updatezles

Well well well..have been working hard (haha) and managed to get my first two interviews under my belt, albeit rather unsuccesful ones but interviews none the less. One with London Indie band Pull Tiger Tail and one with the dub-step genius Skream.. i havnt got round to writing them up but i will post them as soon as i have and they should make for some interesting reading!

anyways.. untill then! Lu xx

Gig Tonight..

Good Morning people...
hope you enjoyed the summer yesterday (if you got any) i was stuck in the sweltering heat at work.. no reviews or anything today but will post one as soon as i have written something new, going to a little gig tonight with my sisters so may try and get an interview with the band.. fingers crossed! :) any other suggestions for a review will be greatly appreciated!!
laterssss xxx

Margaret Atwood - Moral Disorder

Morning, Happy wednesday..hope you are well, i am in a good mood today despite my friendly workmate walking out the other day and leaving me to work with my scary polish boss untill she has been replaced! not great..

Had a wonderfull day yesterday drove from Bath to Bristol on my friends little motor boat, came second in rounders and created a new cocktail 'Lock Water' (Gin and Pepsi Max!)

Anyway todays review is another Canadian lovely, will be writing some new more current reviews soon, maybe a film or something.. remember comments are always appriciated!!

Hope you all enjoy the sun forcast for today!! Laterssss!!

Never Sentimental Meticulously Observant – Atwood triumphs again.

In the interest of complete disclosure I must admit, ashamedly, that up until a couple of months ago I didn’t know a lot about Canada’s most famous literary export Margaret Atwood. I had heard of the Handmaid’s Tale, a social critique portrayed through an unsettling dystopia, from friends who had studied it at school and I must confess it didn’t sound like my cup of tea. However I was pleasantly surprised after reading Moral Disorder Atwood’s collection of 11 short stories. These short stories, together, resemble the fragmented snapshots of a life not unlike the images captured in the dying mother’s photograph album seen in The Boys at the Lab. The majority of the stories in this collection are written in first person which gives Moral Disorder an autobiographical feel to it, the rest of the stories are narrated by Nell. One assumes after reading the blurb that all of the stories are connected and even if you didn’t read the back it is clear that each story echoes the former. The compilation starts by introducing the main character Nell who is married to Tig, the story highlights the tiny seemingly insignificant intricacies and intimacies of their marriage beautifully. Then the novel begins chronologically starting with Nell’s infancy which Atwood does not embellish, her style is realistic and this is seen through her uncertain and detached portrayal of childhood. The headless horseman reflects on Nell’s childhood relationship with her much younger sister and introduces one of the motifs throughout Moral Disorder, that of identity, this can be seen when Nell thinks to herself weather she is ‘a sister pretending to be a monster or a monster pretending to be a sister?’ The short stories trace moments of Nell’s life from childhood to her teenage years and then adulthood, there are large gaps of time between each story but I don’t think that this hinders the collection at all, if anything the omissions speak just as loudly as what has been written down by Atwood and make for even more enjoyable reading. the gaps in time allow the reader to imagine what Nell got up to in between the years of applying frozen skin cream to her face in order to help her studying to organizing a ‘crystal person’ to remove entities from her husband’s recently deceased ex-wife’s house. The gaps of time in between the stories allow the reader to flesh out the character of Nell anyway they chose which makes Moral Disorder an incredibly fulfilling read. One of my favourite aspects of this collection is the tone of the book which is that of a good humoured intelligence that made me feel as though Nell is a great friend telling stories over a coffee. Atwood’s character Nell is somewhat detached from the stories that she inhabits which enables her to be beautifully observant and witty. Although none of the premises for the short stories are revelatory; the birth of a child, affairs etc the stories are still unconventional; as a child Nell feels alienated through her intelligence, as she is older she starts a relationship with a married man and then lives on a subsistence farm in the middle of nowhere. It is these abnormalities in her life that makes her realistic. Nell’s fascination with home keeping manuals and knitting a layette for her little sister seen in the art of cooking and cleaning is replaced with the strong desire to remain rootless as she gets older. Atwood does not conjure a conventional fairytale where everything falls into place instead she exemplifies how an intelligent woman can choose to live out her life. Atwood manages to combine her writing with a multitude of intertextuality; one of the reasons that Atwood’s moral disorder is a collection of stories and not just a fragmented novel is because the majority of the short stories are about stories. The legend of sleepy hollow, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and also tales she has been told from her mother. Atwood is very aware of the process of reading and this is seen clearly in My last duchess in which Nell attempts to dissect a poem learning not only new words such as ‘verisimilitude’ (I have already forgotten what that means) but also uses the meaning of the poem as a way of understanding the anguish of her adolescence. The theme of a life’s cycles permeates this collection, of birth, growing up, growing old and dying in Moral Disorder.

