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Hello reader,
you've come this far, searching and hoping to find something completely different no doubt. This is an old blog of mine, a space to park some of the longer ideas that didn't fit anywhere else. Please peruse some of these below.
However, if you really want the gritty, ballsy, critical and creative writerly meat, you'll need to trek on over to the Slow Review, where I now park all my better thinking and eassaying into the cultural past.
Thank you,
rino
you've come this far, searching and hoping to find something completely different no doubt. This is an old blog of mine, a space to park some of the longer ideas that didn't fit anywhere else. Please peruse some of these below.
However, if you really want the gritty, ballsy, critical and creative writerly meat, you'll need to trek on over to the Slow Review, where I now park all my better thinking and eassaying into the cultural past.
Thank you,
rino
Notes on Christianity
Organised religion supplants (true personal) conscience. With theological metaphysics & structure, ritual, obscure mysteries, moral guidelines and rigorous dictates of faith & exclusion.
The question of Christianity's veracity (ie the True Faith) is nowhere near as interesting or relevant as Why this religion has worked so well for so long. Is it because the formula and tenets of Christianity lend themselves so well to politics? From the first Christian emperors to the popes and the Jesuits and the sectarian parties of today? Or because of its dogma, so flexibly interpreted across Christian sects, churches and sub-denominations? Or because monotheism makes for great religions of war & conquest? For its relative ability to meld power with changing times? And where is the individual in all this? — weak, a sheep, in need of (shep)herding.
I still cannot shake the idea the Christianity as a moral belief system defined itself as the religion of the weak & disenfranchised, that its true access to spirituality in the monologues of (The) Christ have been usurped & petrified by the inherited Church. That Christianity is now more dogma than spirituality. Christianity is fundamentally a prescriptive religion, and all such systems when married to power aspire to social control, forming and fear — under the illusion of shepherding souls. Power exercised through threat of transgression: excommunication, blasphemy, heresy etc; a dogmatic religion whose conformism is openly called Orthodoxy.
I think the politicising of (evangelist) religion in America is the pinnacle of something important. Religion crossing back into the State again. The reduction of personal rights and freedoms according to Christian doctrines as a guide for policy; the teaching of intelligent design (will intelligent design evolve into intelligent conscience?), the regression of a nation for cynical politico-religious ends; and of course a rigorous differentiation of class and discrimination all over again (which in America's case is not the triumph of a new Christianity, but of Republican wealth).
I think the Great Rapture, the index of the End of All that evangelists so fear and desire is nothing more than the last great rattle of Christianity itself, the final twitch of fervent mass-activity. The point where evangelical America realises that We the People are responsible for Bush, that we are responsible for the world around us, ourselves alone, not some failed corruption of an administration that exploits its base supporters and feeds them idiotic myths of being spoken to by God or lead by the Gospels as it destroys the planet. The Rapture then as the last death-rattle of the Christian religion as an exploitable religious tool, bludgeoning the (self)righteous with fear and paranoia and ultimate unresponsibility. After which Christianity may become a personal religion once more, not a politically-minded force on TV playing to conservative instincts, so easily dousing its political ends. It may become a motivator of conscience again. Surely Christianity is not the religion of cronyism; and what would God think about Scooter, DeLay et al?
Funny that, Television is also a corrosive to conscience.
Conformism at its most wilful: when faced with the ineffable. Now that science has diffused the potency of the ineffable, the role of religion has become purely personal. Yet that is how Christianity began: as an ordering of the unexplainable, of the cruel, uneven indifference of events unfolding; an excusing consolation for the continuity of suffering; an offer of salvation and eternal reward. The cruelty of an impossible reward as cover for the harsh necessity of oblivion.
The history of Christianity's power is the history of the Church. Its modern decline is not due to social irrelevance or officious rigidity so much as its no longer being directly indexed to the sources and means of power (hence the Rapture Index, as the delayed expression of hunger for such direct sway again, that last scrap of interpretative power). The decline of Christianity began with the manifold separations of Church and State, but that doesn't mean Christianity hasn't looked to new means like television and personality politics to get its message and system across, or other means to profitability.
One of my problems with Christianity is that when you accept the tenets on faith, and align your idea of Faith with Christian doctrine, then you (should) also accept the evil things done in the name of Christianity over the last two millennia: the slaughters, witch hunts, inquisitions and crusades, the unchristian killings done In the Name Of. And that these are never considered necessary imperfections or acknowledged barbs in its history, necessary to the form & texture and continued growth of the faith. Or that adherence to its dogma implies some degrees of fundamentalism: in conscience, self-righteousness and perceived superiority, in letting certain facts of reality and existence go, in wilfully saying No and drawing strict boundaries of what can be accepted.
