| Author | Message | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Sometimes however loud I shout I can't hear me. This is a thread for musings on the novel. What it is, why it exists, and so forth. Assorted tin pot ideas - annoying generalisations - unfounded assertions - the usual. Seems to me that the novel exists as an urban phenomenon. In other words that it has come about in order to express that species of exile in which our lives are either in the process of, or have wholly become, urbanised; so that it is a kind of mourning. Its grief, like one of those elongated faces you see on painted African masks, is the grief of a loss that cannot be rectified: whatever the ostensible subject matter the racial memory that is its spring is the vanished pastoral. So, ancient or - what's the word? - ancestral fears: the powerhouse. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
>Sometimes ... Me, too. But then the zen suggestion occurred: stop shouting!  The Novel as an Arcadian form: is all book-length fiction a mourning? "Don Quixote," "Tom Jones," and "Lolita" might fit the idea, but I'm less sure about (say) "At Swim-Two-Birds" or most comic fiction. Hard ground to cover, though. This book tried it with pop culture, and got into a dreadful muddle: http://www.amazon.co.uk/England-Mine-Albion-Wilde- Goldie/dp/0006550150 | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
>> the novel exists as an urban phenomenon Hmm - I wonder if it's worth seeing more as an industrialised form? The rise of the novel coincides with the rise of industry, and (specifically) the ability to mass produce books. Also, its relationship to magazine publication? The modern novel takes much of its shape from the activities of serial publishing 19th Century folk. Also, does this conversely make poetic narrative a pre-industrial form? It was experimented with but never really became popular in the C19 (Pushkin, Byron helping invent modern narrative? Where does Robert Browning fit in? Or poems like The Ancient Mariner, feeding into the prose culture?) Going right back, epic poetry's regular rhythms, rhymes, repetitions a pre-industrial mode of writing? IE one that's designed to assist memorising, so the work can spread without industrial production of texts to support it? | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Comedy is the refuge of melancholy. I think. The fundamentally melancholic remains the most permanently funny. Randy Newman. Catcher in the Rye. I often think of the novel as a response to exile. Some examples are needed however. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
>Exile ... Often a response to what was and is no longer; or what isn't and should/might be. Dickens's whole career pirouetted round those poles. One reason must be that you write seriously from your deepest impressions - and those are stem from childhood or adolescence, states from which you're irretrievably exiled. One might explore the point, and argue that our current "extended adolescent" culture mitigates against large-scale serious fiction - or one could stand well back while another flood gate opens and you come up with examples to prove one a tendentious wally. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
The British, or the English - or the Londoners - maybe: when one compares these writers with American ones, and they don't seem to be able to convincingly render idiomatic speech the way the Americans can. Not that there isn't talent. But I am not convinced that people are able use it. Justina Robson for example. Living Next Door to the God of Love - is a bit of a farago. She is able to write. But I don't think she sufficiently realises that writing is more than just a process, the adding of one word to the next, that discovery, transformation - realisation - is right at the heart of writing and has to be acheived in its own terms, however long it takes. Too many novels are like undercooked bread, still doughy in the middle. It's dismaying because their authors could do something really significant: if they understood the need for patience. I'm afraid I put MJHs current books in that category too. Wasted opportunities. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
>Wasted opportunities ... I'm puzzled. As I've said before, I think "Light" is a wonderful novel, mixing up everything from ghost story effects and noir tropes to pinpoint observation of domestic breakdown and obsessive aberration, to produce a redemptive denoument that I never read without somehow hearing the climax of Gorecki's Third Symphony playing behind it. It's hard to think of another recent novel that scans so much in such depth and does it so well. So, I'm not flaming you - but I am intrigued. Was it the whole apparatus of the book that disappointed you - or would you simply have taken it somewhere else? And if so, of course: where? | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
I also enjoyed MJH's last couple. Both of them replayed a number of classic Harrisonian strategies while developing new ones and breaking new ground. I wonder if this impatience in contemporary writing is a symptom of this era. Martin covered some of this ground in his "extended adolescence" post. If the writing came out as more mature, or more considered, it wouldn't be such a genuine artifact of our times. Big Brother, in its noughties sense, and the Bush and Blair twins are witness to our slightness. Then again: this is all theory. I don't read much contemporary writing, possibly for precisely these reasons. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
It's true, Martin, I am puzzled too. I can't understand Light's tremendous reception. It may be as I said once before that I read it in the wrong key, heard all the notes in the wrong context or something, but in any case what I was looking for was something that I think hasn't yet been fully achieved in modern sf: not for me; a sense in which the interval between the science fiction and the portrait of ordinary life is seamless. Light didn't get anywhere near that ideal I don’t think; but on the other hand maybe it wasn't trying. But since it did indeed do a kind of mix between sf description and ordinary life description maybe such a demand as I have isn't out of place. Using my own taste as sole criteria may be a bit of a blunt instrument so I am not going to overemphasise this 'deficiency'. Let's see if the point can be made in a less invidious way. I have probably said before that it sometimes feels to me like I am on a big red bus when I do my thinking - it's not me that's driving it, it's that crazy bus-driver up front! Downstairs! I am just an alarmed-looking passenger in the middle seats of the top deck. What I think is that the principle source of ordinary fictional sense needs to be understood in science fictional terms; so here is an attempt to formulate that. In this view the main source of fictional sense comes from the way that it demonstrates our origination in the 'ordinary world'. It does this paradoxically not straightforwardly; this is the key: in so far as, when we read, we are 'not in' the ordinary world of course but 'somewhere else' - ie in the place of the fiction. That mechanism sets up a requirement in us: for the fiction to work (in whatever way) as a meditation on our relation to the world as 'originary beings' so to say: as beings who come from it. It must show us that we come from here. For example the place that making coffee has in our lives. Two people sit at a table drinking coffee. Carver does this with absolute authority. When I read his fiction I feel that “this is where I come from” – that I come from within it … ! Apply this to the science fictional aspect of Light. When I read that I don’t believe most of it. There are only one or two little things he does that compel me – that make me feel that “this is where I come from”. For example, when whatever her name is, the female ship drops someone off somewhere, on a backwater planet, and the sense of hopelessness and desolation that the person dropped off feels is described. Or when that duck appears to indicate ‘game over’, earlier. These were things that made me feel that I came from the fiction. Otherwise, I mostly felt blank. As when in a film loud and impressive explosions stand in the place of story and characterisation – one is filled with a sense of ennui. In my view only a very subtle judgement will get the science fictional element to work in terms that replicate that sense in ordinary fiction that you often get, in other words that “this is where I come from”. Lionel Shriver in We have to Talk about Kevin does it for me quite well in ordinary terms, for example. My problem with MJH is that he doesn’t respect the fiction aspect enough in science fiction to have the patience to make it the equivalent of ‘mundanely’ convincing: ie into a convincing *unreality* ... And I think it’s because he has the typical science fiction writer’s conviction that science and fiction don’t mix fundamentally: that fiction *can’t come* from science – categorically. So that MJH is deeply conflicted by this complex ... Why I so much admire PKD as an sf writer, in contrast, is that he has few or no inhibitions about to what ludicrous edge is he prepared to take science – as long as it works dramatically he couldn’t care. With Justina Robson however we are back to the same problem. I think that she needs to concentrate much more on the dramatic sense that fiction can have – I mean where it is not a matter of science or fact at all that the sense that “this is where we come from” finds itself enacted in the story – it is purely a dramatic flourish – a feeling of total unreality. Basically that is what I want much more of from them both: more unreality. Much more! I find this failure of nerve, the sense that there is a kind of ‘fictional cramp’ in the writing, in China too. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
