this was due to the fact that she knew better and didn’t care enough, or knew better but found her instincts too strong to avert disaster, is a matter of debate. But her novels were everything she herself wasn’t: precise and perfect.
Gone, and she was caught in this appalling muddle. Life was like that. Here you are, it said, and then immediately afterwards, Where are you? Her life, at any rate, had always been like that.
(Quartet, Chapter 12)
I found Rhys when I was 15, via a thick book inexplicably left on the shelf in my reading class. My teacher claimed to have no idea how it got there. Doubling as an English teacher and one of the school’s football coaches, he knew nothing of her work.
The book was a thick one, like a textbook. Paperback. Red and white lettering on its black spine: JEAN RHYS: THE COMPLETE NOVELS. I pulled it out of the shelf and stared at its cover, on which was the photograph “Lovers, Place d’Itale” by Brassai. I was mesmerized. I had never held in my hands anything like this book looked. I had no idea what was inside.
What that book contained was a style that was beautifully sophisticated and at the same time stripped of all pretension. It contained the ultimate outsider’s worldview. It embodied everything that meant being utterly alone and fucked. There were five novels hidden within its covers, and not one of them diverted from this course. I read each one slowly, and as I did a dark clarity slammed into me again and again. When I finished the last one, I wanted to know: Who was this person, that she could write like this? And what the fuck had she done to me? How did she know these things?
Diana Athill: “In the years when I knew Jean Rhys… she often spoke about how much she wanted to ‘get things right’: to be as true as possible in her writing to place, speech, mood, the taste and texture of experience, and to achieve this precision without… ‘any stunts’…. The stuntlessness of her style is its great beauty. She fell in love with words as a child, but she never used them rhetorically, to show them off. I have sometimes thought that the way she wrote resembled the way a cat moves. Her language does what it needs to do with an elegance and economy which is perfectly natural and easy… or rather, easy-seeming.
“You cannot get something right unless you have a thorough knowledge of it. Jean was a conscious and dedicated artist who wrote novels, not a woman displaying, or brooding over, her own experience in the form of autobiography, but she never denied that the material for her novels came from her own life…. She thought– or said– that she chose to use it because it was the only thing she knew well, but she was not really choosing, she was following her nature. She could not have done anything else, being a deeply self-absorbed person who was also honest.”
Rhys was born on the island of Dominica in 1890 as Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams. She studied drama at the Royal Academy in London and later flopped as a chorus girl. Abandoned, with no real family nearby to fall back on, she posed nude for an artist and was, in succession afterwards, a volunteer canteen worker and office clerk. She married a Dutch-French journalist in 1919 and wandered through Paris, Vienna, and London with him, until his arrest for bigamy and for selling foreign currency illegally. And that was when she met Ford Madox Ford, a well-known writer in his time, and began an affair with him, and also began to write. She went through three husbands in total, a lot of seedy boarding houses and hotel rooms and liquor bottles, and ended her days in the countryside in England, difficultly sweet and complicated until the last.
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Rhys is best known for Wide Sargasso Sea, a real masterpiece and prequel to Jane Eyre, which tells the story of the original madwoman-in-the-attic, Bertha Rochester, in her own words. In it, Rhys was able to use her own experience of the Caribbean to give this minor character, who in Austen’s hands amounted to nothing more than a device to divide her heroine from her object of affection, into a symbol of the irreparable damage of colonization. Feminists and scholars have high regard for the novel, and its publication swept Rhys out of obscurity and poverty. It was the last novel she ever wrote.
But I don’t want to dwell on WSS. Great as it is, it’s a culmination. The apex and the end. I want you to know about the other novels, the ones that languished in out-of-print status for decades, the ones that show just as much brilliance, the ones that were such a revelation to me at 15.
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You Think I Want More Than I Do: Voyage in the Dark –(Anna’s dream as nightmare)
Anna is a displaced girl from the Caribbean, practically alone in England and with lousy prospects, who falls into an affair with a proper young man who beds and abandons her. She’s the embodiment of inarticulation, an uprooted beauty who’s never been at home anywhere– not even at home, where she hated being white but couldn’t find a place among the Creoles, either.
Her impression of stepping onto England’s shores is the beginning of the novel, “…as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy… I couldn’t get used to the cold.”
