Galley Beggar Advent 2023

DECEMBER 10

david collard’S CULTURAL HIGHLIGHTS

I SPENT MOST OF THIS YEAR INDOORS, struggling with covid and its foggy aftermath and reading mainly contemporary poets while writing a book about – you’ll never guess – contemporary poetry. In literary terms this was like a liquid diet of Red Bull, espressos and whiskey shots. I’m now easing slowly back into novels and non-fiction, and my accumulated TBR pile is daunting. Two short novels I’ve read and admired are Lara Pawson’s Spent Light (CB editions) and Rónán Hession’s Ghost Mountain (Bluemoose Books), both published early in 2024 and both of which can overturn any argument that Anglophone fiction is going through a slack patch. And as usual it’s the indie publishers who are doing the right thing.

And non-fiction. Melissa McCarthy’s Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro (Sagging Meniscus Press) is a book of four essays on flora, photography, sharks and explosives which I’ve been reading and re-reading. It buzzes with intelligence, wit and insight and, like its tongue-twisting title it also resists easy and accurate recollection, so there’s always something there to surprise you. 

More non-fiction. Tomoé Hill’s Songs for Olympia (also from Sagging Meniscus Press) is a dazzling response to Michael Leiris’s The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat, which was in turn his response to the celebrated painting by Manet. I’ve never read anything quite like it – sensual, candid, intense and deeply personal; at times I felt I knew the author better than I know myself.

I don’t watch television and rarely go to the cinema these days, but am working my way slowly through a backlog of around 300 unwatched films on DVD and Blu-Ray accumulated over the past decade. I’m currently rediscovering Tarkovsky, Fassbinder (prompted by Thousands of Mirrors, Ian Penman’s terrific book about the director) and the wonderfully austere collaborations of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. One archived telly thing I did watch  online is Jonathan Miller’s dark and disturbing version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1966). I’ll watch this again in the dog days between Christmas and the New Year. I’d like everyone I know to watch this. And I’ll also watch again and again and again the unmatched Granada TV production of Pinter’s No Man’s Land with Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Michael Kitchen and Terence Rigby.

Musically (if in no other sense) I’m a bit like Wittgenstein, who claimed he didn't care what he ate so long as it was always the same. I tend to take one piece of music (which could be anything) and listen to it, and nothing else, for days or weeks. My American publisher Jacob Smullyan, no mean musician himself, sent me a while back a link to the 1958 recording of Mozart’s G-minor string quartet, which I have been playing constantly. It’s by the Griller Quartet. Jacob tells me they gave concerts at Dr Johnson’s house off Fleet Street during the Blitz, and performed for Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt at the Potsdam conference. 

As usual at this time of year I’ll put one foot into The Unquiet Grave, Cyril Connolly’s pungent and melancholy wartime reflections on loss, age and failure. That’s the stuff – we all need ironic points of light in these dark times.

DAVID COLLARD’s Multiple Joyce: 100 short essays about James Joyce’s cultural legacy was published in 2022. His next book is due in Autumn 2024: In the dream of the cold restaurant: fifty essays about one short poem. Both are published by Sagging Meniscus Press. He curates occasional regular online gatherings and details appear on his blog and on Bluesky.