This goes back to something MJH noted on the old ES site: Conrad may be hard for us to read because we think so much more quickly now, and our perceptions aren't linear, but cut-up and bricolaged. The Modernists were the first to grasp this sense of overload and fragmentation: with the Internet it's simply our standard, blink-rate life in the wired-up world. Setting that melange into linear form on a page is quite a task - hence Moorcock's mockery of "Jillian Barnes" et. al., who still wish wave were particle and fumble accordingly. But when you get someone who knows what they're doing, you get "Light; or - http://www.lanark1982.co.uk/lanark.html - or (the typographical tricks put me off at first, but so far this is almost un-putdownable): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Sorry, MJP: our posts crossed. It's a personal thing, isn't it? My reading presents me with areas I know - or, less definably, that I've suspected - in a way that's exactly opposite to yours. Not because I hang around with serial killers, self-tattooed magicians, or aspects of hyperreality dressed up like Piglet ( I thought so, anyway. The Schrander Comes to Hundred Acre Wood ...) - but because the tube trains, the graffiti, the littered streets sedated under the sodium, the haunted business parks stuck on marginal fields like a geometric mirage, the stripey-shirted grazers in Pizza Express, and those contingent but meaningful comments overheard in the street or the bar match exactly what I come across any day of the week. It's a joy to find this amount of "now" captured this neatly; and, for me, those realist elements earth and legitimise the fantastic elements that play around them. Perhaps the biggest compliment you can pay an artist is to realise that they've changed your perceptions, your expectations. To this day, if the train pauses with its doors open, I think: who are we waiting for? I listen very carefully to radio interviews with any migrants newly arrived from "The East"; and, if I'm ever near Dean Street, I can't help but keep a watch on the parked cars, just in case something steals out from between them, "neither a child nor a monkey, but something of both," and begins to follow me. To me, a fiction that touches you in this way can't be much further embedded in "reality": clearly, though, we don't all feel that way. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Criticism is a very uncertain process. If one looks at PKD for example he wrote alot that is unconvincing read in isolation but that cumulatively creates a quite different perception. I absolutely love the way that he manages to get a WB Yeats poem, an airborn cop car and a dalliance on the grass with a wasted teenage girl into a scene in Our Friends From Frolix 8, but I am not sure how many share that enthusiasm. But the argument is complicated in anycase by the sense that I am trying to suggest: in other words, it precisely isn't a sense of reality that I am interested in in these terms, but a sense of convincing *un*reality. The PKD scene is utterly unreal and yet convincing. That is why I like it; the acute feeling of paradox that it creates. Science fiction is a fiction of unreality. But to get that feeling it has to be realistically unreal! It has to take itself seriously. Like Dick does, in his fiction, it has to jump right off the cliff. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
This makes differences of view and opinion a lot clearer! Probably, it also points up the traditions and objectives involved: a streamlined Pulp-powered narrative allied to noir, which relies on sharp dialog and ever sharper variations on a "where's the monster?" rationale; and a more inturned and glancing technique derived from Pritchett, Mansfield or Bates, where the detail may *be* the monster - or make you doubt there was one in the first place. Either can intrigue me - but, just as a matter of taste, I find the second richer and more resonant in UK07. Who do you rate apart from Dick? I can still read Bester, but most of the writers PKD came up with now seem ancient; and the ones he got classed in the US New Wave (broadly, 95% of those in "Dangerous Visions"), closet Neocons or unbearably glib. Any recommendations? | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
Early Delany still holds up well for me, Martin. 334. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
For that sense of unreality? Specific novels. Djinn by Robbe-Grillet. The Glamour by Christopher Priest. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I am old fashioned. I think the older sf writers usually better than the newer ones in many ways. One other thing that I found really poor in Light, which immediately struck me as I was reading it, was the lack of 'space'. The ordinary physical world was depicted well but interstellar distances seemed never to extend beyond cupboard-sized shelving. Someone like van Vogt gets space much better. The human unreality of space. - Going back to the theme of the experience of ordinary reality as fictionalised and the way that this reflects on our condition exile from the world, as depicted in the kind of novel that deals with such a form of fictionalisation, an ideal example I think is Per Petterson's To Siberia. Set around the Second World War, the story of a woman's upbringing. She eventually leaves home, and then finds that she has nowhere to go back to - no place of return. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Interesting: the idea of outer space didn't survive our contact with it, as Ballard noted - or else it appealed to a sublime "last high frontier" emotion in US writers which has also withered: in the same way no one could act credibly like John Wayne in a contemporary film, because we're all too cogent, too jaded. Our heroes come with footnotes now. As for the lack of space in "Light": Kearney's transfiguration in that lemon-smelling void mitigates against that, surely. After all the magickal claustrophobia, the twinks and the tanks and the lurking threat of Dr. Haends's box, we're suddenly released into this infinite tumble of radiance and event and purpose, where "real things are happening." Works for me! | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
OK Martin you win that argument: space it has. >>>the idea of outer space didn't survive our contact with it Yet still it persists in so far as it - whatever it is - space is out there - there it is and it is not a part of human reality: or it is there, present in it, but ignored, like something sour in the pores, old sweat; vanished heat. The Alien! Lingering on. Persisting. Invisibly. Dreaming. Thinking. Lonely beyond dreams. Mind staggeringly cruel. Where there are creatures you would not survive two seconds with. Madness! Multiply something like a tiger to the power of 20 and you might have something like it. It doesn't breathe. It does not need air. It survives. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
It looks at planet Earth and it thinks: lunchtime. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
In space, no one can hear you eat! | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
It's that post-coital clarte, that sense of being empty ringing on and on; that loud endless bell. I wake up and it's Sum-day and the village is quiet, or quiet but for that bell homecalling. Catcher in the Rye is an impressive work. It is more or less perfect. From whichever angle you look. I have just re-read it. If it has a flaw then it's Phoebe, the soft angle on children. Otherwise, nihilism. A loud loud silence. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
>> the lack of 'space' Hmm, that's interesting. In pure geographical terms, there's a fair amount of space in light - quite a lot happens there within the novel. I wonder if what you're responding to is a lack of a particular way of describing space? You seem to want a (perhaps Romantic) sense of the sublime to be worked into it - is that the case? Which lack throws interesting light (ho ho ho) on MJH's strategies and stances as a writer - he's most definitely not a Romantic, rather someone focussed on intimacy and failure rather than transcendence and sublimity - so perhaps writing about space in that way is not something that's possible for him? Tho' taking your point Martin - there's also the leap into the Kefahuchi Tract as a moment of sublime transcendence - perhaps what he rejects in not writing immediate, transcendent space is the ease of transcendence that that kind of rhetoric represents. You've got to work for the sublime... and even then it might bite you! Over and above this - the idea of space not surviving our contact with it - it's not that we've contacted it, it's that we've realised that we're probably never going to get to the interstellar void etc. Going to the moon and dropping robots on Mars, etc, categorically isn't scooting through hyperspace in the galaxy spanning Millenium Falcon. Like small children being told we can't have something, we're busy pretending we never really wanted it anyway. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I think that we will evolve into space. Seriously. But it's not a very real proposition yet is it? Not at all. Its silly. I immediately felt disappointed with Light that it didn't describe space. In these terms it seemed like too many other sf novels - or like Thunderbirds or something, where the ships have those sparklers for rocket power. But I can't see how you can get away with not evoking it in a science fiction novel in which significant parts of the drama take place in the sidereal universe. Compare the way Tarkovsky does it in Solaris. He manages to evoke the cosmic. It is done brilliantly. That aeronaut standing by a lake at the beginning. The fronds moving in a stream. The house in the wilderness. A Bach choral. He creates a true quite devastating feeling of space and of our unreality when it is looked at on the scale of the cosmic. Connected with this a little. Did anyone see that photo published in the Guardian a few weeks ago, from a book of photos about the Soviet Union? It was pure Tarkovsky. It showed a wilderness with a tall burned out actual rocket standing upright in the middle of it. Perched on its top were two rough looking locals searching for salvage. And surrounding all this were literally thousands of white butterflies, like snow flakes. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Hmm - on one hand I agree with you, I felt that as well. On the other hand, I don't think that's what MJH was writing about in that book - rather, he was focussing on people's fear of space (read as possibility) and described the space they were in accordingly. Over and above that, for the various in-space characters space was a working environment; and that's an experience we'll never have. For us, space is an awesome empty space - for them, it's the place they (metaphorically speaking) 9 to 5 in. It's an interesting question, tho'; does SF as a genre demand sense of wonder as a core component? Not neccesarily, I'd say - like all literary effects, it should only be used if its got a reason for being there. I don't think it's necessary for what Light's trying to achieve, and (more broadly) I'd also say that MJH tends to use transcendent effects only relatively rarely... space included. Oh, and my preferred providers of cosmic awe are (within SF) Stephen Baxter for vastness and Alastair Reynolds for horror... Agree with you about that picture, just fantastic... | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
The picture sounds wonderful, but I didn't see it. Link ,anyone? | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
It's from a book called Satellites: Photographs from the Fringes of the Former Soviet Union. I've ordered it from Amazon. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Have a look: http://www.aperture.org/store/books-detail.aspx?ID =514 | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
! MJP, you're exactly right. This could be a "Stalker" outtake: a beautiful and playful part of the Zone. At least two of the other pictures seem to look through Tarkovsky's eyes as well. Utterly unrelated query, but if anyone knows it, someone here will. I'm trying to trace a Jewish/rabbinical quote, that a good man should leave 3 things behind him on the earth - a book he's written, a tree he's planted, and a son he's fathered - or words to that effect. Any ideas? | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Sure. I got some ideas. Who aint? But I swear it's a royal pain in the ass tracing these things. It really is. Three? What for? Ho ho ho. A real smart alec I am sometimes. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Most helpful of you. Anyone else? | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Hmm, I don't know - but for some reason it reminds me of the old Japanese story of a calligrapher who is asked to paint a cheerful motto on a scroll by a client. The calligrapher paints (beautifully): GRANDFATHER DIES FATHER DIES SON DIES Of course the client is very pissed off, until the (very serene) calligrapher points out that this is the natural order of things and surely it's the best possible outcome that things happen in this order? The client is mollified, but I'm not sure I would have been. History doesn't record what the wife / rest of the family made of it. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Sorry Martin; but it's that Catcher in the Rye. He's like one of those crummy ear worm things that once they get into your ear they wont leave; that's what I think anyway. They aint polite. It gets like its falling down the stairs talk all the time. I really mean that. Maybe cosmic sense (to resume my own voice) hinges on a kind of dual feeling of not being at home *at home*: but yet feeling at home still in the experience of the vastness of things, the endlessness; in inhospitable nature somehow throwing a net around you; so that even though you find yourself suspended in the infinite - in a place of no return - here is a living moment in it. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
MJP: Indeed! Al: Something for me to ponder on my way home tonight. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
Martin, I think that the "plant a tree, write a book, father a son" motto is not jewish. I have always found it related to Horatio Alger and such "can do" school of writers, with never a quote of the supposed jewish origin. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Plant a tree... I've seen it attributed to Plato. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Just been rooting on the web. It comes out as a Plato quote, a Talmud quote, or a Slovenian national proverb (!). Oh, and in vaguely similar terms as an ancient Chinese proverb. A Chinese sage might have wondered - Is there a need for proverbs to be un-homely to emphasise their wisdom? On the outside, looking in... Is there an equivalent external referent in Chinese, Jewish culture? Or is it that the nature of our culture (ongoing creative destruction of free market life) militates against the survival / heft of ancient moments of wisdom, so we have to buy them in from elsewhere? (a yard of yer finest wisdom, squire...) | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
"A true Slovenian must raise a child, write a book and plant a tree." Resnica! | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
Well, for one thing It doesn´t sound too jewish. It if said raise a son to study the Talmud, maybe. But other than that I cannot think of any other jewish bias toward men. Same thing for ancient chinese. Maaybe father a son to continue the family bloodline and so on. It cannot be ancient because as far as I know the premium on individual autorship begins with romanticism. For most people in the middle ages write a book would have meant copy one. An also it cannot be ancient because "the plant a tree" ( unless it is a sacred grove or something and that was somethin only priest could do) echoes the current situation where nature is in danger. Certenly a roman would have wondered what was the point of planting a tree per se. Also raise a son is definitely modern. Most ancients would have just said: get married and/or have a family. I could be wrong but it certnely sounds 20th centurish to me, not ancient. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
What the novel does preeminently well is provide the plasticity of life's context with concrete terms of definition. Such is inherent in the very design of the novel. There is endless scope for the descriptive setting up of the story. And endless scope for its explanation. (To state this very briefly.) This "newest, most fluid and least formulated of all the arts" (Wharton) thrives on its being that: the unfinished, undefined nature of life in its any given moment, is best captured by a medium able to mimic that unfinishedness. By contrast a poem has almost no space for this 'setting up' - for setting the scene. The general direction of the argument in these discussions, carries the implication that life is becoming increasingly 'contextless' - is in all sorts of ways 'losing its context'. Having an online discussion like this itself provides an illustration. It is a discussion that, circumstantially, is without context. It doesn't even matter what time of day it is for example, never mind what country the writer happens to be in, whenever he makes his contribution. That has to be reflected in the novel too. With the question of 'setting up' a modern novel for example - compare Catcher in the Rye with A Nest of Gentlefolk. With Turgenev, its sometimes as if he is introducing you to people who are present - sitting around in his drawing room or something. It's a social occasion. With the Rye book, everything's dissociated. It is the written testimonial of someone cut off from life. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Catcher in the Rye again. The events in the story occur largely without context. Caulfield is expelled from Pency, and goes on a kind of self-destructive binge, wandering from place to place, drinking, talking, whoring, running away, living in a world in which he has no home, in which there is nothing likeable, where nothing is really an amenity: even though ostensibly (for those who are, like Caulfield, moneyed) the amenities available to him are endless. New York is his playground -. But it is a playground without context; without meaning. Everything is 'phoney'. Makes him feel nauseated. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Three novels/films that encapsulate this circumstance: The Catcher in the Rye The Graduate Midnight Cowboy Each is about growing up into an impossible world. Interestingly, in two of them involve the same basic catalyst - of the young man, the 'graduate', having sex with an older woman. The world that is impossible is a world without a past: the post war world in other words. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Pop albums invoke this idea too: Czukay's Movies Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts Two quintessential postmodern works. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Jon Hassel's 'fourth world' music fits there, too. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