Anna’s feelings about England never really change; she never adapts. She never adapts to the codes and etiquette of affairs, nor to her status as a shabby little chorus girl who will eventually wind up on the abortionist’s table. She begins on shaky legs and ends with smashed kneecaps, stranded in a country where she imagines everything as artifice in a dream– the streets are all the same, a fire in the fireplace seems “painted”. And as the novel progresses, and she continues her fall, she finds herself longing for objects and things to fill a void and halt anger in her that she doesn’t truly sense, let alone understand; a really fine example of this is when her lover gives her a bracelet, and she imagines it as a knuckleduster.
When the lover disengages, and she sees the end of the relationship coming, she resists it. He’s full of reproach, trying to extricate himself from what he sees now as a distasteful girl who wants everything from him. And the only thing she can say, inadequately, is, “The thing is that you don’t understand. You think that I want more than I do….” Which doesn’t communicate what she wants or thinks or needs half well enough to persuade him to see her again.
The ending is a cynical slap, at the same time allowing Anna to keep her dream state via a lot of gin, legs spread for an abortion while the gloved doctor hovering above says, “You girls are too naive to live, aren’t you?”
Laurie laughed. I listened to them both laughing and their voices going up and down.
—-“She’ll be all right,” he said. “Ready to start all over again in no time, I’ve no doubt.”
—-When their voices stopped the ray of light came in again under the door like the last thrust of remembering before everything is blotted out. I lay and watched it and thought about starting all over again. And about being new and fresh. And about mornings, and misty days, when anything might happen. And about starting all over again, all over again….
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Genital Games = Self-Preservation: Quartet –(Marya as victim turned co-conspirator)
“You forced me to share you for months,” said Marya, “for months. Openly and ridiculously. You used your wife to torture me with.”
He answered coldly: “I don’t know what you mean.”
And she saw that it was true.
Originally called Postures, which brings to mind both the gymnastics of trying to maintain emotional control in public and sexual positions, this novel takes most of its form from Rhys’ nasty affair with Ford Madox Ford, under the nose of his wife, the painter Stella Bowen. The affair and friendships between them all ended badly, but Rhys was able to take the wreckage and create an incredibly, psychologically true and devastating piece of fiction:
After her husband’s arrest in Paris for shady dealings, Marya (her name means “bitter”) finds herself stranded with no money and very quickly falling apart. (A taxi driver even sees it at a glance, calling to her one evening, “Hey, little one. Is it for tonight the suicide?”) Acquaintances Hugh and Lois Heidler, artists of the Montparnasse set, offer her a place stay and friendship… which devolves nearly as quickly into a jealous menagés a trois as Lois complicitly orchestrates a seduction between her husband and their guest. As they use her and corrupt her for their enjoyment, Lois slowly begins to realize that Marya is no longer their toy; she willingly becomes a participant in not only the relationship but an emotionally jealous co-conspirator, which sets her dead against Lois.
Hugh Heidler is the first real masochistic lover in Rhys’ collection of characters: Absolutely a manipulator, a pervert disguised as a pillar of his social set, he creeps into Marya’s room and watches her sleep and at first lavishes attention on her, only to pull back the moment she drops her cold reserve and reciprocates. As her allegiance to her husband vanishes, Heidler sees it and turns hostile.
She collapsed on to the bed and lay there breathing loudly and quickly as if she had been running. He stood looking down at her…. Her head had dropped backwards over the edge of the bed and from that angle her face seemed strange to him: the cheekbones looked higher and more prominent, the nostrils wider, the lips thicker. A strange little Kalmuck face.
—-He whispered: “Open your eyes, savage. Open your eyes, savage.”
—-She opened her eyes and said: “I love you, I love you, I love you. Oh, please be nice to me. Oh, please, say something nice to me. I love you.” She was quivering and abject in his arms, like some unfortunate dog abasing itself before its master.
Heidler was saying in a low voice: “I have a horror of you. When I think of you I feel sick.”