Christianity ceased to be relevant when it no longer inspired great parallel movements in art. Or even generate notable scholarship.
Organised religion supplants (true personal) conscience. With theological metaphysics & structure, ritual, obscure mysteries, moral guidelines and rigorous dictates of faith & exclusion.
The question of Christianity's veracity (ie the True Faith) is nowhere near as interesting or relevant as Why this religion has worked so well for so long. Is it because the formula and tenets of Christianity lend themselves so well to politics? From the first Christian emperors to the popes and the Jesuits and the sectarian parties of today? Or because of its dogma, so flexibly interpreted across Christian sects, churches and sub-denominations? Or because monotheism makes for great religions of war & conquest? For its relative ability to meld power with changing times? And where is the individual in all this? — weak, a sheep, in need of (shep)herding.
I still cannot shake the idea the Christianity as a moral belief system defined itself as the religion of the weak & disenfranchised, that its true access to spirituality in the monologues of (The) Christ have been usurped & petrified by the inherited Church. That Christianity is now more dogma than spirituality. Christianity is fundamentally a prescriptive religion, and all such systems when married to power aspire to social control, forming and fear — under the illusion of shepherding souls. Power exercised through threat of transgression: excommunication, blasphemy, heresy etc; a dogmatic religion whose conformism is openly called Orthodoxy.
I think the politicising of (evangelist) religion in America is the pinnacle of something important. Religion crossing back into the State again. The reduction of personal rights and freedoms according to Christian doctrines as a guide for policy; the teaching of intelligent design (will intelligent design evolve into intelligent conscience?), the regression of a nation for cynical politico-religious ends; and of course a rigorous differentiation of class and discrimination all over again (which in America's case is not the triumph of a new Christianity, but of Republican wealth).
I think the Great Rapture, the index of the End of All that evangelists so fear and desire is nothing more than the last great rattle of Christianity itself, the final twitch of fervent mass-activity. The point where evangelical America realises that We the People are responsible for Bush, that we are responsible for the world around us, ourselves alone, not some failed corruption of an administration that exploits its base supporters and feeds them idiotic myths of being spoken to by God or lead by the Gospels as it destroys the planet. The Rapture then as the last death-rattle of the Christian religion as an exploitable religious tool, bludgeoning the (self)righteous with fear and paranoia and ultimate unresponsibility. After which Christianity may become a personal religion once more, not a politically-minded force on TV playing to conservative instincts, so easily dousing its political ends. It may become a motivator of conscience again. Surely Christianity is not the religion of cronyism; and what would God think about Scooter, DeLay et al?
Funny that, Television is also a corrosive to conscience.
Conformism at its most wilful: when faced with the ineffable. Now that science has diffused the potency of the ineffable, the role of religion has become purely personal. Yet that is how Christianity began: as an ordering of the unexplainable, of the cruel, uneven indifference of events unfolding; an excusing consolation for the continuity of suffering; an offer of salvation and eternal reward. The cruelty of an impossible reward as cover for the harsh necessity of oblivion.
The history of Christianity's power is the history of the Church. Its modern decline is not due to social irrelevance or officious rigidity so much as its no longer being directly indexed to the sources and means of power (hence the Rapture Index, as the delayed expression of hunger for such direct sway again, that last scrap of interpretative power). The decline of Christianity began with the manifold separations of Church and State, but that doesn't mean Christianity hasn't looked to new means like television and personality politics to get its message and system across, or other means to profitability.
One of my problems with Christianity is that when you accept the tenets on faith, and align your idea of Faith with Christian doctrine, then you (should) also accept the evil things done in the name of Christianity over the last two millennia: the slaughters, witch hunts, inquisitions and crusades, the unchristian killings done In the Name Of. And that these are never considered necessary imperfections or acknowledged barbs in its history, necessary to the form & texture and continued growth of the faith. Or that adherence to its dogma implies some degrees of fundamentalism: in conscience, self-righteousness and perceived superiority, in letting certain facts of reality and existence go, in wilfully saying No and drawing strict boundaries of what can be accepted.
Christianity ceased to be relevant when it no longer inspired great parallel movements in art. Or even generate notable scholarship.