"The spirit has no voice, because where there is voice there is body." Leonardo da Vinci. Interestingly this is used by Agamben for his motto in Infancy and History (see other thread too.) In these terms one might choose to see the globalisation of culture as an activity 'increasingly of the spirit'; that is as the manifestation of an increasingly disembodied world; or again as a ghost infinity: not actual. (Whatever that might mean.) I know he is something of an acquired taste, but to get back to Salinger again, all Salinger's stories involve childhood or youth at their centre. He seems to see children generally as essentially unspoiled people; that is as ideals, because they are human beings as they should be, before the onset (the fall) of adulthood. There is something in this; which leads me to the thought that the culture of extended adolescence (as Martin terms it) that seems to surround us on all sides, can also be regarded as an attempt to hang on to or to better realise this ideal state: this origination of energy. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Salinger's stories: If you haven't read "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" - you've missed the incredible: http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/perfectday.htm l "He edged the float and its passenger a foot closer to the horizon." - In context, one of the most disconcerting sentences ever written. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
>>Satellites: Photographs from the Fringes of the Former Soviet Union My copy arrived today. Nice looking book, but crap idea to gloss-varnish the page edges. Can't open the damn thing! It's like one of those old books where you had to cut through the page edges before reading. Don't know if that was the idea or not. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
From a review by Michael Wood of Pynchon's Against the Day (in the LRB): "on page 1 is a group of boy adventurers called the Chums of Chance, heroes of a series of jolly books with titles like The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit … The narrator addresses us as ‘my faithful readers’ or ‘my young readers’, adopts a verbose and patronising diction to match, and presents us with a dog who appears to be reading Henry James. Well, surely is reading Henry James, because when asked what his book is he says, ‘Rr Rff-rff Rr-rr-rff-rrf-rrf’, easily scanned as The Princess Casamassima … I sneaked a glance at the later pages. Was Pynchon going to keep up the pastiche?" | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I have still to collect my Satellites ... from the post office. The flat's letter box is too small. Been re-reading all of Salinger lately. Martin, For Esme ... is a seminal collection. One thing that struck me when I first read him all those years ago was the what I thought very American habit of the name-checking of designer goods and products. Veeery important!!! In the Graduate the Dustin Hoffman character spends most of his time 'drifting'; and in the best and sunniest and most idyllic way of course. When he first arrives back from college, at his wealthy parents' house, he realises that he has no constituency. He is a child of the 'generation gap'; in spite of his heroic acheivements at college, he has no idea what to do with his life. His life lacks a context, a story. So he spends days, weeks, months, floating in the pool, staring out at the world sightlessly through his designer sunglasses. "The sound of silence" his soundtrack. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
>> he realises that he has no constituency Hmm - the party scene is the one that's stuck in my head, where he's surrounded by older men going 'Aluminium! You have to get into aluminium!' and similar. That sense of two very separate, completely un-related worlds very well caught. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Al, the party scene. That is a brilliant moment. But the man actually says something more like: "I have just one word to say to you: Plastics. Plastics." The thing I am trying to suggest here is the way that Hoffman's character finds himself 'without a world'; contextless. Each of the dramatic elements works to suggest this perfectly. Firstly for example the word "Plastics" utterly wholly without context or explanation. Hoffman comically replies something like "Uh, yes sir." | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Another big scene for this is when the parents give Hoffman a scuba-diving outfit, bring all their freinds round to show him off, and we we see him walking out into the garden towards the swimming pool, slowly flapping in his rubber togs like something from Mars. The sound track is of his ghastly gasseous breathing. He then plunges into the pool, a world of silence, is wholly disconnected from the cocktails cigarettes and canapes scene out in the garden: nowhere. One of the things I especially like about the film is the way that it reverts to reverie each time the camera withdraws from direct social observation. Its mood of infinite contemplation. Light and its reflection. Off water. Off trees and road, amongst the shadows as Hoffman flashes over bridges in his brand new red Alfa Romeo; something evoked too by the songs. This is the postmodern world, the world without a defining story other than that of the bomb. A world that youth categorically wants no part of. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
YouTube is our friend! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU2pKPTX_f0 The Plastics scene. Enough said... What sticks with me is not so much the contextlessness but rather the fact that the two separate contexts (Dustin's / the parental generations) absolutely don't touch each other. Watching the film I imagined the parents' deep sadness and confusion as a child they've nurtured, brought up, whose achievements they've taken pleasure in and (one assumes) made part of their own identity has suddenly become absolutely alien to them - precisely becausse of that nurturing, that care, those achievements. But how temporary is the alien-ness? Part of Dustin's problem (sorry, can't remember the character name) is that he's lost one context - university - and hasn't yet created the next one (always thought leaving university, and thus education in general, is one of the most absolute losses in life) which will give him a foundation for relating to other people. Context defines the self? The film as reverie - indeed, but it's also dramatising a very specific moment in Dustin's life, very effectively - the between context moment of confusion. Is that what post-modernism is? *goes off to read Lyotard* | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Interesting also to see that scene as a profoundly failed initiation right. The shaman takes the initiate into the private place to reveal... *THE SECRET*... the initiate ready to become a man... etc - and the secret is just ridiculous. Implicit in all this is Dustin's need to create his own personal context. The shaman's context makes plastics a very meaningful word - what's the equivalent for Dustin? How will he find it? Can he even do so? | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Hi Al Useful little clip. I think I am painting with a broader brush. The film resonates beyond the edges of the screen. What I want to discuss is the loss of the past, given the upheavals of the Second World War, and the image of the future that this created. In the clip, here is a Captain of Industry inviting young Dustin to join him. In this sense this Captain of Industry represents a continuation of the pre-world war story; the Grand Narrative of Industry and Science, but - as the film strongly suggests - it is a damaged, compromised, foolish project. In other words because this Captain of Industry has lost all context. A renewal is required: a new consciousness. We are in the midst of that still. Another Grand Narrative that the war helped to terminate or underscored the termination of can be argued to be the Narrative of God. Darwin and Freud set the ball rolling. Let's go back to this theme of delayed or extended childhood: to the thesis that one of the main reasons for this phenomenon is that it enables us to cope with a 'mannerless world': a world with no audible human voice that is to say. In so far as childhood and adolescence constitute their formative creation. In Midnight Cowboy we have Mr Cowboy (I should really learn their names) - John Voight - leaving home for New York. Disconnecting himself from his origins for the Freudian world of Oedipal sex and free money. The journey in the coach brilliantly summarises the situation again - like the scuba diving scene in The Graduate - his radio picking up the cross state radio channels at each interval of his waking; with, at each interval of his waking, a new stranger confronting him. At each interval again, disconnection and dissociation. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Incidentally, correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me that both films have folk-song based sound tracks. We might muse on that. (Al, vaguely connected with this, you might want to go over to David Byrne's site where he currently has a folk selection on his online radio station. Interesting. Broadband only.) | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