Quartet has some kind of emotional distance between its characters. Coldness pervades it and grows with each page. And along with it, there’s this central character who willingly goes to the gallows with hardly any protest. Marya is full of rage, dependency, and trauma. Her lips are constantly trembling and the only thing that seems to traumatize her more than the Heidlers is the awareness that she could easily be left behind in some shitty, dusty-smelling hotel room or boarding house, left to rot now that her corruption’s been completed. What’s especially stomach-turning is how, when you’re permitted a glimpse of Marya’s unchecked thoughts, she’s only thinking of how lost she was before Heidler. And how “happy” she is with him, “without thought for perhaps the first time in her life. No past. No future. Nothing but the present….”
There are lots of novelists who’ve written about how sick we can be in love, lust, and debasement. But Rhys captures it so well, and she did it long before any of the postmodernist renditions.
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Decline and Decay: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie –(Julia as mechanical doll )
She opened her bag and took out two ten-franc notes and some small change. “This is all I’ve got. I had a cheque for fifteen hundred francs but I went and gave it back.”
—-“I see. Quite,” said Mr. Horsfield.
—-Then he thought that after all there was only one end to all this, and as well first as last. He opened his pocket book…. He took out the five hundred and one of the thousand franc notes. They were creased carefully into four.
—-He put them into her hand and shut her fingers on them gently. When he had done this he felt powerful and dominant. Happy. He smiled at Julia rather foolishly.
—-“Will that do for a bit?” he asked. “Will you be able to manage?”
—-“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. You’re very kind. You’re kind and a dear.”
—-But he noticed that she took the money without protest and apparently without surprise, and this rather jarred him.
Julia has drifted from place to place, and now she’s alcoholic, down and out. She lives off of men who are guaranteed to abandon her… and they do. Her last affair with the Mackenzie of the title has caused a break in her somewhere, and when he tries to pay her off with one last payment, she confronts him in the restaurant where she’d last been with him and gives him back the money, as if to salvage some bit of dignity for herself. But the scene is witnessed by fresh blood, a young Mr. Horsfield (“I’m a decaying hop factor! My father did the growth and I’m doing the decay.”), who steps in just where the last one left off. And rather than rescuing a distraught young woman, he comes to see that she’s not so young, not stable, just not there. And he tires of her soon enough. too.
Julia operates in a daze; “cloudy”, “as if in a dream,” as Rhys characterizes her. She goes on surviving, somehow, moving about like an awkward mechanical thing. And when she rouses herself momentarily to get away from Paris, her tiny surge of energy brings her back to the shores of England, to her dying, senile mother and sister. But no comfort is found there either; Julia tries to connect with her mother, comes to her like a child seeking protection, and the mother is frightened by her as if by a “monster”. Which is exactly right.
Everywhere in this novel is permeated by the atmosphere of nothingness, death, darkness, and an anger and aggression that never manage to connect or hit the right targets. Julia is intuitive, extremely sensitive to her surroundings and to certain moments, but at the same time she’s got no comprehension of them. She’s completely disconnected from her actions, and her mother’s eventual death only tips the scales into a further downward slide.
And I felt as if all my life and all myself were floating away from me like smoke and there was nothing to lay hold of– nothing.
This is the ultimate in masochism, the last breaths before suicide. The darkest of the dark, and there’s never for a moment a release of that darkness you feel reading it.
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Lay Back and Pretend You’re Dead: Good Morning, Midnight–(Sasha as self-medicated incest victim)
For me, there has never been a more accurate depiction of a child, sexualized and used up before her time, grown into a woman, who repeats that moment with every encounter: In this scene, Sasha, who is again very much the quintessential Rhys protagonist (down and out in a seedy Paris boarding house), beds down with René, a gigolo:
And there we are– struggling on the small bed. My idea is not so much to struggle as to make it a silent struggle. Nobody must hear us. At the end, he is lying on me, holding down my two spread arms. I can’t move. My dress is torn open at the neck. But I have my knees firmly clamped together. This is a game– a game played in the snow for a worthless prize….
…. “You think you’re very strong, don’t you?” he says.
—-“Yes, I’m very strong.” I’m strong as the dead, my dear, and that’s how strong I am.
—-“If you’re so strong, why do you keep your eyes shut?”
Because dead people must have their eyes shut.
—-I lie very still, I don’t move. Not open my eyes….
—-“Je te ferai mal,” he says. “It’s your fault.”
When I open my eyes I feel the tears trickling down from the outside corners.
