Essential Skills

A Film Is A Statement

2012-01-28T19:02:00.003Z

1. We must make political films.

2. We must make films politically.

32. To carry out 2 is to dare to know where one is, and where one has come from, to know one's place in the process of production in order then to change it.

The opening performance of Arika's recent weekend of film was by the Museum of Non-Participation and is probably best described as being immersed in a physical documentary. It noted simultaneously the audience’s active position and that audience's sort of belated insufficiency as actor. That is to say, the audience is never quite there. The work was arranged throughout a large studio space with numerous screens onto which separate images (both moving and still) were projected while the artists performed a pre-prepared text that alotted them each "parts" which they read in turn.

If it is true to say that the space of the work and the space of the audience were collapsed, with the latter contributing through its movement around the room, choosing which simultaneous projection to focus on, walking on the same level as the artists who mingled in and out of audience members while reading, then it is also true that through this very device an amplification of film's relation to distance was effected. At a basic level film shows you something, and by implication the thing being shown remains to some degree outside of, distinct from, oneself. Here, this distance was strangely augmented by pushing the audience toward a greater blend with the work. In so-doing, the work amplified an existing tension: a screen's manifestation of separation. This contradiction is present in the word "screen" itself: it is something onto which something can be projected and thus shown, but it can also screen off something, making it unable to be seen. The work manifested this tension even as images poured over and beyond the screens, and as different images projected on different screens at the same time, requiring an audience selection of priorities. In its attempts to disrupt that singular experience of one person watching one screen, it recalled it even more.

Space is clearly important. Is critical thought best served through immersion or through a clear demarcation of thinker and that-which-is-to-be-thought-about? In a way the work turned on this question, mentally pacing it out, embodying an ambivalent answer. At one point, the artists noted the discombobulating experience of watching a lawyers protest against Musharaf in Pakistan in 2007 from the white space of a contemporary art gallery. As a metaphor for the spatial dynamic the work itself was acting out, it was a simplified one. The work’s effectiveness came from its very complication – and making-extreme-of – that inside/outside binary.

Sound is equally important. That which came from the various projections and the artists' reading was akin to that of a documentary (the projections slightly quieter than the voices "over the top"), but a moment where the street sounds of a Pakistani protest triumphed over the shuffling of audience feet and murmur marked a point of intense immersion. It resembled a piece by Chris DeLaurenti, performed at Instal in November 2010, N30: Live at the WTO, which turned the pitchblack gigantic space of Glasgow's Tramway 1 into a simultaneously aural memorial and re-enactment of the World Trade Organization protests of 1999. It was beautiful, angering and above all deeply moving.

So far I've focused on the audience watching. In “The Tracking Shot in Kapo,” Serge Daney describes Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour as ‘“things” that have watched me more than I have seen them.’ A text pointed to by Arika as a point of departure for the weekend, in this context it asks: What are the variations of non-participation? We can not participate in an oppressive society. Either by sheer refusal or by active participation in oppositional organization. We can not participate in the struggles of resistance (of the forming of oppositional organization). Either because of doubts and fears, or by compromise, by the complications that make binaries problems in the first place. Daney’s switch gives it another meaning: accusative, it demands a reason for one’s actions, for participation or non-participation. It is a demand for active thought.

What is true about the Museum of Non-Participation is that the audience participates in its work. But what is that work? It seems to be the manifestation of an argument (like the film Argument, shown on Saturday): complications and complexity exist (in the pouring, the multiplicity, the simultaneity of images), but binaries (choice) will continue to exist. How does one remain faithful to both of those realities?

But I haven't put this quite right. It aligns the inescapable boundary the screen creates with the choice of one-or-the-other. It aligns the inescapable complexity of the world with an overflowing of images. The problem is this: that boundary stops action, whereas the choice of one-or-the-other creates action: one chooses and one follows that choice. With the boundary one never has to choose because one is always stuck this side of it. What would be better to say would be that somehow the immersion – through the overflowing of images, the simultaneity of them – demands a choice. Perhaps the immersive tendencies of this Museum are a way of dragging one in off the fence, and the abrupt meeting with the screen a metaphor for the accusative demand. Through immersion one is being dragged into the struggle (one of art, of politics, and art-and-politics) and one's position then has to be defended, thought about.

Lutz Becker's film Kino Beleske (Film Notes), screened immediately after The Museum of Non-Participation, was a document of the Student's Cultural Centre in Belgrade in 1975. Throughout, various members speak pieces to camera which reminded me a lot of La Chinoise, which surely figured somewhere in the weekend's thinking if not Becker's. At one point a Serbian student appears wearing sunglasses covered in tin foil, echoing Jean-Pierre Léaud's nationalist glasses in Godard's 1967 film.

During these pieces to camera one hears the cars, horns, wind on the streets outside which continued being streets as the artists spoke. It seemed to me that the effect of this - desired or otherwise - was to dramatize the same question of the position of critique that the Museum of Non-Participation did. (What does it mean to participate? What is one participating in? Is non-participation a form of participation in another activity? Is there such a thing as not doing anything?) What was the relation of these students now speaking to camera and those streets we can hear? Watching the film over thirty years later, the students' relation is more that to contemporary art (especially given the appearance of artists that would go on to make big names for themselves) than their immediate surroundings. There is a risk that those streets get lost in a dialogue that focuses on career patterns or the amused comment of a friend seeing a younger incarnation of a newer acquaintance. The film's soundtrack kept that risk from being trampled, and forced one to consider one's position in relation to the film, the film's in relation to the audience, the situation of us watching it to the film's history, to art and political history, to ongoing narratives.

Chto Delat?'s songspiels understood position as movement. In “What Does It Mean To Make Films Politically?” one of the group’s members, Dimitry Vilensky, writes: “political cinema is a multi-layered composition that combines emotional effects and total intellectual analysis. Paradoxically, we must learn to touch the viewer’s heart without entertaining him.” Needless to say, the entertainment evoked here is the particularly seductive kind of Hollywood and mass culture.

In a phone-call to the audience before the screening, though, Dimitry talked about wanting the work to be entertaining. What could he have meant? I think he meant it to be mobile: their films are available on their website and Dimitry talked about them being screened in different countries and contexts. Certainly the form - though recognizably Brechtian, with a particular history - is not too far removed from certain popular entertainments. The closest thing in a British context might be music hall, except with the politics evacuated and replaced with a certain type of cynical bawdiness. (As I began writing this, in fact, I noticed a review of a new musical called Big Society).

Discussions of avant-garde artistic practice are understandably wary of terms like "entertainment" and "popularity", but I do think it is an important question to ask. How does avant-garde art understand its relation to mass culture? Godard's "What Is To Be Done?" is useful here. To make political films or to make films politically represent two understandings of this relation. Godard is explicit about this: one represents a certain - yet limited - step forward; the second represents a deeper commitment.

This isn't about co-option but ambush. Surprisingly enough, given assumptions of the historical avant-garde's contemporary uselessness, the form of the songspiel Chto Delat? use creates a new twist on artistic history: it inaugurates a direct link between contemporary art and its antecedents that is a link of continuation and development (a positive tradition) rather than nostalgia-tinged analyses.

Yet there is also something less direct about this mobility, and it points to an interesting idea: that often politcally active art achieves results by circuitous routes, by accident rather than as a direct answer to the question What Is To Be Done? In this alternative understanding of effect, art can use surprise (ambush) as a tactic, but only really if it is unaware of doing so. We wait years for revolution and then numerous ones pop up in countries we'd never have expected (although perhaps we weren't looking closely enough).

A letter to Rebecca Solnit about following in footsteps, unwittingly

2011-08-10T19:58:00.013+01:00

Dear Rebecca,

I'm not quite sure whether to apologise for writing. It feels vaguely, generically risky, as if I'm crossing a line I don't know about but everyone else is watching in horror as I stride obliviously over it.

I am writing because I am having one of those extended epiphanic periods of discovery with a writer, where you read book after book, interview after interview, out of sheer excitement, and at some point you actually feel your understanding of the world shifting a little, widening out, dots meeting with other dots, everything becoming clearer yet also simultaneously - and frustratingly - cloudier: do I have so much still to learn? This writer, if you haven't guessed, is you, the books and interviews yours, and I'm writing because it felt natural to express this experience one way or another. Strange though to think that this letter is one that will be read by more than one person but the single person to whom it's addressed may never read it.

I had been meaning to read your work for quite a while. I started with A Field Guide To Getting Lost, which I started in July this year. I loved it, read it quickly, and moved on toSavage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, which I thought equally remarkable. Somewhere between finishing the former and starting the latter, I finally confirmed that I was going to be returning to San Francisco for the first time since 2008, this time for my friend Tobias's wedding. It had been stressful, and worrying, and saddening, thinking I couldn't go (Tobias had asked me to be one of his groomsmen), and a weight lifted, and all the mentions of that great city in your work became less abstract, less faraway fairytale and more a place that had direct relevance to me.

I have to confess, though, that once I arrived in San Francisco, I hardly read your book. I was only 100 pages or so from the end of Savage Dreams, and looking forward to starting Wanderlust: A History of Walking (I love that heavily emphasised "a", so importantly destabilising), but the city took over, and I hardly read a word - of anything - for 10 days. Reading suddenly seemed neglectful of this place, this glinting, grimy peninsula right there outside our window. Maybe travelling is less a time for contemplation than wholesale immersion; I continued writing in my journal for the first few days, then slumped into writing bullet-pointed lists of the main events and stops of the day, then stopped even that.

I did buy your Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas in City Lights. Carrying it around for a day before getting home, I wondered about using it literally, taking out the maps and following the routes, reading the essays whilst walking. But the book seems less direct than that. The "infinite" does it: the variations, the endless reconceptualisations of a city are dreams of a place that only half exists, the rest made from the tumbling process of linking experience and imagination and history to that first half, the firm sediments of streets, buildings, and people.

Perhaps I lied a bit about not reading, but your atlas was the only thing I spent any real reading time with, reading late in the evenings, sitting with the window open and hearing the nightly shouts and laughs and sirens of the Tenderloin. This worked just as well, the small essays about a neighbourhood we'd either been to that day or the day before, or were planning on going to the next, seeping into my knowledge of those places, adding and layering and complicating the city. (It's hard to write about it with the right amount of distance, now, back in Glasgow, on a day of rain. That city? This city? The city? Is the distance psychological or geographical? Miles and hours don't seem enough to describe the distance, both nearer than them and much farther). I read about the gangs of the Mission, realised I'd walked through the site of a murder, oblivious, searching for ice cream. I read about Muybridge and Hitchcock's own weaving footsteps, 50 years apart, knowing about the latter but nothing about the former, save his famous pictures. Your unlayering of the complicated politics of Civic Center and UN Plaza: the UN formed there?! Really? And the right-wing intelligentsia stationed in think tanks and laboratories surrounding the city, the wider Bay Area turned into a pincer clutching liberal San Fran with its "real America" hawkism.

***

Returning from my own wanderings, I finally started Wanderlust. In it, you write about the connection between walking and writing:

"Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before, and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there."

Reading your words whilst walking in your city, these two practices, similar but separate, merged in a complicated way: reading your words allowed me to trace on a road your absent footsteps. Although it wasn't about you, really; not then, anyway. It was about the city and its history, and we were just two of the millions of human beings that have been part of that history, however small our roles. My relationship was not with you but with the city, just as yours was not with me but with the city. We were two people brought into connection by the city, and the revelation at first was that it was possible for two people to have similar reactions to a place. It was like that moment where you realise that a piece of music you have had such an intimate relationship with that it seems it exists only for you actually exists for the rest of the world too, and people have entirely differently intimate relationships with it, but also, sometimes, have almost exactly the same intimate relationship with it.

I'm not sure that's very clear. I'm struggling to pinpoint the angles of the relationship. What I'm trying to say is that I walked around your city, and halfway through that wandering I bought and read some of your words, which then influenced how I experienced and interpreted that city. So perhaps they could have been anyone's words, any words. I could have read a straight history of San Francisco and had a similar, albeit slightly different, experience. I would have been subject to another interpretation of the city, with all the prejudices, interests, and political biases that involves. But the point is I did read your words, not someone else's.

***

But there was a point, only when I got home, only when I was looking at the photographs I had taken of the city and I was separated from the immersive visual experience of it, that I fully realised what was happening. Somewhere and sometime the relationship changed; when I paused my reading of Savage Dreams because of the overwhelming "being-right-there" of the city itself, I changed the dynamic from one of conscious knowledge of your footsteps to total ignorance. My connection to you was cut off, because I stopped reading your words.

On the torturously long flight over, when I was too tired to read your book and it sat in my lap like some sort of totem, we passed over the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and past Elko and Winnemucca in Nevada, almost over Yosemite, the places you explore in Savage Dreams. I knew what the Salt Flats were because of your book! But that's when it stopped. For the next ten days, your influence fluttered and crackled like a radio, but the signal was never direct. It's true we went to the Tenderloin National Forest because of what you write about it in Infinite City, "a lush refuge in a rough neighbourhood":

But I had no idea I was unwittingly following in your footsteps when I went to the same bar you write about in Wanderlust:

"I had a date to meet some friends for drinks at the famously kitschy old mock-Polynesian bar the Tonga Room in the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill."

Here is my film of the band on the boat on the pool in the bar:

Nor indeed when I wandered around the Grace Cathedral and watched two elderly Chinese ladies exercising by the labyrinth:

"In pale and dark cement it repeated the same pattern made of stone in Chartres Cathedral: eleven concentric circles divided into quadrants through which the path winds until it ends at the six-petaled flower of the center."

You can just see a bit of the labyrinth at the bottom of the photo I think.

And I had somehow missed all these places you write about in Infinite City, like Dolores Park, where we dozed before going to see a terrible film at the Roxie Theater (which you note in your sad map of the demise of local movie theaters):

Three years after I first tried going (we were too late; it was closed) I saw the graveyard of the Mission Dolores. I knew I was following in Hitchcock's, Kim Novak's and James Stewart's footsteps, but not yours:

So many of "the forty-nine jewels of San Francisco" you've wandered before us. The Women's Building, which we went to in 2008:

This year the murals we saw were in Clarion Alley, your "carnival of visions":

The "fairytale palace" Conservatory of Flowers, where we went for a reading and watched an exotic beetle on the floor:

The Castro Theatre, in the midst of the Jewish Film Festival:

And in the atlas you too go to Sugar Café, Dottie's True Blue Café, Mission Pie, Four Barrel...

***

And then somewhere it flipped; I was no longer following you, you were following me.

When we arrived home, exhausted from the 13 hour flight and a 6 hour train journey from London, slumping onto the sofa, in front of me on the coffee table was a book entitled English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, by one J.J. Jusserand, the same book and author I presume that Christopher Morley is referring to in the section you quote in Wanderlust:

"We know from Ambassador Jussurand's famous book how many wayfarers were abroad on the roads in the Fourteenth Century..."

My first weekend back at work in Kelvingrove Art Gallery, I served an American lady who when she turned away from the counter was revealed to be wearing a black backpack with a Sierra Club badge on it, the same name of the club that you write about in Savage Dreams, one of America's oldest environmental groups, founded by John Muir, who was born in Scotland.

***

I've had to slow down my reading of Wanderlust because I am wandering again in a few weeks time, this time less aimlessly, to Antwerp to give a paper at a conference. I will be talking about abiding, and David Foster Wallace, and American politics, and I suspect you will pop up in there somewhere, a now-abiding presence in my life and whose political activity and its relationship to your wonderful writing I have hardly touched on here, if only because it poses so many questions I will have to think about it for a long time before I write anything about it.

I am happy that you are a prolific writer, that I not only have lots more of your books to read but that I will probably read them again and again for their beautiful complexity and acute, intuitive understanding of one's relationship to place, literature and history.

Your ongoing reader,

Mark

Best San Francisco

2011-08-10T19:52:00.003+01:00

(photo Eric Fischer)

Best book-browsing - the two hours spent in City Lights, wandering from one shelf to another, wonderfully overwhelmed by the selection (mentally cursing Glasgow's lack of equivalent) and sitting down on a wooden chair reminiscent of my family home's dining chairs, next to painted placards demanding change, and reading a momentary discovery, Roland Barthes' "What Is Sport?" a text for a documentary for Canadian TV by Hubert Aquin (apparently unavailable online) printed with incongruous images of English and European football from roughly 2007, including Brad Friedel saving a shot for Aston Villa, and a Chelsea and Valencia player going up for a header. Turning a corner to find Lil struggling under a weight of ten or so books, unable to choose which ones to get.

Best communal breakfast - America is supposed to be individualistic, and dinner is supposed to be the meal you go out for. At Brenda's, at 8am, it was packed with people eating amazing breakfasts and chatting to each other and the waiters and chefs. There were queues to get in at both Dottie's and then Brenda's. People wanting to get out and about early on a weekday morning.

Best intense emotion - the sheer joy at hanging out with Tobias, Dain and Neil again, all of us together in one place for the first time in seven years; the ridiculousness of that - why hadn't we done it earlier?! - but also the beautiful fact of it being halfway across the world, how we'd not managed to meet up in London all those years but had somehow managed to congregate in a magical city for a special event. Being able to remember publicly the great times we had making films and to say how happy I was to be here, in this moment, celebrating with Tobias and Tu.

Best oasis - the Tenderloin National Forest, discovered in reading City Lights-bought Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, and just around the corner from where we were staying. Set up in part by the Luggage Store Gallery (whose premises on Market Street we failed to find in 2008 and forgot to search again for this time), it exists in a small alley on Ellis Street, opposite the Glide Memorial Church (where tourists can see gospel on a Sunday morning, providing they queue early to avoid sitting in an annex and watching it on TV), and is experienced as a genuine oasis of calm and contemplative peace in the dark chaos of the Tenderloin. Ellis has a particularly large population of homeless people and drug addicts, who by day gather at corners and the entrances to convenience stores, and by night lie curled up in piles of blankets along the sidewalks up against buildings and fences. Mornings, they congregate outside Glide. There is an occasional local support worker there talking to them.

The Forest is made up of a gravel path around the edge of a garden of mixed plants and trees; there are big leafed bushes and small succulents, and there are two human-made ponds, one constructed from an old bathtub that is home to orange fish. Halfway down, under the shade of a large tree, is a small seating area. An old man with a white beard was sat there quietly when we passed, and we nodded and said "good morning".

Best use of stereotypical American phrase - the guy on the BART station wearing a SF 49ers cap and jacket, talking to his wife who may have been blind (she held a non-white stick out in front of her to guide her) who was also wearing a 49ers cap and jacket, though of a different design, who asked her to "quit busting my chops".

Best overheard mobile phone conversation - on the Muni 71 back from the Quiet Lightning reading in Golden Gate Park, a guy got on already talking on the phone. He had two long plaits of hair either side of his head that met behind to form a ponytail, and wore three or four bead necklaces that reached to his abdomen. He sat a few rows back from us, and talked loudly to a friend about a girl who "has not done anything to change my view of her character", as well as a guy they both know, though vaguely, who had been a keynote speaker at a conference at SF State, a conference at which the bus-rider had also been speaking on a panel, this mutual friend being someone "that works with the young brothers real close" at schools and I think youth clubs, someone who has realised that "that's how close" you've got to work with them: daily, in their own environment.