>>correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me that both films have folk-song based sound tracks I wouldn't call Midnight Cowboy's soundtrack folk-based. It had that Nilsson song on it (which was cover of a Fred Neil track) but apart from that, not much what I would call folk. Bit of West Coast pop, bit of psych from Elephant's Memory (the party scene) and that wonderful John Barry score with all the harmonic stuff on it. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Ok so not folk or country based in that way. But: does the Nilsson song begin as well as end the film? Interestingly enough, it contains the same assertion of 'silent speech' as The Graduate's Sound of Silence, now that I think about it: "Everybody's talking at me; can't hear a word their saying; only the echoes of my mind". Catcher in the Rye of course ... another song based story concept. The suggestion is I suppose that these songs recall pre-industrial life or the human scale of life. Contrast the psychedelia of the Elephant Party. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
The sounds of silence is a vision of apocalypse that echoes Poe. Silence-in-the-noise is seen as an invading destructive presence. "Everybody is talkin" ia a paean to the simple life, a rejection of the city but it offers an alternative "I am going where the sun keeps shining", Paul Simon does not offer such alternative. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
As Batman would say to Robin: Robin I think I see a pattern emerging. But I am missing the Apocalypse in Midnight Cowboy. If it's anywhere it's in that party scene and also in the bombed out tenement where they live. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Yes, so there is a twin register: "Are you going to Scarborough Fair ..." - that sense of reverie: light, shadow, a perfect world, an ideal world, shangri la - that place from which we are exiled. ("I am going where the sun keeps shining") The actual or the real world, underlying this vision or reverie. The apocalypse. Divorce. Unhappiness. Dissociation. Disconnection. Plastics. The Cowboy lost in New York. Religion is a nutcase in a tenement block. Yep, he has to sell his boots. (see io's thread). | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
The cowboy is lost by the river of Babylon then? Anyhow the whole thing in Scarborough Fair is undercored by "there are soldiers to kill line". The narrator in the song is saying farewell because he is most likely dying. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
The twofold register again: Joe (John Voigt) and Ratso leave New York together - finally - to get to what is suggested to be a sensible pragmatic new world; they look forward to a new life in Florida. Decide to get to a clean, honest, decent place. Ratso (Hoffman) never makes it. For him it’s Shangri la. It can’t be otherwise. (Repeatedly envisioned in mocking terms throughout the film by Ratso). Joe throws away his cowboy clothes (boots? jacket? hat?); and then dons a sensible short-sleeved shirt. Ratso - he has died on the trip. To the melody of that song, the clean apocalypse. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
>> this Captain of Industry has lost all context I thought I disagreed with you but now I'm not so sure...! Can't help but buy into this loss of context thing - fits with a broader sense that the single overarching life narrative (coherent career, emotional life, etc) is no longer possible, whether for economic or broader social reasons. Perhaps that's what leads to the sense of extended adolescence as well? If you define adulthood as settling into a clearly defined, consistent and mature version of the self then adulthood is no longer possible in a world that demands constant change of job, adaptation, reskilling, etc - you never have time to mature into a single, adult narrative but are instead only ever present at the adolescent moment of choice - what shall I be in my life? The shamanic dictum 'plastics' no longer represents deep wisdom to shape your life by because you can't live by it any more - the permanent career and identity it offers no longer exists. Interesting that the exemplary secure career given here should itself be in something axiomatically artifical and malleable. >> Everybody's talking at me; can't hear a word their saying; only the echoes of my mind Language is a shared experience. Folk implies a pre-industrial shared culture. Both impossible within the arguments that these films are making. >> I am going where the sun keeps shining Surely an impossible alternative to go to? A statement that's disproven nightly... and on a metaphorical level optimistic at best! | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
>>>"there are soldiers to kill line". The narrator in the song is saying farewell because he is most likely dying. I am not sure I get that arturo. Do those lines appear somewhere in the song? I hear an idyll. Peace. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Next up on this subject of novels is - uh - American Graffiti. Really an example that needs no explanation. ... But for the fact that somehow it foreshadowed Star Wars. The advent of the CGI film. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Very haunting credit sequence, though: I never hear "All Summer Long" without thinking of it. And a film from times when the popular past really *had* gone, rather then being a perpetual consumerist phantom, haunting the present tense. It still looks that way, too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h32Kdrh0Z48 - like Atlantis with hot-rods. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
Actually MJP I missremembered. The actual lines are: Tell her to reap it in a sickle of leather (War bellows, blazing in scarlet battalions). Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (Generals order their soldiers to kill). And gather it all in a bunch of heather (And to fight for a cause they've long ago forgotten). Then she'll be a true love of mine. Those lines are not traditional. Paul Simon added them. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Hmm, his Vietnam riff? Didn't he rip the arrangement off from Martin Carthy? I wonder if the lines came from Carthy originally? In the context of the above (ahem) adding those lines is an interesting act of context creation. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
I don't think Martin Carthy would have written such trite lines, but the arrangement was his. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Another ground breaking film from that time - I think anyway - is Little Big Man. It takes the side of the Indians in a realistic historical way and contains scenes of horrific slaughter by the American army, and again where music plays a key role: those drums and pipes (fifes?), however it goes, that tune they play as they march in to the slaughter over that pure snow. Dustin Hoffman again. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
As far as I know Carthy got rather angry because the recorded song was credited as a Simon original with no mention to the traditional element wich I do think points out that Carthy did not write those lines. And Interesting thing about the Two rivers masacre: Frank L.Baum then a young journalist had published a piece about indians living in fear of an atack a few weeks before. Seemingly it was an humorous piece. Anyhow after the slaughter he had to leave the territory and change carreers.Thus, The wizard of Of. Also, there was a public outrage about the massacre and there was a court martial waiting for Coronel Custer when he returned. Thus, he engaged the sioux against standing orders hoping that an unexpected victory would help him to go throug the court martial. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Some anorak stuff: Simon's is a rewrite/interpolation of an earlier lyric, "The Side of a Hill." Like Dylan, he performed in various UK folk clubs about 1962, and both - um - *adapted* what was played by other artists for their own, wider audience. Carthy next heard "Lord Franklin" under "Bob Dylan's Dream," his arrangement of "Nottanum Town" as "Masters of War," and found most of the chords to "Scarborough Fair" underpinning "Girl From the North Country." Dylan at least had the grace to acknowledge all this, along with Carthy's skill - I don't know if they came to any financial settlement. But despite his talent, and a lasting fondness for his time in England, Simon still gets viewed by older folkies as someone who simply looted the tradition for his own ends: shades of the similar controversy which "Graceland" met with in the Eighties. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