Sasha is a prototype, I think, and in creating her Rhys broke ground that remained untouched for years. I don’t know of any other writers who ever fashioned a novel around the lingering results of incest in the early 20th century, let alone of any who managed to do it in such a dreamy, hazy way that forces you when you read it to be on the alert for all traces of life under its surfaces. Multiple images and memories merge into single events, which are then displaced and seemingly out of context; there are no blatant flashbacks to clue you in. Suppression, as one of her critics wrote, leads to manifestation. It’s nothing less than an achievement of a work that mimics the psyche, naturally and perfectly. There are few, if any, who could ever do such a thing.
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When I first read these books, I read them intuitively. There was something about them, taken together, that I understood with an intensity that surprised me. I didn’t understand everything, of course. But quite a lot of things I understood exactly. I find it a mystery that rather than being further damaged by her words, which was my initial reaction when I got to the end of GMM (What the fuck did this just do to me?), I felt in some strange way… clear. I can’t explain it to you in any other way. And it’s not important that I try to explain further. Jean Rhys has already done that, and beautifully.
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Selected Bibliography:
—▪— The Left Bank and Other Stories, 1927
—▪— Postures, 1928 (released as Quartet in 1929)
—▪— After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, 1931
—▪— Voyage in the Dark, 1934
—▪— Good Morning, Midnight, 1939
—▪— Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966
—▪— Tigers Are Better-Looking: With a Selection from ‘The Left Bank’ , 1968
—▪— Penguin Modern Stories 1, 1969 (with others)
—▪— My Day: Three Pieces, 1975
—▪— Sleep It Off Lady, 1976
—▪— Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, 1979
—▪— Jean Rhys Letters 1931-1966, 1984
—▪— Early Novels, 1984
—▪— The Complete Novels, 1985
—▪— Tales of the Wide Caribbean, 1985
—▪— The Collected Short Stories, 1987
Criticism, Biography:
▪— Jean Rhys: Life and Work (Carole Angier, 1990)
▪— Territories of the Psyche: The Fictions of Jean Rhys (Anne B. Simpson, 2005)
▪— Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma (Patricia Moran, 2007)
—-
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p.s. Hey. ** Golnoosh, Hi, Golnoosh! It’s so very nice to see you here. Thank you so very much! I enjoyed your first podcast. Take care. ** Dominik, Hi, D!!! The book Jeff mentioned is the same book that you mentioned. The TV project is a confusing mess. There remains an extremely remote possibility that the TV series could still happen, but only if our producers can find another production company to co-produce the series and if a new writer is brought in to normalise the script with Zac and me as ‘advisors’. That’s what Gisele wants to try to do, and Zac and I have no say in that. If that fails, Gisele wants to try to turn the script into a feature film. I remain very skeptical that that will happen. So, so as not to have wasted five years for nothing, and because I think there’s a lot of really good things in the script, Zac and I are going to try to turn it into a readable text or fiction, which may not work, but that’s the current idea/hope. I haven’t told Gisele we’re doing that yet, but, if it seems like it’ll work, I will. Your weekend sounds pretty A-okay. Very best of luck with the session today if you need it. Yeah, Paris reopened kind of. You know, it is strange out, but it’s really, really nice to see people everywhere again, and to have most stores reopened, and to hear the sounds of life everywhere, so it was kind of exhilarating, but ominous too since more people means more risk. But I walked all over, enjoying the return of Paris for real, and it was, yeah, quite nice. Ha. Nerdy kid so high on bud he turns his baseball cap backwards even though it makes him look even nerdier love, Dennis ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Strand seems to be Christophe’s go-to distributor over there. Makes sense. He just made this tiny 50 second long film about my novel ‘Closer’ in quarantine for a big French mag/site Les Inrokuptibles. I’ll link to it once it’s up. I’m being cautious. Parisians seem to be behaving themselves in public, as they have pretty dutifully all along, so maybe it’ll be okay. Thanks. You too. