Bedside reading

Pattern recognition

Writers may not be more self-aware than anyone else but they keep better records. A body of work is the snail's trail of sensibility. But artists are as limited in their capacity for change as anyone else: no matter what they observe they will continue to make the same mistakes. This is one reason why writers tend towards melancholy: they have the data but can do nothing with it.

All by way of saying I've been reading the pulps again and trying not to drive a mental red-pen through words and sections. I finally -- finally -- made it through Dragon Tattoo. I love the images from the book and the film and I'm looking forward to Fincher remake and yes, it's sold a billion copies but boy does it creak. Pointless to rail against it, not least of all because the author is dead, but stroke of luck that the killer mastermind forgot to shut the door... The oversight would not embarrass Henning Mankell, who writes very well about Wallander drinking coffee and eating a sandwich; fairly well about the everyday nature of police investigations and terribly about crimes themselves. But Raymond Chandler's Playback is one of my favourite crime novels and that made no sense at all, so I have to give Mankell a pass... Now I'm back to Richard Price and Lush Life. Clockers was an OCD Adam 12. Maybe Lush Life will be the same. But I'm into it because of its dialogue and detailing.

In between I've been re-watching The Killing. The series has such a great setup that it can only be let down by the resolution. Not unlike the unravelling of a cheery Danish sweater... And dipping back into Twin Peaks, Hitchcock... And Californication. Nothing will be as good as Hank's first season so that's the one I return to. Again. The same decisions, the same mistakes over and over, the accrual of which becomes the author's style.

I took a wrong turn on the astral plane

People are raving about the posthumous Amy Winehouse album but I find it difficult to listen to, and not just because she isn't here any more. The production is too up front for her intimate, sharply sensitive vocalisations. Even if the young singer's performances were physically frail – and lord knows they probably were – it's wrong for the band and producers to take center stage, let alone put a beat box there. Winehouse is played over on 'Girl from Ipanema' and trapped by a snare drum on 'A Song For You.' It's as if everyone's pushing past her for the last piece of the limelight. Bad production, bad karma. Above: Amy in her happier unhappy days. (Update: And here, accompanied in Ireland. Recommended.)

In 2006 Bookslut – my favourite slut – interviewed Lawrence Block about his Hit Man series. The first book in the series is a crime novel I really admire.

Let's start with the new book, Hit Parade. What's next for John Keller?

Morrow will publish Hit Parade on July 4. Like Hit Man and Hit List, the book's an episodic novel, and I don't know to what extent it differs from the earlier books. It seems to me we get a little more background information about Keller, and that he's going through changes and emotional stresses. But he's still Keller.

Does Keller's distant nature lend itself to the episodic format you've employed in the Hitman trilogy?

It seems to. Most of the episodes seem to work as short stories. Playboy will be publishing one sometime this spring.

Does Keller have a conscience?

It seems to me he has both roots and a conscience. They're just a little different from most people, and he's learned to cope with them differently.

Peter Straub said that Keller reminded him of you more than your other characters. Is it hard to keep yourself out of your books?

No, what's hard is keeping myself out of jail.

Full interview is here.

The 47th pancake

Mr. Stratford discusses Distance Looks Our Way. When I worked at the Auckland [City] Art Gallery people always seemed to be referencing it. That, the "cinema of unease" and the Edmonds Cookbook.

You know that feeling when you sit up suddenly and a pull a muscle? I think I just did that to my brain. It's been a long week / month / year.

Meanwhile...

20th Century Fox may have leaked a photo of the space jockey. Mr. Trent Reznor and Mr. Atticus Ross have released a free sampler from the Dragon Tattoo soundtrack. (If you buy the whole three and a half CDs' worth you get their Karen O cover of 'Immigrant Song' free. Full of win!) This is Purity Ring and this is The Brighter Future. And tonight, Matthew, Sienna Miller will be Tippi Hedren. The press announcement is not wrong to describe Hedren as Hitchcock's obsession but he had more than one.

Hearing things

Ornette Coleman is 81 years old. If he was Amy Winehouse he would have died in 1957. I didn't know what to expect of a musician that age, especially a horn player. But reviews of his appearance London's 2009 Meltdown Festival were good and after checking out some recent concert footage it seemed likely that he would at least be interesting. In the end he was a lot better than that.

Coleman closed the London Jazz Festival at the Royal Festival Hall with three other musicians: Tony Falanga (double bass), Al McDowell (electric bass) and son Denardo on drums. When the band started playing the bass and drums were so lively that I thought Coleman might be resigned to playing along with / on top of his backing in the manner of late Miles Davis, but he soon got stuck in there. Although he had approached the microphone with a stately half-step Coleman's back was straight, and his playing was as sharp. The trio had a boisterous style but he pushed them aside with bright, entertaining solos. His breath is shorter, obviously, but he still has the range. He played for an hour and a half with two encores and the band listening as attentively as the audience.

I'm not a jazz trainspotter but numbers included 'Blues Connotation', a cover of Ellington / Coltrane's 'Angelica' and a Bach mash up: the latter sounded better than that sounds. The quartet finished up with 'Lonely Woman.' Ornette Coleman at 81: more alive than many.

More Lies!

A new German edition of my first novel Lügenspiele (Pack of Lies) is coming out next year. Mana-Verlag will publish the new edition in time for the Frankfurt 2012 book fair, at which New Zealand will be the guest of honour, and hopefully in time for some other literary festivals.

The cover of Lügenspiele may change, not least of all because the novel will be available as an ebook: on black and white screen, the red of the first edition (shown above) would read as black. Or maybe that would work... Either way, I look forward to the German translation becoming available on digital: it's important to keep pace with technology.

Pointe blank

This is my favourite picture in the RCA's Degas and the Ballet exhibition. At 400 x 890mm 'Before the Ballet' (c.1890) is nearly anamorphic in proportion and the field of the empty floor falls away to a void. The real painting is blurry save for the feet of the dancers in the right foreground – the composition presses into the first girl's raised instep. The second dancer's exposed spine as she bends forward is reminiscent of Degas' many bathers, which Francis Bacon admired. You can see Bacon in the way in which the expanses and verticals of Degas' compositions are tensioned by the twisted human figures, and RB Kitaj in the renderings from photographic sources like a dry-brushed identikit.

Gustav Klimt would paint his figures nude and then proceed to cover them with clothes and patterning. Degas renders the dancers' upper bodies and the legs as solid forms but leaves the space between waist to knee as an impressionistic scribble. As sculptural plans his sketches for 'Little Dancer Aged Fourteen' are just plain odd: he plans the bronze in two halves and covers up the join with a real lace tutu. Beneath the fabric, the figure's right leg swells to join her stomach like a Henry Moore. The maquettes of nude adult dancers, modelled in wax as studio models and cast in bronze only after the painter's death, are fully detailed.

Many of the later, larger works that have been scaled up from photographs lose their dynamism but the hatchings and striations of his pastel drawings compensate for the magnification. 'Danseuses en bleu' still rocks. But nothing has quite the uncanny silence of 'Before the Ballet' or 'The Rehearsal.' Degas' paintings are sold as pretty, but like his 'Beach Scene' (1868) they are darker than that.

At their best the wide-framed little paintings are surreal arrangements of dead-eyed figures that play off each other but never interact. These rehearsals are have an ashen, spooky quality, from the staring dance masters to the unnatural poses of the girls. The longer you look at them, the more you realise something odd is going on.