Sometimes a book nips at your heels until you take notice. I first spotted Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in the magical establishment that is Raven Books in Blackrock a few months ago, picked it up, was intrigued by the title, read the back cover blurb and put it down again. A couple of weeks later I happened across it again in an Enniscorthy thrift shop, figured somebody up there was trying to tell me something, bought it and brought it home.
Estes’s book, first published in 1992, is a study of female psychology through the prism of folklore and fairy tale, a book that, in its re-examination of female archetypes and the innate wisdom of myth – of story itself – perfectly complements the work of Joseph Campbell, Marina Warner and Angela Carter.
I’m a sucker for self-improvement books, especially if they’re angled towards those of a creative bent (despite the new-agey jargon, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is another holy text). And while I’m no male feminist (most blokes who claim to be such are probably trying to get laid), it’s always enlightening for any father, brother or lover to see how the other half thinks, lives and breathes.
But Estes’s tome isn’t just for girls. Switch every ’she’ to a ‘he’ and you can read it as a book about the human soul, about empowerment, instinct, sex, love, tribal memory, the head and the haunches, bad relationships, holy love affairs, ritual and art. It teases out the subtexts of well-worn tales like The Red Shoes and The Ugly Duckling and finds within them perennial resonances. Consider this reading of the Bluebeard myth:
“…This acquiescence to marrying the monster is actually decided when girls are very young, usually before five years of age. They are taught to not see, and instead ‘make pretty’ all manner of grotesqueries whether they are lovely or not. This early training is why the youngest sister can say, ‘Hmmm, his beard isn’t really that blue.’ This early training to ‘be nice’ causes women to override their intuitions. In that sense, they are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator. Imagine a wolf mother teaching her young to ‘be nice’ in the face of an angry ferret or a wily diamondback rattler.”
My discovery of Estes’s book came, coincidentally enough, at the end of a humdinger year for female Irish artists: Margaret Healy, Miss Paula Flynn, Wallis Bird, Odi, Julie Feeney (2010 should see the release of Carol Keogh’s debut solo album, plus the long overdue unveiling of Alice Jago’s Born Stubborn). In the wider world, there were great records by Bat For Lashes, Neko Case, Emm Gryner and Florence & the Machine. If any song could soundtrack Women Who Run With the Wolves, it’s Florence’s ‘Rabbit Heart’, a rousing paean to the moment a woman comes into herself, realises what it is she was put on earth to do, and summons the courage to go about it: “This is a gift, it comes with a price”. Estes, one imagines, would approve.
Falling Down A Mountain
Tindersticks
4AD
The second coming of the Tindersticks reformation is upon us (following 2008’s The Hungry Saw), and the band don’t sugar it for the hummers and hawers.
The opening title tune may be one of their darkest but also most intoxicating moments, a dirty noir improvisation featuring trumpeter Terry Edwards at his most jazz devilish, recorded in a couple of takes with a little help from collaborator David Kitt, plus a driving pulse courtesy of new skinsman Earl Havin. Over six minutes the collective explore the sonic what-if of Bitches Brew located in Paris instead of New York, possibly informed by French or Italian neo-realist new wavers.
It’s a hard act to follow, but they make good on the promise. Falling…, recorded in rural France and Brussels last summer, is the ensemble’s eighth outing, and they’re sounding crisp as a well-cut suit, but grimy underneath. It doesn’t hurt that Stuart Staples has fulfilled his long time ambition of dueting with the divine Ms Mary Margaret O’Hara. The result, ‘Peanuts’, is a beautifully batty slice of oddball doo-wop.
Elsewhere it’s business as usual, but business is good. Francophile la-la kitchen sink torch tunes like ‘Harmony Around My Table’. Bad-assed Ramblas rave-ups such as ‘She Rode Me Down’, set to a backdrop of flamenco handclaps, Andy Nice’s cello and Jo Fraser’s flute. Or ‘Keep You Beautiful’, one of those Tim Hardin-like songs of devotion that they do so well, with snazzy major-to-minor changes underscoring a world-worn vocal. Or groovy but ghostly mood pieces like ‘Hubbards Hills’. The apocalyptic 60s pop of ‘Black Smoke’. The chilling but majestic closer ‘Piano Music’. Sublime stuff, all of it.
File alongside Richard Hawley’s last masterpiece as a four-in-the-morning Gitanes ‘n’ cognac special.
The act of writing might be described as a benign way of turning a neurosis into a vocation – and for the lucky few who can keep their overheads below their advances, a living.
“Between you and me, writing is all I ever think about,” says Oregon-based novelist and Richmond Fontaine frontman Willy Vlautin. “I started writing as a crutch when I was a kid, 13 or 14, mostly fantasy stories, and then when I was about 20 I started writing pretty seriously. It evens out my head when I write. I’m nicer to be around ‘cos I can get all the things that haunt me or worry me out, and I can control ‘em.”
But as anyone who has read Vlautin’s three downbeat but resolutely decent novels (The Motel Life, Northline and his latest, Lean On Pete) will tell you, there’s a always a shadow side.
