The use of the word “cringe” as a noun makes me … um … wince.
There’s a superb piece in The Nation by Ethan Iverson about what happened in jazz between the deaths of John Coltrane in 1967 and Lee Morgan in 1972, much of it in Slugs’, East Third Street, NY, and very little of it recorded: Jazz off the record. Featuring McCoy Tyner et al 🎶
I got Alboran Trio’s third album, Islands (2020) in the post today from Italy. I wanted the cd rather than a download and Italy was the only place I could get it (possibly apart from Amazon: I didn’t look). It took 4 weeks to get here but at least it did in the end 🎶 🎹
An essay in the LRB about the Pelicot rape trial unexpectedly sent me back to the second book (of six) in Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series.
The last Talk about books of 2024 is about Tana French’s seventh novel (and first standalone), The Wych Elm, the story of a man in his late 20s who has always considered himself lucky, till a vicious assault partly changes his mind 📖
Tana French’s seventh novel is her first standalone: the first-person narrative of a young man who always considered himself lucky, till a vicious attack partly changed his mind.
I found two Virago paperbacks, Jamaica Inn and Frenchman’s Creek respectively, in the Castlebar Oxfam shop yesterday, at €2 each. I’ve been meaning to read more du Maurier so this is opportune.
I’ve been expecting this for almost a decade: Martial Solal has died aged 97. He was never one of my favourite jazz pianists but an extraordinary improviser. He didn’t rehearse but practiced exercises incessantly. I saw him live twice: once solo, once with the Moutin twins 🎹 🎶
Like Auster’s immediately succeeding novel, Moon Palace (1989) is about chance, contingency and possible coincidences. But its interest for me is quite different: it’s a novel that has absent or missing fathers at its heart.
Is John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960) having a bit of a moment on Substack? Two posts in the last 3 days, by Sarah Ditum and Adam Roberts, discuss the novel, and Cecily Carver mentioned it back in October. Perhaps Updike is coming back into style 📚
I wanted to see the new Brad Mehldau trio in Nancy in October but didn’t get my act together. And now that very concert has turned up on RTE’s website! Rossy’s drumming lends itself to a more contemplative style. Some Mehldau compositions I hadn’t heard before and a return to earlier repertoire 🎶🎹
I just accidentally discovered the maximum size of a note in Tot (⚠️ Mac App Store link). Each note is limited to 100,000 characters.
Just finished Belinda McKeon’s Tender 📚. I’ll be rereading it and writing something about it in Talk about books in the next few months. This post is just to try out @manton’s new feature: adding the cover image to book posts.
The current Talk about books post is about Iris Murdoch’s 1973 novel, The Black Prince. I make a highly tendentious and unsupported suggestion a few paragraphs from the end, secure in the belief that hardly anyone will read that far 📖
Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, the narrative of a man imprisoned for murder who has previously had a sexual relationship with a much younger female character, owes something to an earlier novel. It repays the debt with interest.
Sarah Ditum on Kirsty McColl in The Critic. Not long before she was killed, McColl recorded some of the songs written by Phil Chevron for his never-to-be-produced musical about a fictional Irish-American boxer. I’ve been listening to those. Get the CD, not the download (she’s on the bonus tracks) 🎶
It seems that Books at One might be in difficulty, according to this subscriber-only story in The Irish Times. That would be a shame.
This morning I started to write a post responding to Anil Dash’s “Don’t call it a Substack” from a few days ago. I got to about 400 words but decided (not for the first time) that this is not the kind of thing I want to write about any more. I’m fed up with reading opinions, particularly my own.
I don’t know why I don’t keep the orientation lock on my phone all the time. I almost never want to view it in landscape 🤷♂️
But yolked [sic] together like this, they’re each diminished.
Today’s post from Talk about books is about Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields. It marks the end of the fourth year of Talk about books’s existence 📖