Best epiphany that everyone probably had ages ago - American fashion is America having a conversation with itself, mainly about subcultural groups and to a lesser extent class. This is made more clear on returning to the UK where the class element dominates. The (white) (middle-class?) youth of the US wear far more classic Western wear (those shirts with curved pockets, popper buttons, flanel and wool shirts, gimme gaps, even Levi's) than in the UK, where the current fashion, from Topshop/man right down to vintage stores and small manufacturers seems to be a convoluted, arch, raised eyebrow and above all IRONIC conversation about the UK class system; all this stuff that one way or another always seems to reference Brideshead Revisited, deck shoes, Oxford shirts, Panama hats; the very British confliction in regard to the aristocrats - revulsion/attraction. How Burberry has become a working class label. America's dominant styles are conversations between different subcultural groups, and of course far more about race, too; thin white middle-class hipsters (both male and female) referencing the hyper-masculinity of cowboys.

San Francisco Images

2011-08-05T18:59:00.004+01:00

I got back 6 or so films from SF. Click on the photos below to be plunged into the middle of the rest.

San Francisco Notes: Images from Here

2011-07-26T06:27:00.038+01:00

From Delta airlines inflight magazine, on the Triangle region of North Carolina:

"located strategically in the center of the triangle ... the 7000 park is home to more than 170 of the most influential, avant-garde companies on the globe"

"this is a region whose most important industry is higher education"

"applied science of engineering, textiles and agriculture - areas that generate the intellecutal property and human capital of the Triangle"

"the nation's first university-operated nuclear reactor"

"seven nationally renowned community colleges that are each in tune with what existing and emerging industries need in order to assist the area's ever-upward growth"

"we're ... helping to build that next generation of students who will fill jobs and also be in an entrepreneurial position to create new ones"

Overheard at JFK, one uniformed worker to another: "if only we can make it as friendly as Terminal 3."

Overseen at JFK, on a TV news screen: "Polygamist prophet set to stand trial."

Walking westward along O'Farrell, a group of five or six people in ragged clothes that have broken down from specific colours to a general street-dirt-grey, slumped outside a grocery store. Very hard to see where their heads are and other body parts, they seem to sink into their clothes. One clear image - a hunched figure, all layers of battered fabric, extending out from this material a muddied hand. Another: a row of people sat on upturned milk crates, propped up against convenience store walls.

Images: big cars that are more like minibuses than cars, with tinted windows, arms at the wheel the only sight of the driver; the area's ambient noise, shouts and cries and zooming cars and the eerie human-ish wailing of emergency sirens, sub-woofing bass; the shopping trolleys piled high with a person's life; the shopping trolleys full of Coke cans scavenged from bins up and down Market, going to the reclaimer for 6cents a can; the guy below our kitchen window with a brown paper grocery bag full of shoes.

All this two or three blocks from the tourist area and the Marriots and Hiltons. This appears inevitable; appears as a geographical bad conscience - America's attempt to hide the underbelly always a failure, it sticks to commerce and cheery positivity. Even the addicts and madmen wandering the streets here appear cheerful.

More images: a thin white man in pajama bottoms, shoes and dressing gown stops halfway across a busy street to laugh and point and chat to a skyscraper; a man sits on a fold-out stool outside a convenience store - he's homeless but you get the impression this is his regular spot - cheerily shooting the breeze with fellow street-dwellers. This morning a queue down a block - a church? soup kitchen? - waits patiently. A policeman who seems to be patrolling the line chats amiably to the beggars who gather round the fire hydrant on the street corner.

An indie-mart at punk venue Thee Parkside, Potrero Hill. Small crafts, lots of paper goods, jewellery, most of it referencing one way or another ideas of Native American patterns. Loads of small, independent and entrepreneurial enterprises, especially food - a guy hand-making pizzas, Angry Man Eats, Kung Fu Taco.

The vivid cultural mix of the Mission; Mexican and white hipster. Mission Street bilingual, Spanish dominating over small-lettered English. Other streets full of a youth that reminds me of the extended interviews in the Woodstock film, a mix of innocent traditionalism and rebellion, earnest and honest even when striking a pose. That particular interview with a kid with blonde hair and his girlfriend, sitting on a road-side verge, him talking about his immigrant father, how he had wanted to make something of himself and so doesn't see why his son would give up all that, the son saying he is trying to do the same as his father but in his own way.

6:44 in:

and into:

I always see American youth through this interview. The kids here, in cut-off jeans, careening round on bikes, talking languidly. A girl saying over and over "motherfucker" and managing to create layers of meaning in the repetition of one word: as inclusive gang, jokely as fellow reprobates, as lovers of beer (available in- and out-side), bands starting at 2pm.

I've always been attracted to what gets called the American "can-do" attitude: replying "yes" far more than "no". Taking things where you can, because life is harder (more risky). Wandering around this city, even this city, the streets are a far more conflicted place than in the UK. Rougher, yes, but more at stake, too - you have to work harder to get something, but what you get will mean more. Less complacent. "Closer to the bone". More rooted; if the streets are up for grabs, it's because there's something worth fighting for.

At 24th/Mission, at the BART, on a crossroads, street preachers with megaphones shouting in Spanish about God. One guy without a megaphone walking a line of meek-looking street-dirt-grey attired men ranged along a flowerbed, enunciating a passage from the Bible.

At 16th/Mission, at the BART, on a crossroads, an intimidatingly large number of homeless people sit around on the mural-ed bollards. The atmosphere feels extra-tense and there is shouting weaved into the ambient noise. It is unclear where the shouting is coming from.

Before coming home, a detour down an alley with hundreds of painted murals, all shouting positive accolades of the human spirit and aiming fire at the true culprits: "Capitalism Is Over! If You Want It".

Any Help.

Two times in one day this appeared scrawled on a piece of cardboard. The first, an old guy with a grey beard and a happy face under a SF baseball cap, wearing a black leather jacket in the sun, propped up on a medical crutch and taped to the crutch the sign. Us, walking down from City Lights clutching a logo-ed brown paper bag holding books and postcards, talking enthusiastically about plans for activist and literary activities. Any help. The man's face seemed different to others asking for money - if possible more melancholy, with a bemusement at his predicament that made even sadder than the others that seemed so resigned, already so sad. We walked past and stopped and went back and gave him money. He asked: "Can I help you find anything?" and pointed us toward SFMOMA. Any help. After giving us directions ("see that jukebox-shaped building?") he said in a voice it was impossible to tell whether it was sarcastic or not: "it's not like I know this place or anything".

The second time, walking home from a burrito and a beer in a Mission taqueria. It was dark and busy somewhere near Cyril Magnin and O'Farrell, lots of people, tourists and not, and a figure slumped at the intersection, nearly on the road, in some sort of bright hooded top with blothes on it as part of the design. The hood was up over the figure's head which was slumped onto their chest. A small figure but difficult to really tell how old they were or whether they were a man or a woman. Against his or her legs the cardboard sign. Any help more desperate and plaintive, a last gasp: ANY help. The sign seemed to speak instead of its author.

A street on, under the squared-off arches of a Hilton, a group: a young man with a suitcase on wheels, piled high with bits and bobs and a variety of crudely self-laminated begging signs. He had a guitar case on his back. He was talking enthusiastically to a man playing a steel drum, who had on his face a look of resigned pride, as if to say to the world: "you think I'm begging, but I'm serious. This is art." He didn't seem like he wanted to be associated with the others in the group milling around.

Two abortive trips to Gertrude Stein-related exhibitions due to prohibitive prices: $18 for the SFMOMA, $11 for the Contemporary Jewish Museum.

I am woken up in the middle of the night by the surprise sound of an amplified guitar out on the street below our window. The morning after, walking toward Powell BART station, what I presume to be the same guitarist appears, an amp cord extending from the guitar around his body and into a small bag on his back, where the amp is. He's still playing.

UC Berkeley, long-time bastion (in my head) of a progressive university culture, the FSM, that great speech by Mario Savio in 1964:

It turns out to be a pale, pathetic shadow of that, somewhere between the country club/golf course-style landscape of the grounds and an upmarket 18-30 vibe of the surrounding streets. We wandered up past the clock tower, past a building with BOTANY engraved on one tower and ZOOLOGY on another. Real-life students scurried past, all wearing blue and yellow Cal-wear, under black-and-white banners featuring their smiling photographed likenesses and inanely positive quotes about university life. One in particular: "Happiness! Opportunities! Critical Thinking! Research!" followed by the obligatory reference to the football team: "Go Bears!" On the campus periphery the shops and bars form what appears as a theme park for the "college experience", a town entirely devoted to the commerce of education. All communication seems to occur in banners, always the next event, always a cheery special offer.

On the BART back from Berkeley, a girl in front of us who completed a Rubics Cube twice in rapid succession between stops.

At a McSweeneys book launch at The Make-Out Room, we took the last two seats opposite friends Aimee and Bernardo, who we began chatting to, and when she had to leave Aimee invited us to a barbeque she and her husband are holding this weekend.

Talking to the guys from Apple who work with the guys from McSweeneys about what can a book do. Lil meeting Greg, the guy who has ran the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation for the last five years, and being able to tell him how reading What Is The What? inspired her to start working for refugees.

Russell telling me that Jonathan Richman lives in San Francisco, wanders around the Mission, and has been seen doing paintings of houses, using an easel propped up in the middle of the street, resting on one knee as he paints.

Russell pointing at a double-decker luxury coach and telling us about Google, Yahoo, Apple etc ferrying their employees to-and-from work in these coaches that have food and wifi, and travel specific routes separately from public transport, a whole network of routes not marked on public maps.

A guy on O'Farrell falling into step with us, a big grin on his face, asking us "What's the greatest nation on earth?" Our hesitant reply: "I don't know." "I'll tell you what it is, cause you're gonna need this," he says, half raising his arms to the heavens. "It's the do-nation." He asks us where we're from, and on hearing Scotland asks us whether 'Danny Boy' was written there rather than in Ireland, because he's heard that. Then he starts singing it, in a wonderful deep resonant voice. As we reach the corner, I find a dollar and he smiles again, telling us how happy he was that we laughed at the "do-nation" joke. Our smiles make him smile. He starts off down the street, but stops, and asks us what the greatest city is: "Genero-sity" comes the answer.

Waiting to go into a bar on the corner of O'Farrell and Jones, a woman appears. Her teeth are what strike me most; they are broken and split off at different angles. She starts singing "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" and we mill around, feeling many levels of uncomfort. She kneels to ask for a dollar, saying "but I tried to make you happy". It is only a few hours later that this hits me; and when it does it really does HIT: in the incongruous atmosphere of a club on a Friday night, remembering this woman trying to make us happy.

A Sunday in Mill Valley. Sitting on the back deck of a French-styled cafe, wearing tuxedos without the jackets, me and two old friends collaborate on our speeches for our friend's wedding. The light filtered through the trees is mottled and creates ornate shadows. In front of us are sandwiches with fries, pushed aside to make way for paper and pens. Sitting here, elbows on the table, hands in the air, thinking, watching the others write, feeling a wonderful sense of camaraderie that comes from us all being together for the first time in seven years, us trying to express our love for our friend, it feels (embarassingly enough) like one of those scenes from The West Wing where Leo gets the staff together for a working breakfast, or those times at "Campaign Camp" where they play basketball in between making policy.

Driving back at night, in a bus full of wedding guests and the groom, through Marin County and over the Golden Gate Bridge, the city and the bay and the bridges all lit up, constellations in the dark. Lil remarking on the 30s-style design of the GGBridge, it's almost like time-travel.

In Powell BART, a man with a beard and a gravelly voice singing with a guitar who is surprisingly good, stopping midsong for a spoken word section: "What year is it? What week? What day is it? Not a relevant question. They're all the same" before going straight back into the song.

A woman at a bus stop on Haight, near the park, walking up and down shouting, first something about the tenth anniversary of 9/11, then "shut the fuck up".

At the entrance to Golden Gate Park, early evening, under a tree a group of homeless men gathering for what looks like a discussion, sat in a circle with one guy speaking earnestly in the middle. Yards away, more homeless people on their own. One guy has lain out blankets like a picnic, and has a radio tuned to a local station that blares out ads.

Watching an exotic beetle on the floor of the Conservatory of Flowers, feelers feeling spilt beer on the floor as readers read into a microphone at a Quiet Lightning night. It is only a matter of time until the beetle gets trodden on. Feet miss him, and then when our eyes are turned he gets flipped upside down and chopped in half by an errant booted foot. We look up in horror, and meet eyes with a girl who shares our morbid amusement - the funniness of sharing apparently over-sentimental emotion.

Walking home, coming face to face with a raccoon.

SFO ads:

"Who will you trust to secure the private cloud?"

"Sorry. No dog. No pony."

Being Abroad

2011-07-24T04:02:00.002+01:00

My friends Lucy and Russell's project Being Abroad, with lovely sketchbooks and essays, including one by me, is up online now.

It's very strange to read writing from 4 years ago, about an experience 2 years before that. Separate, enclosed, unrelated moments strung together.

The Blue of Distance: More Thoughts On, And From, Rihanna; on Teenagers, The Smashing Pumpkins, Rebecca Solnit, Proust; as a Tribute to a Friend

2011-07-08T13:36:00.030+01:00

A few years ago, in the early hours of a weekday morning, I walked through the Hyndland area of Glasgow with a friend after an evening of drinking and talking. Past town houses and terraces mostly dark and sleepy, he spoke about wanderlust and the desire for a life of drama.

My friend was restless and talking about moving away. He worried about having nothing to complain about, about a lack of drama in his life. He was finding contentment difficult to deal with; to him it was a threat to life's potential for excitement.

My nostalgia for my teens began almost immediately after they ended, and lasted for most of my undergraduate degree. Despite conscious relief at the closing of certain dark chapters, the heightened sense of being alive that such dramas - however contrived - bring is one never entirely forgotten. It becomes a template of sorts, and it takes time to shake off.

The process through which it is, eventually, shaken off - cautious and occasionally abortive explorations of new people, a new city, new art - is a combination as heady as it is intimidating, and it is unsurprising that a certain amount of uncertainty results; a confused fluttering between known dullness and unknown futures.

I learnt self-indulgent self-created/ing drama through the sentimental emotional wraught-ness of sitcoms and teenshows, not to mention certain bands and books. I wrote my A Level English paper on Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar and compared those books to my happy life. It was the perfect age to read them: 17 and happy, acting unhappy.

This video a perfect audio-visual instantiation of what I'm talking about:

It's part of growing up. Something excruciating yet necessary.

You stretch beyond yourself to give that self room; some bits go back to where they were, others remain extended. Some lead to new places.

But its exhausting. It artificially heightens everything to an emotional pitch that is unsustainable. By making every misunderstanding or miscommunication a cause of intense internal wrangling, it adds to the very confusion it is part of; you're never quite sure what is you feeling something and what is the public "you" feeling.

(That late capitalist complaint: valorising emotion whilst simultaneously distancing us from it.)

Nostalgia isn't simply a longing for the past. It is a longing for the recreation of the past in the present. In a sense it is fiction-making - world-creating - though a creation that always falls short, and which leads to nostalgia's frustration at its limited powers. It becomes a desire for recreation and a desire for greater powers of recreation.

The temporal span of "What's My Name?" is uncertain. Is the meeting in the store at the start of the video their first meeting? Are the blue scenes in the bedroom later in their relationship? If so, why the mournful, submerged, and nostalgic synth strings that play throughout? Because they suggest a gap in time between the tale and the telling. Is the entirety of the video set in the past then, with two time periods - the first meeting and the height of their intimacy? In this case, the synths might speak to this same nostalgia and desire for nostalgia. The video wants to recreate not just the perfection of intimacy but the excitement - the drama - of the first meeting.

I’ve been reading Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide To Getting Lost. In it, she writes:

"Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgeting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss."

Her book is interwoven with chapters entitled “The Blue of Distance”:

"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost ... For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains ... Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in ... "

"Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away."

My friend is moving away today. Less from wanderlust, though, and more for love.

Tom is re-reading Proust this summer, and as I stretched out on the sofa reading Solnit's book and he sat in the yellow chair by the open window, a breeze (which we looked up the scientific definition of: "where does it come from?") rustling what I call my nephew's Dadaist type-writer poems pinned up on the wall, he read out one of Marcel's frequent aphorisms: "It was not for the first time that I felt that those who love and those who enjoy are not always the same."

Marcel thinks the drama of love is incompatible with enjoyment. That love's emotional turmoil doesn't allow for enjoyment.

Perhaps he writes about it elsewhere - he seems to cover everything else - but here he misses out this: those who enjoy the lack of enjoyment (ie: drama) that love brings. Though it soon becomes less enjoyment than addiction.

A possible reading of Proust: a story about addiction to drama.

Doesn't Marcel at every turn create drama rather than resolve it?

Drama with its literary and theatrical overtones. Addiction to drama also being an addiction to telling the drama's story.

In Search of Lost Time's cyclical structure: the story of how Marcel becomes a writer.

Personal contentment vs public discontent. Personal contentment can be a bulwark, a safe place, a created world where everything is perfect; from which to escape the world with which one is so discontent, but also, neccessarily, to fortify oneself against it, to refuel for the fight, to nurse one's righteous anger.

&

I will miss my friend, but I am happy for the reason he is leaving.

Blue and Orange: Notes On Colour in Rihanna's "What's My Name?" Video, Hollywood, British Playwrights, Tintin, Paul Eluard, Heraldry, and New York

2011-07-07T10:40:00.027+01:00

Two colours dominate this video.

The blues and oranges. Look how the blue lines on his jumper match the blue line of her shorts. The red on his jumper and the reddy-orange of the milk carton. Her slightly-clashing but dominant orange nails. The nails throughout shift between blue and orange.

Two-thirds of the way through this colour scheme spreads out from distinct items and takes over the entire video:

It's tempting to see these colours as public/private. The juxtaposition of the public sexuality that Rihanna performs in orange with the unexpectedly genuine-seeming intimacy between her and Drake in the blue scenes.

Orange is for outside, public, performance. Blue is for inside, private, the home.

I am genuinely surprised at how touched I am by the smiles Rihanna and Drake share in the blue scenes. So many videos perform a version of intimacy - so often in the home, in fuzzy light - yet there's something intangibly different here.

Elaine Castillo is right in her wonderful recent essay on the PANK Magazine blog:

"It’s why Rihanna and Drake’s “What’s My Name?” holds me so much. Am I the only one who finds this song deeply melancholy and wistful? The genre of song being: erotic melancholy. One of my favorite genres. Something erotic and melancholy about: “Say my name, say my name—wear it out.”"

She's not the only one. The synths in the background throughout, with their minor keys. A sense of loss. The more I listen, the more sad it becomes.

And of course blue is the colour of melancholy.

Blue and orange are also the colours of Blogger, the platform I use.

Hollywood uses these colours obsessively on its movie posters.