>> The wizard of Of. Sounds very cool! The Genitive Wiz. Btb, being even more anoraky, did you know that the Professor's / Wizard's coat in the Wizard of... was actually (by chance) an old coat of L. Frank Baum's? Martin - hmm, have read about Simon's looting elsewhere, Dylan's pillaging new to me. Tho' not just those two - Jimmy Page seems to have got quite a lot from Davy Graham / Bert Jansch. MJH mentioned seeing BJ at Les Cousins back in the day - now that's a night out I'm very jealous of! | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Page: Simon to nth power, really. "Black Mountain Side" = "Blackwater Side," Bert Jansch; "White Summer" ripped off Davy Graham's amazing version of "She Moved Through the Fair"; and then we could talk about how much Page "borrowed" from US black musicians, who had little idea of copyright, and couldn't afford a lawyer in the first place. But, hey - that's entertainment! Both Jansch and Graham have shrugged about this - and take the attitude that "people know what's what, so it doesn't really matter." But I suspect the prospect of tangling with a high-powered international legal team might have a lot more to do with it. As for Les Cousins - clearly The Place: not only everyone mentioned above, but also Al Stewart, renowned as the best Dylan cover singer in London. Apparently got an advanced copy of "Highway 61," and sat up all night learning "Desolation Row" so he could be the first UK musician to play it live, next evening. Quite astonishing; or quite sad, really, depending on your point of view. Mind you, he had been in a group with Tony Blackburn on vocals for quite a while - so he clearly had Things To Prove... | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
>> a group with Tony Blackburn on vocals Hmm, that would have had me sitting up all night proving myself... every night... Tho' on the other hand a lecturer who'd been around a bit back in the day told me once that Page - in his role as leading session guitarist of the 60s - did a fair number of the 60s most famous scorching bluesy guitar solos, without credit. Maybe he felt he'd earned the right to steal a bit? Re Blues - yup, was reading the other day about a grumpy Muddy Waters complaining about 'skinny white guys' stealing his act. Skinniness - hmm, if nothing else, rationing gave good cheek bones. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
> Steal a little bit. Could be. But playing on "As Tears Go By" and "Tobacco Road" isn't really a license to rip off anyone, I don't think. Coincidentally, his Wikipedia entry also lists session work for Al Stewart - we're beginning to see a *pattern* forming here ... though I'm unsure what it is. Then again, I don't think he ever sued Clapton for "Let It Grow" - which is "Stairway to Heaven" in all but name. But as Morgan Fisher got 40% share of "A Whiter Shade of Pale" just before Christmas, the courts are obviously getting sympathetic towards this kind of thing: so maybe Bert should try a new solicitior. Gold in them thar hills, etc. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
I'm sure Morgan Fisher would have been delighted, especially he never went anywhere near Procol Harum, preferring instead the glam delights of Mott The Hoople ;) Anyway, Dylan's still at it, having just 'been influenced by' Nic Jones' version of Canadee-i-o. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Ah god, you're right. Post at the end of the working day and an old brain here. Sorry. As for Dylan and Jones: http://www.dylanchords.com/35_gaibty/did_dylan_ste al_canadee.htm | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Hmm - this whole stealing-of-music thing is very interesting. Dylan and characters like him are presented as bastions of integrity, heroes of creativity who haven't sold out, etc, etc. Not to deny the quality of the work - but what's behind the creation of such an adulatory iconography? Why the constant repetition of life stories / incidents in all the music mags, books, etc, like medieval lives of the saints? What do we look for in those lives? What are we expected to learn from this new pantheon of exemplars, who sit that little bit closer to heaven than we do, and whose life stories have been formalised and made canonic in ways more appropriate to a cult than to a musical genre? How does that interact with the little moments of reality that break the surface every so often, like these exemplars of light fingered ruthlessness? | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Sorry, examples not exemplars... *carried away by own rhetoric* | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
I thought that was how you made music in the first place. Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders says something about how you learn a song, forget a song, play it all wrong, and before you know it you've got a new song. Originality is for girls. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
>Bastions ... This is Dylan's latter day image. To listen to him now, post-Jesus, post-heart scare, post-60, you'd never recognise his earlier, drug-soaked, fastest-tongue-in-the-West incarnation, when anything from Hank Snow to zen buddhism was grist to the mill. Contemporaries were amazed he could hear a song once and play it perfectly - and disgusted he could watch them once on stage and have their entire act, gestures, ad libs and all, off pat within minutes. I suspect a different iconography crept in once lawyers and PR folk got to work: caution governs any singer/songwriter talking about "influence" (you'll never heard Costello talk about what he owes Graham Parker), and a the stereotype of the "inspired artist" is much easier to market than an odd truth. So Dylan now "aapears" as this combination of Cecil Sharp and Davy Crockett - and is possibly tickled pink by the thought. But his real story isn't canonic at all - it's uniquely odd. He's a quiet boy from a midwestern Jewish family who wakes up one day and decides that what he'd *really* like to be is - well, Little Richard! A loudly dressed, ambisexual Afro-American in duck shoes and a pompadour, screaming at a piano. I'm sure there must be more radical personality shifts you can experience - but I can't think of them just now. What do we want from these lives? They touch our own desire to be "other," to transform ourselves into that half-remembered child's world where we were the centre of everything and future doubt was unknown - our desire to be exemplary. Fortunately for our sanity, most of us never get within sneezing distance of the real thing: take ego, add unlimited vodka, coke, and crystal meth, and - voila! Complete moral and physical collapse! | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Can't help seeing that dichotomy as key to their appeal. On the one hand, they represent the perfected, liberated modern self - following desire at a very instinctive level, without check or hindrance, and being rewarded by (what's perceived as) pure, acknowledged, creative self expression - on the other hand, dying young and horribly / going mad / etc, thus pointing out to us that we're actually quite sensible to not act like this. Not quite Dylan, but more generally - is the classic rock star icon the perfected consumer self? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
>Perfected ... I'd say so: it's always listened to, never denied. Artistically, this leads to fourth-rate music from musicians who ran through their talent years ago. Socially, it means the culture gives excessive elbow room to Geldof or Bono - and to those who ape their "presence," like Blair. But as these are all "consumerist" figures, their rhetoric and calls for "change" and "revolution" can never escape the quotation marks. It's a gesture from 40 years ago that once might have meant something, but which now carries only a ritual strength and assures an audience that, no matter what, the shops will still be open. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
*rushing around* Hmm, so Blair did make it as a rock star after all! | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
In His Dreams. I'm not sure which has been more nausaeating: a Prime Minister (that is, someone with an actual mandate and the means to effect change for millions of people) who openly admits he's "in awe" of Paul McCartney; a Prime Minister's university friend, Mark Ellen, editor of "Word" magazine, who conducted an interview with his "old mucker" after the Iraq invasion without ever once broaching any subject beyond the comfy confines of ancient Atomic Rooster gigs; or a Prime Minister whose apparent retreat into belief in his "achievements" exactly copies those dreams we had with an air guitar by the bedroom mirror, imagining we somehow "were" Ry Cooder or Tom Verlaine. But it's a crock of the bad stuff, and no mistake. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Tho' the rhetoric of change and revolution is interesting. While apparently - well - revolutionary, what it leads to is a constant recreation of the self - and therefore a constant need to buy new stuff to recreate the self (Bowie's reinventions as a map of a perfectly achieved consumer lifestyle?). In the context of a consumer world, stasis becomes a revolutionary act. Or alternatively - taking the sense of self from what we can't choose, not what we can choose. Or just plain anonymity. All anathema to Blair. Iraq as the perfect rock'n'roll revolution - an apocalyptic political freakout, the last long side of a double concept album about saving the world with your ego. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Bowie: well, exactly. "All of this - and it's all *ME*!!!" Iraq: that missing Merzbow mix of "Metal Machine Music." Anti-consumerism: well, there is this lot - http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/AmericanFamily/story?id= 127871&page=1 - but can that *really* be their family name ..? | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