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, it was terrific. You’re really on to something with your writing, man. ** wolf, Ah ha, the maestro. So you do kind of vaguely remember it. Good. It’s a beaut, you must admit. I have a weirdly good memory. I don’t what that’s about. As I told Dominick, it was strangely really joyous to be in an alive Paris again. And, many mask wearers and no cafes not withstanding, it did feel almost of normal again. The exhilaration will wear off any second, but, yeah, it was nice. I just poked around, looked, meandered. Any noticeable change outside where you are? Thank you again so much, pal. All love, all respect. ** Bill, Hi. I did, in fact, more than I expected to. We can go in bookstores again! In small numbers. My favorite, After8, opens tomorrow, and I’ll be so there. The extra MOPI footage is really worth watching. It doesn’t add up to being anything overall, but the extra River footage is, in some cases, as good as his scenes in the actual film. ** Jeff J, Hi. The album of demos and outtakes, etc, by The Quick is ‘Untold Rock Stories’. The tragedy of The Quick is that they just a couple of years ahead of their time, and it was back when you either had a major label or you were homeless, and they never got signed, just came close a few times, and they broke up out of frustration too early. Their genius songwriter/guitarist Steve Huffstetter wrote many/the best of The Dickies’ early songs, and then he was in Los Cruzados for a while, and then he started writing for film. The Quick’s singer and bassist formed Great Buildings, who didn’t last long. The Great Buildings only album is solid, a few excellent tracks. The Quick’s singer, Danny Wilde, later hit it ‘big’ with his band The Rembrandts, of the ‘Friends’ theme-song fame. The Quick’s drummer went on to be the drummer of a quite good, overlooked experimental Goth band called Choir Invisible and then became the drummer of The Three O’Clock. The Quick’s keyboardist quit music after The Quick. So there’s a thumbnail history. The Quick’s story really is tragic. They were truly great. I saw them live maybe 40-50 times, and if they’d hung in there a little longer, they would been Cheap Trick-level popular and respected. 20/20 are among the real creme of Power Pop. I think Cheap Trick and Dwight Twilley are in their own category and transcendent, but among the rest, I would say 20/20 and, especially, Shoes, who are kind of the Donald Judd of Power Pop, are easily way up there. The first two 20/20 albums are excellent: ’20/20′ and ‘Look Out’. The Flys made a couple of good singles, but that’s it. Yeah, is that live version of ‘Private Hell’ not incredible? That’s my favourite Jam song. i have not done a post on Little Caesar Press books. Huh. I really should do that. I don’t have copies off the books here, so I couldn’t do excerpts or anything. Hm, maybe, if the internet is willing, I can at least do a very simple list of the books with covers, etc., if that would be interesting. Good idea. Thank you. Cool about the questions. I’m here/down. The TV script was always intended for a three-episode TV mini-series from its inception. If this text idea works — big if — it would be in the form of the skeleton of a TV series. Something like that. ** Sypha, I suppose it is unusual for you to be already familiar with something I post on the blog? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Everyone, Steve’s new tune is … ‘Acid Rain’. I’m enjoying the tracks and enjoying hearing your ideas and grasp evolve. Hope that mattress is bed bug free and available. I watched the new James Benning, ‘Maggie’s Farm’ which is amazing, and the latest Margaret Honda, ditto, and the first film directed/written by a very interesting young novelist who shall remain nameless because it was dreadful. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Yeah, parental loss, very heavy, very weird. An old friend of mine was telling me about his father, who lived through the plague of the early 20th century, and who’d had friends who were so spooked by it that they literally became recluses for the rest of their lives. I’m sure there’ll be a contingent of those people this time too. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. I liked your sound things a lot. They weren’t at all what I was expecting, even though I think I didn’t what to expect, which is … interesting. Anyway, thank you. ** Okay. Another restoration today, this time a fantastic old post about the sublime Jean Rhys by the sublime human and former, beloved DC’s d.l. Mieze. Have a good one in its company. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
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Stanning post, I wonder how she kept on living with this amount of depression.
Maybe Alcohol.
It somehow reminds me how I felt when I read The Bell Jar.
Depression can be an aphrodisiac, Milk. It certainly was in Rhys’ case.
Rhys is terrific. Merchant-Iory made a rather good film adaptation of “Quartet” and there’s a film of “Wide Sargasso Sea” that I haven’t seen but stars Martine Beswick — and is therefore required viewing.
