Text

|
There are lots of things we don’t know. Stuff that’s obscure. Even hidden from us. But there’s plenty we prefer not to know. Things we don’t dare remember. Sometimes that’s a mercy. Other times it’s a form of servitude. Tim Winton ‘Juice’

Juice by Tim Winton is a a dystopian cli-fi novel.[1] It is set in a stark, climate-ravaged future Australia. The story begins with an unnamed man and a young, silent girl traversing a desolate landscape in a scavenger rig. Their search for refuge leads them to an abandoned mine, where they are captured at crossbow point by a solitary, wary survivor.

Like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, the narrator begins to recount his life story to his captor in an effort to survive. His story reveals a childhood spent in a community on the north coast forced to live increasingly underground to escape the heat of the sun. He describes a world where the consequences of past environmental destruction are a brutal daily reality. This is epitomised in the story about the orange:

She took the orange and pulled out her clasp knife. She set the fruit on its axis and passed the blade around the rind. Not quite at the middle, but a third of the way down. She turned it until the cut met itself. Then she set the knife a little lower and repeated the procedure. When she was finished, a curl of pithy rind came away and a whole band around the middle of the orange was naked.
She put the fruit in my hand.
That’s how the world is, she said.
I don’t get it.
Leave it here, on the bench. Come back tomorrow and look at it. And the day after that. That’s the world, how it is. Most people know this. But not many understand why.
So, what’s the answer?
That’s for another time. Geography before history.
Why can’t you say?
Everything in its time and season.
Talk like this unsettled me, but I was an obedient son. I left the orange where it was. Next morning, and several days thereafter, I returned to it and saw how the wounded orange scoured and struggled to heal itself.
Whenever my mother saw me examining it, her expression was impassive. On the third day, as she passed, she picked up the orange and dug the ragged nail of her index finger into the very centre of the sphere.
What’s this part? Of the world, not the orange.
The equator, I said.
Correct.
Then she set her thumb against the lower band of skin.
See this? This is us. Just north of —
Capricorn, I said.
Yes, the Tropic of Capricorn. But all this, she said, fingering the dry band that ran around the middle, people used to live there – millions and millions of them. But not anymore. Only here. And here. Where there’s still skin. North of Cancer, south of Capricorn.
That’s where people are?
That’s how the world is.

Source: Juice by Tim Winton

As he grows, the narrator is drawn into a clandestine organisation known as the Service. This group is dedicated to hunting down the descendants of those they hold responsible for the global environmental collapse. The bulk of the narrative follows the narrator’s dangerous double life as an operative for the Service, carrying out violent missions while trying to maintain a semblance of normal family life with his mother, wife and daughter.

Juice feels like a departure from Winton’s usual fiction. I have read a few Tim Winton books over the years, including Cloudsteet, Blueback and Dirt Music. Whether it be the sparse landscape, the ever present ocean and contrast between city and country, each novel in their own way is clearly set in Western Australia.[2] Although exploring a Sydney which is surrounded by a wall, the Republic of Utah, the Arctic swamp and the Persian Gulf, Juice too is still predominantly set in Western Australia, however 200 years or so in the future. This is an uncanny landscape that has been ravaged by climate change.[3] Although weather has a place in other novels, in Juice the impact is turned up to 11. There are glimpses of the past in the pages, but gone are the animals, people and habitat. Even the coral has even been mined to support farming. With all this said, Juice is still a coming-of-age novel, so not everything is different.

As a story, for me it sits somewhere in-between Cormac McCarthy’s spare description of a ruined world presented in The Road and Kim Stanley Robinson’s exploration of people’s response to the climate crisis in The Ministry for the Future. Unlike McCarthy’s world, which feels like there has been a particular event (or maybe that was just the film influencing me), Juice makes clear that the situation is in response to the climate. While The Service reminded me of Robinson’s terrorist group Children of Kali, who grew out of a devastating heatwave in India that killed millions.

The novel serves as something of a call to arms. However, unlike Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, it is not necessarily clear what the particular call is. It feels like it is less about preaching and more about asking questions and living with the ambiguity.

He has written this book to make people think about the trajectory that the world is on and the interests that are driving us down that road, but not necessarily what they can do about it. Because it is likely that even Winton would agree that while the response he imagines in Juice – taking violent revenge on those responsible for the state we are in – may be one some readers might wish for, it is not one they can really do anything with.

