Vampires Tour, Deutschland, Juni 2012

Vampires gets its (belated) official German release this Friday. You can preorder the album here.

Following the release, I’m delighted to be heading back to Germany on a Vampires mini-tour, accompanied by…

Paul Love on percussion, musical saw, harmonica, organ and melodica, and
James Farrimond on accordion, Waterphone, xylophone, glockenspiel and harmonium

Tour dates

Thurs 14 June – Prinz Willy, Kiel

Fri 15 June – Festival contre le racisme – Lecture & performance @ Theatrium Bremen

Mon 18 June – Secret Bremen show, email for details

Tues 19 June – Cafe Kandinsky, Worpswede

Wed 20 June – Freundlich & Kompetent, Hamburg

Thurs 21 June – St Gaudy Cafe, Berlin

Fri 22 June – Soupanova, Berlin

Sat 23 June – Big Buttinsky, Osnabruck

This Friday,  my impossibly brilliant friend, booker and general favourite person in the world Klarita Pandolfi is collaborating with The Light & Shadow Salon on an event at Tate Britain.

Inspired by Turner, they’re having a panel discussion on the nature of the sublime, in which I’ll be participating.

I’ll also be performing a brief piece, accompanied by dancer extraordinaire Mel Simpson.

Chiara Ambrosio, a very exciting filmmaker, is hosting. Other guests include the philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant (a Schelling authority, for anyone who shares my interest), the poet Gareth Evans, and the exceptional Bird Radio (who kindly provided flute to my Immortality album those many years ago).

Tickets are free, but it’s likely to fill up fairly quickly. Doors open at 6.30.

The night will finish with a screening of Quays Brothers’ ‘In Absentia’.

As I wrote yesterday, Russell Hoban is probably the single biggest influence on my words. And, in some strange way, led me to write a classical piece for the first time - the Requiem, which is dedicated to him, and being performed with Roger O’ Donnell and The Contrarian Ensemble at Shoreditch Church on Monday.

I had the honour of interviewing Hoban, telephonically, a few months before his death. In it’s published form, the interview was abridged into a couple of hundred words. But the full transcript is below, and may be of interest to anyone who shares a love of his work.

Q: Much of your work features juxtapositions of characters from different times and places – Perseus and Fay Wray, the Rotting Head of Orpheus in contemporary London. What causes the juxtapositions to come to you?

Goodness! What a question that is! Well… as I’ve written elsewhere, whatever I’ve done is because I’m friends with my head. Being friends with my head, I rely on connections it will make for me. For example, when I wrote Riddley Walker, it began with a visit of Canterbury Cathedral where I saw the remains of a 15^th century painting of St. Eustace. While I was looking at it, that joined up with some ideas that my head had been saving up for me about two articles written in the New Yorker by Edmund Wilson six or seven years before that, about Punch and Judy and the showmen who made the puppets and performed with them. And the two things put themselves together so that there came to me the idea of a time in England after an atomic catastrophe, 1000 years later a this government, as it was, would be where Ramsgate used to be, in a town called The Ram.

The decrees of this government would be propagated by travelling puppeteers performing what was called the Eusa show. And that’s a perfect example of how things come together in my head.

 In Kleinzeit, the phrase ‘a barrow full of rocks’ gets stuck there, and recurs, mutating through the course of the novel. In The Lion of Boaz-Joachin, the same thing occurs with the phrase ‘to close one’s eyes in the presence of a lion’. Is that a reflection of your experience with words?

Yes. Exactly.

How do you go about tuning into your ideas? Do you have a fixed process?

What happens is that when I tune into a particular channel of thought, things feed into it that I didn’t know were there, because the mind retains everything that has ever entered it. It isn’t always accessible, but once you do open a particular channel of thought, the things that you do remember, but didn’t know about, will feed into it.  There is a line of one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays about a public channel of energy that a man can tap into…

This feeds into an idea of One-ness that you write about, particularly in Riddley Walker.

Oneness?

The idea in Riddley Walker that there’s something looking out of one’s eyeholes, something that we’re all part of, but unable to express.

In Riddley Walker, the oneness is always coming apart into twoness. At various points he tries to be one with someone or something, and every time, it comes apart and becomes two. I think that in all of us there is a yearning for a unity which is never attainable.

You’ve a line, I forget where it’s from, that’s haunted me for some time:  “It is the longing for what cannot be that turns the world from night to morning…”

It’s from The Second Mrs. Kong. Yes, that’s exactly what it is! The longing for what cannot be.

Is this The Terror? In many of your works – there’s the ‘blackness’ in Fremder; in The Medusa Frequency, you refer to the Terror, with a capital ‘T’.

The Kraken says that the Terror became the Kraken. It’s the last line in Heart of Darkness, where Kurtz says, ‘the Terror! The Terror!’.

 This Terror, this Horror,  they are immanent in the universe. It’s one thing, the Terror / Horror, he cloaks itself in various guises. It becomes the Kraken, or it becomes whatever is – how can I say – fashionable.

And it’s something external, but part of the human condition that we can’t escape?

