Anthony Burgess on D. H. Lawrence

From Canadian Television, 1985:

“[Lawrence is] a man who showed us that literature is essentially a subversive thing. The job of the writer is not to confirm people in their comfortable prejudices but to wake them up a little, lash them into re-thinking their thoughts and reassessing their emotions.”

‘Things Have Changed’: a short story

A third recent short story has just appeared on my website in pdf format:

THINGS HAVE CHANGED
by Matthew Asprey

This is a noirish comedy of obsession, frustrated desire, and brutal revenge. Here is the opening:

When did I make the decision?

It was the night the tide raged into Bivouac Bay. I watched the waves retreat. What a sight – catfish floundering on the shore in a slick of sewage. I told the driver to park the limo at the edge of the beach. I kept the windows closed to the stink. The villas on Dover Heights glittered behind us. I wrote a letter:

Dear David,

You’ll remember me from the incident at your wedding. After that I was forced to leave Bivouac Bay for a period of reinvention. Now I’ve returned and I still love your wife…

CONTINUED

[Photo credit: rockcreek at Flickr.]

‘A Cabin On A River’: a short story

I have republished another recent story on my website in pdf format:

A CABIN ON A RIVER
by Matthew Asprey

Here is the opening of the story:

CATHERINE AND I walked down the road. On the right side the rubbly grass fell away for a hundred feet until a sheer drop to the riverbank. I could see the roof of my uncle’s cabin and jetty down there. We walked another mile until we reached the marina. We loaded our luggage into a tin dinghy that was rusting between the fishing boats. The old wharfinger came out of the boathouse with his windcheater buttoned to his throat.

“Mr Palmer, yep?” he said. “Your uncle phoned. I topped up the fuel.”

“Thanks.”

“He really should put that outboard in storage. No good it just sitting out here.”

He nodded at Catherine and went back to the boathouse.

The knot tying the dinghy to the wharf was coated in mould. I had to open my pocket knife and saw through the rope. I started the motor and took us downriver. The wind pierced through our jackets. Catherine tightened her hands on the gunwale.

“This’ll be great,” I said into her ear. “Out here you leave the crap behind – news, politics, clocks, dates. We need this.

CONTINUED

‘Villa des Bijoux’: a short story

I have decided to republish three recent short stories: ‘Villa des Bijoux’, ‘Things Have Changed’ and ‘A Cabin On A River’ will appear online over the next few weeks. The first of the three is already available at my website in pdf format:

VILLA DES BIJOUX
by Matthew Asprey

The story, set in the French winter of 2000-01, is about an obsessive hunt for a location used in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film To Catch A Thief. The villa des bijoux is the home of John Robie (Cary Grant) in the village of St Jeannet on the Côte d’Azur:

Here is the opening of the story:

This is a story of discovery and also a story of loss. I’ll begin in Paris, in the wintertime, in the lobby of the Hotel Bolovens in St-Germain-des-Prés. I was sitting with my fat half-sister Alexis on a sofa. I was wearing a horizontally-striped blue-grey pullover and a red foulard with white polka-dots. I looked fantastic. Alexis, unimaginatively practical, hid her figure in a black woollen overcoat.
“Leon will help us,” I reassured her.

CONTINUED

Link to my new academic journal article on Henry Roth’s ‘Call It Sleep’

My most recent academic article, ‘”Losted” in Brownsville: Experiential Realism in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep‘, has just appeared in NEO: Journal for Higher Degree Research Candidates in Social Sciences and Humanities, a refereed on-line journal published by Macquarie University, Sydney (ISSN 1835-9590). The paper was originally presented at the Macquarie SCMP Conference in October 2008.

Here’s the abstract:

This paper explores the construction of an imagined urban landscape through the employment of subjective point of view in Henry Roth’s modernist novel Call It Sleep (1934). This involves an engagement with Robert Alter’s recent critical writings on 19th and 20th century European novels in terms of their ‘experiential realism’. Alter’s flexible approach to reading fiction goes beyond a consideration of mere urban representation and towards an understanding of the complex relationship between setting, subjectivity and language in the novel.

Call It Sleep maps an early 20th century version of Brownsville in Brooklyn, New York City, through the subjective language of a Jewish immigrant child named David Schearl. Brownsville is always a subjective entity, and always in flux, dependent on David’s emotional state. This paper examines a key sequence of the novel – David’s ordeal as he loses his bearings in the streets – in light of Brownsville’s documented history.

The full paper can be read here in pdf format. See also the issue introduction by editor Dr Anthony Lambert.

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers in San Remo ‘63

‘Mosaic’ (Walton)

‘Children of the Night’ (Shorter)

Art Blakey d, Freddie Hubbard tpt, Curtis Fuller tb, Wayne Shorter ts, Cedar Walton p, Reggie Workman b