Blue/Orange is a play written by the English playwright Joe Penhall. It is set in a London psychiatric hospital, where a patient claims to be the son of an African dictator.

The play premiered in 2000 and starred Bill Nighy, Andrew Lincoln and Chiwetel Ejiofor. In 2005 the BBC made it as a TV film starring Brian Cox, John Simm and Shaun Parkes.

On the BBC page for the film, it suggests that Penhall was inspired by Tintin and the Blue Oranges, a live action French film from 1964.

According to Wikipedia "the term of the 'blue orange' is a moderately popular image among the French, and was originally inspired by Paul Eluard's strange quote 'Earth is blue like an orange' as a reference to the colour of the fruit when it rots."

Eluard, who knew Louis Aragon and Andre Breton, and collaborated with Max Ernst, was married to Gala before she left him for Salvador Dali. He was also friends with Man Ray and Picasso.

His poem The World Is Blue As An Orange:

The world is blue as an orange

No error the words do not lie

They no longer allow you to sing

In the tower of kisses agreement

The madness the love

She her mouth of alliance

All the secrets all the smiles

Or what dress of indulgence

To believe in quite naked.

The wasps flourish greenly

Dawn goes by round her neck

A necklace of windows

You are all the solar joys

All the sun of this earth

On the roads of your beauty.

Rihanna is from Barbados.

The official colours of its flag are ultramarine and gold. In heraldry, a trident is always called a barbe, making a pun on the name of the country it represents.

Barbados' coat of arms is blue and orange too.

New York City, where the video for "What's My Name?" was filmed, has a flag. It is a vertical tricolor of blue, white and orange.

Castillo writes:

"the video's utopian vision of New York. A communal New York. A New York you fall in love with, and in. It's telling that neither Rihanna nor Drake are Americans; American-dreaming being the province of immigrants."

The Lower East Side - those streets Rihanna waltzes through - is part of the island of Manhattan, itself part of what was named New Amsterdam by settling Dutch migrants. The Dutch national colour is orange.

*

The video for another single from the same album as "What's My Name?", "Only Girl (In The World)", also has lots of blue and orange:

SpiffyToast3: On Fifa11, Shedding Skin, Crap Jobs, French Supermarkets, DFW, and the Wit and Wisdom of West Highland White Terriers

2011-06-26T18:17:00.008+01:00

Fifa11 for Tom's Xbox has recently become a large part of my life. It has crept into mornings-before-work having already conquered the get-home-from-work routine. It is quite possible that my doing more hours at the museum and my playing more Fifa11 are not un-related. A sign of the mind-numbing the museum creates - including the new mind-scrapingly dull (and politically dubious) Riverside. Crap jobs are supposedly good for being disposable; you can drop them at the door. This job is so crap its crapness spurts through the gap underneath the door and through the keyhole, into the morning-before and the evening-after.

As well as playing lots of virtual football, when I get stressed - or, rather, when my body gets stressed (I am often unaware of the stress for a few days, there is a lag between my body's knowledge of its stress and my psychological knowledge of it) - the skin on my fingers, mainly on my right hand, curiously (the hand I write with), starts to go dry and die, spreading in separate constellations of little crop circles until they enlarge so much they meet and all the skin on the fingers (usually the index and one next to it) sheds itself. This process, once it has began, is unstoppable and takes roughly two weeks to work itself through.

A vivid inner life is essential for a crap job. When I worked at Sainsbury's as a teenager, loading pallet-upon-pallet of chilled goods onto shelves, I imagined myself an artisan cheesemaker carefully placing delicate creations onto the shelf. In orange rubber gloves that made cheesehandling a clumsy affair, I would use thumb and forefinger to pluck a cheese from its bottle green plastic crate and place it on the shelf. In the time it took to make this action - a few seconds at most - an increasingly vivid story played itself out in my head, where the environment around me did not so much dissolve as metamorphosise into a French supermarket, which was staffed by people who (a) could wear their own clothes to work underneath the grass-green khaki waistcoat with Super-U or Petit Casino or Monop' written on it, (b) were surly with customers at no risk of sanction and (c) had a surprising gourmand knowledge of cheeses.

This story swatted away the boredom only intermittently. The attention required to prolong the pretense was already quite large, and an infuriating fact of the crap job is that it dulls precisely what one needs to get through it - one's attention. It is a horrifying and insidious catch-22. This job would be fine if I could pay absolute attention to what I'm doing but the fact that what I am doing is so mind-crushingly dull means that my attention is shattered. This unsolvable problem became a secondary - and yet just as exhausting - issue as the job itself.

I have been attempting - again with only flickering success - to channel the lessons of DFW's The Pale King. The attempt to transcend boredom through attention.

"Drinion is happy. Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss - a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom."

The gift. Who profers this gift? I'm interested in spirituality and what Wallace called the "religious impulse". When I read about this gift of life, I can't help but think religiously.

"Days in the desert" too. I think of 40 days and 40 nights; trial, suffering, struggle. Abiding. That word abide that pops up in Infinite Jest, as Gately undergoes his suffering in hospital, bearing it second-by-second. That word that pops up again and again when religion is touched upon - Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Justin Taylor's The Gospel of Anarchy.

SpiffyToast3 is the name given to me by the computer when I connect to the worldwide web of Fifa11 players through the Xbox's internet connection. Two words, one a colloquialism. Does "spiffy" only come up for British players, with the Xbox working out location from the IP address? Are there appropriate colloquialisms for each playing country? Is "spiffy" even a word? Even a colloquialism?

*

In a cruel irony, the museum sells books on how to stay happy and positive day-by-day. One of the key authors of this school of tat is a person by the name of Ulysses Brave, author of amongst others The Wit and Wisdom of Highland Cows and The Wit and Wisdom of West Highland White Terriers. These two "books" consist of glossy photos of aforementioned animals on the recto side with one-sentence, vaguely "Buddhist" musings on life on the verso. Brave is an elusive person, internet-identity-wise, though I did find a reproduction of the inside cover blurb on the person on an Amazon page selling one of Brave's works entitled Life Is Sweet (which has a long-haired, long-horned cow on the cover) (for no ostensible reason). Here is the blurb:

"Ulysses Brave is a self-help guru specialising in animal self-awareness. After carefully selecting his choice of images, he writes philosophically about his chosen text. Born in Newfoundland, Ulysses has studied and travelled throughout the world, honing his gentle wit through observation and occasional listening. He lives in East Anglia."

Here you can click to see inside. Brave has also written a series called How Not To Be The Perfect Husband / Wife / Teenager / Celeb.

*

*

Paying attention involves not thinking about paying attention. But boring things don't gain your attention without an active choice to pay attention to them, which obviously involves thinking. Something you are trying very hard to achieve can only be achieved by not trying at all. I have tried looking very very hard at a £4.99 cotton shopping bag, tracing its weave, its graphic depiction of the new museum, the way the price sticker doesn't stick to the bag because the bag is made of a type of coarse cotton that doesn't respond to flat, plastic surfaces. It is difficult. I don't want it to be so much effort; what I am trying to pay attention to doesn't deserve it; I am wasting my time.

*

DFW had a "personal self-help library".

About Time

2011-06-24T00:44:00.001+01:00

My essay-in-notes on Masha Tupitsyn's remarkable Laconia: 1200 Tweets on Film, Christian Marclay's The Clock, and the ubiquitousness of Don DeLillo, is up now on the Glasgow Review of Books site.

Radio Bikini

2011-06-16T21:54:00.003+01:00

"The atomic bomb, tested two times (once above water and one below water) on the Pacific island of Bikini Atoll, is truly one of the most important metaphors for American history and society, which always thinks (i.e., 9/11) of the immediate spectacle of the explosion - never the fallout. In 'Divine Violence', Slavoj Zizek discusses Peter Sloterdijk's proposal for an 'alternative history of the West as the history of rage ... The entire Messianic logic of rage-concentration and total revenge that exploded with Judeo-Christianity.' 'What is crucial in this position,' Zizek goes on to say, 'is the later monotheistic, Judeo-Christian mutation of rage (mutation also applies to the bomb's radioactive side-effects, my addition). While in ancient Greece rage is allowed to explode directly, what follows is its sublimation, temporal deferral, postponement, transference' (Radio Bikini opens with President Truman delivering the following statement about the atomic bomb:

Thus the universe's basic power is even harnessed as rage and total revenge.) One could argue that the two-part atomic test that took place on Bikini in 1946, and which Robert Stone recreated using archival footage in his 1988 documentary Radio Bikini, is an enactment and staging of this Judeo-Christian mutation. The first bomb is in some ways an explicit and direct explosion of rage-concentration - although it wasn't presented that way to the Marshal islanders who were moved from their island en masse - and the second (underwater) explosion is followed by its ultimate sublimation, 'temporal deferral and postponement' in the form of a silent and symbolically bottomless sea and the slow-burning and long-lasting (time-release) radioactive fallout that spanned a period of 40 years.
From the get-go, the atom bomb, witnessed by US navy sailors, and appraised for its entertainment value like some Hollywood blockbuster, was deemed a huge box-office disappointment: 'It was a pretty poor spectacle', one soldier bemoaned, as the surface (and what besides the surface has ever interested America?) of the water and sky kept up appearances by remaining perfectly calm and perfectly clear."

(Words from Masha Tupitsyn's Laconia: 1,200 Tweets on Film)

Toyota Celica

2011-06-13T12:12:00.002+01:00

"A long moment passed before I realised this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform. It made me feel that something hovered. But how could this be? A simple brand name, an ordinary car. How could these near-nonense words, mumured in a child's restless sleep, make me sense a meaning, a presence? She was only repeating some TV voice. Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida. Supranational names, computer-generated, more or less universally pronounceable. Part of every child's brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to probe. Whatever its source, the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence."

"Tuition at the College-on-the-Hill is fourteen thousand dollars, Sunday brunch included. I sense there is a connection between this powerful number and the way the students arrange themselves physically in the reading areas of the library. They sit on broad cushioned seats in various kinds of ungainly posture, clearly calculated to be the identifying signs of some kinship group or secret organisation. They are fetal, splayed, knock-kneed, arched, square-knotted, sometimes almost upside-down. The positions are so studied they amount to a classical mime. There is an element of overrefinement and inbreeding. Sometimes I feel I've wandered into a Far Eastern dream, too remote to be interpreted. But it is only the language of economic class they are speaking, in one of its allowable outward forms, like the convocation of station wagons at the start of the year."

(words from Don DeLillo's White Noise)

Readings at The Mutual Assembly

2011-04-20T13:43:00.003+01:00

Along with other members of the Glasgow Open School and contributors to the Glasgow Review of Books, I will be reading selections from the poetry of Fernando Pessoa tomorrow evening at the Ironbbratz Studios at 84 Miller Street, as part of The Mutual's week-long Assembly. The event begins at 7pm and will also include workshops, discussions and a potluck supper! Come on down!

More info can be found at the Mutual's website.

Glasgow Review of Books

2011-04-19T16:59:00.004+01:00

My review of The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books is up on the Glasgow Review of Books site. There're also pieces on Edwin Morgan's scrapbooks by Jonathan Anderson and Chris Kraus's Where Art Belongs by Chris Law. Check them out! And be sure to bookmark the Review, more pieces coming soon, as well as a printed edition, and events and much, much more!

The Gospel of Anarchy, the Polaroid Kidd and Internet Disappearance

2011-03-24T12:48:00.015Z

I'm reading Justin Taylor's novel The Gospel of Anarchy at the moment. It's about a punk house in Gainesville, Florida called Fishgut, which appears - I'm half way through the novel - to have been founded by a mysterious figure called Parker, whose particular brand of "anarcho-mysticism" got him chucked out of a previous house called the Palace of Zinn. I am just at the bit where Taylor describes what is known about Parker:

"Parker was raised in religion. Thomas knows that much. He ran away from home as a teenager, from some fucked sect of -- what were they? Snake-handlers, Adventists, Baptists, speakers-in-tongues, Witnesses, maybe renegade Mormons; no way to be sure. He was long unchurched by the time Thomas met him, but the language, the forms of thought were stuck fast. They were who he was. Parker was a big-b Believer, he had a God-entranced vision of all things, but because of how Thomas grew up - secular atheist Jew, same as David - the very idea of belief was foreign to him, and he did not for a long time comprehend what it was he was dealing with."

I'm reading Taylor's book because of a great interview with him I read where he talked about merging the languages of anarchism and belief, and I'm fascinated by the interactions and overlaps between left-wing politics and religion, partly because it's neglected in the dominant narrative of left-wing anti-religion but also because these two apparent "poles" were the guiding ideologies of my childhood, and "the language, the forms of thought" remain, much like with Parker, "stuck fast" in my make up.

Reading these passages about Parker's punk house I was reminded of the photos of Mike Brodie, better known as the Polaroid Kidd, who a few years back surfaced with amazing photos of young punks and hobos riding trains around the States (and which punctuate this piece). In 2007, the Needles and Pens gallery in San Francisco held an exhibition of his stuff and the Kidd was interviewed on Fecal Face's SF page (which can't be found there, as far as I could tell, but is c&p'ed here). I was preparing to go to SF in February 2008, and I was finding out about all the galleries that cluster around the Mission and other parts of the city, one of which was Needles and Pens.

I remember seeing the Kidd's photos and being blown away. They depict a life that is not alien so much as alienly familiar - I have seen Walker Evans' photos for the book on the US south's sharecroppers he did in the 30s with James Agee Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (another religious reference), and I've read Woody Guthrie's (semi-fictional or not) autobiography Bound for Glory (potentially another?) with its tales of train-hopping hobos, as well as all the subsequent Beats and Dylan stuff (with Ginsberg's visions and idolatry of Blake, and Dylan's temporary discovery of Christianity and songs about seeing St Augustine), and all the pop-cultural spinoffs from all of these. But all that was in the past, and I suppose I felt the world had changed so much since those times that the way of life that went with them must have changed just as much. So when I saw the Polaroid Kidd's photos, and the lives they depict, and realised that the photographer was two years younger than me, and that this was going on now, all that accumulated history (and mythology) of American working and alternative life rushed back in - in to my imagination, my conception of America, my interpretation of the photos, even my conception of what types of lives were possible.

Reading Taylor's novel today, I wanted to see the Kidd's photos again, to confirm the similarities between novel and image. But searching for either "Polaroid Kidd" or "Ridin' Dirty Face" (his old website) on Google returns nothing but references to him. Clicking on Needles and Pens' link to his website returns that infamous 404 Error - Page Not Found message and typing in PLRDS.com (which Brodie used to manage) takes you to an anonymous place-holder. Apart from the gallery's page, mixing the Kidd's photos and those of people looking at them, we are left with blogs written by others like me who discovered him one way or another and were stopped in their tracks by the vividness of the images. Luckily, they've embedded a lot of his photos, so that between them and N&P you can get a sense of his work, but it's a shame that they are often small or not enlarge-able.

But it's also kind of apt, the Kidd's apparent disappearance from the net. There's something almost mystical about people disappearing from this sub/mini/parallel version of the world, perhaps because it's so difficult to escape it once you've appeared on it. This disappearance is perhaps better described as ghostly, or hauntological; glimpses, flashes and traces remain in embedded photos (themselves copied from digital versions of physical chemical reactions) and fond remembrances in the comments sections, including from apparent family members of the Kidd's.

It's easy to be cynical about what I'm saying here, but I do think there's something wonderful about the way these photos have weaved in and out of my connections with galleries and subcultures. I'm finding it hard to put my finger on it, but I think it's to do with the way the images have appeared, disappeared, and reappeared (along with their maker) and how that mirrors different subcultures weaving in and out of mainstream society. It is something spectral that connects my own meandering thinking; is it that creating a different life for oneself necessarily includes an amount of utopian thinking and that that includes an amount of imagining something beyond what is observable, touchable?

Lines Standing Out From The Screen

2011-03-09T11:18:00.004Z

I read a lot of literature blogs. And normally, if there's a post which indents a lot of quotations from the writer being discussed, I will skip that particular post. I find it pretty hard to read from a screen anyway, and then excerpting writing out of its context compounds that. It's the same when I read academic essays - if there's a lot of block quotes from the writer, I find it incredibly hard to concentrate on them. They don't seem as important as the main body of the text, somehow. Perhaps that's to do with the indent - the quote seems subordinated to the essay. Which is strange, because the entire raison d'etre of the essay is to discuss that writer's work. An interesting power struggle is going on there, who has the more authority? Does the academic feel the need to subjugate the author's work in indented quotations, or is it entirely in admiration? Does the author retain a strange god-like presence over the academic, however much their work is indented? Is all this reading too much into a simple act of differentiating one author from another?

The reason for these musings is a blog post I read today on Big Other, in which just that sort of indented quotation happens, and yet in which I paid far more attention to the quotation than the writing around it. I thought these two sentences were pretty remarkable (as did the blogger). There is this one from Cormac McCarthy:

"Our job here is to restore to the deaf child the function of his pipes and all their stops: the larynx with its valve; the timbre-moulding pharnyx; the pillar-supported palate, which, depressed, hangs like a veil before the nares; and so on."

and this one from Mary Caponegro:

"conforming to no law with which I am acquainted: a sort of wood box slightly askew; no saltbox, neither hat nor shoe, a leaning tower without a Pisa’s dignity, haphazard, squat, and deep within, a strange conglomerate of spaces…"

I just think both are fantastic sentences. I wonder if it's to do with a familiar/unfamiliar dynamic - I own one book by each of these writers but have read neither. I know their names, and a little about their style and other books etc, but have never spent time with their work.

Guild Halls

2011-03-04T10:27:00.007Z

At last night's GOSSIP #2, we got into a mini-discussion about the potential political associations with the word "guildhalls", the context being Philip Larkin's poem "Going, Going":

I thought it would last my time -

The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there'd be false alarms

In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.

Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.
- But what do I feel now? Doubt?

Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more -
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score

Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when

You try to get near the sea
In summer . . .
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,

That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon

It was these lines that made us think:

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

Some, in hating the poem, singled this stanza out as evidence of a deeply deadening conservatism. That the list given here is full of lifeless things, lifeless and quaint and enemies of progress. There are no people in that list (enhanced by shadows without the things that make them). There are (presumably empty) meadows and lanes, and carved choirs - still, heavy objects, an impression compounded by the inevitable associations readers will have with choirs - a group of people, singing, perhaps even joyously - juxtaposed with the rigid createdness of "carved", something hewn out of a lump of inanimate matter, perhaps a little crudely, not quite the real thing. The lively hand that did the carving, meanwhile, is nowhere to be seen. That "carved choirs" can also refer to objects in a church further encourages this sense of solidity and solemnity.

But guildhalls?

I said that to me, guildhalls - and more specifically guilds - connect to a particularly English collectivity, a civic pride that is not conservative but actually something of the opposite. Not radical exactly, but certainly connected with a sense of an active culture of trade expertise. The guilds fit in my head with libraries as services for the people, as seen in this film of the Sheffield City Library. So I thought I'd look them up, to see whether my associations have any basis.