Source: Tim Winton Juice Reviewed by Robert Goodman

In some ways Juice is also a novel hope. This hope isn’t a naïve optimism for a perfect future. Instead, it’s more grounded in the enduring capacity for human connection, resilience, and the potential for moral courage even in the face of despair.

The ‘juice’ of the title is thus presented not only as a colloquial term for the energy produced by oil companies – the companies had ‘every sort of juice. The stuff that drove engines, trade, empire’ – but also the energy that drives the hero’s motivation and resilience, his ‘moral courage’, as the author described it in a recent interview. ‘It takes a lot of juice to perform,’ his fictional counterpart observes.

Source: Paul Giles reviews ‘Juice’ by Tim Winton

This hope actually extends beyond ‘humans’ to the accommodate androids as a means of survival.

Overall, Juice is an important read. As with so much of Winton’s writing, it provides a means of wondering and imagining.[4] In the case of Juice, this is wondering and imagining about the possible future we are entering.

The great mystery of people lies in the many ways in which they’ll deceive themselves.
All people?
All the ones I’ve known. Everything you read in the sagas.
Even now?
Especially now. Like I said, there are lots of things we don’t know. Stuff that’s obscure. Even hidden from us. But there’s plenty we prefer not to know. Things we don’t dare remember. Sometimes that’s a mercy. Other times it’s a form of servitude.

Source: Juice by Tim Winton

Side note: I listened to David Field’s reading of the text. Although, I could not shake my memory of ’hungry thirty’ throughout.

  1. “Tim Winton is far from the first author to write post-climate-change fiction. For those coming to this from the science fiction side, the world-building is a bit lacking. The narrator’s mission never really makes a lot of sense. Better examples, for those interested in the genre, are Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, Claire North’s Notes from the Burning Age, and Clare Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus.” Source: Tim Winton Juice Reviewed by Robert Goodman ↩
  2. It sometimes feels like Winton is almost sponsored by the Western Australian government? ↩
  3. It would be interesting to have a book set 200 years in the past, when the British first colonised? ↩
  4. “In a 2013 interview, Winton remarked that ‘fiction isn’t a means of persuasion. Fiction doesn’t have answers. It’s a means of wondering, of imagining.’ Although the way it envisages climate catastrophe is thought-provoking, it is ultimately this creative projection of ‘wondering’ and uncertainty that makes Juice a profound as well as an enthralling novel.” Source: Paul Giles reviews ‘Juice’ by Tim Winton ↩
Text

|
Nostalgia can grow on most surfaces, but some surfaces are more hospitable than others. Michel Faber ‘Listen’

Listen – On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber is a meditation on what it is we talk about when we talk about listening to music:

This is a book about music, and about the people who listen to it – your friends, your neighbours, me and you.

Source: Listen by Michel Faber

It is made up of a number of sections, each containing a bricolage of reviews, online comments, interviews and Faber’s own experiences, to address a particular idea. These sections often read as much as self-contained essays, but as a whole, they bleed into each other to create an intriguing exploration.[1] Although the book is not intended to be Faber’s reflection on music, his style of writing cannot help being personal. This feels something akin to what Clifford Geertz called ‘thick description’, where layers of meaning and context are meticulously woven into the narrative.

As a book, Listen explores a number of questions. For example, what is it that we are actually hearing? How does this differ to what animals hear? What is the actual place and purpose of music? For adults? For children? Emotionally? As an accessory? As a commodity? Does listening to and engaging with music actually make children smarter? What are the stories we tell and are told through music? Who tells these stories and why is so much music in English? When is music just noise? Is Nickleback’s music really that bad? Is it still ok to listen to Morrissey? We are going to listen to Taylor Swift forever, right? How does music play out in the brain? What does it mean to be a fan? What is the place of music reviews? Is classical music just a fancy orchestral cover band? What is the place of music in space? What are the appropriate precautions to take when listening? Vinyl is better, right? Can everyone really sing? Or is it okay to fake it with a backing track? However, more often than not, these questions are left ambiguously unanswered with the reader simply left to dwell on things. Almost like a warning, Faber states in the beginning that he is here to “change your mind about your mind”.[2]