>>>I thought that was how you made music in the first place. [ie by copying] I'd agree. That's how the imagination is originated: it comes through imitation. Originality needs a blueprint. Or an endless series of them. I think one can hear in Catcher in the Rye echoes of the Thirty Nine Steps. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Here we come to the great cataract, to the Niagra, to the grand finale of Postmodernism, so to say, open to the viewless eye for as far as it can see. Or it cannot see. The copy. The imitation. Nowhere does it end. However far back you go. However much you yearn to be alone, original, initial, final, special, alpha and omega, this catastrophic ordinariness: on it goes to infinity. It would be absurd to suppose that the poet borrows his lines direct from nature or that he could. Since he eats his supper in the most ordinary of surroundings why should his thinking or anything else be different? | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Why reinvent the wheel when you can hotwire someone else's car? | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Hmm - well, physically we're all versions of someone who came before, remixes of our parents, etc - all the way back to a rather ambitious amoeba several million years ago, then to the stars and dawn of time etc (insert sensawunda here) - not too much of a stretch to see consciousness and products of consciousness working in the same way... Oh and - difference between inspiration and outright theft (Syd Barrett getting riffs wrong to make Interstellar Overdrive vs Paul Simon's light fingers...) | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Al I can't see the difference there, unless you mean to imply that Simon's music isn't any good. Everyone needs models. Role models. We pick up language through imitation - I would presume. Speech is imitation. What is peculiar to the present - to the postmodern - is that the things we imitate are so obviously not 'originals'; but make believes. I spent I don't know how much enthusiasm as a child watching Lost in Space; The Time Tunnel; Land of the Giants; Star Trek; in some sense using them as the 'originals' to my life: as the identifying criteria of my life. I aspired to the Time tunnel. I wanted to go on adventures that entailed other worlds, and women in skirts. It was life Jim. So my mind took on board a mode of imitation that was completely unreproducable, so to say; and I knew it. I grew up knowing that I lived in a world that could not be imitated because it did not exist. That is a postmodern circumstance. Compare Hemingway for example. He grew up wanting to imitate Roosevelt's African Adventures; which is exactly what he was able to do. To originate himself in (plausibly) real life terms. Now you get writers with their heads full of spiderman; with infantilised mythic idiocies. Imitations of 'non-life' being, now, life. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>Lost in Space; The Time Tunnel; Land of the Giants; Star Trek As it happens, I remember in infant school I used to invent TV series, normally cheap imitations of existing ones and tell other children about them as if they were real. I think I'd even tell them what day they were on. I'm not sure why I did this, and this certainly wasn't some sort of postmodern parnk. But as far as I remember I was never contradicted by other kids. For the space of the conversation we must have wanted to believe that there was such a programme. >>inspiration and outright theft This is something that Billy Childish talks about. He believes that modern painters no longer learn by copying in the traditional way, and that this has impoverished the visual arts. Looking at the legacy of the New British Artists he might well be right. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
One could argue that the object is to know that one is imitating therefore and what one is imitating with as much precision as possible. Otherwise there is simply unconscious imitation. Something half-baked. I love that PKD story where - sometime in the future - these townspeople have machines able to reproduce objects, other machines, indefinitely, like photocopies. The ability to understand and advance technology has deserted them but still they have these 3D 'photocopy' machines to help them along. So when someone's fridge packs in they simply 'photocopy' a functioning one. No trouble. However, there is a fly in the ointment. (How could there not be?) It is that, like a photocopy itself, the reproduced object is not *quite* as the original; a certain amount of blurring takes place, a loss of detail. As with a photocopy, one loses the integrity of the original. And so these townsfolk have long since only had copies of copies of their machines. Cars that are copies of other copies of cars, with all the blurring that that entails. The gears no longer mesh so sweetly. The doors don't fit so well. The newly photocopied fridges have a tendency to pack in very quickly; the vegetables go bad quicker. The milk sours. You get the picture I think. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Hmm - MJP, you know the Interstellar Overdrive story? Syd Barrett was trying to pick out the 'Little Red Book' riff by Love (I think), couldn't quite remember it, fumbled it, fiddled around a bit, and came out with the IO riff. Paul Simon heard Martin Carthy's arrangement of Scarborough Fair, copied it, and credited it as his own, thus taking all kudos, royalties, etc. The one's creative; adding to, moving on from something that already exists. Continuing the great creative conversation. The other is theft; taking someone else's work, presenting it as your own, and reaping the fruits thereof. I'm surprised you see the two as indistinguishable. >> by copying in the traditional way, and that this has impoverished the visual arts I wonder if that comes from a crisis of subject (for painters) - long term on the one hand, ever since the removal of the traditional Renaissance / Post Renaissance patron structure, short term based on the fact the film, photography, etc do reproduction better. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>I wonder if that comes from a crisis of subject (for painters) - long term on the one hand, ever since the removal of the traditional Renaissance / Post Renaissance patron structure, short term based on the fact the film, photography, etc do reproduction better. In terms of painting: what Billy Childish was copying, in the particular instance where he made this statement, was the paintings of Van Gogh - an artist who was active on the eve of the industrial shift caused by photography, and also one who suffered from a lack of patronage. He's probably being willfully naive as ever, but I think he's also conflating this sort of process with the traditional rock guitarist learning curve - copying the riffs and postures from your heroes until they have been absorbed seamlessly into your own playing. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Al. Not that I am trying to defend Paul Simon, and not that I don't believe in copyright - but what is the difference between those two stories apart from the fumbling? They seem the same to me. But that's of peripheral interest anyway. The course of the argument here is that postmodernism - I love this topic - invests us in an art of inauthenticity; the reproduction, the copy, has equal weight with the 'original'. Because there is no original. What is the original of all those paintings? Is a Lichenstein original? Or a Warhol's Campell Soup print? What about the Campell's soup label artist? who he? The orginal designer! (Did he get copyright on that?) So it's kind of the polar opposite to Modernism, which is specifically about *being original*. (An original Picasso! Or Mondrian! Or Eileen Grey!) | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
>> the reproduction, the copy, has equal weight with the 'original' >> What about the Campell's soup label artist? Hmm. There's more to the Paul Simon theft than I thought... my metaphor for understanding it is - I write a short story. Someone reads it, it resonates with them, they write a response to it that takes its themes / narratives / characters in interesting new ways, personal to them, publishes it. Don't think I'd have a problem with that. Someone reads it, photocopies it, publishes it under their own name. I would have a problem with that - theft, as I see it. And yet. The Campbell's soup can... on one level, Warhol has *stolen* the design. On the other hand, visual arts have always had an element of copying the world into art (not that representation is in fact copying...) and creating something that is more enduring, more aesthetically pleasing than the original. Not so much copy equals copy - equal weight - rather representation improves. Was Andy copying or representing? I think he was representing... Going back to my obsessive Paul Simon gripe (why is he winding me up so much today?) - Syd re-presented, Paul copied. Tho' Paul's real crime wasn't the copying, come to think of it, but the passing off - 'this isn't a copy, it's my original...' How's that different from Andy? A screen print of a soup can is not a soup can... and Andy never pretended to be the graphic designer who designed the can ('this is a picture of my can'), he was always the artist representing the can ('this is my picture of the can') | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