I would be exceedingly careful in going out and about — though Paris is Beyond Enchanting. Stateside the overwhelming majority is staying home. But the news is filled with stories of wacky right-wing demonstrators demanding their “Freedom” to get sick and die. Of course they don’t state it in those terms but that’s what they really want “at the end of the day”
Meanwhile Here’s a song by Stephen Foster that perfectly expresses how I feel, sung by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s wife in an arrangement by Van Dyke Parks.
This thorough post really makes me want to give her books another chance. It’s interesting though your final description of how her books affected you and that you read them ‘intuitively’ has been my exact experience with your books – except that I’m much older than 15… Now this will be my convincing response when friends and family ask why I’ve become a bit obsessed with reading your books:
‘When I first read these books, I read them intuitively. There was something about them, taken together, that I understood with an intensity that surprised me. I didn’t understand everything, of course. But quite a lot of things I understood exactly. I find it a mystery that rather than being further damaged by his words, which was my initial reaction when I got to the end of The Sluts (What the fuck did this just do to me?), I felt in some strange way… clear. I can’t explain it to you in any other way. And it’s not important that I try to explain further. Dennis Cooper has already done that, and beautifully.’
Anyway, truly honoured that you listened to and enjoyed the first episode of my radio show! I admit it’s a dream of mine to have you as a special guest and interview you on Queer Lit…
Hope you enjoyed the bookstore outing, Dennis. Ours are still closed, but the next step is to allow curbside pickup. Ah well, a little at a time.
This is turning into a spring of addressing embarrassing literary omissions for me. First Sebald, Jean Rhys real soon, I promise.
Do you know Samanta Schweblin’s new book Little Eyes? I’m reading it with an online book group, really enjoying it so far. I’m not sure if it might hold up for another 150 pages, but we’ll see.
Been also enjoying this, with one of the Pan-Sonic guys, in case you haven’t come across it:
https://karlrecords.bandcamp.com/album/utopien-i
Bill
It was the original of Mieze’s excellent post that first turned me on to Rhys’ work, and I’ll take this rerun as a pointer to take on more. I especially love Good Morning, Midnight but maybe the big hit Wide Sargasso Sea should be tackled too.
I’m personally finding this lockdown to be stimulating for creativity. Writing more than ever before, which is not saying much for me but still it’s a good thing.
If Mieze is still reading, thanks for this Jean Rhys post. Really inspiring and esp. enjoyed the write-ups. I have that very same edition of her Collected Novels. She’s a real master.
Dennis – Thanks for that rundown of the Quick’s tragic history and its players second musical lives. I bought a download of their demos album and hope to listen to it tomorrow. Really excited that it exists. Appreciate the tip on the 20/20 albums which I’m going to hunt down next.
I love Dwight Twilley’s “Sincerely” which you hipped me to ages ago. Are other records by him as good, or at least within shouting distance of that marvel? That’s the only one I have for some reason.
Glad you’re into the Little Caesar publication post. I’d be excited to see it whatever form it took.
Watched Godard’s “Image Book” last night and thought it was one of his very best. Felt like it was speaking its own language, which I was starting to learn by the end. Mostly I haven’t had the attention span for experimental work these days, but something about the rapid pace of the images, sound, information made it immediately engaging and a huge pleasure. Excited to watch it again.
Poetry Qs coming for you later today, btw.
Dennis, Another excellent restoration! I was just texting with Mieze the other day. She’s well. Speaking of which, I need to video chat with her soon. We do that every month or so.
Weirdly -and unrelated, yeah- Joe M was just telling me about his dad, who was POW in Japan during WWII. Things give you perspective, no?
Yes, I’ve got a few friends on FB -and I’ve seen many other on the interwebs in general- who say they’re not going out until there’s a vaccine. Will work from home, get food delivered, etc. I’m like good luck with that. Fastest they’ve ever gotten a vaccine for anything has been something like 4 years. Usually takes 15-25 years. (Yeah, I did a little research, hahaha.) We still don’t have vaccines for things SARS or even the common cold. Some may never see daylight again!
But the good thing about reopening is that you don’t have to if you don’t want to. No one will be compelled to go out if they don’t want to.
“It’s the new normal.” Well, it might be new, but it ain’t normal. I ain’t ever gonna let it feel normal for me.
However, I think things will get back normal sooner rather than later. I’m an optimistic guy. 😀