Musings from the sofa – Yeah, still.

I remember…

The mighty Backlisted podcast is having a summer break, but they’ve left weekly drops of their Locklisted podcast to fill the gaps in listeners’ hearts and minds. This week they talked about I Remember, by Joe Brainard and I scurried upstairs to grab my copy.

Brainard was primarily an artist not a writer, and if you want to spend a lot of money on clothes, it looks like there’s stuff out there with Brainard prints. But the book is a lot cheaper and more stylish. It is simply a list of things he remembers, with each sentence starting ‘I remember’. It’s a deceptively straightforward approach, because while it allows for randomness, it also allows Brainard to capture the way that sometimes memories lead to others, which then lead to others. They might be interesting, banal or tap into a shared vein of nostalgia with the reader.

The Locklisted hosts tried writing ‘I remembers’ for themselves and it was good listening, so I thought I’d give it a go, as a prompt. The trick is not to think too much and just the let memories flow.

I remember a biscuit tin full of buttons that my nan had, and how beautiful and fascinating they were.

I remember the moments I knew I was going to fall off my bike.

I remember reading a book in which a girl had a sugar mouse that she kept, and really wanting my own sugar mouse.

I remember starlings flying over and through Birmingham city centre at dusk, when I’d taken the long way home from school.

I remember a Mickey Mouse alarm clock that I had, which ticked so loudly that when my friends stayed over we had to bury it under clothes. I used to find the ticking really comforting, but I’ve never been able to have another ticking alarm clock since.

I remember being projector monitor at school. The hymns were written out on acetate paper and I had to find them and put on the projector screen the right way round.

I remember the excitement of starting a new school term, with a new bag and pencil case.

I remember and old picnic box we had. It was four layers, of alternate white and orange plastic and each layer had compartments for different sorts of food and cup holder for a plastic beaker.

I remember when the cats were kittens and they seemed weightless in the air when they jumped.

More Ava Lee

The third Ava Lee novel, The Wild Beasts of Wuhan, finally turned up and I guess I have not to mind it took so long since it came from California. So then I read that and The Red Pole of Macau in 24 hours and now I’m back to ‘what am I going to read?’ You’d think I would learn.

They were both very different, which is something I’m appreciating about this series. In The Wild Beasts of Wuhan, Ava is tracking down art forgers to recoup the money for her clients. That takes her from China to Europe to the Faroe Islands and back again; the amount of time she spends on ‘planes is exhausting just to read about. It’s a fairly complicated puzzle to unravel but of course, Ava does. That is not a foregone conclusion, though and I wonder if there’s a future novel where it all does go wrong?

The back story is also building across the novels, and in The Red Pole of Macau it’s that which is the starting point. Ava is Chinese-Canadian, the daughter of Marcus Lee and his second wife, Jennie. Marcus also has a third wife who lives in Australia with her children. Although all the families know of each other, they remain separate.

Marcus asks Ava to help Michael, his son with his first wife, and this draws Ava into a family financial mess. Michael is also heir and future head of the family, who will pick up the responsibility for looking after all three families when Marcus dies. Although, based on the evidence of this novel, Michael is no kind of business man and they’re SOL if that happens. Anyway, when it transpires he’s gotten into a very dubious investment with what turn out to be gangsters, Ava feels she has no choice but to get the money back. The alternative is that Marcus will bail him out and the entire extended family will suffer.

In effect, a couple of idiot men have screwed things up and a couple of smart women will have to sort it all out. And that’s what they do. Michael’s dumb ass business parter gets kidnapped and Ava spins Michael a line about how she’s going to get the ransom money together, all the while planning a nice, set piece rescue. For this, she gets help from May Ling, her client from the previous novel and a woman with an enormous amount of contacts and influence.

There’s not more violence in this book, but it’s of a different sort and it starts to take Ava down a different path. She always refers to herself as an accountant, although acknowledging that if the people from whom she is trying to reclaim money are recalcitrant, she’s prepared to have their fingers chopped off to help persuade them otherwise. But the action in this book leads to an execution.

There are 8 further novels so far, and copies of those are all probably in California as well. So I’m interested to see how Ava’s character development goes.

In audio land, I’m spending a lot of time in Wyoming, with Sheriff Walt Longmire. This is doing nothing to put me off the idea of going to Wyoming. Big, open country full of no-one, you say? Huh. Now that I’ve finally upgraded my OS again and have AppleTV, well boy howdy, I get access to the TV show too. And therein rings the death knell of Netflix again.

In which I go to the opera

In fact, that’s my plan for this evening. I’m going to watch Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, about which I know no more than the accompanying blurb on the website. But, I decided this is cultural exploration week and the opera is free, so what have I got to lose?

The rules are, I treat the performances I’m watching as though I’m physically there (within reason). This means, no phone and I have to stay for the whole thing, but I’m allowed to pause to refill my wine glass.

This week I watched:

Oklahoma!, starring Hugh Jackman and Maureen Lipman in a National Theatre production from the 80s. While I love a musical, I haven’t been a big fan of this one. I saw it when I was young and absolutely didn’t understand the ballet sequence, and had a general impression that the whole thing was long and a bit dull. So it definitely seemed worth re-exploring. This was a great production and I’m glad to have been reintroduced to some classic show tunes.

BalletBoyz show Ripple, via Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage on Facebook. I struggle with some contemporary dance because I don’t know how to read it. While I admired the technique and skill in this performance, I mostly didn’t actually like it. Then again, that’s not always the point of art, is it? Sadler’s Wells are making more performances available as well so I’ll keep checking in.

Bruce Springsteen on Broaday, via Netflix. Which I loved so, so much, and which delivered the definitive performance of Born in the USA. Even the most obtuse listener could have no excuse for continuing to think it’s anthemic. I mostly don’t care about live shows, the benefit of experiencing the performance live is countered by the horror of being in a big crowd of people. But I really, really wish I had seen this live, and now I’ll be digging out the Bruce backlist and working my way through again. So Friday night with Brooooce and a couple of glasses of wine? There’s nothing to complain about in that.

I’ve done a couple of online yoga classes as well, via Facebook Liv and I’ve booked ahead for upcoming streaming theatre from the National. Jane Eyre is on next Thursday, and then later in April it’s Twelfth Night with Tamsin Greig. So all in all I continue not to struggle with being required to stay mostly at home. My challenge is that there’s so much to do, how do I choose?!

Meanwhile, to keep me busy today, I bought Cain’s Jawbone, which is a literary puzzle. It’s a 100 page novel but the pages are in the wrong order, so as the reader you have to figure out the correct order and identify the murderers. It was written in the 1930s by Torquemada, the Observer’s cryptic crossword creator, and it’s only known to have been solved twice. I don’t rate my chances at all but hey, I’ve got some spare time.