By its meandering nature, Listen is one of those books that sows many seeds. Some of the tidbits that took are that: “the world is intrinsically silent.”[3] “Being grown-up doesn’t guarantee that you understand anything; you merely have the vocabulary to talk as if you do.”[4] “The familiar sounds of which our tribe approves are Music. What’s not Music is Noise.”[5] Classical music is “a séance – tuning into that man and his humanity.”[6] “When a vinyl disc is brand new, the first play is the best you’ll ever get.”[7] “The only medium that’s ‘full frequency’ is your head.”[8] “If you’re middle-aged, you will soon reach a point where your brain can’t process much more.”[9]

Just as a black hole is defined by what is not there, but should be, Faber’s taste and preferences are glimpsed at or inferred throughout. There are times when I am really drawn into Faber’s discussion of his love of Coil’s Astral Disaster, his father’s collection of schlager or Jane Tabor’s ‘A Proper Sort of Gardener’. However, these threads are a distraction from what this book is really about and that is ‘you’ as the reader. As he states in the introduction:

Art does not ‘hold a mirror up to nature’. It holds a mirror up to you.

Source: Listen by Michel Faber

This made me wonder if Listen was actually written in the margins of another abandoned book?

In a discussion of the track ‘Luminous Beings’ on the Song Exploder podcast, Jon Hopkins spoke about his process of creating something in order to destroy it:

Basically I built something in order so I can destroy it and then something more interestingly can grow out of it.

Source: Jon Hopkins – Luminous Beings (Song Exploder)

I wondered about this idea while reading Michel Faber’s book Listen and the autobiographical material.

In the introduction, Faber explains that this book is one that he always wanted to write. However, while reading it I was left wondering exactly what the initial idea for the book was? Faber states that the purpose of the book is to ‘perceive your stuff differently’.[10] However, like Hopkins’ initial idea, I wondered if there was an initial autobiographical ode to music which the book actually deconstructs, a reflection similar to say Rob Sheffield’s memoir Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, that was destroyed to write this story.

Listen covers so much territory. The catch is that it often demands of the reader to stop and consider.[11] I just wonder how many readers would actually dedicate the time to properly engage with it? Interestingly, in the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Faber explains that the original script was much longer.[12]

All in all, I am glad I stumbled upon Listen on shelf of my local library, while randomly perusing while my daughter was looking for books. It is definitely a book that I feel has changed my mind about music and listening and helped appreciate the small things.

