Nostalgia de la boue, indeed
What is it with the British and the perfectly revolting? One is reminded of the Fugs' doleful ditty, "Wide, Wide River" ("Flow on, flow on/River of shit/Right from my toes/On up to my nose") -- if it were describing a matinee picnic on the Avon.
First, there's Clare Clark's new novel coming out in May (discussed below), which does describe the Thames in the 18th century as "no more than a stinking brown ditch of rotting shit." This, after her debut with The Great Stink.
And now there's Emily Cockayne's Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600-1770. Christopher Hart in The Literary Review has a merry old time with the book, managing to hold his nose, cover his ears and give it an enthusiastic thumbs-up all at once: "it's a veritable feast of filth and foulness, and I loved every minute of it. The chapter titles tell you immediately what to expect: 'Itchy,' 'Mouldy,' 'Noisy,' 'Grotty' and 'Dirty.' They sound like a South West Trains service."
A research associate at the Open University in East Midlands, Ms. Cockayne offers her readers a journey to an England past, "an England where people still drank ale instead of tea for breakfast, defecated in the streets as if it were the right of every freeborn Englishman to do so" and where Samuel Pepys wouldn't mind if a lady at the theater let fly and accidentally spat on him -- "providing the lady was pretty."
Perhaps it's the instinctive response of many British to their own posh self-marketed image. I know that whenever I see another handsome, Georgian-period London street in another Masterpiece Theatre costume drama, I try to imagine it filled with "the disagreeable Objects of bleeding Heads, Entrails of Beasts, Offals, raw Hides, and the Kennels flowing with Blood and Nastiness." At the very least, the street would be deep with horse manure (and people trying vainly to sweep it all up), while inside the homes, all those gleaming, maid-polished surfaces would be covered with gritty coal dust and perhaps a thin layer of grease from the vats of animal fat being burned at nearby slaughterhouses and pigsties.
Indeed, there's a street in northwest London named Mount Pleasant -- which, it turns out, was actually the locals' sardonic term for a huge pile of the "merdurinous" that stank there for years. Nowadays, Mr. Hart points out helpfully, "Mount Pleasant" is best known as the home of this.
Categories:
Recommending
Richard Price's best novel since Clockers, Lush Life is a slice of life on the Lower East Side, complete with the ghetto kids, the new bohemians, the old Jews and the cops. A restaurant manager at 35 fears he's no longer the wannabe artiste who'd turn into a full-blown artiste some day. When he sees a younger version of himself get shot during a mugging (and then gets blamed by the cops), he comes apart. Price takes these cultures and stares through all of them. Lush Life is a crime novel, a terrific literary thriller, a sampler of Price's namebrand talents with dialogue and deadpan humor. Price is after more than just law-and-order, crime-and-punishment, justice-is-served. This is a portrait of big-city America..You think The Wire, Law and Order, the old Homicide are the best TV has to offer? This is all that -- between covers.
In Life Class, Booker Prize-winner Pat Barker returns to World War I, the setting for her magnificent Restoration trilogy. Where those novels followed shell-shocked poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen through their convalescence, Life Class follows three painting students (based on real Slade School artists Christopher Nevinson and Paul Nash) as the war approaches. Elinor wants little to do with the war or with men: They're distractions from her art. Kit, a hot, young futurist, is primed for the war's industrialized destruction, while Paul flees his working-class background. As usual with Barker, the sexual relationships, war-time atmosphere and gruesome battlefield details are brilliantly conveyed: Her prose is lean but lyrical, compassionate yet cool-headed. No character is quite as compelling as Regeneration's bitter bisexual, Billy Prior, but the Great War's upheavals in art and combat, sex and class, provide Barker with material for exceptional historical novels. A new trilogy? One hopes so.
Blogroll
Critical Mass (National Book Critics Circle blog)
Acephalous
Again With the Comics
Bookbitch
Bookdwarf
Bookforum
BookFox
Booklust
Bookninja
Books, Inq.
Bookslut
Booktrade
Book World
Brit Lit Blogs
Buzz, Balls & Hype
Conversational Reading
Critical Compendium
Crooked Timber
The Elegant Variation
Flyover
GalleyCat
Grumpy Old Bookman
Hermenautic Circle
The High Hat
Jon Swift
Laila Lalami
Lenin's Tomb
Light Reading
The Litblog Co-op
The Literary Saloon
LitMinds
MetaxuCafe
The Millions
Old Hag
The Phil Nugent Experience
Pinakothek
Powell's
Publishing Insider
The Quarterly Conversation
Quick Study (Scott McLemee)
Reading
Experience
Sentences
The Valve
Thrillers:
Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind
Crime Fiction Dossier
Detectives Beyond Borders
Mystery Ink
The Rap Sheet
Print Media:
Boston Globe Books
Chicago Tribune Books
The Chronicle Review
The Dallas Morning News
The Literary Review/UK
London Review of Books
Times Literary Supplement
San Francisco Chronicle Books
Voice Literary Supplement
Washington Post Book World
AJ Ads
AJ Arts Blog Ads
Now you can reach the most discerning arts blog readers on the internet. Target individual blogs or topics in the ArtsJournal ad network.
Advertise Here
AJ Blogs
AJBlogCentral | rssspecial
the blog of the National Performing Arts Convention
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
rock culture approximately
Rebuilding Gulf Culture after Katrina
Douglas McLennan's blog
Art from the American Outback
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
No genre is the new genre
John Rockwell on the arts
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude
dance
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...
jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
media
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Martha Bayles on Film...
classical music
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds
publishing
Jerome Weeks on Books
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera
theatre
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world
Elizabeth Zimmer on time-based art forms
visual
Public Art, Public Space
John Perreault's art diary
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
2 Comments
Leave a comment