Hello again,
I have been thinking a lot recently about how you have to come to certain things in the right frame of mind. This is sort of a vague and random concept, so perfect to think through in this space. This train of thought started off when I recently started listening to an Angel Olsen album, My Woman, that was out in 2016.
Nothing especially triggered this as far as I can tell. But it’s possible there was some subliminal cue, maybe I heard a song in a film and recognised her voice or something. But anyway, I was on the bus one day and it came into my head that I should try listening to her again (I hadn’t in years). I put on a song and I was really blown away by her voice, and I ended up on this album and I’ve probably listened to it once every two days ever since.
I’ve been interested in how much her voice seems to resonate with me now specifically. I remember when I first heard her music, back around 2012 probably. I did think it was pretty good. And I think I was meant to go to a gig one time but didn’t for some reason. (Which suggests to me that I didn’t make a special effort to.) But it didn’t strike me as it has done now.
I have been thinking about why this is. The best reason I can come up with is that I was getting into dance music at the time and her music just does not suit that vibe. I was at university in Manchester and I would spend every weekend at these enormous house parties or seeing certain DJs in clubs. People lived in these big 8 or 9 bedroom houses, which often had warren-ish basements too, and there would be a whole string of parties every weekend with hundreds of people in attendance and that was my social life at that time. Her music just doesn’t fit with that.
I was trying to think when I would have potentially listened to it. And I did spend a lot of time back then on the bus. One of my jobs was flyering for clubs so my shifts tended to be night shifts. I would take the bus home by myself around 2 or 3am, and I could have listened then. But I remember I liked to listen to old Manchester music on those bus trips. The Chameleons or Joy Division type stuff. It made the journeys seem atmospheric. (I still think The Chameleons are very underrated among people my age so you should listen to them if you never have. Start with Swamp Thing and then listen to that whole album. But don’t do it during the day right now because it’s too warm and it will just sound stupid, wait till the evening.)
But anyway, when this Angel Olsen album came out it wasn’t the right time for me to listen to it. And then I didn’t think it was for me for a long time. Well I actually just didn’t think of it at all. And now it has come into my life when I’m ready to appreciate it, serendipitously.
This has got me thinking about other pieces of art I happened upon at the right time. Recently I read a book that was supposed to be very passionate and it wasn’t and I was very disappointed and just couldn’t get into it. I finished it because I never don’t finish books (which is a curse) but I hated it and it took ages. And actually now I don’t even know if it was supposed to be passionate or if I just assumed that of it. But I basically wanted it to be something it wasn’t and then I hated it for that.
It did make me realise I’ve been wanting to read something passionate. Actually the whole time I was reading it I was thinking of D.H. Lawrence and craving the borderline melodrama of his books. So now I’m going to re-read a few of them later in the summer. I’ve always had a soft spot for his work. And I think that’s because I first read him when I was around 13 or 14 (probably because I had the vague idea it was a risque thing to check out of the library) and he writes so well about the insanity of a huge crush, and also about the slightly mysterious and disappointing sense of losing interest in a huge crush. And that’s basically all you do and find interesting when you’re 13.
Then I was talking to a friend last week and she said she had been reading a book called Free Love by Tessa Hadley. My friend described it as: A housewife in 60s London has an affair with an 18 year old and runs off. I haven’t read the official description or the book but that sentence alone made me think: Yes! The book of the summer! So, based on her description, I’m going to read that too, alongside the D.H. Lawrence re-read. (Now you see how I end up getting totally the wrong end of the stick about books before I read them.)
When I started thinking about this idea of coming to things in the right headspace I realised I usually try to avoid coming to anything for the first time when I know I’m not in the mood to click with it. The way trends work in book publishing there often ends up being a lot of tonally or thematically similar books out around the same time and then you just get sick of whatever the trend is because it’s everywhere.
With books at the minute I’m avoiding anything that seems like it will probably be humourless because I am personally a little over the numbness and dourness which has been everywhere this past while. And so, even if I read what is probably a good version of that, I know I’m coming to it with a sense of exhaustion and I won’t get along with it.
But then, of course when you do this you end up missing out on some stuff which fits the category you want but can be mischaracterised. Satantango, for example, is very funny, but people don’t tend to foreground that quality when they describe it. So if someone suggested it to me now I would likely (wrongly) think: God no!
And sometimes what you want is unpredictable. This weekend I was meant to see Jaws with a friend. It was so hot I really didn’t want to go to the cinema, and also seeing Jaws in particular felt extremely unappealing in the heat. I remembered the acting as being really over the top. And it was an old version with the original colour and sound (I don’t know enough about the architecture of film to explain this in detail) that someone had found in a basement during lockdown. So I was thinking: It’s going to look like crap.
But actually it was amazing. Watching a film set in a beach town on a hot day is actually kind of perfect it turns out. And the original music was so much scarier. Or maybe that was just seeing it in a room full of people. And the characters are over the top, but in a really good way. There is that grizzled old man who offers to kill the shark and kind of has a bad Belfast accent (there’s me, I thought, whenever he was on screen) and that great scene where he shows off his various scars.
Also there’s a campy humour in Jaws which you just don’t see so much of at the minute, or if you do it’s in a hammy, slapstick comedy in which that’s basically all you see. It got me thinking about how tonally uniform a lot of stuff is at the minute, which made me realise something else I didn’t know I’d been missing.
Till next time xxxx
I was on NPR in Texas recently to talk about this piece. And I am doing a “salon” with Celeste Marcus from Liberties in July if you want to join us, I think it will be fun. Here is a code for free tickets: Libertellect. I have an essay out with them soon which I’m excited about.
And pre-order links for Lazy City are here.
Some Things I Liked Recently:
This by Kevin Power on Nicole Flattery’s book Nothing Special (which is out in the states very soon).
This (a re read) on what a sustainable society can look like by Noah Gallagher Shannon. I’m interested in the perception people have of what they have when they’re told to want less.
More flowers!