  1. “The author, writing with refreshing openness and stylishness, proceeds exactly down that path, tackling all manner of listening-related subjects, from volume to genre to atonality to classical music to white bias. The book is a heady brew of energetic essays, each one enjoyable, although it can be difficult to discern a throughline of thought or even, sometimes, the relevance of a given essay to the book’s expressed central aims.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber [6/10] – Read Listen Watch by Andres Kabel ↩
  2. “Reading this book will change the way you listen. I’m not here to change your mind about Dusty Springfield or Shostakovich or Tupac Shakur or synthpop. I’m here to change your mind about your mind.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  3. “The world is intrinsically silent. When trees fall or bombs explode or violinists pluck pizzicato, all that happens is that the surrounding air is disturbed in various ways. Atmosphere is displaced. This displaced atmosphere is what enters our ears, and we do the rest. Our ears and brains are musical instruments. To be precise: our eardrums are conceptually no different from the drums we see a drummer playing. The world is playing us.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  4. “Being grown-up doesn’t guarantee that you understand anything; you merely have the vocabulary to talk as if you do. An adult is capable of phrases like ‘sinister, stalking guitar riff’, which sounds cleverer and more definitive than ‘Argh! Vampires!’ But is it? Whenever we find ourselves feeling superior to a child who is expressing their naïve opinion of what music is about, we should ask ourselves: What is it about my own response that’s so much better than this child’s?” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  5. “The symbolic resonance is clear: avant-garde art will swamp us if given half a chance. Parochial art which harks back to a bygone era is a bastion against the dangerous incomers. The familiar sounds of which our tribe approves are Music. What’s not Music is Noise. We don’t want any of those noisy harbingers coming over here, stealing our time and violating our brain cells.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  6. “Rather than feeling like a tribute band, it almost feels like a séance to me. I mean, Beethoven couldn’t have played a string quartet, so it’s not as if he was able to make it exist; he didn’t do it. You’re enabling his concept to come to life. So I always think of it more as a séance – tuning into that man and his humanity.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  7. “When a vinyl disc is brand new, the first play is the best you’ll ever get. Almost inevitably, there will already be some unwanted pops, clicks and rustles, because molten polyvinyl chloride is prone to manufacturing defects – rogue bubbles, irregularities in the heating and cooling phases, or impurities in the vinyl itself. Each additional play will degrade the surface a little more.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  8. “I also respect that some people enjoy the sound of vinyl more than they enjoy the sound of digital. Music happens in the brain, not in some abstract realm of graphs and meters. If the ‘warmth’ of vinyl’s groove rumble makes you deeply happy, you are more blessed than a CD nerd who is deeply dissatisfied by the kilohertz parameters of the 1995 German remaster compared to the 2003 Japan-only remaster that he can’t get hold of but has read about in a hi-fi magazine. … keep in mind: the only medium that’s ‘full frequency’ is your head.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  9. “If you’re middle-aged, you will soon reach a point where your brain can’t process much more. Having once felt well-informed and connected, you will feel yourself growing increasingly ignorant and out-of-touch. More and more of the new music you wish to understand will be made by, and for, minds that don’t work like yours. Music which speaks to formative experiences that didn’t form you, music which riffs on cultural allusions that elude you, music which has no use for all the things you’re an expert on. The future is here and you’re not part of it.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  10. “Many books about music are a glorified display of the stuff the author owns, which he (it usually is a he) thinks you should own too.† It’s not the aim of this book to make you own more stuff. The aim is to help you perceive your stuff differently.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  11. Personally, I had to read it twice to really take it all in. Even then, I feel I could easily have gone back and read it all over again. ↩
  12. It would seem that Faber listened to his editors and trimmed it back. Although I wonder if there is a means of publishing these pieces left on the chopping board elsewhere, in a blog or something, similar to Andrew Stafford’s ‘Notes from Pig City’? Or maybe I just need to read it a third time. ↩
Text

|
If you tell the truth – and I always do – you shame the devil. Miriam Margolyes ‘This Much Is True’

I came to Miriam Margolyes’ memoir This Much is True for the humour and Margolyes’ reading of the book. However, I got so much more.

I’m quite sure you picked this book up hoping I’d make you laugh. That’s what I seem to have become best known for. I lack the filter others possess and out of my potty mouth pop filthy sexual anecdotes, verbal and physical flatulence on a grand scale. I swear, I fart, I draw attention to things best left unremarked – and it seems it’s made me popular. Please don’t think I’m unaware of my duty to both entertain and shock you, but I won’t allow my book to be just dirty talk. Let me tell you the truth about myself, too.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

As you would expect, as an autobiography, it covers the usual backstory, whether it be Margolyes’ family’s Jewish heritage, upbringing in Oxford, education at Newnham College, Cambridge University, and life beyond, including properties in England, Italy and Australia. She also unpacks her diverse career, working her way through radio, voiceovers, drama, Hollywood and now documentaries.

Gifted with so much confidence, everything is placed on the page. This includes recounting the recording of a soft-porn tape Sexy Sonia: Leaves from my Schoolgirl Notebook and doing black face, twice.

If you tell the truth – and I always do – you shame the devil.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

One of the things that is common with celebrity autobiographies is the incessant name dropping, such as meeting both Queen Elizabeth and Mother Teresa. However, Margolyes takes name dropping to the next level. She has so many friends, with 11,833 names in her phone.

Most people like to pounce on an empty bench, but I long for human communion – that to me is Holy Communion. I love talking to people, and asking them questions. They’re giving me a present of their stories. Talking, listening, learning what it’s like to look through the eyes of another soul.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

On the flip side of this, she also calls out those who are not ‘friends’.

Throughout, Margolyes provides an insight into the challenges associated with being a working actor (or actress). For example, she recounts the story of how they were going to replace Snape after Alan Rickman challenged the contract.

The final, very long, book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was being filmed in two parts. Warner Bros decided that both parts would be filmed together – and therefore he was only due one fee. His gifted agent, Paul Lyon-Maris, pointed out that if the films were separately released, Warner Bros would receive two incomes. Therefore, Alan Rickman should also get two fees for appearing in both parts. Warner Bros refused and said they would have to recast. Recast Snape? Alan smiled. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. The day before shooting was due to start on part two, they agreed to pay Alan both fees. You do wonder sometimes about the mental acuity of Hollywood moguls.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

Like Sam Neill, Margolyes did not attend drama school. She is therefore happy to celebrate the various people who have helped guide her along the way.