The Wikipedia page on guilds describes them as:

"an association of craftsmen in a particular trade. The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel and a secret society"

As those three descriptions suggest, the guild doesn't neatly fall into an idea of right-wing conservatism nor left-wing collectivism. Whilst they were organisations of workers, they conspired to keep their trade secrets secret, and appear to have been more associations of individuals than a genuinely collective group. Nevertheless, in some senses they could be seen as opposing a capitalist idea of mass production, and certainly in some areas of contemporary culture, the idea of the master craftsman is seen as a positive alternative to cheap, mass produced products. See for instance the artisan and organic food movements.

Of course, these movements have faced criticisms - that they privilege individuals with enough time and money to buy the products these artisans produce, as well as seeing solutions in individualistic endeavours that have no potential for mass application. The amount of land needed for all farming to be organic, for instance, is so large that any idea of Britain being able to sustain that sort of production remains dead in the water. (Not to mention the de-toxification process the soil would need to undergo, as well as the complete silencing of global mega agri-business corporations).

But to counter that again, one could suggest that the guild idea is worth retaining for an idea that can seem both more abstract and more practical: the idea of the master craftsman ensures that trades continue in some form and do not become conscripted into a global corporate economy that makes shoddy products cheaply and quickly, and without any real connections being established between the crafter, the materials and those that use the product. That people remain that know what blacksmithing is, or cobbling, or being a butcher, or a furniture maker. If a prominent effect of globalisation has been to separate people from their immediate environments, and to discourage meaningful contact between people and the food they eat, the tools they use and so on, then the master craftsman or woman and the guilds may be a way of re-establishing these connections. In books, for instance, in a market where Amazon has pretty much any book anyone could want, often for extremely cheap prices and available at the click of a button, it is refreshing and encouraging that small presses aware of the history of book-binding and proficient in its skills are re-appearing.

It doesn't seem, then, in the end, that guildhalls have particular associations with any specific political viewpoint. I suppose in a way that complicates Larkin's mourning. What complicates more, though, I think, is to compare the things/ideas that he is ostensibly mourning in the poem with the things/ideas movements like the slow food movement, the green movement, DIY culture and the like are championing, and to wonder whether the words "conservative" and "progressive" have the same meaning as they did in 1972, when "Going, Going" was written, or even if they have any meaning at all anymore, whether they are even useful words to invoke when talking about political aims.

From the NYRB personals...

2011-02-18T09:37:00.006Z

There's that cliché about writers getting stories from the personal ads in newspapers. Sometimes it seems like the only stories you could get from them would be tales of the banality of commuter/suburban life and how these ads are a chance to stave off loneliness; a sort of mechanical solution to a non-mechanical problem: I person alone + random stranger that answers ad = 2 not-lonely people.

But looking through the New York Review of Books' personals the other day (I flipped through the review checking the titles of the reviews for ones to definitely-come-back-to; possibly-come-back-to; probably-not-come-back-to) I wondered if the editors of the NYRB place a certain premium on "literary" or story-worthy ads.

First there is a string of ads (under the heading "Personal Services"), all of which to some degree or another, play on the body/mind binary and the potential for blurring it:

THE RIGHT STUFF-Date fellow graduates and faculty of the Ivies, Stanford, and a few other excellent schools.

EROTIC EXPLOSION. Let me blow your mind, your ultimate erogenous zone. Provocative talk with educated beauty. No limits.

AURAL EROTICA with a naughty raconteur [...]

Then under the plain old "Personals" are 20-line exegeses on self and love as well as 4-liners. Both lengths, curiously, read like lists:

TOO GOOD TO RESIST: striking natural beauty - sexy, sophisticated and completely real at the same time. Slender, lean, really cute. Adventurous, curious about everything; artist, low-key humanitarian, trailblazer. Fun-loving, athletic. Not a false note. [...] [for another 17 lines]

WEST COAST MAN, 70's, seeks West Coast woman, well-read, well-spoken, not tall, for warm walks and talks together. Note: Lost phone number of previous respondent. Please call again.

Then, marked by a special box-border, is a mini-autobiography entitled "Widowed Gentleman, 55", then loads with strategically-placed exclamation marks - "Let's Laugh Together!" - and a sort of testimony from a happy customer, as it were:

"In today's world it's not easy to find someone who can craft a well-written letter, let alone someone who will take the time to mail it to a PO Box and await a response. But in addition to being a litmus test for literacy, it turns out that the character traits inherent in such a person - optimism, patience and persistence - are exactly those required for a successful long-term relationship."

Do any of these jump out as a story? I don't really think so. They all seem a bit bland. I suppose I could see THE RIGHT STUFF as a Salinger-esque tale of aristocratic disappointment. And I instantly warm to the WEST COAST MAN who lost the phone number of the last respondent. But it's a stretch, maybe.

But then there's this, which struck me pretty hard given the context it appears in:

STATE PRISONER, 61, KIND, CONTRITE, emotionally generous, spiritually and intellectually inquisitive, active and young through yoga and handball, defies prison code by proclaiming that he is the only nerd in town. Seeks friendship with open-minded, intrepid women, to connect through the books we love and the ideas and issues we care about, and as a palliative against the cruelty of a prison subculture in which kindness is a vice with drastic consequences.

From those bold bits you know you've got something different. And then the bit about the prison code which you're not sure how to take; is it a joke? but it has a dark edge to it too - prison codes don't sound a whole load of fun. And then that last bit! There's a sort of desperate bitterness there, but an integrity too, an intent to continue to praise kindness despite the "drastic consequences", which to me sound terrifying, just left there at the end of the sentence.

30 minutes rather than 30 seconds

2011-02-15T12:31:00.004Z

Continuing from what I was describing as part of the GOSSIP session, at the start of this video (about 1 minute in), David Foster Wallace talks about culture that rewards speed over consideration, and perhaps (well, definitely) part of the joy of the session the other evening was the sheer difference of the experience, of escaping the culture of constant, speedy gratification.

This is part 4 of 9, a one-and-a-half hour interview with Wallace which is fascinating and also a little sad.

FURTHER TO THIS: My word choice above wasn't quite right. It was less the simple fact of the difference that was so affirming. It wasn't even the particularity of it either. It was perhaps more a realisation - in the form of a simple doing - that escape needn't be that difficult. At least in individual, discrete way. I guess sort of puncture holes in the balloon-like covering that is capitalist culture.

This simple doing was perhaps itself simple, but maybe it was a little complicated too. I'm not sure. It was the result of a certain number of people agreeing to do something outwith normal day-to-day experience, to place a certain amount of trust in each other, to collectively invest an act (which was itself collectively realised) with a certain degree of importance, or value. Not value in a stupid monetary way, but in the service of education. But proper education - deep study, scholarship. I will always, I think, see something monastic - religious - in scholarship and study. It is one of the many ways exposure to religion as a child has contributed to who I am now.

Along this topic, this morning I was listening to Radio 4's Today programme (it was just after 8am that this bit was on) and they were discussing human compassion in relation to revelations of neglect in the NHS. John Humphries was trying to find out - and I think probably in a genuine way - why simple, basic, fundamental (he used one of these words, I'm not sure which) human compassion had apparently failed in the case of nurses failing to help an old dehydrated lady drink from a jug of water at the side of her bed, which she couldn't reach, or use.

They talked about various things and then talked to an Emeritus Professor of elderly/geriatric (I can't remember which term was used) Medicine, and he talked about the business model of care superseding the model of care that had the very compassion Humphries was getting at as its centre. This Professor said that the introduction of business models in the NHS (targets, managers, all that stuff) was partly responsible. And Humphries' response was to say "but that doesn't change human nature". I was dumbfounded. I wasn't - am still not - sure whether to accuse him of naivety or active dis-information. Of COURSE it effects human nature! THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT! That's what nurses have been saying for years!

Mostly his response was saddening - people just don't think of capitalism as something to be criticised. It's what Thomas Frank writes about, and what Mark Fisher writes about in Capitalist Realism, too. I saw this quote from Fisher's book today on a blog by Jackie Wang:

"An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact."

Speaks for itself really.

What was so nice about the GOSSIP session last week - and this probably going to sound just about as naive as Humphries, but it's true, so there - was that we maybe, very briefly, and just the 7 of us, entered/created a space where capitalism's ideological position wasn't a fact, and wasn't naturalised.

A Throw of the Dice...

2011-02-10T22:17:00.002Z

I've been reading Stéphane Mallarmé today for the first of the Glasgow Open School Studies In Poetry (GOSSIP).

The session was remarkable. If you've clicked on that link you will have seen that the session was organised along the lines of a Quaker meeting. Basically, this means sitting in silence for an hour, only being able to speak once and only if the spirit moves you. For Quakers the text is the bible, for us it was Mallarmé's collected poems.

I read the same page from the infamous A Throw of the Dice... again and again, forgetting really that I was in a small room with six other people; I withdrew into myself, or, rather, the world dissolved away. The limit of awareness was me and the page - the lines of the poem on that page. I was no longer aware - or worried - of how I appeared to others, how my posture, my facial expression communicated or miscommunicated. It was like every muscle relaxed at the same time.

And yet this only happened because of the situation; it would not have happened had I been reading alone at home. Somehow the intensity of seven silent bodies in the room contributed to this dimishment of the world.

My reading attained a new depth - the rigidity of reading the same passage again and again, vainly trying to prize something out of it, actually opened out into a looseness that a struggle with a text rarely yields.

Two Quotes About Literary Rebellion

2011-02-07T18:32:00.003Z

Continuing from a below post re: DFW and literary rebellion, here are two quotes from DFW essays that I've been pondering.

The first is from the famous "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", originally published alongside this interview with Larry McCaffery in Dalkey Archive's Review of Contemporary Fiction. The version I read is the one collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and is dated 1990:

"It's entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of US fiction's possibilities. The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in US life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and the squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the 'Oh how banal'. To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness." (pg 81)

And the second is from his essay "Joseph Frank's Dostoyevksy", which I read in the collection Consider The Lobster, and dated 1996:

"The big thing that makes Dostoyevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we - here, today - cannot or do not permit ourselves [...] there are certain tendencies we believe are bad, qualities we hate and fear. Among these are sentimentality, naiveté, archaism, fanaticism. It would probably be better to call our own art's culture now one of congenital skepticism. Our intelligentsia [and here DFW inserts a footnote, which says "which, given this review's venue, means basically us" - the review was originally published in the Village Voice Literary Supplement] distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level. We believe that ideology is now the province of the rival SIGs [Special Interest Groups] and PACs [Political Action Committees, which Wikipedia tells me is "the name commonly given to a private group, regardless of size, organized to elect political candidates or to advance the outcome of a political issue or legislation"] all trying to get their slice of the big green pie ... and, looking around us, we see that indeed it is so. But Frank's Dostoyevsky would point out (or more like hop up and down and shake his fist and fly at us and shout) that if this is so, it's at least partly because we have abandoned the field. That we've abandoned it to fundamentalists whose pitiless rigidity and eagerness to judge show that they're clueless about the 'Christian values' they would impose on others. To rightist militias and conspiracy theorists whose paranoia about the government supposes the government to be just way more organised and efficient than it really is. And, in academia and the arts, to the increasingly absurd and dogmatic Political Correctness movement, whose obsession with the mere forms of utterance and discourse show too well how effete and aestheticized our best liberal instincts have become, how removed from what's really important - motive, feeling, belief." (pgs 271, 272-3)

Now I pretty much agree with all of this, but not to the point where I blindly follow it, and where I don't see potential trip-ups. The problem with all this is that it is extremely difficult to marshal this to have the desired effect, and to steer it away from mawkishness, complacency, from basically buying in to the very thing it criticises. Or rather from creating the flipside of the thing it criticises - for every piece of hip fatigue, there is the faux-emoting of Oprah, both of which are as removed from real feeling as each other.

So the problem is that you can't really put what DFW writes out as a general program, because there are too many bad writers (and lazy thinkers) around who would not only give it a bad name, but completely and utterly mess the whole thing up, doing far more damage than good. Wallace is far too good a writer for this to apply to him - he actually manages to do what he calls for here. (In my opinion, at least, certainly not Wallace's himself. And actually, I do find myself wondering whether to take him at his own assessment - whether he doesn't succeed so much as simply "not fail", ie: break everything down and create a place from which to start, without actually starting himself).

But besides Wallace, there are very few who manage this. Contemporarily-speaking, I mean. I can't think of any off the top of my head.

So what do we do?

Dancehall Vol. 2

2011-02-01T10:37:00.002Z

A shortened and edited part of my dissertation has found its way into my friends' Ben and Hannah's journal, Dancehall. It's got new poems by Peter Manson and a selection of responses to November's Instal festival at the Tramway, which a lot of us as part of the Glasgow Open School took part in. You can order it for £2 or read it on their website here.

Alienated by the conformity and hypocrisy of mass society? Have we got a car for you!; Or, cutting adrift the new

2011-01-27T22:33:00.013Z

I had forgotten - only just remembered - that part of the reasoning behind having this blog was to test out in writing some passing ideas to do with my thesis. So here's one I had today, typing up notes I made from Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism which I read in October/November.

Frank's book is all about how business discovered coolness, or hip, in the late 1950s and 1960s. Although discovered is not quite the right word. Because discovered is what the general co-optation theory re: business and the counterculture says happened, and it really didn't. There wasn't any need for discovery, because business and the counterculture were always-already pretty tight.

Here are some quotes from Frank's book I put down in my notes:

"democratisation of the modernist impulse"

"the cosmic optimism with which so many organs of official American culture greeted the youth rebellion"

"two of late capitalism's great problems could easily be met: obsolesence found a new and more convincing language, and citizens could symbolically resolve the contradiction between their role as consumers and their role as producers"

"what distinguished the ads of the 60s was its acknowledgement of and even sympathy with the mass society critique. It mocked the empty phrases and meaningless neologisms that characterised the style of the 1950s. It deftly punctured advertising's too-rosy picture of American life and openly admitted that consuming was not the wonder-world it was cracked up to be"

"an untiring propagandist for the business value of the principles of modern art"

"alienated by the conformity and hypocrisy of mass society? Have we got a car for you!"

"In order for an ad to work, Lois argued in 1991, one had to cause outrage. Good advertising, therfore, is synonymous with rebellion, with different, with the avant-garde's search for the new"

"In the counterculture, admen believed they had found both a perfect model for consumer subjectivity, intelligent and at war with the conformist past, and a cultural machine for turning disgust with consumerism into the very fuel by which consumerism might be accelerated"

"the orthodoxy of transgression"

"Retro's vision of the past as a floating style catalogue from which we can choose quaint wardrobes but from which we are otherwise disconnected, is, in many respects, hip consumerism's proudest achievement: it simultaneously reinforces contemporary capitalism's curious ahistorical vision and its feverish cycling of obsolesence"

"rebellion is both the high and mass cultural motif of the age"

"the 60s... are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent"

I think my supervisor John Coyle is right, Frank is a great proponent of contemporary Frankfurt School critique. His books (I'm currently reading What's The Matter With America?) are meticulously researched, wonderfully drily-wittily-written attacks on the culture industry and consumerism.

The upshot of all this, all those quotes above, for me, is a profound undermining of the concept of the new with regards to art and literature. Reading Frank, it becomes pretty much impossible to believe in the radical potential of "the new" in art. In a world dominated (still) by a rabid consumerist urge for the new, how on earth can art fail to be drawn into that?

Having said that, it doesn't necessarily follow that art can't have a profound effect on people's lives and society at large, even help create radical change. I still think that's possible. The problem is how to do it, and with its traditional tactic (the new) dismissed, that problem becomes even greater.

I am increasingly confident/hopeful that David Foster Wallace's work is key to this problem, and it's something to do with ethical commitment and somehow re-inserting into a culture infused with a distancing irony (or hip) some sort of human feeling/emotion/communication. Reading DFW allows for a rather wonderful transcending of petty "theory vs historicism" or "avant-garde vs realist" arguments - the gossip of academia.

In his essay "Joseph Frank's Dostoyevsky", Wallace laments:

"Can you imagine any of our own major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this [Ippolit's "necessary explanation in The Idiot] (not, mind you, just as hypocritical bombast so that some ironic hero can stick a pin in it, but as part of a ten-page monologue by somebody trying to decide whether to commit suicide)? The reason you can't is the reason he wouldn't: such a novelist would be, by our lights, pretentious and overwrought and silly. The straight presentation of such a speech in a Serious Novel today would provoke not outrage or invective, but worse - one raised eyebrow and a very cool smile. Maybe, if the novelist really major, a dry bit of mockery in The New Yorker. The novelist would be (and this is our own age's truest vision of hell) laughed out of town."

But he's a little hopeful too:

"But they wouldn't (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that? How - for a writer today, even a talented writer today - to get up the guts to even try?"

I myself am hopeful, and it's because of Wallace himself. He did get up the guts to try, and at times succeeded. In his story collection Oblivion there is a story called "Good Old Neon". It is effectively a monologue about someone deciding whether to commit suicide, but it's not ten pages, it's forty.

Poet of Britain

2010-12-30T22:32:00.007Z

Me and Lil have rejoined Lovefilm, and the first films we got were a collection of Humphrey Jennings', made as propaganda films for the Crown Film Unit (which used to be the GPO Unit, of Night Mail fame) during World War 2. Lindsay Anderson (of If... fame) called Jennings the only poet of the cinema Britain has produced, and watching his films Listen to Britain, A Diary for Timothy and I Was a Fireman (aka Fires Were Started), one is tempted to agree, and pretty wholeheartedly too. It's the combination of wonderful visual imagination (strongly collagistic/montagist), the depiction of collectivity/working towards a common aim, and hard-hitting emotional impact that is really impressive I think.

Here is - in my opinion - the best of the three we've seen, Listen to Britain, in its entirety:

And here, a bonus clip, just to show Jennings' magnificently layered visual intelligence at work in the famous "kazoo band" clip from 1939's Spare Time (which I haven't yet seen):

God, the more I watch that, the more amazing it seems!

DFW Christmas!

2010-12-25T12:04:00.004Z

I'm interested in what people take to read over the Christmas hols? Do you go for broke and take heavy tomes, or are you pragmatic and take page-turners? I've taken one that looks like the former but is in fact the latter (Infinite Jest), and one that is simply the latter, but wonderfully intelligently intellectually curious-ly-so (Consider the Lobster).

1910 / Interceptions

2010-12-13T16:06:00.002Z

This last weekend saw the conference I mentioned a couple of posts down in "Guerres Imaginaires".

I've been blogging about various panels and our own Interceptions event. See my posts (and other people's), here.

Ways of Seeing

2010-12-06T11:25:00.002Z

Recently, I have ventured into the jungle that is Ubuweb ("All Avant-Garde, All The Time") to watch John Berger's 1972 BBC TV series Ways of Seeing. I've just watched the first episode, and the intelligence, the gentleness of touch, and the lucidity with which Berger communicates with his audience is remarkable and inspiring. Some people will notice early on the first episode's debt to Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", but Berger doesn't need to knock the audience over the head by referencing it directly; he just talks simply and compellingly about the ideas. The only reference to Benjamin is a title-card at the end, saying "many of the ideas in this programme appear in a 1936 essay by the German writer Walter Benjamin". Not even the title of the essay! I think that's great; it doesn't matter who wrote it, really; so often noting the author is a sign for the presenter/writer to show off. Berger doesn't need to, it's the ideas that matter.