Yes. I’m 85 now, and as I get older, I have the feeling of being inhabited by thing that looks out through our eye-holes, and is not separate from the horror and the terror. In Riddley Walker, Riddley recalls walking with his father along the shore and seeing a broken seagull and his father kills it. And he remembers the yellow eyes of this gull that stare scareless to the last. They were in the creature, but they didn’t care nothing for the creature they were in… this comes from a memory of my own, seeing a broken seagull in Maine, with those scareless yellow eyes, and thinking on it since then, it comes to me that there is, in all of us, this yellow eyed thing, scared of life, that is in us but doesn’t care anything about is. That is there before us, will be there after us, and it isn’t – what can I say – it is not conservative of the form it inhabits. It doesn’t care at all for the race of creatures it inhabits. It is there in the people that Riddley remembers from time back way back who are the people that we are now and will go on making us do what we do. So there’s always the urge to find new ways of destruction.

You can get just as dead from a kick in the head as from the one littl one (gunpowder) but your foot is on the end of your legs, so it’s not all that exciting. But to make the on1 you have to have the agreements, and the numbers of nexter and you gotta have the words. So that’s exciting. And that’s how it is with us right now. You can be sure that as we speak, Native Indians are on the Amazon river, experimenting with an enriched guano, sitting on their laptops and working out how to make the one little one.

You wrote in The Moment Under the Moment on Adorno’s idea that The dream of reason produces monsters…

Yes. Dreams are a safe environment for the monsters that the mind delights.

Do your books fall into reality or dream, then, if that question makes sense.

No, it doesn’t.  Reality is whatever is. My books are concerned with whatever aspects of reality I perceive when I’m writing, and whatever aspects of reality my characters experience.

So in my latest work, Angelica Lost and Found, Angelica perceives a reality that is not ordinarily perceptible to anybody. But it’s a reality.

When you use Orpheus, what are you evoking? Is it one particular thing, or just a field of association. I remember, for example, you’ve stated previously you feel it was he rather than Hermes that gave Apollo the lyre…

Yes. I did. Orpheus has occurred in various of my writings, and is that element of us that is always seeking and in the various versions of the Orpheus story, is trying to recover Eurydice, who is lost to him.

There is a Rilke poem, I’m just trying to remember, from his Sonnets to Orpheus…  [pause while both of us flip through our respective copies, unsuccessfully]

Eurydice is what cannot be regained…

And Orpheus is the part of us, forever searching?

That’s right. And Orpheus is a part of us that we can never quite escape, and some people are more aware of it than others.

Are there any works, past or present, that you’d recommend that everyone read immediately?

Well, yes! There’s also George Eliot. I’ve been rereading Daniel Deronda. And she’s pretty much inexhaustible. But I interrupted my second reading of Daniel Deronda to take up Sister Carey by Theodore Dreiser. And Theodore Dreiser’s part of a generation that included Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair, a generation that has fallen out of fashion.

In Sister Carey, this middle-aged man, who’s yearning for something that he’s never had, finds this delightful young woman, Carey, and, well, he ends up, I can synopsise by saying that the spider invites the fly into his web, and the fly eats up the spider. He’s a tremendous writer, Dreiser, and I recommend that everyone read him.

Also, while I’m recommending, a reference source – more than that – a source that I’m referring to in what I’m writing at the moment is the five quartets that are Beethoven’s late quartets. Obviously, they’re a work of genius, but they’re fascinating in that as my son, who’s a composer, first pointed out to me, Beethoven is vulnerable, and listening to them, I get into the idea of vulnerability more and more. In these quartets, he is always walking on thin ice, nothing is taken for granted, everything is open to question, he didn’t know what the outcome would be, except that part of his mastery was that one movement leads inevitably into the next and into the next, and one quartet leads

You’ve mentioned that you’re at work on a new novel. Am I allowed to ask about it?

The male and female leads in this novel are both in their novel are both in their seventies, which will be rather fun for readers who are around that age. The critical success of Angelica has made me realise that readers enjoy a book that is fun.

Has your readership ever been of concern to you when you’re writing, if that makes sense? Do you think of anyone else when you’re writing?

No. No, I don’t. I have a fan club called The Kraken who are, I guess, are mostly kindred spirits, that is, the same kind of weirdo as I am. Except that in the present case, I’ve been encouraged by the enthusiastic critical response to have fun… not to get heavy.

For Angelica, I haven’t had a single review that… they haven’t just been favourable, they’ve been enthusiastic.

Moving back to your writing process, does a lot of your character goes into your novel, or do you just exist as an intermediary.

Sure. A lot of my character’s in Volatore, a lot of my character’s in Angelica. All my aspects appear in my fiction.

Q. Do you suffer with your characters, or just acknowledge their suffering, in the capacity of an observer.

Yes, definitely, I suffer with them. Because of various public events recently, I had to reread Riddley Walker, and at the point where Granser blows himself up, the black leader [leader of a pack of wild dogs] pushes his muzzle under Riddley’s head, and Riddley says, ‘that black leader, he was like death on four legs with his yellow eye – he wanted me to pet him, and that’s when I cried for the dead’. And I cried when I read that, because, because I felt… felt it.

 Q. Are your characters the most important part of your life?

Well, the writing is the most important part of my life. I can’t live without it. If I’m not writing, I feel physically unwell.

Q. Before writing full time, you were an illustrator. Did you write then, and did you feel this way then?

I guess so. When I was an illustrator, it didn’t take me over as completely as the writing does. Now I’m always writing. I mean, when I start putting myself together in the morning – I’m writing – and impatient to get through breakfast – to get writing, to get some of the thoughts down.

Finally, and this is a question of particular personal interest, as much as anything else – can we talk about Gods? Gods – old, new, western, eastern, appear in a lot of your work. Do you see an anthropological relationship between them, or do you believe in any in particular…

Well… If I can put down the phone for a moment, I’ll get the word processor up on my computer, and read you something I’m working on, as an answer.