I had some reservations about Gwyn Thomas’s book The Dark Philosophers when I read it earlier this year, yet I liked it well enough to want to try one of his later productions. I settled on a volume of his short fiction entitled Gazooka and Other Stories, first published in 1957. I wanted to like this book but can’t say that I did. I finished it yesterday. Most of the pieces in the collection are in a more or less comedic vein, and the tendency of humour to age poorly accounts for some of what I disliked. It’s not the worst of such cases — relatively little in it has fully curdled — but an air of mustiness prevails.
I get the impression that Thomas was first and foremost a prodigious talker: an unstoppable anecdotalist and raconteur. Without the music of his voice to animate the words, they can seem to lift a little feebly from the flatness of the page. If there had been such a thing as an audiobook version read by the author, that would have been the ideal way to approach it. There is altogether too much dialogue for my liking: characters often talk or think in overdone half-page paragraphs, minimising narrative momentum.
To my taste the story that worked best was one called ‘A Teacher’ which was one of only a couple of pieces in the book not aiming for laughs. The title story is by some distance the book’s longest (‘gazooka’, I gather, is just another word for kazoo). It concerns some farcical events centred on a marching band (of kazooists), set in a South Wales Valleys town in the summer of 1926 — the grim year of the General Strike. Events unfold with exasperatingly slow wordiness, with ostensibly humorous set-pieces failing to raise a smile. Plodding through with scant enthusiasm I was much surprised at the genuinely beautiful ending that Thomas contrived for it.
After a bad experience with vintage sealing-wax I’ve acquired some that’s newly-made in the traditional style, concocted in France to a 17th-Century recipe by J. Herbin. I won’t be using it often, so the box of ten sticks of wax may even last beyond my lifetime. It would have been more sensible to get just a few loose sticks, but in doing so I would have missed out in the glorious old-school packaging a full box provides.
Via Discogs I obtained a second and better-sounding CD copy of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk (as mentioned in the entry before last). Ordered together with it was Les Fleurs, a 2001 compilation of music by Minnie Riperton. Hitherto I’d only been familiar with the famous ‘Lovin’ You’ and (though I had more than once forgotten its name) the title track. Spanning a progression from psychedelic soul through to disco, it’s a fine introduction to her work. Her pre-disco numbers are more to my taste than the later output. Riperton’s voice is exquisite throughout: crystal-clear diction; a bright, clear timbre — and those astonishing high notes.