“What kills me is self-doubt,” he says. “My ability with language. And just my intelligence. I’m really hard on myself about all that stuff. But for me the day that I found out The Motel Life got bought, it was one of the biggest monkeys off my back. That’s a lucky feeling to have. It takes a concrete weight off your back and then hands you a pick.”
And Vlautin has certainly multiplied his talents. Three novels in four years, and Lean On Pete is his best, the hard luck story of a disadvantaged teenager, Charley Thompson, who harbours ambitions to be a football star. Shortly after moving to Portland with his dissolute father, Charley begins working at the local track, where he befriends an aging racehorse that he attempts to save from the boneyard.
Vlautin belongs to a long tradition of writers – among them Nelson Algren, William Kennedy, Ray Carver and Denis Johnson – who anatomised the underbelly of dispossessed America, but his tales rarely glamourise their subject matter. This is no college dropout who once drank a couple of Buds for breakfast and thought he could be Bukowski. Vlautin’s stories possess an Edward Hopper diner melancholia. Like those of Steinbeck, they hit you where it hurts.
“I am really influenced by Steinbeck,” Willy admits. “I have his picture by my bed and quotes by him, just because he wrote about dire situations and working class people with great romance, and although he’s really sad there’s great heart to it. Even when I was a kid it brought me great comfort.
“I was trying to write Lean On Pete like an adventure story,” he continues. “I wanted to be around someone that, no matter what happened to ‘em, they kept trying. And also, I’m still really conflicted over horse racing ‘cos it’s always been one of my favourite things to do, but the more I’ve dived into it the harder it is on me ‘cos it’s a rough sport.
“Sometimes it seems pathetic and ridiculous to be drinking beer and betting money on jockeys risking their lives and horses living a pretty rough life – and risking their lives. We have kind of a rundown track, Portland Meadows, which is in the book, and you see too many horses and jockeys getting hurt without making any money, with no glory days in sight, and it just starts eating at you.”
Therein lies the book’s residual power, its evocation of classic American subjects – the young kid with dreams of sports stardom, the noble beast, the last-chance gamble – except when rendered in Vlautin’s beautifully spare prose these archetypes come off as a little more… scuffed.
“You know, I never even think about it like that, but I guess you’re right,” he concedes. “I played sports in high school and I really wanted that kind of stability day in and day out, trying to do something decent. And I think that’s why my guy Charley Thompson does that as well.
“If things are rough for me, man, I always try to write about something that will at least help my head out a little bit, and that kid sure did. He spends his whole life reacting to things ‘cos he hasn’t had enough of an easygoing time to think about where he’s going. Plus he’s really young. He doesn’t dive into his psyche or talk about himself very much because he isn’t there yet.
“So I think all that’s on his back, and his introspective side and his past will come and haunt him later on when he’s rested up and has a chance to start thinking about things. He’s really simple, and that’s why I had him run so much, because every time he gets worried he goes running, and when he’s tired he doesn’t think about anything.”
No great mystery then why the kid identifies so closely with the horse. His situation is so dire he never allows his mind to roam beyond where he’s going to sleep at night and where the next meal is coming from. Charley reels off lists of groceries as if he’s afraid of or unable to think about anything more substantial than basic food and shelter. Shades of Orwell: “Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one’s blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.”
Can Willy remember when the idea for Charley Thompson’s story first came to him?
“Y’know, it started as a six verse folk song that every time I’d play it for someone they’d either fall asleep or just go, ‘Jesus dude, this is so depressing – what’s the point?’ So I just started writing it as a novel. And I’d go out to the track and it seemed like at least once a week a horse would break its leg, and you just start thinking.
“Portland Meadows is near this pocket of really rundown houses, and once in a while you’ll see a kid like Charley Thompson working on the back side of the track, and so it kind of started from there. I’m friends with a jockey out there and she told me about people living hand to mouth in tack rooms. The other thing is I own an old Portland Meadows racehorse, and he’s really Lean On Pete, so I was kind of writing about him as well. Just the basic idea of trying to get a racehorse out of a bad situation, and the only one who could do it is a dumb kid.
“The dream for me is to write books that you can carry with you,” Willy concludes. “Luckily for me I don’t work a straight job, but when I did, it took a certain kind of book for me to read at night and not fall asleep, when you know you have to get up at six in the morning but you can’t put it down. A book that a guy would carry in his pocket, but also maybe it means something to him besides being a quick fun read.”
Lean On Pete is published by Faber & Faber.
Looking forward to Nick Kent’s memoir Apathy For the Devil. Here’s a quote from Karl Whitney’s interview at 3am magazine.
“Keith Richards, Jerry Lee Lewis, Iggy Pop: big tough men. Let’s see how tough they really are. What is a real tough man: is it someone who goes out and can drink and drug more than anyone else, but who doesn’t really look after their own children? Or is it someone like Neil Young, who has two children — one in particular — who suffers chronically from cerebral palsy. And he has devoted his life to making his son the centre of his life; to making him as loved and as wanted as possible. He’s tried to create things to help his son communicate with other children. There’s a big difference. That’s what a man is, to me; that’s what a fucking man is.”
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/like-dilu…
