#james ley

[do-you-know-this-play]

Do You Know “Wilf”?

Yes, I’ve been in/worked on it

Yes, I’ve seen it

Yes, I’ve read it

No, but I’ve heard of it

No, never heard of it

Voting ended onSep 26, 2024

[reviewsphere]

Love Song To Lavender Menace

THEATRE REVIEW: Love Song To Lavender Menace ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ @jamesleyplay @Lovesongplay @lyceumtheatre @mamoru_iriguchi @poreid @MatthewMcVarish

There’s something deeply moving about the simplicity of Mamoru Iriguchi’s set design which accentuates the tenderness of James Ley’s beautiful love song to not only Lavender Menace (Edinburgh’s first gay bookshop operated by Bob Orr and Sigrid Neilson in the early 80s), but also the emerging gay scene of the time and Auld Reekie itself whose one o’clock gun can, to quote a respectable married man…

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[mulberryroad]

Finally, a critic who notes the virtues of Patti Smith’s M Train

James Ley, writing for the Sydney Review of Books:

I have been referring to M Train as a ‘memoir’ by default, but it is something far more ambitious and complex than the word implies. It is a work in an elegiac mode that occupies an indeterminate space between autobiography, essay and fiction. It describes a series of pilgrimages Smith undertakes to pay her respects to some of the artists who have meant something to her. The first of these is an account of her and her late husband Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith travelling to French Guiana in the early 1980s, so that she can gather stones from the site of the now-abandoned jail that Genet romanticises in The Thief’s Journal (1964) as the apex of the criminal social hierarchy. Genet never made it there and the stones are a gift that Smith intends to deliver to him. Over the course of the book, she visits the former homes, or more frequently the graves, of Frida Kahlo, Bertolt Brecht, Sylvia Plath and Yukio Mishima, among many others. But M Train is more than a collection of homages; it is also a series of dreams, a meditation on the meaning and sacredness of objects, a reflection on the transporting and consoling power of literature, an ‘aria’ to Smith’s favourite beverage (coffee), and an essay on ageing, grief and loss. 

 M Train is a book measured out in coffee spoons. Its rhythm is set by the regularity of Smith’s day-to-day existence. She likes to rise each morning, walk to her favourite Greenwich Village cafe, sit at her favourite corner table, place her usual order (coffee, brown toast with olive oil), and lose herself in thinking and writing. Throughout the book, this cherished routine is constantly disrupted. Her various travels, physical and mental, draw her away from this grounding reality. The basic structuring technique is perhaps gleaned from Haruki Murakami, whose novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle(1994) Smith spends part of M Train obsessively reading and annotating, until she loses her copy in an airport bathroom. The rhythm of Murakami’s fiction tends to be established in its depictions of the repetitiveness of everyday life — the inevitable cycle of sleeping, waking, cooking, eating — around which dramatic or meaningful or imaginative occurrences must organise themselves. M Train is similarly pulled in opposite directions. Smith establishes her routine against the inexorable and corrosive march of time: it is her quiet way of resisting something that cannot be resisted. Its tangibility and orderliness are in marked contrast to her melancholy awareness of the intangibility of her memories. ‘We want things we cannot have,’ she writes:

We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.

[traversetheatre]

Here it is, the brilliantly fun trailer from the lovely bunch that is Village Pub Theatre. And, as of this morning, officially loved by David Leddy of Fire Exit. Now that's some stamp of approval, right there. 

[mulberryroad]

Who are some of the critics you admire, and why? There are lots of them. At a pinch, I would probably nominate William Hazlitt as my favourite critic for the sheer vitality of his prose. But I’d hesitate to choose. The twentieth century produced an extraordinary number of great critics and they all tend to have different virtues. A brilliant close reader like Christopher Ricks can be inspiring, but a bluff journalistic critic like Edmund Wilson can be great on his day too. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis has always struck me as a major critical achievement. There are critics I admire because they have taught us to think about culture in new ways, critics like Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes, but in general I tend to be drawn to critics who can combine depth of knowledge with an accessible style, people like Frank Kermode or Susan Sontag, or some of the old New York intellectuals – Elizabeth Hardwick or Lionel Trilling, for example. A lot of the literary theory that was a big deal when I was at university resulted in some very interesting thinking but it didn’t produce much in the way of good writing. One of the fascinating things about criticism, I think, is that an individual critic’s obsessions, weaknesses and blind spots can be important too, because in their way they can also help to clarify certain arguments and distinctions. I often disagree with James Wood’s criticism, for example, but I invariably enjoy reading him. His anti-‘hysterical realism’ campaign was wrong-headed in all sorts of ways, but it identified a faultline in contemporary fiction and got people talking. Daniel Mendelsohn, Adam Kirsch and Laura Miller are good contemporary critics, and I think Andrew O’Hagan’s cultural criticism is always excellent. There are music critics I like, as well, particularly Alex Ross, Jon Savage and Jim DeRogatis, though of course when it comes to rock criticism you can’t go past the doyen Lester Bangs: fearless, passionate, brilliant, slightly crazed and completely hilarious.

James Ley is the editor of Australia's newest literary publication, the Sydney Review of Books, our (online-only) answer to the London Review of Books and New York Review of Books

- The Wheeler Centre: Books, Writing, Ideas