Notes on Science Fiction
Science Fiction is all about technology, that much is obvious. Combining imagination with hypothetical speculation and wishful thinking about future settings, SF can provide retroactive extensions (in a positive or negative vein) of the technology whose roots we experience today. These extensions are usually a criticism of our current interactions with technology and science — we depend(ed) too much on computers and machines; we mistakenly thought that science could protect us from disease and destruction etc. But it is still one of the truly broad imaginative genres. SF can factor in cybernetics, information technology, future capitalism, alien races and concepts of otherness, stellar travel and tourism, higher spiritualities and intelligence, weird physiologies and sexuality, fancy gadgets, fancy science and weapons, in addition to the standard u/dystopian commentaries. And it’s usually quite a transparent genre — it has its own techno-babble and jargons, it draws on distinctively human traits, stereotypes and behaviours, and is clearly dependent on wide leaps of faith. But SF can also be coherent and systematic like the various Star Trek franchises; it can suggest consistent worlds of possibility. And by taking for granted the inevitability of efficient space travel and exploration, it can make us feel better about our technological/scientific limitations today.
I love SF for its speculative powers and bold acts of prophesy. It is an act of extended interpretation, a radicalisation of the New. But it also has its transparent problems on a structural level. Basically, the technologies of typical SF have (supposedly) undergone several generations of paradigm shift — within the limitations of what we currently conceive to be possible later. Regrettably, the technology has advanced but the narrative worlds haven’t. The narratives are always predictably 20th Century human. Why else is the clear-cut moral range of the Western so adapted to SF? On a very basic structural level that ignores for the moment the leaps of faith involved, and which ignores the trends and fashions of narrative culture, narrative has, when viewed in technological parallel, changed little over the last thousand years. Good guys on grand adventures fight against evil aliens or technologies; there’s friendships, loyal teams and skimpy heroines; missions spinning out of control that become desperate journeys home; mysterious objects/omens/phenomena that teach humanity crucial lessons about itself or the vastness of space; there’s power plays within hierarchies and rebel factions — and all with the clearest scenario establishment, suspense and resolution of within 1-2 hours or 190 pages (and I beg indulgence here — it is an error to confuse plot with narrative — narrative is the whole active field of story and effect, not just its obvious formal/genre elements). For us, these are a series of fixed and universal forms which change little except in shape and colour but which inform much of the novelisation, filming and televising of SF. An episode of Star Trek might deal very intelligently with an interesting and debilitating problem of interstellar physics, and the formal execution of the episode might reflect this; but it’s still an extension of the problem/teamwork/solution form worked out in 50 minutes. (Star Trek - The Next Generation embodies most perfectly what could be called the corporatisation of SF — a reliable, bankable and easily-consumed SF-product franchise. More on this later.) It’s easy for SF to dream up convenient stellar drives and beeping tricorders — it is much harder to conceive and execute a narrative experience that is truly futuristic or that hypothesises how future generations might expand and experience the structures of narrative beyond superficial trends. Because narrative too should also undergo paradigm shifts if it is to be truly futuristic.
Considered the deep-time projection of SF speculation, I’m starting to detect a new trend of late: the basing of scenarios on near-future technology and materials recognisably closer to our current computer/communications/travel capacities (for instance Red Planet, Star Trek Enterprise); and thereby the emphasising the gadgetry of SF and not the science or its sub fields of physics, astronomy, biology etc. One of the curious misconceptions of SF is its nominal definition. Science only ever plays a minor contextual role in SF worlds, a vaguely explanatory system or philosophy of concepts and understanding. SF has always downplayed the conceptual/theoretical schema of Science to offset its physical, technical manifestations. The paradigm of technological change is one we can readily identify with since our own gadgets advance fast and often. Science, in the broadest sense, is inconveniently both too specialised and (at least, on its outer rims) far too hypothetical to create a solid picture of where we’re at in the universe. Between quantum physics and string theory there’s little to base a consistent projection of the future on. We experience our present in terms of technological progress rather than the distant, epoch-bending shifts of paradigm that define the Science of our reality. Who cares about the science.
The modern SF consumer identifies with the fancy gadgets that are not conceptually far removed from his mobile phone. The feeling I get is that the Science of SF has slowed down, that it has adopted the conservative measures of the Next Generation, establishing limits and developing diplomacy instead. The early trend in SF was to project further and deeper into the future — the current trend is to draw back. Either because SF can get pretty abstruse or because the same old plots don’t complement the future-ideas in a relative sense, or because we’ve reached some unspoken limitations about what is humanly knowable that we can only resort to deliberate ambiguity (think 2001, Solaris). It could also be due to the phenomenon that gave rise to the Clock of the Long Now — because our rates of technological change are so rapid, we’ve been experiencing a shortening of time and the corresponding sense of the future. Technology has not really given us more leisure time or space, it has crammed more time and media in, thereby shortening it. We have trouble conceiving and sympathising with perspectives of deep time, just as there are few if any institutions that encourage the long view into the future, with planning and thinking that works in terms of millennia rather than four-year terms. (Corporate and optimistic SF like The Next Generation could be argued to act like a mildly comforting narcotic here. More on that later too.)