How much of it is training, how much of it is innate? A mixture of both. I have no formal training: I didn’t go to drama school, mainly because I was already twenty-two when I left Cambridge and I didn’t want to remain a student for another three years. I read quite a bit about theatrical technique but mainly I have learnt on the job and through observing others.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

Throughout, she gives a masterclass of sorts, explaining how she fashions characters:

When I read a text, I use the bricks of my own personality to fashion a character. It’s the text that gives you the mortar, the other elements of what you’re creating and what you have at the back of your mind’s eye. When I get a play script, I want to see if the character has changed at all during the course of the piece. Is there an arc to the character? Or, if not, does she move in any way from beginning to end? If there is no movement, I have to try to put it there, because it’s boring to know everything about a character from the minute they step onto the stage. The actor or actress must surprise the audience in order to engage them and to entertain them. That’s what I look for in the writing. But the surprise must be organic, from within. Imposing it won’t work.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

A part of this is about being open and available for the moment of discovery:

I try rather to discover what it is that opens the door to a character for me, and it’s always different things – maybe a single line of my script, or something that another character in the play says. I see every rehearsal as an opportunity both to offer and to glean something new from my fellow actors – as long as you are receptive to that dialogue and you open yourself to the moment, the process of finding your way into a character becomes a continual foreplay. Every inch of your skin has got to be sensitive to the moment, and if you’re lucky, the moment comes – but it can go again just as quickly. It is a flash, and you can’t control it and you can’t compel it – you just have to be available. That’s the most important thing: you make yourself available for the moment.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

Intriguingly, she explains why she dislikes people seeing rehearsals as they serve as a space to see what it means to be on the stage:

I think that you see how you want to appear on the stage. And I don’t mean physically: what I mean, rather, is that somehow you ‘see’ what you want to do with your character, how you want her to be. What is her reality? You glimpse it, distantly, and as you rehearse, and with the help of your colleagues and your director, and the costume department and the make-up artist, and so on, gradually, it all feeds into your ‘being’. Then the creation, your character’s being, starts slowly and imperceptibly to take root, and to be there for you to step into on the first night, or whenever the first audience appears.
That’s why I hate it when people ask to watch a rehearsal. Sometimes directors say, ‘Oh, I’ve asked a few people to come in to see how we’re going.’ I can’t bear it, because a performance is a fragile butterfly of a thing – and it has to be coaxed and nourished and soothed. Exposure too early is scary and frightening, because an actor’s nature is to perform – that is what we do. And that’s how we think of ourselves – we are the performers and you are the audience. When we see an audience, we will perform, but if we’re not ready to deliver our performance, then something phony, invented and inorganic is risked being laid onto the fragile structure that is slowly coming into being.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

This has me wondering about how we engage with creative work before it is complete, such as listening to demos or reading drafts.

One of the aspects that expanded my thinkingafter reading Margolyes’ book was the role of males and the place of gender. She shares cases of studied cruelty associated with the Footlights and Warren Beatty’s question, “Do you fuck?” Margolyes highlights the limited interest in feelings from many of the men in her life.

I realise I’m generalising but from my experience I find that the range of thought and conversation in most men is limited. They’re not interested in feelings. Many men react with horror and fear when a woman starts crying.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

This reminded me of a comment in James Hollis’ The Middle Passage:

Robert Hopcke, in Men’s Dreams, Men’s Healing, suggests that it takes a man about a year in therapy before he is able to internalize and be present to his actual feelingsa year to reach where women are usually able to begin.

Source: The Middle Passage by James Hollis

All in all, Margolyes is a character full of contradictions. This includes: being a left-wing passionate monarchist, with an Order of the British Empire for Services to Drama; an atheist who still embraces her Jewish culture, such as fasting on Yom Kippur, maintaining dietary restrictions during Passover, and never eaten bacon, ham or pork; a Jew who questions the Israeli’s policy towards the people of Palestine; and proudly out, but with regrets about formally coming out to her parents. This leaves us with a intriguing and complicated story.