Guerres Imaginaires

2010-12-02T15:36:00.003Z

The weekend of the 11th and 12th of December Glasgow hosts a conference entitled "On or about December 1910, human character changed": Centenary reflections and contemporary debates: Modernism and beyond. I'm part of an organising team for a parallel postgraduate symposium called Interceptions: Theory's Modernism and Modernism's Theory. A while ago, I wrote a small article on "future-war fiction" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for the 1910 Centenary Reflections conference blog. You can see that version here. Below is a longer version.

On the 19 March 1906, the Daily Mail began the serialization of William Tuffnell Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910, an "invasion-fantasy" in which Germany invades Britain. It was enormously popular (no doubt helped by marketing that included sending actors in German military uniforms to march down London's Regent Street), greatly increasing the Mail's circulation and translated into 27 languages. Somewhat surprisingly for a bestseller, the book made some interesting formal choices, couching the events as a military history with excerpts from journals and military descriptions of troop movements. Subscribing to the theory that Britain was in constant threat of invasion by the Germans, the book stressed the importance of preparation and training. Nevertheless, apparently unable to countenance a total German victory, Le Queux describes a British resistance called the "League of Defenders" who lead an uprising against the invading hoardes. A film version, retitled If England Were Invaded, was released in October 1914.

Having been an art student in Paris in the 1880s, Le Queux went on to become a journalist and prolific author. One of three books he published in 1910 was the intriguingly titled The Unknown Tomorrow, with an even more intriguing subtitle of How the Rich Fared at the Hands of the Poor. 2010 eyes may find equally fascinating the title of a 1913 book by Le Queux The Lost Million, somewhat underestimating the carnage to be wrought over the subsequent five years. Two books published in 1914 bear the titles The German Spy, A Present-day Story and The War of the Nations.

In his article "Future-War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871-1900", I.F. Clarke notes that after Francis Cheynell's Civil War-infused Aulicus his Dream of the Kings Sudden Comming to London, published in May 1644, the future-war genre failed rather conclusively to take off. Until, that is, the year 1871, the year of the Paris Commune and the unification Germany. Clarke's article traces the explosion in stories of guerres imaginaires across Britain, France and Germany, all if which imagined variations on "the next European war" utilising the new weaponry made possible by technological development. Some writers (notably H.G. Wells in his 1914 book The World Set Free) went as far as to imagine a bomb so massive in its destructive capabilities that its use as a deterrent would lead to a new era of peace on earth.

The tone of this "massive European interest in The Next Great War, der nächste Krieg, La Guerre de demain" was a "cheerful language of anticipation", a language by no means limited to the military minds that first wrote such stories, nor the popular press that took over.

"With you I would have liked to depart for the Great War, which we are all expecting and which is so long in coming. Under your flag I still hope to see it, if there is a god of battle and he can hear me. To while away the waiting I have dreamed of this war, this holy war in which we shall be victorious." So wrote Commandant Šmile Augustin Cyprien Driant (known as Capitaine Driant), dedicating his book War in Open Country (1888) to his old regiment.

Compare the above to Marinetti and the Futurists, describing in 1909 how "like young lions we ran after Death". Singing "the love of danger", they "glorify war -- the world's only hygiene -- militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture". These are "beautiful ideas worth dying for", lit by "the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons".

If, then, 1910 ushers in a new mode of human consciousness, human character, one may be forgiven for thinking that it was long in the making. Long in the making, and wide in its reach, too; not merely the artistic consciousnesses of those that went to the Grafton Galleries in the last months of the year. Woolf may well have been right about the “human” scale of it. With these future-war tales and fantasies, it appears people were longing for a change, desperate in these “fantasies of the future” for what Clarke calls a “newer universe”.

Same Old Story

2010-11-04T12:55:00.001Z

Shameless plug. Although not technically a plug, as no-one will be coming to it. A boast, then.

I am taking part in this conference in Manchester tomorrow. Getting the train at 5:40 am. Great.

Swindlers!

2010-11-02T14:26:00.003Z

Mark Fisher has written one of the clearest, on-the-money excoriations of what he calls The Great Bullingdon Club Swindle, otherwise known as the "difficult decisions" and "tough choices" our blessed government of backbone-less millionaires is making for us.

Read it.

Forget Keep Calm and Carry On, GET AGITATED AND CHANGE THINGS.

Biting Into A Crisp Apple

2010-10-24T21:31:00.006+01:00

Last weekend (15th & 16th) me and Lil went to Glasgow's Concert Halls to see three concerts as part of their Minimal Weekend, itself part of a three-year exploration of the minimal classical music made famous by Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

The highlight was The Smith Quartet's version of Different Trains, on the Saturday in the Old Fruitmarket. The piece is out of this world -- it has a sort of tangible materiality that makes the world "artefact" (as in an art artefact) perfect. Different Trains is actually not only an artistic artefact, but that more familiar, historical one. One often hears about audiences and readers being "transported back" to the past; Different Trains transports history into YOU.

On the Sunday we saw a few of Reich's smaller pieces - Violin Phase, Electric Counterpoint and Vermont Counterpoint. Although each was played by a single player and a tape (as opposed to multiple players), seeing (and Reich's music really does make you LOOK at the musician) them played live in any way whatsoever is still rather fantastic. Searching for Violin Phase today, I happened upon the video below, which looks to me like students at a conservatoire playing it. Below it, in the comments is a (very uncommonly, for Youtube) interesting one, which just happens to say something very interesting about Reich's music. Here's the video:

Scrolling down, you'll see this comment:

"This is the soundtrack to biting into a crisp apple."

I think that's strangely apposite. It gets at something about Reich's music, something about heightened experience, about sensual extravagance, about the particularity of moments. Everything the same and everything different. One day I will write this better.

Here's the first part of Different Trains. Take time out. Listen to it. Find the other parts. Part 2 is particularly mindblowing. It's ending is one of the most chilling sections of music I've ever heard.

The train whistles you hear are made by a viola!:

The (Personal) Historical Importance of the Bristol Rovers Supporter's Club Shop

2010-10-17T10:34:00.007+01:00

My friend Henry is writing his Ph.D. on the poet CH (Charles Hubert) (!) Sisson. He was born in Bristol on the 22nd of April 1914, and the Telegraph's obituary from 2003 describes him as "the son of a watch and clock repairer who later became an optician." His roots were, as Sisson himself put it, in "innumerable generations of farmers" and he grew up in Eastville, notable for being for much of the twentieth century the home of my football team, Bristol Rovers.

The Eastville Stadium -- near the giant gas works that gave Rovers their nickname "The Gas" and their fans that of "Gasheads" -- was demolished in 1998 after a decade out of use to make way for an Ikea superstore. Sisson's house itself, if not entirely demolished, was certainly adapted. He notes in his autobiography (On The Look-Out: A Partial Autobiography) that his childhood home "is now the Bristol Rovers Supporter's Club Shop".

Eastville was where my mum and her brothers and her dad first watched Rovers. We've also since been to the Ikea. I don't know if Sisson's house still stands, no longer his house nor the Supporter's Club Shop, which has moved, along with the team itself, to the Memorial Stadium in Horfield.

What I like to imagine, though, is my mum walking past Sisson's house on the way to a game, maybe with her dad who was roughly the same generation as Sisson (and from a roughly similar background). Sisson, at that time, was presumably in the middle (or late-middle) of the writing career that Henry is now studying. In passing Sisson's house -- or the Supporter's Club Shop -- my mum marked out a connection fifty years in advance of my meeting Henry in Glasgow in 2009.

Chin Stroking Between Updike and Wallace

2010-10-09T13:03:00.004+01:00

I've had a tab open for weeks now with this article by Barrett Hathcock on the Quarterly Conversation on Nicholson Baker as the "missing link" between John Updike and David Foster Wallace. I finally read it this morning, and whilst problematic in a number of ways (I think it simplifies DFW, and pays too much heed to the privileged position of the artist/writer/observer, amongst other things), it is certainly thought-provoking and wide-ranging and context-providing. A good chin-stroker of an article.

On the Guilt of the 40-Pager; and some Postmodern Triumphalist Wankery

2010-10-05T10:45:00.004+01:00

This last week or so I've been reading Rob Stephenson's Passes Through and Raymond Federman's Critifiction: Postmodern Essays alongside each other.

I hadn't intended specifically to read these two texts together, but as it happens they are perfect companions. In his introduction to Stephenson's book, Lance Olsen (on the board of FC2, and who I wrote my dissertation on) describes Passes Through as a critifictional text, "a mode of discourse suspended between two sorts of imagination, one theoretical, one creative." (Although Olsen notes that definition's "too easy" binaries, it is a good basic starting point for thinking about critifiction.) Olsen plays around with variations of passing, passes etc so you have the novel "passing through" various literary, musical, artistic discourses and the text just about "passing" for a novel. Getting away with it, as it were. The intro itself is called "Passes Through : Passing For : Not Knowing". The starting point is clearly Stephenson's novel itself (and there's the Barthelme reference in the last of the 3 phrases) but in its lowercase version, "passes through" is a nod to the central essay of Federman's book.

Entitled "Critifiction: Imagination as Plagiarism (...an unfinished endless discourse...)" it basically (this is pretty blatant reductionism on my part!) talks about writers never actually inventing anything but being to greater or lesser degrees plagiarists, or as Federman -- cheekily or irritatingly, depending on your viewpoint, and postmodern-wankery-threshold -- calls them pla[y]giarists. After saying that to write is "first of all TO QUOTE" (he puts things in caps and bold when he wants to make a point) Federman says that "the writer is therefore neither inside nor outside his language. He does not pause within it. He merely passes through it" (my italics/bold).

Federman's essays are far more enjoyable -- and readable! (I'll come back to that) -- than Stephenson's novel, which is difficult and dense, or, as Olsen puts it, alongside more traditionally positive descriptions ("invigorating", "liberating"), "frustrating" and "elusive". These impressions become illuminatingly ironic when you read Federman on "readability" (in the essay "What Are Experimental Novels and Why Are There So Many Left Unread?"), on those critics of experimental literature (he hates that phrase) he calls "the 40-pagers", people that only get that far into such a text before giving up and pontificating on its terrible writing and "unreadability". The message from Federman, and from Stephenson and Olsen, is that sometimes writing is SUPPOSED to be difficult, SUPPOSED to frustrate, infuriate even. Federman talks about readability being "reassuring", it is the "pleasure of recognition" that "guides us back from the text to the security of the world, and therefore gives us comfort". UNreadability, on the other hand, is the "agony of unrecognition":

"And so there we have it!" writes Federman, "Second conclusion: (a) the usual, traditional, conventional (readable) novel that which is linked to a comfortable practice of reading and preserves, guards, protects culture; (b) The experimental, innovative (unreadable) novel, that which undermines culture and brings to a crisis the reader's relation with language".

Being inferred into a status quo is just about all the encouragement one needs to plough on through a difficult book! Unable to live with my status as a "40-Pager" I carried on through Stephenson's difficult text, and it is true that it became a rewarding experience. Though there is some truth in saying that my persistence was down to Passes Through itself. Its difficulty comes from its dense, imagistic use of language -- to the extent that you feel over-powered by it, that your mind can't hold it all. But at other moments, this very denseness -- richness -- is what brings you back to it. There seems to be SO MUCH THERE! that it suddenly feels the complete opposite of difficult and unreadable, it suddenly feels eminently READABLE! (I like this caps thing). There are times when -- postmodern-wankery alert -- its very UNREADABILITY BECOMES READABLE, and vice versa.

DFW Doesn't Hate Anyone

2010-09-19T11:01:00.007+01:00

Of late I've been on a bit of a David Foster Wallace binge. A group of us have been reading 30 pages of Infinite Jest a week since about mid July, and it's everything and more that the most superlative reviews say about it. One of those books that is under-served even by all its plaudits. Recently, too, since the dissertation ran out of time, I've been reading his essays (after a brief blip when I couldn't settle on a book and started The Double and then remembered what happened last time I handed an essay in - the need to read something very readable to get my reading skills back up and running, so I read Don DeLillo's Point Omega, which whilst not great, was nicely sparse and elusive. And whoever it was that said he was great writing on film, they were right).

So I'm now on to the last one in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which is the eponymous essay, the one about a week spent on a cruise ship around the Carribbean. I think it's quite infamous; the boat's name was the m.v. Zenith, which DFW very quickly, and with an acknowledgement of its groan-worthiness, re-christens the Nadir. In the book there's one about playing tennis as a young teenager in the Midwest ("Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley"), there's one about TV and US fiction, there's one about his trip to the Illinois State Fair ("Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All"), a small one about postmodern lit theory, one about David Lynch, one about tennis player Michael Joyce titled "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness" and this one about the cruise. (Not entirely sure why I listed them all there, but still). What comes out of all of these, and in the various Youtube videos I've watched of him, is what some people might call his "humanity", but if you wanted to be less bile-inducing, you might say ... that he doesn't hate anyone. He writes about people conned and sucked in by capitalism, by the media, by consumerism. He revolts at junk food, lack of community, Hollywood over-bearance. But none of it is ever directed at people. This isn't because it's simply directed at "structures", "corporations", or "systems", it's more complex than that, but never is it a case that someone could easily choose not to buy some piece of useless tat, or eat a salad rather than some horrible fried thing.

At a meeting yesterday, we were talking about DFW and someone said that he might be characterised (and has been?) as having a sort of classic US liberal position - this person used abortion as an example, saying DFW might be both pro-choice and pro-life. I'm not quite sure how that connects to classic US liberalism, but the point being that he often refuses to take a position, that he can see both sides. One might be tempted to call this a sort of humanism, but then you're back in the "humanity" of the man stuff, which is also groan-inducing, so I won't go too far. But there is something understanding about him. You see it in his video interviews (also part of the binge), where he is able to come up with a remarkably subtle position right off the bat, where most people in such situations, faced with having to answer a complicated question, simplify both the issue and their position in order just to be able to say something. What's fascinating about this is that that subtle position is probably far closer to what people actually feel about something than the simplified one-side-or-the-other variety. I would be fairly confident in saying that most people are probably conflicted about most issues. (Whether they admit it or not is another point altogether). So DFW has this ability to tap into his feelings directly, without any obfuscation for media, for presentation of self to the world, any of that stuff, and communicate them clearly and succinctly too. This subtle position is actually far more direct than the one-sided one.

You should also totally watch this video. It's a reading from the state fair essay, about the perils of baton-twirling. It's hilarious:

ADDENDUM: This lack of hatred DFW feels towards the people he meets and who fill his essays perhaps has something to do with fascination. In the end, his fascination with people, allied to the Charlie Rose-noted talent for observation, triumphs over any sort of dislike or anger. Ultimately, the people acting out the idiotic logics of postmodernity are fascinating rather than evil, and even though they are forced to project Professional Smiles retain some sort of basic independence that DFW can find.

Impossible Mysteries

2010-08-23T09:56:00.004+01:00

After watching the last of the BBC's new Sherlock series the other week, we had a conversation about mysteries and genre fiction. I'm discovering a new appreciation for genre fiction (after reading about China Mieville's The City and The City I felt that maybe I'd given sci-fi short shrift) and mysteries particularly. Really, I've always liked them - I read The Three Investigators and The Hardy Boys when I was a kid, loved those 60s spy TV series like The Champions (are these really mysteries?) and Bond films, and have rather enjoyed Miss Marple and enormously enjoyed Poirot recently. I love the formulas you find in them, and the particular modus operandi each detective uses, Poirot's "leetle grey cells" or Marple's faintly irritating faux-little old lady act.

Much as I loved Sherlock, and I really did love it, especially the last one (see vid above), I wondered after whether these famous detectives should diversify their methods. Not necessarily for crime-fighting reasons, but more for reasons of audience edginess. Whilst we may not know who committed the crimes, and we are usually given enough clues to be able to imagine any number of people capable of committing it, we always know that the detective's prized and trusty M.O. will, in the end, discover the culprit. That is the one thing that is never in doubt. This is even admitted insofar as both Poirot and Sherlock Holmes have a figure - in both their cases a woman towards whom they have complicated feelings - who has bested them (once) and who acts as a sort of spectre of failure. Nevertheless, the Irene Adlers of the world are for all intents and purposes merely spectral, and whilst Holmes may say "only one person has ever beaten me", ostensibly in order to show his fallibility, it just goes to show the opposite.

My wondering led me to imagine a mystery story where the uncertainty led all the way down, so to speak, so that the reader wasn't even sure of the detective. You could take this as far as you liked, you could have just his/her M.O. that was iffy, or you could extend it to their whole universe - are they really a detective at all? I remember trying to write a play once about a group of people that thought they were revolutionaries, and that it was only a matter of hours before the anti-terror police would come crashing through the door. The idea was to make it uncertain whether they truly were dangerous revolutionaries or kids excited by pictures of Che Guevara. (Writing that now, I realise I missed a trick - that uncertainty could say a lot about the over-harsh anti-terror laws the last government introduced). The play was aborted, as I wasn't a good enough - or dedicated enough - writer to make it work, and doing this thing with a detective would be particularly difficult, given the intricacies of mystery plots. But it would be great to do, to make a sort of existential detective (not like those in I Heart Huckabees), to introduce continental philosophy to the mystery genre, where the reader doesn't know anything at the start and continues not to know anything throughout, but keeps reading because there is bait enough that they will know something sooner or later.

Google Woolf

2010-08-19T12:39:00.003+01:00

I saw this image on HTMLGiant the other day. Lots of ideas.

1) Is it a profound image or is it po-profound, a sort of sixth form poetry? Can it be both? There is something profound about a lack of profundity, isn't there, that sort of piercing amateurishness that is actually more visceral and connected to both writer/image-maker and reader/viewer than something tailored by a master crafter. It isn't layered through double- and double-double-guessing of audience and their views of the artist, their knowledge, their intelligence etc etc. What it is layered through is a self-conscious attempt at self-creation-by-assocation - the sort of teen (I was one) that said how great things were not because he/she thinks they're great but because they know the associations these things elicit in people's heads, like the Beats making people think of crazy, hobo artists, or Sylvia Plath or Holden Caulfield... But that self-consciousness is so obvious that it becomes a sort of brave honesty in a way.

2) Weird time/place thing. This is a map of a place, and a very particularly contemporary one - the technology has only been around for a while to do it, and it was taken on a specific day at a specific time when the sun was a particular point in the sky and people were a certain way down that particular road. But all of a sudden it's a March day in 1941. The creator has chosen to take away the satellite option which de-temporalises it in a way, or at least allows for the March 28th 1941 to be there.

