Tom Waits: Low Side of the Road
The Wire is still spreading its brutal Baltimore magic overseas, even if it is old news in the U.S. After five TV seasons, the last ending more than a year ago, the cult crime show may have run out of shocks at home. But it is gaining ever-greater status in the U.K.—and not just for its stars, even for the man who wrote its opening theme.
Tom Waits, whose "Way Down in the Hole" appeared in a different recording for every run, only one sung by Waits himself, has found a new generation of fans. He also now has new biography, written by Barney Hoskyns and published by Faber. TLS history editor David Horspool is intrigued to discover how the 60-year-old singer in his early days “was strong-armed by his management into touring as an opening act for Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention.” There's an explanation, too, of Waits' more recent “clunkingly straightforward take on the Israel-Palestine question.”
But beweeen Zappa and Gaza there comes the story of some extraordinary songwriting—with themes and styles that are enthralling their new audience. He has kept “the Devil way down in the hole,” writes Horspool, by seeming to have done a deal with the angels.
When Art Went Boom
Last November, Angus Trumble wrote a trenchant piece for the TLS deploring the lack of critical acumen applied to the art of perfumery —and explaining why we should admire Joy parfum like a Matisse and sniff knowingly (and as little as possible) at Heiress by Paris Hilton. This week, the curator of paintings and sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art sticks closer to his main area of professional expertise—while finding some nasty whiffs around the galleries of the boom era now departed.
Reviewing Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World, he considers the three Ds (Death, Divorce, and Debt) that still fuel the auction rooms. These days, there is an especially enhanced role for Debt. In the new hard times, dealers' hype is harder for everyone: and to read this book, says Trumble, is “rather like leafing through Country Life in the trenches of Passchendaele.”
Colm Toibin’s Beautiful Brooklyn
The most-talked-about novel in London is Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, the Irish writer's latest and most satisfying homage to Henry James. According to the TLS critic and Cambridge scholar Ruth Scurr, “Toibin knows what it means to want something modest and simple at the center of your life but not be able to have it. Better than any of his contemporaries, he knows how to capture the timbre of that sorrow in fiction.”
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Peter Stothard is editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He was editor of The Times of London from 1992-2002. He writes about ancient and modern literature and is the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq war.