Beautiful Losers - Leonard Cohen.

Morning, morning! it is Saturday and i am sat at work in the back room, the girl i work with had decided not to come in this morning so i have some time to post my first review! this is something i wrote for a uni module i took about Canadian literature.. if your interested in any way in Mr Cohen then give this one a quick read and feel free to comment...

Anyway, im off to see some firends in london tonight so have a good weekend and enjoy!

Leonard Cohen – Beautiful Losers.

Reading Beautiful Losers is like being slapped around the face by porn king Ron Jeremy whilst he recites Joyce to you in a French-Canadian accent; shocking and annoying… Me and Leonard go way back, we’ve had a somewhat difficult relationship. When I was younger my older sister was an avid fan of his music and even though I found him as easy to listen to as a three am cat fight I pretended to like him to be ‘cool.’ Fortunately enough I later on in life I realised that I could probably achieve this without the help of Mr Cohen. When I found out Cohen had published fiction I jumped at the chance to see if he was any better as a writer than he was a crooner.

I must say at first I was impressed; beautiful losers is the story of a love triangle between the nameless narrator, his wife Edith and their domineering and sexually obsessed friend (who may or may not exist) F. Beautiful losers is split into three into three sections, book one; the history of them all, the nameless one finds himself alone and hanging on to sanity after the suicide of his wife and the disappearance of his friend/lover F. The second book entitled a long letter from F is written from a facility for the criminally insane which somewhat answers for the absurdity of the first section and finally the third book, or epilogue; beautiful losers is written in the third person and describes a man running away from the police.

Leonard Cohen’s literary career precedes his singing career and beautiful losers is his second and final novel which was impressively described at its time of publication, in 1966, as one of the most radical and extraordinary works of Canadian literature ever, although on the other hand it was also described by one critic as ‘the most revolting book ever written.’ As with me and my sister it is possible to neatly split people into those who do and those who don’t like Leonard Cohen, however I would be surprised to find anyone over the age of 20 who hadn’t at least herd of him. Cohen’s distinctive music marries punk, cabaret and folk I’m sure you can find any of his 17 albums in the rock section of any good record store. Like his music Beautiful Losers also explores numerous themes; history, mythology, sexuality and fantasy.

Beautiful Losers is not a novel to read quickly as its neurotic and obsessive use of sexual imagery and obscene language can become slightly monotonous after a while (there are several pages of repeated words). The story seems to have no coherent narrative and Cohen manages to be both shocking and dull at the same time, its strangeness perhaps a reflection of the 1960s from when it was written. Cohen must be certainly be applauded for his inventive and powerful post-modern narrative techniques and there is a great irony and dark humour behind all of the sordid filth that permeates Beautiful Losers (you’ll feel like having a scrub in the shower after reading the novel.) The book creates a sense of claustrophobic intensity and is defiantly not for the faint hearted.

The female characters; Katherine Tekawitha (a native Indian Catholic nun) and Edith are not given enough attention, they are the most interesting yet the least developed characters as Cohen seems to be preoccupied with the homosexual relationship between the two male protagonists. Katherine Tekawitha’s narrative of how she became a Catholic nun after French colonisers arrive amongst her tribe is interesting enough to be made into its own story but Cohen reduces her narrative to a mere number of pages.

Beautiful Losers adamantly refuses to make any sense, as a reader I continued on in the vein hope that the next page would reveal some sort of hidden meaning but as I came to the anticlimactic last page I decided that I had either completely missed something or that the book is merely a random collection of pseudo-intellectual (potentially drug induced?) thoughts. Beautiful Losers is unfortunately both pretentious and self-satisfying and Cohen neglects to concentrate on engaging with the reader, Beautiful Losers has the potential to be an enigmatic and groundbreaking text but it misses the mark on both accounts until it resembles the ramblings of a drunken and horny teenage boy. It is at best marginally better than his music.

My Blog Virginity..

And so it begins... my very first blog, how long i will keep up with this blogging malarkey only time will tell but my intentions are good. I'm attempting to create an online cornucopia of reviews of films, books and music but knowing me and my pitiful background knowledge of all things technical these intentions are potentially naive! i must admit i am blogging for purely selfish reasons to further my chances at any job vaguely journalistic but hopefully this will be an enjoyable side project whilst i complete my final year at university. So people of the online world my first reviews will be revised projects from my second year at university including a review of a novel written by Leonard Cohen. Enjoy!