It's not just a map of a place, though. It's obviously a map of a time, too. It reminds me of that phrase you see in news reports or travel brochures about "a corner of Britain that has forever remained in 1941". It's usually about a theme village or something, or somewhere that hasn't got broadband yet. So what's this? Is this the same thing, a kind of Woolf theme park? I don't think so, I don't imagine there are plaques up or anything. It is one of those places that becomes a sort of shrine, although that's not quite the right word, a place that people gravitate to. Like the Salford Boys Club for Smiths fans, or Jim Morrison's grave in Paris. It becomes a portal where people think they can establish a firmer contact with the person. Like the kisses all over Oscar Wilde's grave in the same cemetery as Morrison's. A place comes to stand for the passage of time, it comes to almost hold energy from that time long ago, it is as if it has never really moved on. Time stood still. Which is exactly what this image does - it makes time stop. Images always do that.

3) No line between A and B. Derek - doing his PhD on Woolf - jokily said that Woolf would probably have resisted such linearity! He's got a point though. A line would make the thing ridiculous, make it over-proscriptive, as if it were just a case of going from one place to another (which I suppose it is, in a way). But in truth that line would be undescribable. It wouldn't contain anything, there's no way it could, no way that you could make it have meaning in any proper way.

If there's an A and a B, one wonders if there's C, a D, and so on. If there were a line, one might get the impression that nothing ended at B, it was just a stop-over. There is already an element of that with just the A and the B. But one could also say that the presence of the A and B make it even more poignant - something cut off early, there's another 24 letters to go! (Ironic to mark the death of a writer with the first letters of the alphabet). One could say it renders the sudden stop even more sudden than if there hadn't been markers. The sudden stop upon realising that there is no C, there's no "and then what happened?" That's just it.

Heart Chamber Orchestra

2010-08-19T09:35:00.000+01:00

Physical music?

Heart Chamber Orchestra - Pixelache from pure on Vimeo.

Someone Else's Notes on Inception

2010-07-25T11:11:00.001+01:00

A good set of ideas/reviews/notes on Inception at HTMLGiant. It made me question my initial disappointment, like I perhaps dismissed it too quickly. Maybe I'll see it again.

Conference of the Birds

2010-07-19T09:49:00.005+01:00

Thanks to Nomadics I've discovered a great podcast by Stephen Cope called Conference of the Birds. His website is here, and you can also find his programmes here. From that second link, the Internet Archive one, you can imbed the player; this is what I was listening to this morning:

UPDATE: The first song on this one is absolutely amazing!:

The singer's name is Houria Aïchi. Here's some info on her and a video.

Football Stuff and Kate Zambreno Writing Brilliantly Again

2010-07-10T23:27:00.002+01:00

Round-up:

Great K-Punk articles on football:

"Postcolonial melancholy and all that" - "The FA has gone from being a quasi-Feudalistic shambles to being a neoliberal shambles. Same English malaise, different systems. Once a crumbling repository of old English power (members of the Admiralty used to sit on committees), it is now the kind of business ontology-oriented body of which Adam Crozier was the CEO. (Crozier's dismal passage through English institutions like the FA and the Royal Mail tells its own story about life in neoliberal England.) Like English culture in general, the FA has passed from dithering cronyism to post-Fordist short-termism. Neither mode provides much appetite for planning or strategy. Reading Zone Styx's account of Germany's reconstruction after their 2001 defeat by England, one is astonished by the clear contrast with the situation in England. There is in English football no infrastructure capable of implementing a long-term strategy in the way that Germany has. Löw is not a lone aunt sally in the way that England managers are; he is the figurehead of an institutionally-defined strategy and one reason that Germany have had a consistent level of success in international football is institutional memory, something that England conspicuously lack (what they have instead is a kind of bad hauntology)."

and "Football/capitalist realism/utopia" - "If the brave new world wouldn't arrive for the working class, it did arrive for Clough personally. Instead of being at the vanguard of a newly assertive working class, Clough's period of greatest success coincided with the ebb tide of postwar proletarian collectivism. Clough was sometimes sneered at as a ‘champagne socialist’ because he saw no contradiction between being a leftist and achieving success. Like many born poor, Clough was never able to fully believe that he had finally vanquished poverty from his life - hence, all those TV appearances, ghosted columns and the bung-rumours."

and Kate Zambreno writing brilliantly, again: "What would Foucault say. Yes. Foucault. On Lebron James. "

Updike's Easy Terrorist

2010-07-05T18:30:00.002+01:00

I'm reading John Updike's Terrorist at the moment, as sort of background reading for the dissertation. There are blurbs all over it saying how great it is, the Mail on Sunday says how "masterly" the prose is, and Ian McEwan saying how he's "the finest novelist writing in English today" and John Banville saying "no one else I know of, simply no one, writes this well" and the publisher's own blurb saying how Updike is "America's foremost writer on the times we live in". It's all so gushy, gushy, gushy.

And when you start reading it, you get this calm feeling, you imagine a sea and a little breeze, maybe you're on a beach and you have a little drink next to you, and every now and again you put down the book, open still but face down on your tummy, and look out to the sea and watch people swimming and people in little boats. Because it's all so easy, this book, it's like Updike wrote it whilst half-asleep. Every word seems to be there so perfectly, like he imagined the whole thing in one go and it just appeared on the page, without any thought or anything, without any crises or deletions or redrafts or shifts from the first to the third person and then back again. It's sleepwalking literature masquerading as edgy and contemporary. There's no questioning in this, no doubt or anything, not of literature's ability to portray things, not of his own ability, not of anything - there are no problems here for Updike, this book was probably a breeze to write. Come to think of it, he probably wrote it sitting on a lounger on a beach every now and again putting his notebook down to look out at the sea to watch people swimming and people in little boats.

New Fave Blog

2010-06-26T09:46:00.003+01:00

I read a lot of literature-related blogs, usually ones attached to small presses or groups of writers - HTMLGiant and Big Other are the main two I read, but there are a lot of others - the Millions, the Constant Conversation and Nomadics are also particular favourites. I think it was through one of these that I discovered Kate Zambreno's blog, Frances Farmer is My Sister which is my current fave blog. I like it because of its roughness - her writing seems to flow out of her and she makes all these connections and digressions. She mixes personal experience with literary and academic ideas in a really compelling way. Whenever I read it, I always find some sort of inspiration for my own academic work - the way she connects ideas together, bringing in Deleuze with say, contemporary zombie films (I'm not sure if she did that, or whether that's just the sort of thing she would do) and creates a sort of theme-driven essay/personal memoir that circulates around the same ideas but in increasingly interesting ways. She's currently writing a book of essays for Semiotext(e) which given her blog and Semiotext(e)'s back catalogue, should be absolutely fantastic. Shame we've got to wait til autumn of 2011. Meanwhile, there are her novels to read...

New Photos on Flickr

2010-06-24T13:05:00.000+01:00

New Type

2010-06-21T10:24:00.005+01:00

I'm in the new volume of Type Review, along with erstwhile friends and colleagues Henry King (not as kind his listing makes out!), Ryan J Davidson and Tom Coles, who's incredible-looking writing makes him the featured writer for this issue. There are some pretty great pencil drawings in there too.

You can buy here, as well as peruse their always-entertaining blog.

The Player-Manager Balance

2010-06-21T10:24:00.002+01:00

What I was saying in that last post about the position of managers in modern football is touched on slightly by Richard Williams in today's Guardian:

"It is their [the players'] game, after all. Nowadays we tend to exalt the top managers – the Fergusons, Mourinhos and Wengers – above those who actually play the game, for the simple media-driven reason that they are not only more rounded characters but the only ones in a position to say anything provocative or even interesting, providing newspapers and broadcasters with the running narrative of a football season."

As a journalist perhaps he places too much emphasis on the media side of the game. I don't think managers are exalted because they say interesting things in the media, because, quite frankly, they don't. Mourinho's "Special One" comment was six years ago now. Last year, when Mourinho won the Champions League again with Inter Milan, he was notably quieter. No, I think managers are exalted not because they say interesting things so much as they just say something. Players are kept away from the media more, and managers have far more license to pontificate. Theirs, after all, is a game of words and thought; they are not actually playing. When they talk to the media or write their programme notes, they are doing their job. Talking to the media is part of that. For the players, it's something slightly different.

This effect of the massive media attention football gets, combined with the rise of sports psychology and greater understanding of the mental side of sport - all sport - I think is the reason managers are scrutinised as much as players are. I've always been suspicious of the school of thought that says "at the end of the day, it's the players' fault", because they go out there, most often, to execute a game-plan conceived primarily by the manager. It is the manager's job to look at his players, look at the opposition, and construct a game-plan that he thinks his players can do with respect to the other team. The England players' reaction to the awful game on Friday reveals this, I think. Their criticisms of Capello - at least the ones that have trickled out through the media - revolve around them having to carry out a plan they feel was the wrong one. It is very notable that once on the pitch they didn't try to change the plan. They gamely carried on, probably aware it wasn't working, but both powerless and ignorant to change it.

Players look to their manager to direct things, and for the most part they follow the plan, especially on the pitch. Off the pitch, as we're seeing, it's a different story. To say it's the players fault, then, disconnects fundamentally the relationship between the manager and the players during the 90 minutes of the game. Far too much emphasis is placed on the fact that the players are on the pitch and the manager not. What needs to be looked at is the operational relationship between the two. What is the balance of power there? A good manager constructs a solid game plan which is all the more solid for building in the flexibility to change it if it's not working. Managers are lucky if they have intelligent players they can entrust with understanding the plan, realising if it's not working and changing it. For the first few years of his time at Liverpool, for instance, this was very much Rafael Benitez's relationship with Xabi Alonso, who was often described as Benitez's "eyes and ears on the pitch".

The real problem, I think, with England at the moment, is that Capello has never had this relationship with any of the players, and so cannot create it now, even if he wanted to, which is doubtful, given his authoritarian stance. That balance between the off-pitch manager and the on-pitch players has been knocked off-kilter, and they are all scrabbling around in the grey area it's created.

David v Goliath

2010-06-17T10:19:00.004+01:00

The Spain result yesterday crystallised something. France drew, England drew, Argentina won narrowly 1-0, Italy drew, Brazil narrowly won 2-1. Of all the favourites, and they weren't even a favourite, only Germany have looked assured. They have surely been the team of the tournament so far, they were pretty amazing the other night.

But this is not necessarily the big teams underperforming, as a lot of people have been saying. Clearly no-one wants to lose their first game and so conservatism wins out over adventure in most cases. And the big players need to feel their way into a tournament like any other. I've read elsewhere that the standardisation of training regimes means that tournaments are unlikely to turn up a real clash of styles and approaches like they used to (did they use to?). An additional, and perhaps unseen, aspect of the globalization of football.

But what I think this shows too is the psychology of football, the tactics, the results of careful and methodic studying of DVDs of the opposition in order to pick their weaknesses and work out their strengths. Studying your opponent is not a new idea, but there seems to me to be an ever-increasing emphasis placed on the psychology of the game, and thus the role of the manager. José Mourinho is talked about in such glowing terms because of his tactical masterclasses (see Inter's win over Barcelona in last season's Champions League), whilst managers like Marcello Lippi, Fabio Capello and Guus Hiddink are prized so much because of their adept readings of the game. You see evidence of this emphasis when you look at the managers of so-called "lesser teams" - Ottmar Hitzfeld is managing Switzerland. He's one of the very small group of managers to have won the Champions League with 2 different clubs. Sven-Goran Eriksson is managing the Ivory Coast. I know Sven's not the best manager ever, but time was when smaller countries would find much smaller profile managers. You have Carlos Alberto Parreira managing South Africa and if Russia were in the World Cup, they would be managed by Guus Hiddink.

Teams are going out with very carefully plotted game-plans. North Korea executed theirs almost to perfection, Switzerland certainly did. They are drilled on these again and again and the test of the players is how much they can stick to it once they're in the glare of the floodlights and the TV cameras.

Football football football!!!

2010-06-17T10:08:00.003+01:00

Football football football! I love the World Cup. I love the games, I love the endless geeky conversations about performances, what Rooney's best position is, whether Spain will choke, how good those North Koreans were, and what I love the most is statistics, statistics, statistics. I could go over them for hours and hours. I like reading every column inch I can find on the things, right down to the design and manufacture of the Jabulani ball (which is rubbish, apparently) and those buzzy things drowning out crowd noise, as well as going over the passing stats, the assist stats, the possession stats, everything.

Now I discover Mark Fisher, aka Kpunk, is blogging the World Cup with a few other distinguished bloggers. This is exactly the sort of writing I want about football. Engaged, knowledgeable, thoughtful. And written by teachers and writers of philosophy, politics and critical theory! Excellent! I recommend it for anyone. Anyone.

Gianni Vattimo

2010-06-13T10:39:00.003+01:00

Last week the University of Glasgow held its annual (I think) Gifford Lectures and Italian Communist, MEP and professor of philosophy Gianni Vattimo came to talk about "The End of Reality". I could only make it to one of the series, but a thing in it caught my attention. I'll try to follow it through, and it'll probably be more what I think he said than what he actually said, but I don't think that matters.

So, we have seen, especially since postmodernity, a gradual dissolution of reality, with the idea of being as event (did he mention Badiou at all?), an event "in which we participate actively as interpreters" (that was one of the introducers speaking) rather than as an objective given. If it is an event, then, it is ongoing, continual, and in that sense it is a dialogue, between at least two and probably between far more than two. Being is not reducible to an individual. It is therefore collective, and Vattimo talked about "solidarity instead of objectivity". This either led to or was itself an "increased spirituality to everyday life" because of the idea of God as the Holy Trinity is a dialogue too - God in this image is not an individual being but a (manifestation of a) dialogue. THIS is the End of Reality - it is the increased spirituality of everyday life. If reality ends - reality here being that objective event - then that end is an increase in spirituality because reality ending creates a dialogue, which is Godlike.

If this is true, then human life is always incomplete, never-ending. This is why, said Vattimo, a devout Catholic who believes not in God but in the "death of God", "I don't think we can find salvation on planet earth".

I liked him immensely. He was very well turned out in blue suit and pink tie, chuckled a lot, got lost, skipped bits of his paper, ran off tangentially into little anecdotes and jokes that were sort of half-lost in translation, given his thick Italian accent. It's pretty amazing Glasgow can get people like that to come over and speak - he was here for a week, he gave a seminar on Saturday and then a series of lectures from Monday to Thursday. David Jasper, from the Theology department, gave an emotional little speech afterwards about how these lectures remind us what the university is for - sharing ideas, talking, meeting - and how we said goodbye to Gianni as friends.

World Cup special Flickr update!

2010-06-10T23:28:00.000+01:00

Polarising

2010-06-04T10:22:00.002+01:00

Last night I turned on BBC News 24 and it was showing that programme HardTalk, which has been amusingly stupid in the past, see here:

and continued to be so last night. It was a different interviewer - not Steven Sackur - and he was interviewing Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who's book Infidel I'm reading at the moment as background reading for my work on Lance Olsen's Head in Flames. Hirsi Ali is interesting because she, more than anyone I can think of, reveals the confusion of left- and right-wing politics that is the current state of politics worldwide. That she came to prominence in the Netherlands is not coincidental, it is the perfect place to show this confusion. I remember reading a Momus blog about a Socialist party in the Netherlands that was anti-immigration because they claimed that the movement of workers and so-on was a capitalist ploy. That's as maybe, but I don't think you can call yourself a Socialist if your outlook is nationalist, not internationalist. You can call yourself someone who stands up for the poor and ignored, but not a Socialist. The Socialist anthem is The Internationale, socialist politics are specifically formed in an internationalist context. Reading Ian Buruma's (excellent) book Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (interestingly re-named in the US Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance), you discover yourself agreeing with anti-immigrant politicians because they are for women's rights, and against pro-immigration politicians because they turn a blind eye to domestic abuse. Hirsi Ali, in her fight against the degrading treatment of women, suggests that Muslims "learn" from Christians and become more Western. Buruma calls her an Enlightenment fundamentalist and Christopher Hitchens writes the intro to Infidel.

I had intended to put up the interview (having found it on youtube) and leave it at that, but a search of youtube reveals an earlier HardTalk interview and a few others, all with descriptions along the lines of "Hirsi Ali's fascism revealed" etc etc, which just goes to show how polarising she is. Nevertheless, the book Infidel is really very good, whether you agree with her or not. I would imagine it would make anyone, of any political stripe, question what they take forgranted. It poses difficult questions.

Dissolving and Inventing

2010-06-02T00:14:00.002+01:00

The books to read list just gets bigger. David Shields has compiled a reading list, made up of "books, each of which asks what is for me the only serious question: given that we die, and given that there is no god, how do we find purpose in existence?" He "seem[s] to like books that help you get out of bed, but just barely. These books do that, with ferocious and, for me, life-affirming honesty."

We are re-watching the West Wing at the moment, so those quotes are ringing in my ears like the mawkish/inspirational round-up lines at the end of each episode, but if you can ignore that, then they might be useful. Or failing that, the actual books might well be.

Still Here

2010-05-31T10:57:00.001+01:00

By way of an entry, seeing as there hasn't been one for nearly a month, there are some new photos up on flickr:

There will be a proper(ish) post soon.

Aborted Lefty Morosity

2010-04-27T22:04:00.004+01:00

OK, so my whole plan to write that long piece on left-wing morosity has come to a shuddering halt. Never make promises you can't keep. But, in order to partly fulfil it, here's what I got down, which is what I wrote the five minutes after I had the idea...

The most remarkable thing about Chris Petit's Content (still available on 4oD for a couple of days. NB: Not anymore) was how easily it fell into the familiar pattern of morose decrying of contemporary society. It seems, nowadays, that to criticise the neoliberal, globalising mission of Western (and increasingly Eastern) governments, is to affect the pose of a sleep-walker at a funeral, leaden-footed and mono-toned.

It is to buy - without reflection - into a narrative already set in motion, a narrative which passively lists what is wrong without appearing to actually have any belief in its power as critique, without having any of the required positivity involved in actively positing something different and laying out how it can work.

The important thing - for the weavers of this narrative - is not to question the narrative itself, but to critique simply the society that sets itself up to be critiqued. Whatever you do, don't question the narrative itself, the increasingly repetitious narrative of the disjointed, morose left. The key thing is not to question this, but to posit your originality within it, to find your niche so that your voice can be heard, and hopefully heralded as "long overdue" and "important".

This pose also is increasingly technophobic. It both amazes and frustrates me that we (both as a society and more specfically as left-wingers) allow generalised, lazy thinking about the internet and technology when we decry precisely that in politics, culture, urban planning, and pretty much everything else. As the monotone voice-over of the film intones, "for all the excitement of the internet, for which read: online gambling, conspiracy theories, and internet porn, most of it remains as flat as the plains of the American west, blighted by tumble-weed and inhabited by the redundant, the forlorn, and the unvisited in search of belonging." No mention of the use of the internet by dispersed resistance groups, by local communities, by freedom-of-information advocates, by Obama; or by small presses to distribute avant-garde and experimental literature around the world, or musicians and film-makers to find audiences for their work, or by artists to share work, or simply by people from different backgrounds to come into contact with each other. Clearly there is a lot of utopianism about the internet, but the way to correct that is not by lazy, uninformed diatribes against the sorts of things one finds in the "real" world beyond the internet as much as on it: physical casinos appearing in city centres, BNP and EDL marches in English cities, the sex-shops of Soho.