In the Buck Rogers era, the future was an arbitrary number. As though, looking at an SF projection of a thousand years from now, we can imagine all these great achievements but still have to dabble with shitty plots about heroes with guns. I’d like to believe that a consciousness of narrative’s current limitations (in terms of genre forms) inform this shortening time-scale in SF. We’ve exposed and exploded all genre limitations in the last century, but seemed incapable of generating truly new paradigms of story. At least we might bring plot-reprocessing to new lows, say the cynics — but that is already happening consistently. One of the most effective sub-genres of SF is CyberPunk, which banks heavily on the idea that there’s not going to be much of a future anyway — and in a loose sense this has somewhat come about. We have stopped speculating and interpreting possibilities of deep future time. It could be the lack of visionaries in science and art. It could be the lack of dreaming beyond Humvees and home renovation. It could be the tired old narratives.
I understand that for a SF television show especially, the story has to adhere to basic rules and the science has to be bite-size. But I want more hypotheticals about how future generations process and arrange information, about how they will participate in culture and whether any new forms and genres will peak and level out, with only their media or delivery changing occasionally like ours do; or whether a true paradigm shift can occur in the process, structure and experience of narrative. Whether a truly Other narrative is possible. Or whether our burgeoning rates of technological change will continue to shorten our perspective of time. Future writers and directors might correctly diagnose our technological obsession and salvage or redefine our experience of time and narrative in some way.
But how, for instance, will future generations solve the problem of solitude? Argue from non-gadgetry principles.
Star Trek Virtues
I read Star Trek (from the Next Generation on) as Technological Utopianism. It is fiercely optimistic about the course of humanity and our ability to right ourselves after the worst global calamities. As with any SF, it tells us more about our present than our future. It surreptitiously proves that idea so beloved in America: that technology will a) give you hope, b) set you free and c) conquer all enemies. I love its easy formula and characterisation and occasional brushes with hard science and sheer impossibilities. I willingly drop into its broad leaps of faith and convenient technical glosses. I like the high regard its scientists are held in. I even tolerate the endless Picardisms about what makes Humans so unique when confronted by some uncomprehending alien entity. I love the excellent and subtle sound engineering. I love all the things that make it a formulaic franchise.
The Next Gen is riddled with utopian attitudes to the future. Its Federation of Planets is friendly to all races and species, tolerant and open to all under a comfortable banner of free trade and exchange. Its most important ethical achievement is the Prime Directive — a doctrine of non-involvement and isolationism. None can establish contact with a new species that hasn’t yet mastered interstellar travel through warp technology. Future technologies shall not contaminate or hasten lesser technologies, it says. A benign but technologically-keyed argument, implying the universality and fixity of all physics and the end or rather limitation of major paradigm shifts once this warp business is achieved. All hunger, energy problems and other capitalist side-effects have in the meantime been eradicated from Earth. The humane utopia has been achieved. All rejoice.
At the head of this advancement is the Enterprise, a rather executive flagship which acts as arbitrator and vehicle of diplomacy as well as cultural explorer, researcher and enforcer of the new universe. It is almost odd that this shiny executive ship can carry out its egalitarian mission of trade and tolerance (without capitalist side-effects) whilst functioning on a rigid naval slash militarist structure of hierarchical rank and command (with StarFleet its parent company). I know it’s probably a carry-on from Roddenberry’s days in the navy; but it begs performative contradiction to base a tolerant, humanitarian system of exchange on an authority-driven system of command. It’s a bit like asking generals and admirals to be good-will ambassadors and statesmen. Humanity doesn’t spring from authority. Those ethics consultants must’ve had their big come-uppance in the future; or the discreet absence of government and politicians (but not lawyers and a love of courtroom dramatics) could be another positive indication. Again, on the level of human reality this is all bollocks and dreaming; as entertainment it’s endearing to see such an attempt at true and tolerant nobility. The assumption is that humanity has advanced somehow, without of course speculating on the specifics or mechanics of this achievement.
