The Empty Page: November 2019 Part Two

Stewart Gardiner discusses New World Island, Alex Niven’s convincing cultural manual, alongside Faber’s updated edition of Lou Reed’s Collected Lyrics

Alex Niven’s New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture Beyond the Idea of England “is part cultural polemic, part memoir”, according to the author. It’s idiosyncratic, personable and gently convincing. Niven is a softly-spoken guide through the peculiar landscapes of the “islands” – as he refers to that barely-hanging-together collection of cultural outposts sometimes known as Britain – developing ideas that adapt Christopher Priest’s fictional Dream Archipelago. Indeed, Niven quotes from Priest’s astonishing science fiction novel The Affirmation and lends one chapter a Priestian title: “Dream Archipelagos & Regionalism 2.0”. The Affirmation may therefore be seen as a fictional field guide to these deeply uncertain times, but only with New Model Island as a sort of extended companion piece of esoteric annotations. Think Ulysses Annotated retooled as provocative cultural manual.

I’ll use another quote from Priest here. “This much I know for sure”, goes the opening of The Affirmation. “My name is Peter Sinclair, I am English and I am, or I was, twenty-nine years old. Already there is uncertainty, and my sureness recedes. Age is a variable; I am no longer twenty-nine.” That passage suggests that all truths are up for grabs. The narrator’s assertion that he is English is just as slippery as his age within the context of the novel. Alex Niven extrapolates upon this idea, builds an argument for dismantling England and Englishness. That the thrust of his discourse comes across as personable and positive suggests Niven’s approach was the right one. He argues that “we should have the imaginative daring to view the islands as a potentially far more dynamic, eclectic and open terrain, a sort of north-west European counterpart to the dappled, variegated seascape of the Mediterranean, albeit with a somewhat less balmy climate.” A notion that appeals – to this London-marooned Scot at least.

repeaterbooks.com/new-model-island

Martin Scorsese, in his introduction to the new edition of Lou Reed’s I’ll Be Your Mirror: Collected Lyrics, not only draws connections between his and Reed’s work, but captures how essential this collection is in a few lines. “Lou’s lyrics have two lives: as they are sung and heard, and as they are read on the printed page.” Not all lyrics come alive on the page of course, and they need not, but Reed’s nevertheless do. His work has the sense of being plugged directly into literature and, as Scorsese asserts, at least a particular strain of cinema that emerged in the 1970s. “It’s essential New York speech, and it feels so close to what I was always trying to do in my own pictures, in the way the characters speak to each other and express themselves.”

Laurie Anderson, who was Reed’s partner of over two decades, illustrates the literary landscape that Reed was part of. It is necessarily hardboiled, lyrical and tough talking. Lou, she explains, “liked men who understood and could dig down into the tough guy act – Philip K Dick, James Ellroy, Hubert Selby, William S Burroughs, James Lee Burke, Raymond Chandler, and above all his teacher Delmore Schwartz. Like Lou, some of these writers performed their work. And their voices, like the deadpan drawl of William S Burroughs, drill into the back of your brain and you can never read their words without hearing their voices.” Reading the words on these pages becomes an act of summoning Lou Reed, a silent incantation where the writer emerges (un)comfortably close to the reader. Nowhere is this clearer than with “The Gift”. As a piece of spoken prose, it has always felt undeniably literary, coming across as a hysterically down-to-earth version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis – heightened reality in place of phantasmagoria. As such it is particularly suited to being bound between covers.

The Velvet Underground and Nico is one of those cornerstone albums for me, that got embedded in my consciousness many moons ago. It has straddled the different musical directions I have followed through the years, seemingly at home in a multitude of contexts. “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “Heroin” in particular were seared into the formative landscape of my mind; pulp-as-art street routines as if torn out and blown up from the pages of William Burroughs’s Junky. The simple-yet-profound repeated lines in “Heroin” never fail to penetrate my inner-space: “And I guess that I just don’t know / And I guess that I just don’t know”. The music writhes across the white of the page as the words burn with Reed’s particular enunciation.

I’ll Be Your Mirror is a collection to be gorged upon at will. At over 600 pages there are plenty dark corners to be turned and brightly lit passages to be traversed. Reed’s storytelling prowess is brought into stark relief in book form and it more than holds up. “My week beats your year”, he asserts at the end of his liner notes to Metal Machine Music, reproduced here. It’s a statement not only dripping in humour, but reads like Lou throwing down the gauntlet to the reader, a challenge to live life more vigorously.

faber.co.uk/ill-be-your-mirror