I find myself frustrated with a left that refuses to feel confident and positive about itself. It's a left that has no chance of appealing to those beyong the converted if it carries on like it.

New Photos on Flickr

2010-04-18T17:53:00.001+01:00

In place of that long piece I mentioned in the last post, which has rather run-a-ground, some photos:

Hard Work

2010-04-08T10:26:00.003+01:00

I've half-decided take a slightly new approach with this blog: to post longer, more considered pieces less often. Which explains the recent silence. I'm working on something about Chris Petit's film Content - which screened on More4 the other week (it was on 4oD, but I think it's gone now) and may come to cinemas soon - and leftist moroseness (morosity?).

In the meantime, if you're ever thinking there's not enough time to get things done, read this article on David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, who in the last year has written a 672-page book on Obama whilst doing his day-job. Here's a little snippet:

"During the year he spent on “The Bridge,” he rose at 5:30 a.m. to write and often stayed up past midnight, but rarely discussed the book at work. “He got up really early, went back to work after dinner with the kids, and took no weekends off and no vacation for more than a year,” said Esther B. Fein, his wife, in an e-mail message."

Isis in '75

2010-03-29T21:24:00.002+01:00

The double CD Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue makes a big claim to be one of my favourite Dylan albums. I've been listening to it for the last few days. The previous CD in this series, the infamous 1965 electric "Judas!" chant one is pretty amazing, yes, but this is amazing too, in its own subtler way. It's a sound of a rag-tag band on full power, fully enjoying the whole experience.

I read Larry "Ratso" Sloman's account of the tour a few years ago. "Guitar sounds filled the air, Scarlett's haunting gypsy violin presiding over the clatter in hot, musky gyms and clean, stainless-steel auditoriums. The Rolling Thunder Revue was a caravan of gypsies, hoboes, trapeze artists, lonesome guitar slingers, and spiritual green berets" he writes. "They took to the road in the fall of '75, a weird karass, Dylan, Baez, Mitchell, Elliott, Neuwirth, McGuinn, Ronson, Blakley, Ginsberg, it went on and on".

The sense of the tour being something more than travelling between gigs I think helped the music. The tour was something of a statement but also something echoing back to travelling players, a twisting of the American on-the-road story, a sort of carnival. This video comes from the 4 hour film they made during the journey called Renaldo and Clara, a sort of quasi-mythical dramatisation of the Dylan myth and all the other myths he ransacked, appropriated and twisted to create it. I bought it on a DVD someone had burned from an old taped-off-TV video; it's never been released officially, perhaps because it's so rambling and incoherent. But that's part of its charm, as far as I'm concerned. You don't have to watch it all in order (or all of it at all!) to get the feel. You can dip in whenever and wherever you want.

I think the band sounds great, so tightly ramshackle - neither boringly similiar each night but not a hotchpotch either.

Toog's Czech Animation

2010-03-27T20:41:00.006Z

Toog's is my new favourite blog. It's charming and rather funny. He has two obsessions: "(1) shepherds, and (2) animals crossing roads".

Today's entry was all about this film from Czechoslovakia (when it was Czechoslovakia). It's made by a guy called Břetislav Pojar.

Toog says "I feel close to the small bear, being naive and candid. And I said to my wife that she's more like the big one; but she doesn't agree". Me and Lil think that she (Lil) is the small one (that falls asleep all the time) and I'm the big one (who wants to play all the time). POST-SCRIPT: There is some debate in our household about whether the little bear is more Lil-like because of the sleeping or the frowning...

I love the colour-palette of this film, all these lovely autumnal blues, browns and reds. It's all so intricately animated but it's not too "busy" either. Lil pointed out how the background is very like a Miro painting:

4:33's Artificial Demarcation

2010-03-25T22:53:00.003Z

It's interesting to see how a piece that invites the audience - and the musicians too, I suppose - to feel the spatiality of sound, its physical aspects, encourages an artificiality in the audience's demeanour - all that coughing! A commenter below the video wonders this too: is there always that much coughing at classical music concerts? There're a few "heh-hems" in between movements, for sure, but these seem to be coded messages of some kind. Not the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?-type, mind, more a covert acknowledgement of the boundaries of the piece, even though objectively (problematic?) there is no change in the physical aural conditions of the hall from the last second of one movement to the first second of the little break. It's as if they need to mark it somehow, and because the piece is silent, there's no obvious demarcation between the piece and the not-piece, so they have to artificially create one.

Great Ecstasy

2010-03-24T10:29:00.003Z

This is a great ten minutes of cinema, I've been watching it over and over again for the last couple of days. Ever since I read about his idea of ecstatic truth, I've been fascinated by it and by Herzog himself. As far as I understand it, the idea is that truth doesn't rest in facts so much as something beyond them, in something both to do with us and completely separate from us. It has something to do with nature, too, some conception of a primitive human. The "bare life" that Giorgio Agamben talks about.

I was struck when I saw Grizzly Man by the apparent fictionality of the interviews with Timothy Treadwell's friends, the doctor that did the post-mortem and others. I later read that Herzog schooled his interviewers, rehearsing what they were to say and preparing lighting effects and the like, so that when it came to shooting they were effectively acting a part. His point is that the truth would not be served by their "spontaneous" descriptions to the camera, the apparent "reality" depicted given extra technical weight by the lack of carefully planned lighting; the apparent on-the-hoof-ness of it. Truth exists as something far past that.

It's a strange sort of spirituality that I like in his films. Moments of almost-transcendence (I think he'd hate that description) pop up frequently, filmed in slow motion to separate them from the film. It's a fascination with the edges of life - or perhaps the very middle - those moments where life appears close to something beyond its consituent parts, like flying through the air on skis in this film, or living in Antartica, living with bears, dragging a boat over a hill. There's something "other" to his films that's never spelled out or looked at directly, it's always by looking at the effects of whatever this other is that we see it, never it itself.

Time for a Manifesto?

2010-03-21T22:43:00.005Z

I've noticed of late a little spike in things - books, ideas - being described as manifestos. This observation is entirely non-scientific, and I don't have any figures to back it up, but it seems as if the manifesto is having something of a mini-renaissance.

Firstly, there's David Shield's Reality Hunger, which seems to be causing quite the controversy a manifesto is supposed to, although it does appear to be a rather subdued controversy, mainly concerning the viewpoint that it's not-really-very-radical and thus not-really-a-manifesto. I am yet to read it, though rather itching to, as it will no doubt form quite a large part of my future studies, and more pressingly I gather there's a mention of cellphone novels in there somewhere that I have to dig out.

Secondly, there's this - You are Not a Gadget (: A Manifesto) in which the inventor of Virtual Reality Jaron Lanier decides the internet's rubbish now. I think Michael Agger may have it right in his review: "The Web hasn't lost flavor; you've lost flavor."

Thirdly - and this is what made me think there was something worth noting here - is Tony Judt's piece in the Guardian on Saturday, which in the paper version was called A Manifesto for a Brighter Future but on the net is called A Manifesto for a New Politics, which is strange, given that it's a manifesto for a traditional social democracy that realises that "radicalism has always been about conserving valuable pasts". Which may or may not be true - the piece is generally good, I think, even if it places a little too much faith in the idea of social democracy - but what is interesting is how it's called a "manifesto". Why? It isn't really, or if it is then a whole host of opinion pieces in newspapers around the world can be called manifestos. And the two books above seem to have added their colonic subtitles for reasons of provocation rather than a genuinely held belief that they are putting across something new. David Shields, perhaps, thinks he's doing that, but if some reviews are to go by, his something new is to say that non-fiction or the tinkering between it and fiction is the way forward, which isn't particularly new. And Lanier's book appears to be a collection of column articles. Which isn't new or even a coherent single piece!

And of course there's the altermodern, which had a manifesto, even if it did seem to be going through the motions somewhat.

So why manifestos? Times are rough/tough/uncertain etc, and in these sorts of times people are supposedly open to big ideas (although none so big as to actually make a difference: hence the use of the word "recovery" so often in relation to the economy), and big ideas need big statements to get them across and that means a manifesto. But it's a particularly postmodern idea of a manifesto that seems to be doing the rounds - call it a manifesto but actually aim to change very little.

Having said that, it would be exciting if we had a new age of manifestos by radical artists being published on the front page of the Daily Telegraph.

Publication Studio

2010-03-21T18:49:00.000Z

Publication Studio Makes A Book from Mike Merrill on Vimeo.

Publication Studio are based in Portland, Oregon.

New Photos on Flickr

2010-03-14T23:06:00.001Z

New batch up.

Big Other and La Monte Young

2010-03-14T09:29:00.010Z

Big Other is a blog Lil discovered, and it's fast becoming one of my favourites. Their writers mix up short posts with longer posts where they intersperse essays on the avant-garde or experimental art with YouTube videos that illustrate what they're saying. It's one of the better advantages blogging has over more traditional essay-writing. I like the interactive nature, and the ability to illustrate what you are talking about - especially music or cinema - in the body of the work, rather than it being extraneous, an "appendix".

This morning, I read a post entitled "What Is Experimental Art?". As well as having a few very useful things for me about the origins of the term "avant-garde" in artistic circles, it curates some wonderful serial and minimalist music. I think I'd like to write on minimalist music one day, I absolutely love it.* This piece by La Monte Young caught my eyes and ears. I'd vaguely heard his name bandied around at the edges of conversations, but never looked into him in any serious way.

A D Jameson, the author of the Big Other piece, quotes Young:

"The very first sound that I recall hearing was the sound of the wind blowing through the chinks and all around the log cabin in Idaho where I was born. I have always considered this among my most important early experiences. It was very awesome and beautiful and mysterious. Since I could not see it and did not know what it was, I questioned my mother about it for long hours.

During my childhood there were certain sound experiences of constant frequency that have influenced my musical ideas and development: the sounds of insects; the sounds of telephone poles and motors; sounds produced by steam escaping, such as my mother’s tea-kettle and the sounds of whistles and signals from trains; and resonations set off by the natural characteristics of particular geographic areas such as canyons, valleys, lakes, and plains. Actually, the first sustained single tone at a constant pitch, without a beginning or end, that I heard as a child was the sound of telephone poles, the hum of the wires. This was a very important auditory influence upon the sparse sustained style of work of the genre of the Trio for Strings (1958), Composition 1960 #7 (B and F# “To be held for a long time”) and The Four Dreams of China (1962)."

You can hear that in this piece, also in the Big Other post. (The quote comes from here):

* POST-SCRIPT: Actually, thinking about it, there's something particularly "everyday" to the minimalists. It seems to me that this music gets very close to the sensation of being alive - variations on a theme; that amazing capacity to simultaneously restrict experience to a few notes whilst opening up what seems like the whole universe; the repetition and the exultation; the apparently spiritual in the apparently mundane. Think about that in relation to this Philip Glass piece:

Suddenly the choice of Glass to score The Hours makes beautiful sense.

Playlist

2010-03-11T22:51:00.006Z

Time for a little music:

Slow Motion

2010-03-10T10:16:00.003Z

From Sauve qui peut (la vie) by Jean-Luc Godard. He's just amazing; mental, but amazing.

Puzzler

2010-03-09T22:38:00.007Z

"a puzzle piece means nothing - just an impossible question, an opaque challenge. But as soon as you have succeeded, after minutes of trial and error, or after a prodigious half-second flash of inspiration, in fitting it into one of its neighbours, the piece disappears, ceases to exist as a piece. The intense difficulty preceding this link-up - which the English word puzzle indicates so well - not only loses its raison d'etre, it seems never to have had any reason, so obvious does the solution appear."

Georges Perec on jigsaw puzzles.

Precariousness and the Real

2010-03-06T22:11:00.007Z

Like Tom B, I've been thinking about the Real a lot recently. Tonight, I was thinking of a conversation I had with him the other day about poetry, in which I said that nice lines were nice and everything, but if that's all they were, if they just made you go "aahhh, that's a nice line" then they were fairly useless, because, after reading the Brecht chapter of Owen Hatherley's book Militant Modernism, I now view that line-making somewhat suspiciously.

As I understand him, Brecht was suspicious of nice lines because it dragged the reader (or the spectator in theatre) into a state of pleasure, encouraging them to both view art as a site for value exchange (you go to a play or read a book in order to "get something out of it") and to suspend their critical faculties. In becoming a product to give its user pleasure, art loses any ability to effect change.

Now, whenever I find myself liking a nice line, I remember Brecht. Nevertheless, there is the possibility of a nice line doing something else. It can be so nice that it goes beyond nice, far beyond it, into something beyond value judgements or questions of taste: the Real. Art is able -- though very, very rarely, see Badiou's chapter on "The Real and Semblance" in The Century -- to access the Real, although only as a glimpse, as a quick-as-lightning flash that darts through the gaps in reality/ideology/culture. The Real is beyond what we know, it is just what simply is. (The Real was the topic for our theory reading group last week, and it was one of the best yet; the point was raised about how you take this theory - its language is so totalising one tends to forget it is a theory that can be accepted or not, just like any other).

It is this quick-as-lightning quality that has interest for precariousness. The Real appears unknowable, unpredictable, and undecipherable. It has no quality, no content, no shape; it does not relate to morals or belief systems. It is -- perhaps -- the ultimate precariousness. The section we read was from Catherine Belsey's book, Culture and the Real. On page 14 she says this: "the real is a question, not an answer". I am writing on the potential for the question to be a key form of precariousness. The Real may turn out to be important.

ULTIMATE PRECARIOUSNESS RESOURCE

2010-02-27T00:07:00.001Z

I found this today, and it's just about the best thing in the world ever for my PhD/dissertation/anything.

Double Metaphors

2010-02-23T21:46:00.006Z

I've been accepted to present a paper at What Happens Now: 21st Century Writing in English – The First Decade at the University of Lincoln in July. Provisionally entitled "'Zombies of the Interrogative Mood': Contemporary Theory, Fiction and the Question of Questions", I'm going to be writing on Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood and William Walsh's Questionstruck: A Collection of Question-Based Texts Derived from the Books of Calvin Trillin and wondering whether the question-based text is a particularly apt form for our uncertain times.

When searching for a title, I flipped through Powell's book and found the zombies quote. I thought it was cool and would catch the conference organisers' attention. Which presumably it did. After I'd submitted it, though, I began to think that the zombie is another curiously apt metaphor for contemporaneity. The zombie is neither alive nor dead, and that's pretty precarious if you ask me! Then I remembered Paul Krugman's "zombie ideas" and thought how apt it is for capitalism - it's not working, but it's not dead. It's in this precarious, limbo-state; everyone knows something has to change, but no-one's doing it.

Interestingly, Krugman meant to point out the lack of imagination in economic policy making - zombie ideas are ideas that keep coming back, as per the common imagination of zombies in computer games and films. He wasn't specifically referring to a precariousness (or precarity, as I've heard people describe it) but it was implied. That's a common thread in contemporary theories and writing: the conditions are talked about, perhaps even uncertainty is mentioned by name, but no-one talks about it as precariousness, as something that isn't just in politics or economics, but filters down from those apparently "lofty" disciplines to everyday life. That's what I'm interested in.

So, the upshot of all this is that my 2000 word paper now has two guiding metaphors, which is one too many really. Either the question-as-concept is (the openess of the question, something that opens up to the unknown and therefore precarious) or the zombie is. Haven't quite worked this out yet.

Mardi Gras 1956

2010-01-28T22:39:00.000Z

Via Boing Boing:

"People tend to sit where there are places to sit" . Or do they?

2010-01-27T23:29:00.009Z

I've been watching this documentary by William H Whyte called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. There was a book too.

I'm revelling in seeing New York in the late 70s. Not the New York of that time seen in films by Scorsese, for instance, or Cassavetes, but the quotidian city, the metropolis of the everyday. In the first ten minutes alone, there are tens of wonderful little moments: the child in the playground hacking up a crate on his own, the lovers dotted around the Seagrams plaza, the business-men saying goodbye to each other. Each of these little urban vignettes are so wonderfully alive!

It reminded me of something John Coyle said about "phantom rides", films made in the very first years of the twentieth century by placing cameras on the front of trams or on carts and just moving through the city. For the audiences at the time, it made them think of the space of the city in new ways, they'd never seen their daily routes depicted in this separate way: they'd never seen them through someone else's eyes before. John said that watching them now, one hundred years later, you are captivated by these people, these ordinary people. They are doing the same things (roughly) that we do; going about their business, going to lunch, to work, to school; their gestures are the same, they wave, they smile; you feel a real connection to them somehow. And then you remember that they're all dead, and it's the most beautiful thing in the world.

For the Modern Everyday course that I'm taking this spring, a key text is Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life. That book is famous for de Certeau's conception of tactics and strategies in the urban environment. Simply put, a strategy is the means by which institutional power (government, business, planning departments, transport systems) control an environment. By constructing obstacles to movement, they funnel human activity into certain routes. Or at least they attempt to. Tactics are used by individuals to re-humanise these spaces, to create mini acts of resistance to the dominance of what in the end is capital; each new route is one of these acts. Think of those parts of grass that have become mud because they have been trodden down by so many people taking shortcuts over them. Those patches of mud are tactics made manifest.

In the film (in part 2), Whyte talks about the relationship between planning and use. But what is the characteristic of the relationship between the plan, the intended use, and its actual use? Who controls what? Whyte is making suggestions for planners based on making the places more friendly to pedestrians. But is that what the businesses that own these plazas want? Are the activities that this film records in fact instances of individuals using tactics to fight the strategies of business and capital?

Are planners planning for people to sit, or are the people sitting breaking the intentions of the plans, are they rebellious? Whyte recommends that places should have "sittable space" but then shows us how "management" obstruct potential seating spots by putting stones, ruts, ledges, spikes, plants or slants in the way. Later on, in part 3, Whyte shows us the (infamous, for students of postmodernity) Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, and the wall it turns to the street. "Have you ever seen a more brutal rejection of the street?" he says, showing us a plain white-brick wall at an impossibly inhuman scale, rising hundreds of feet up from the street.

The tensions brought out by de Certeau's championing of little acts of resistance and Frederic Jameson's description of the Bonaventure as "postmodern hyperspace" are the same ones developing in my, Ben and Tom's talk in the Modern Everyday class: the potential for radical resistance to capital and the form that would take. Is de Certeau to individualistic? His tactics can be used by anyone but there's no sense of collective action. Does the legacy of postmodernity (I don't think we're postmodern anymore) mean that capital can assimilate these little tactics and that collective action is the only challenge to it?

The Interrogative Mood

2010-01-27T08:55:00.003Z

I finished Padgett Powell's novel (?) The Interrogative Mood the other day. It's rather good, and I'll definitely use it in my PhD, (if the bloody application gets in, but that's a whole other story).

It's constructed entirely out of questions, 165 pages of them, divided not into chapters but roughly 10-page sections. There's no ostensible order to the questions (no theme ties together each section for instance), and they range in style and content from "Do you like paint?" to "Is there a future?" - those two appear right next to each other.