True Al. But, Simon owns his voice doesn't he? Could anyone else sing the song like Art Garfunkel, achieving that Paul Simon harmony? I rest my case. The song suits them utterly. Question, painting: what the hell would Warhol do that for in the first place? | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
As Holden Caulfield (him again) might ask: The goddam design on a can of soup hardly cracks open the heavenly choirs now does it? It aint Paul Simon exactly is it? ;O) | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
This is the key difference between music, visual arts and literature. In music or painting, there's an element of performance or movement: whether that's colour, soundwaves, texture or whatever. This is what conceptual artists forget: it's not about ideas, it's physical. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
mjp - ho ho ho! Hmm... well, there's movement in words as well! And music in them. I'd say the interesting thing here is the performance. You don't perform a novel - and how can you do a cover version of a painting? There are less ways of creating an interpretation of the non-performing arts! Tho' art can be performed too! *melts down* Night all! | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>movement in words as well! And music in them. I'd say the interesting thing here is the performance. Indeed. And until the words get out of yr head and out there moving air or making shapes - I'm thinking of Japanese or Islamic calligraphy - they remain conceptual. I remember MJH complaining about Nova Swing that it didn't work as a book to read out loud. Compare with Liz's reading from Generation Loss, where it had become a performance. As ever, what I advocate is that we should spend as much time out of our heads as possible! | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
On the need for collective joy (interesting in the light of the icon-isation of stars as separate individuals who enact frenzy for us) http://www.counterpunch.org/gardner01272007.html "Why is there so little collective joy today? Why is our culture bereft of opportunity for this kind of thing? Mostly, we sit in cubicles at work and we sit in our cars. If you mention 'ecstasy' people think you're talking about a drug. The cure for loneliness and isolation and despair is Prozac... The simple answer is: the ancient tradition of festivities and ecstatic rituals was deliberately suppressed by elites -people in power who associated this kind of frolicking with the lower classes and especially with women...' A very interesting article! | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
>and especially with women ... Well: what are we waiting for ..? | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Well morris dancing sides are always looking for new members - the ladies love it! | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
Errr... This means: You got to figth ...for your rigth...to paaarty. Doesn´t it? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Two clips of very different troupes here in Oxford: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2YplTOOtEI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZjLATAUwao Alex, you're the expert: what do you think? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
And here's an apprentice Schrander man: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfCDN5B0BNI | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
>>Alex, you're the expert: what do you think? The first one is a border morris side - nice clothes, sloppy dancing. The second is a cotswold side (that's the tradition I dance), and not a particularly tight one. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Once I had a balloon. A red balloon. Not just any sort of balloon. No, it was friendly. It liked me. You could hold a conversation with it. Really. It's nice to be liked by something you like. It's even nicer to have a civilised conversation in those terms. The thing about it was, not only was it very intelligent, it was very informative. It was covered in this fine print. This fine writing that you could read which would say something like: You know what the sound of two hands clapping is. But what is the sound of one hand clapping? Very intriguing. But one day somebody decided it wasn't big enough. It need doubling in size or something. So they blew it up bigger - and bigger - and bigger!!! Now it's so damn big the words aren't legible anymore. And it isn't so friendly. That's the story of my red balloon. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Tell me something, MJP. Were you ever this small blonde French kid? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Io: I didn't know it was that kind of a forum ... *Moves over so burly plainclothesman can see screen* | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Originally I come from planet Xylopersophone. We used to travel the universe in what looked like old milk-crates but weren't. Then one day - sad to tell - some ants ate mine. I couldn't return. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>Originally I come from planet Xylopersophone. Is that in the Marimba Cluster? >>Io: I didn't know it was that kind of a forum ... That'll be the next thing: is your inner child safe online? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Onan the Librarian: our new, online helper for the younger KRMBer. *Shudders violently. Postpones lunch* | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
I think we've just experienced violent desalubrification. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Perhaps *this* will help you! *Waves half-empty bottle of oil, gift from family of V. Sprake (decd.)* They tell me it goes really well with green salads or bruschetta. Got to expose it to the right influences, though - http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~galran/Jeep/2002-10/Olive %20Oil%20&%20the%20Moon.JPG | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I have been re-reading all of Salinger. Just a quick peppering of thoughts, as usual. The defiant stance, the attitude of subversive anger, the interest in alternative religions and belief systems, the provisional but constant nihilism, the thinking about the bomb, it is all there back in his fifties Americana. Also the literate, the literary interest in fiction, in books, in poetry. Anyone who reads and likes Franny and Zooey is bound to be influenced by his reverent testimony to the reality of the imagination. He writes with a stunning precision about the most ordinary things. But it involves a kind of cultish self-indulgence. As with Dylan Thomas and the school of alcohol, or as with Hemingway, which is the same, the cult of cigarettes provides his basic guide. There is something precious about his imaginary and hopelessly precocious 'Glass' family but that is a flaw rather than a show stopper as they say. His skill is still amazing. This is useful as a sidelight on our culture of infantilised 'well-being'. Or however one wants to describe it. Everything one finds in Salinger one finds more or less in a pop group. Again and again the interest is in the moment before adulthood. In an adolescence prolonged to infinity. Or the interest is in finding the silence in the moment before belief. I would say that effectively this represents Salinger's wider interest in literature: that is, in the possibility of poetry: because that is the only exit from his nihilism and his need for epiphany. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
>> In an adolescence prolonged to infinity Hmm, haven't read much culture (and that many years ago) but I'd say that sums up much of modern life. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I wouldn't say that it is necessarily a bad thing, however, that a large part of our sense of purpose seems to come from such a prolonging. Oh boy oh boy. I still feel adolescent myself in some ways. Yeach!!! Like Benny in Top Cat. OK TC. (That strange feeling I get always that I missed the first episode.) OK TC here's the lowdown. The shock of the Second World War and its indication that - logically - culturally - what would follow from that, as in Hiroshima, would be nuclear war; would be the end. Isn't there an instinctive turning away from, a perpetual postponement of the adult model, because of that, a deferment. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Hmm, that's interesting - so an adolescent worldview sees maturity as self-destruction in a post-nuclear age? Also a very 60s sense - that hippy sense of aging as loss. 'Hope I die before I get old' etc. And of course the more immediate generational thing - those 60s folk all children of people for whom becoming adult = going to war. I wonder to what extent the 60s perpetual child adolescence thing was a confused reflection of a parental longing to not have grown up? | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
On which, check this out: 'the seeds of doubt you planted have started to grow wild and I feel that I must yield before the wisdom of a child' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kz9pEZEJps Interesting visual rhetoric of the video - oldsters re-energised, a breaking out from the signifiers of maturity... (and a song that rocks like a mutha) |