Kushner/Hobsbawm/CarryOnScreaming!

Today I read the first fifty pages of Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel The Flame Throwers. The book’s main character is Reno, a young woman from Nevada who moves to New York City in the mid-1970s to immerse herself in the city’s burgeoning art scene. There she meets and starts dating Sandro Valera, an older and more successful artist who is also the scion of the Italian Valera family, makers of motorbikes. In a curious coincidence, Reno not only rides motorbikes, but is especially enamored of Valeras; one senses that there will be many such coincidences in the novel. This first section moves between sections told from Reno’s perspective (including a rivetingly poetic retelling of her participation in speed trials on the Bonneville Salt Flats) and sections told by an older male relative of Sandro’s (I’m assuming his grandfather?), from his boyhood in Alexandria to his young adulthood in Milan, when he first becomes entranced with motorbikes. This schematic summary does nothing to capture how gorgeous and assured Kushner’s writing is; she is developing two very different characters in two very different settings and time periods, but both of them are completely convincing and beautifully realized.

I also read the first fifty pages of the great Eric Hobsbawm’s last book Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20th Century (2013). As the title suggests, the range of this book is vast, but Hobsbawm sums up its subject pithily: “This is a book about what happened to the art and culture of bourgeois society after that society had vanished with the generation after 1914, never to return.” In fact, the first few chapters of the book, which for the most part were delivered originally as a series of lectures at the Salzburg Festival, have as much to say about the future as they do about the past, as they debate such subjects as the status of culture in a globalized world and whether festivals (including the Salzburg) have any purpose in such a world. Hobsbawm defends the historian’s right to engage with futurity, but his reasons for doing so are indicated in his more detailed summary of the book’s argument: “The basic argument of the papers combined in this book is that the logic of both capitalist development and bourgeois civilization itself were bound to destroy its foundation…It could not resist the combined triple blow of the twentieth-century revolution in science and technology…of the mass consumer society generated by the explosion in the potential of the Western economies, and the decisive entry of the masses on the political scene as customers as well as voters.” Hobsbawm would argue, I think, that we are still dealing with the consequences of that triple blow today.

Watching Quatermass and the Pit yesterday put me in mind of Carry On Screaming! (1966), one of my favorite ‘Carry On’ films and a very funny spoof of the ‘Hammer Horror’ film genre. Although some of the stalwarts of the ‘Carry On’ series (such as Sid James) are missing from this film, Harry H. Corbett (of Steptoe and Son fame) does a great job in the lead role of Sergeant Bung, who is investigating a series of abductions of young women. Kenneth Williams is at his best as the mad scientist figure and Fenella Fielding (an unjustly neglected actress) is her typically distinctive self as the vamp. This may well be one of the first films to explore the connections between horror and comedy, and it does so in a way that takes the over the top nature of the first and melds it beautifully with the bawdy humor of a typical ‘Carry On’ feature. If you like the ‘Are You Being Served?’ type of sitcom, you’ll love this, and you’ll also get to see Frank Thornton in a minor role, seven years before he came Captain Peacock!