For the first ten or twenty pages, you're figuring out how you're going to read it; the rhythm, the pace, the emphases. The more you read, the more you find your way, and the more you build up a head of steam. You start noticing how the construction and placement of the questions means that you don't read it as a mere interrogative list, that each question has a different tone or timbre to it. Powell mixes it up.

Then you start noticing how questions re-appear in slightly different formations. But they're not "big themes", they're about your love of blue-jays, the fear of a hernia, the comparative beauties of a sunset and a sunrise, whether little rubber army men are still made as toys. They're the type of questions that "characterise", and you begin to wonder about the identity of the questioner. They're the apparently small things that an individual notices or is preoccupied with, and it's in this sense that Powell is very much like Nicholson Baker, (who's new book I'm currently reading). Like Baker, Powell loves those idiosyncracies - "Are you a sweater person?" "Do you take pleasure in cleaning and repacking wheel bearings?" - that always seem to 'say so much' about a person.

This questioner keeps formulating escape plans ("If you were told you could move to a cabin in the Andes, yours for the taking and with some servants on the grounds ready to work for you and that the farm was self-sufficient with their labour, would you go?") and you wonder whether these questions are a self-questioning, some sort of examination. Perhaps this book is an (auto-)biography of sorts, all the questions one asks oneself put together. But perhaps it's not a biography of a person per se, but a psyche, a society, a country even, and perhaps it's not a biography in the sense of a linear narrative from birth to death but a biography in a portrait, a snapshot, and perhaps that snapshot is of contemporary America. I think it is.

These New Musics

2010-01-24T13:57:00.007Z

The Observer Music Monthly tells me that quite a few bands I really liked a couple of years ago when their debuts came out have their second efforts released this week. There's Vampire Weekend and Yeasayer, as well as an older love Four Tet. There's also a very intriguingly-good review of a new album by a band called These New Puritans, who I've never heard before.

First Vampire Weekend. I really liked the first album; I'd been listening to a lot of West African music and I liked how VW incorporated these sounds into a pop record. I liked the literary-student-about-town lyrics about Oxford commas and Mansard roof architecture. After a while though, once the songs had been played a bit too much, it all began to sound a little stale. I haven't listened to them for quite a while. This new album seems quite a step forward, it's more sonically inventive and more interested in creating new textures, it moves away from more straight (chart-y) pop songs without losing the exuberance they had before. It's more confident, too. Here's some songs:

I saw Yeasayer with Al just after getting back from San Francisco in February 2008. I was rather grumpy about being back in Glasgow, and didn't really want to go out to the gig. But I was glad I did; it turned out to be one of the best gigs of the year. At that point I didn't know much about them, and their use of African rhythms (like VW) interested me. The album, when I got it, underwhelmed a little at first, but after listening to it again and again I came to love it. There's a very particular atmosphere to it which I love to get into and explore. So it's funny that I'm again a little underwhelmed by this new single:

I had my Four Tet moment when I first moved up to Glasgow in 2006. I remember listening to the album Rounds over and over as I wandered around a new city. But like Bonobo and artists on the Tru Thoughts and Ninja Tune labels that I was listening to at the same time, I began to get a bit bored by it; it all got a bit too "loungey" and affluent-sounding. It didn't have any edginess to it, it was the sound of comfortable London media types going to the Big Chill. I haven't really thought about Four Tet since, though I did like his collaborations with jazzer Steve Reid. But I really like the house-y stuff on his new record:

I had assumed, in the brief moments where I'd seen the name, that These New Puritans were some fairly bland emo-rocky-something-y band that I didn't need to bother about. But the review I read today describes their new album Hidden as "one of the most confounding, pretentious and self-consciously intellectual records I've heard in years". Now I like a bit of confound-ance/ity, I actively seek out pretentiousness, and I love intellectualism in music, so this seemed right up my street. The album is apparently influenced by "Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, Steve Reich, and 'the plastic textures of modern US pop'". You can definitely hear the first two in this song, as well as a bit of Radiohead I think. It's fascinating. I can't imagine listening to it very often, but I think it's incredible. The video is superb too:

Social Space Filler

2010-01-21T23:08:00.003Z

Found this on HTMLGiant today:

Looks great, there may well be a blog post about it.

And I finished Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? today, so I will be writing about that at some point in the not to distant future too.

Reciprocity and a Lighthouse

2010-01-19T20:57:00.009Z

My computer is down, which means that when I can't get onto Lil's, I use her iPod Touch. Which means, funnily enough, that I do more reading from a screen than I normally would on a larger one; I tend to "bookmark for later" far more often on a larger screen. Anyhow, catching up with we make money not art today, I found two exciting/heart-warming/interesting things. Both were from write-ups of the 4th International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam, which, a little frustratingly, has just finished.

(1) Was this:

"It is estimated that between half and 3/4ths of the economies in developing countries are based on reciprocity. Around 40% of the GNP is generated in shadow economies that rests on this practices of give and take. This kind of informal economy is not only often more important than the official economy, its importance will also increase dramatically in the coming years as the cities in poor countries undergo explosive population growth. Whether it entails physical goods or services, reciprocity often comes with an emotional, personal component."

I allowed myself to indulge in some utopian, ultra-naive thinking (which can be creative too) which linked the rise of "developing countries" (I hate that phrase so much! So many assumptions, what are they developing to?!) to this economy as a possible threat to capitalism. I allowed myself to imagine a world slowly moving over to a bartering system, everything done in kind. It reminded me of what Nick Currie was writing about recently.

(2) Was this heart-warming project from the same exhibition, but the Refuge section:

"Every year, some 20 000 refugees, mostly from Africa, try to reach Europe viaLampedusa, a tiny Italian island between Sicily and Tunisia. Aid organisations estimate that one in ten die during the dangerous crossing. Once they've set foot on 'the promised land', immigrants are directed to a 'Welcome Centre' which inadequacy is creating a worrying humanitarian situation.

Thomas Kilpper, along with a team of architects, engineers and local people, hope to build a lighthouse with a powerful beam that would provide orientation at sea and help reduce the danger to life. Furthermore, the ground floor of the lighthouse would host an arts center. The discussions, exhibitions, concerts and other cultural events organized there would attract both new visitors to the island and local people, giving them an opportunity and space to learn from and listen to each other.

This project underlines the need for a solution to the refugee problem: it's not possible to solve it via restrictions and declaring a 'state of emergency'. We call for a humanitarian and just immigration and integration policy in Europe. None of the refugees is illegal. We oppose any idea to establish a 'Fortress Europe'. The lighthouse will be a self-confident signal: 'here we are, we do not hide'."

I think this confident, positive, and crucially non-defensive valorisation of immigration is something we need far more of, and the fact that it's a lighthouse adds a wonderful sort of 'concrete symbolism' that makes the gesture more than a gesture, something brave and noble too.

Self Service

2010-01-12T23:36:00.004Z

Wandering around Glasgow the other day, Studio's West Coast album came on the "Random Album of the Day" mode on my MP3 player. I bought it, aptly enough, on the west coast of the US, and have listened to certain songs on it a lot, but not this one, so it's a mini-discovery. I'd rather it was just instrumental though.

India zoo

2010-01-12T11:55:00.002Z

Great photos from Madi Ju's trip to India:

Bunker Hill

2010-01-10T23:59:00.002Z

Heard this the other night, pretty great.

Possible Precariousnesses

2010-01-09T22:28:00.003Z

In a recent review, Stephanie Merritt picks out a line from Javier Marias's Poison, Shadow and Farewell, the third part of his Your Face Tomorrow series. Bertram Tupra, a member of MI6, explains to a recent recruit, Spanish academic Jacques Deza, his view of death: ""We've become very soft, very thin-skinned, we think we should last for ever," he tells Deza. "We ought to be accustomed to the temporary nature of things, but we're not. We insist on not being temporary, which is why it's so easy to frighten us, as you've seen, all one has to do is unsheathe a sword.""

Now, my eyes and ears opened and pricked up at this, because that sounds a lot like precariousness. What's more, it is a particularly contemporary view that is both being attacked and being put forward. The idea being attacked is the contemporary desire to extend life, to make it more solid, to protect ourselves against threats. You may wonder exactly how contemporary that is - surely it's human nature? - but I think what Marias is getting at is the particular fetishisation of permanence that an increasingly decadent capitalism creates. The equally contemporary idea being put forward by Tupra - who has just attacked a young diplomat with the aforementioned sword - is a reaction to these capitalist certainties, an embrace of the precarious which is in Tupra's case both a reactionary turning back of the clock to an age both more primitive and in touch with death as well as a more positive embrace of life in that seemingly solid capitalism which works on a valorisation of solidity whilst simultaneously destablising everyone and everything.

Another recent potential precariousness is Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?, a book composed entirely of questions - how much more precarious can you get? The question itself, as a concept, is precarious - it pitches something out into the ether, the dark, the unknown, without any guarantee of it coming back in the form of an answer. It is a leap of faith, it is uncertain and unstable. Here is a quick snippet of Powell reading from it. It sounds really funny if nothing else!:

Histoire(s) du cinema

2010-01-09T11:12:00.001Z

Easter Rabbit Trailer

2010-01-02T23:29:00.003Z

Here's a trailer for a book I've just ordered by Joseph Young. He writes microfictions, there's a little bit about him here with links to his microfiction blog, and his publishers are here.

of the Year

2010-01-02T11:24:00.007Z

I've been thinking about my faves of the year for a while, and here they are.

Album
Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca

This is the only album this year that I've listened to over and over again. It's just perfect. "Stillness is the Move" would have got song of the year too, where it not for Al's "Distractions From Studies" compilation with had Noir Desir's gem on it:

Song
Noir Desir - Le Vent nous Portera (Rubber Room re-rub)

Late in the year, Al made me an excellent compilation. This wasn't necessarily the best song on it, but it's the one I've played again and again and again.

Film
The White Ribbon (dir. Michael Haneke)

This, along with his Hidden, could and should easily make any "films of the decade" list someone wanted to write. This film blew me away, it was so, so, so masterful, this is a director at his very peak. It carefully and deliberately builds a case, but so slyly does it achieve this that you don't realise for an hour or two that it's being done, and when finally it hits you what's been happening since the very beginning, all the little hints and clues, it's devastating. Even more so for the fact that nothing comes of it, no resolution, no understanding, it just continues.

Honourable mentions go to:

The Class (dir. Laurent Cantet)

- a really vital, alive piece of film-making, I could have watched the kids for hours and hours and hours

Rachel Getting Married (dir. Jonathan Demme)

- one of the really enjoyable cinema experiences of the year, with the ultimate "if-I-were-going-to-get-married-I-would-have-a-wedding-like-that" wedding

In The City of Sylvia (dir. José Luis Guerín)

- a deceptive depiction of voyeurism and obsession, with a subtle critique of objectification and image-making, all done through a beautifully composed scenes, long, langorous takes and slinky, summery light

Let The Right One In (dir. Tomas Alfredson)

- eerie and scary, it grabs you and draws you in to a Swedish netherworld of snow, murder and puberty

Great films on DVD:

The Antoine Doinel series (dir. Francois Truffaut), watched for the first time in their entirety this year, and absolutely wonderful!

In A Lonely Place (dir. Nicholas Ray)
- fantastic noir with Humphrey Bogart as good as I've ever seen him. (And I don't really like him that much).

The Best of Youth (dir. Marco Tullio Giordana)
- a revelation, an engrossing 6 hour portrait of an Italian family across 50 years of local and international history.

Book
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

- clearly the book of my year, it took a quarter of it to read, and deserves all those superlatives given it over the 90 or so years it's been around.

New batch

2010-01-01T13:41:00.004Z

of photos on my Flickr. Haven't uploaded for a while, mainly cause I haven't taken many photos! Took a lot over Christmas though, the beginnings of which this batch ends with. Also included, trips to St Andrews and London!

Identity @ The Wellcome Collection

2009-12-21T00:08:00.006Z

After talking to postgraduate students at the University of Westminster the other week, I happened to notice that the Wellcome Collection is very close to Euston station, handy because I had an hour to kill and needed something to do other than attempt to read Proust in a heaving London terminus.

So I went it in, lured by a mention on We Make Money Not Art, and found an exhibition called Identity: 8 Rooms, 9 Lives, a look at ideas of "the self" throughout history. (Actually a rather compact and Euro- if not Anglo-centric history). The introductory remarks did not give me hope: "We all have a working idea of the self: we know 'who we are', or think we do. We understand that we possess an individual identity..." Hmm. It continues: "Some aspects of our identity are essentially permanent, others are subject to change." Hmm again.

But as it happened, the exhibition itself managed to squirm away from these rather out-dated and conservative ideas about identity. The most exciting and interesting room for me was the Samuel Pepys room, although not because of Samuel Pepys. They had some of his actual diaries and various transcriptions of them and they were all very interesting - the handwriting particularly - but it was some prison diaries by some suffragettes that really fascinated me.

Written whilst in Holloway Prison in 1912, Mary Ann Rawle and Kate Gliddon describe their 6 x 9 foot cells, compose accounts of day-to-day prison life and record political hopes and fears. One minute there is an indignant "today I have supper at 4 o'clock for some unearthly reason" (my italics), and next, on hearing of the release of some fellow suffragettes, "so many suffragettes have gone during these last days that it has become a possible thing in my mind for us all to go".

I was amazed to see such similarities between their handwriting and the sketches they did of their cells. (Obviously the cells themselves would have looked fairly similar, but their artistic styles are very, very similar too). I started wondering whether this is a common phenomenon, whether groups of people imprisoned together (especially political prisoners) begin to share characteristics, turns of phrase, handwriting, and whether in these similarities one can read a story of camaraderie or harsh authority. Are these apparently superficial similarities a form of almost subconscious resistance, a sign that even when imprisoned under the state's authority, a group cannot be dismantled and their ideas surpressed, or is it more that the uniformity of prison life, the similarity of environment, day-to-day events, speech and so-forth contributes to a sort of uniformity of thought (and its expression) that is like something out of 1984?

(In a post-script, this room also held various "diaries of ordinary people" including one of a girl growin up in the States in the 30s, in which in the 1936 election, she had written "Democrats Won" which reminded me of the sort of casual, team-based response to political events that me and my brother had as children).

Lazy Voiced Narrator

2009-12-17T23:55:00.000Z

Working Hard

2009-12-13T16:21:00.002Z

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This Friday

2009-12-09T23:40:00.001Z

A double-bill of academic wizardry (or downright dilletantism). Me and Derek are giving papers at the work-in-progess seminars in the English Literature department. Either number 4 or 5 Uni Gardens, can't remember. 1pm.

Derek's paper is called something like "Chasing Rainbows and Granite with Virginia Woolf" (Derek, if you read this, please correct me!) and takes up that famous quote in relation to sexual difference. Mine's called "The Problem of the Contemporary: The Altermodern and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland" and will be the finest 2000 words of my longer piece for the Aberdeen publication next year.

Keitai shosetsu

2009-12-04T21:20:00.007Z

I'm currently preparing my PhD proposal on precariousness and contemporary fiction. To give a gloss on it, it will question contemporary literature's ability to adequately represent a world grown out of postmodernism and postmodernity in the last ten years, a world which I think is primarily characterised by precariousness, from the quotidian (lifestyle trends and job security or lack of) to the extraordinary - those attempts by Western governments to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists or the banking crisis/credit crunch/recession/depression.

I'm going to look at some novels by writers who tackle this world one way or another, with some doing better than others, and end up saying that they're all pretty much failing. In the same way that the early twentieth century needed modernism's upheaval, I think this period needs its own shake-up. No author, at least no author of mass readership, has, for instance, gotten to grips with the internet in any significant way, either as subject matter or - and this is what I'm most interested in - form. You can tell how insufficient literature is when Joseph O'Neill's beautifully written but formally conservative Netherland is praised as "new territory, or at least new subject matter, claimed for fiction" for talking about Google Earth.

Today I've been reading parts of Randall Stevenson's 12th volume of the Oxford English Literary History covering 1960-2000 The Last of England? and discovering how David Lodge wondered at this division of subject matter and form in an essay from 1971 called "The Novelist at the Crossroads". There is most likely a long line of essays of this nature. I suppose it's a fairly fundamental question. I'm about to read Jonathan Franzen's infamous "Harper's essay", now collected in the book How To Be Alone, about the evils of the experimental novel. That Franzen is such a big seller may well not be unconnected to the lack of the sort of experimentation seen at modernism's height.

So I'm searching high and low for glimpses of new forms. I have a suspicion that the internet may have something up its sleeve, though I'm not sure what it will be like and when it will appear. Today, though, I discovered keitai shosetsu, the Japanese phenomenon of the cellphone novel. Dana Goodyear is widely commended for writing the best English-language article on the literary form of teenagers and 20-somethings, but I discovered it through this article by Barry Yourgrau on Salon.com. The cellphone novel, is, written by "Japan's vast demographic of girls and 20-something young women, who thumb out ultra-lurid, mawkish teen romances on their cellphone keypads in scraps of manga-like dialogue, skimpy action, texting slang and emoji (emoticons). They post these skeletal pseudo-confessions in installments, under cute pseudonyms, on dedicated Web sites like Magic i-land and Wild Strawberry where they can be read for a low fee."

They are extremely popular: "In 2007 -- keitai shosetsu's annus mirabilis --half the top 10 fiction bestsellers in the shrinking Japanese book market originated on cellphones. Overall list-topper "Love Sky," by the self-styled "Mika," has sold 2. 9 million copies." Even "Jakucho Setouchi, the Marguerite Duras of Japan, revealed herself as "Purple," author of a keitai shosetsu, "Tomorrow's Rainbow," about a teen's search for love after her parents' traumatizing divorce. Delightfully, Setouchi is also a celebrated 86-year-old Buddhist nun who wrote a contemporary update of "The Tales of Genji," Japan's racy ur-novel classic."

The precariousness that I'm interested in appears here, in connection with a new form of literature. Yourgrau explains how his attempts were hindered by writing them longhand first, then typing up the finished pieces. Not so the more "genuine" ones: "Keitai shosetsu, however, exist in vast online pools, where writers and readers can dynamically engage with each other. And that's key. Yoshi shaped "Deep Sky" based on ongoing hits and e-mails." It is in these Mills and Boon-style stories that perhaps what I'm looking for reveals itself most clearly. These are novels that not just through subject matter but crucially through form engage with contemporary lived experience. They do not look down on this experience from a rarefied distance, but speak directly out of it. They have precariousness built into their very distribution - text messages are easily lost, deleted or ignored, and their authors canvas opinions on storylines through the same medium that those storylines are distributed. Whether these cellphone novels come to be seen as a sort of twenty-first century imagism is of course unlikely (although thinking about it, there is a certain similarity in the vividness of the imagery, the short bursts of text etc), and apparently the American equivalent, Twitter fiction, hasn't taken off to nearly the extent that keitai shosetsu has, but I'm sure its the first of many new forms. To me at least, they claim far more "new territory" for fiction than Joseph O'Neill does.

Noir Désir - Le Vent Nous Portera 12" [Rubber Room Re-edit]

2009-12-03T14:22:00.001Z

One of the best songs on Al's super-super-super compilation he made for me, entitled "Distractions from Studies Vol. 1":