One of the plusses of turning Star Trek: Enterprise into a prequel of sorts (after the Deep Space 9 and Voyager franchises) is that it throws all this future context into near-future relief. With many notable exceptions, this older Enterprise looks much like a modern submarine on the inside: there’s cramped space and bulky bulkheads compared to the Next Gen’s comfortable quarters and boardroom veneers. The retro-technology of ST: Enterprise is still future-technology slash fantasy for us, just given that edge of the almost-reachable. The production designers and tech-wonks of the series have relativised the scale of ST technical advancement in the new series; implying a real scale of growth and not some absolute or ultimate state of end-technology. For the franchise, this means technological scalability and new-product flexibility. And it also means ST:E can be nicely mercenary about its hunger for technology; alternatively leveraging trade with new toys and getting a handle on them risky transporters and replicators. It’s still a case of ‘they’ve got bigger guns and shields than us’ and the usual impossible odds, but never mind that.
And there’s also the elements of standard ST formula: every franchise must have talent in a catsuit, a rational agent offset by a more animalistic one, a doctor and some inexperienced ensigns, hostile aliens with devious (technologist) plans, tech-jargon and tech-limitations, the prestige of officers and the captain and some kind of inane mythology of the ‘chair’ of command. With plenty of lessons in humanity along the way.
And like so much entertainment, it’s fiercely American in wanting to make you feel better about yourself and the world. I used to think this feel-good side-effect was just a by-product of the neat characterisations and even neater plot resolutions, on top of all that utopian escapism. But now I’m fully convinced that the warm glow and slightly fuzzy meditativeness of the new Star Treks comes from some incredibly subtle sound engineering. Every room, scene and setting has its own unique sonic signature, its own shade of white noise hum or ominous but mild throb or natural air effects. Air conditioners tend to sound the same in any room, but ST has gone that extra yard in applying cinema-quality sound engineering to the feel and critical ambience of every room and setting. And it’s a very comforting hiss and hum. It’s textured and sculptured static, it’s the subtlest of colourings working on the level of minimally-perceived detail — if you pay close attention (with headphones) you notice the detail but otherwise they’re comfortably absorbed in the viewing experience. It adds a level of complexity and depth to the tone and feel of the series. And it’s one of the crucial motivators to make me want to explore sound engineering fully. I’d have my own tonal static generators running all the time.
Science Fiction is all about technology, that much is obvious. Combining imagination with hypothetical speculation and wishful thinking about future settings, SF can provide retroactive extensions (in a positive or negative vein) of the technology whose roots we experience today. These extensions are usually a criticism of our current interactions with technology and science — we depend(ed) too much on computers and machines; we mistakenly thought that science could protect us from disease and destruction etc. But it is still one of the truly broad imaginative genres. SF can factor in cybernetics, information technology, future capitalism, alien races and concepts of otherness, stellar travel and tourism, higher spiritualities and intelligence, weird physiologies and sexuality, fancy gadgets, fancy science and weapons, in addition to the standard u/dystopian commentaries. And it’s usually quite a transparent genre — it has its own techno-babble and jargons, it draws on distinctively human traits, stereotypes and behaviours, and is clearly dependent on wide leaps of faith. But SF can also be coherent and systematic like the various Star Trek franchises; it can suggest consistent worlds of possibility. And by taking for granted the inevitability of efficient space travel and exploration, it can make us feel better about our technological/scientific limitations today.
I love SF for its speculative powers and bold acts of prophesy. It is an act of extended interpretation, a radicalisation of the New. But it also has its transparent problems on a structural level. Basically, the technologies of typical SF have (supposedly) undergone several generations of paradigm shift — within the limitations of what we currently conceive to be possible later. Regrettably, the technology has advanced but the narrative worlds haven’t. The narratives are always predictably 20th Century human. Why else is the clear-cut moral range of the Western so adapted to SF? On a very basic structural level that ignores for the moment the leaps of faith involved, and which ignores the trends and fashions of narrative culture, narrative has, when viewed in technological parallel, changed little over the last thousand years. Good guys on grand adventures fight against evil aliens or technologies; there’s friendships, loyal teams and skimpy heroines; missions spinning out of control that become desperate journeys home; mysterious objects/omens/phenomena that teach humanity crucial lessons about itself or the vastness of space; there’s power plays within hierarchies and rebel factions — and all with the clearest scenario establishment, suspense and resolution of within 1-2 hours or 190 pages (and I beg indulgence here — it is an error to confuse plot with narrative — narrative is the whole active field of story and effect, not just its obvious formal/genre elements). For us, these are a series of fixed and universal forms which change little except in shape and colour but which inform much of the novelisation, filming and televising of SF. An episode of Star Trek might deal very intelligently with an interesting and debilitating problem of interstellar physics, and the formal execution of the episode might reflect this; but it’s still an extension of the problem/teamwork/solution form worked out in 50 minutes. (Star Trek - The Next Generation embodies most perfectly what could be called the corporatisation of SF — a reliable, bankable and easily-consumed SF-product franchise. More on this later.) It’s easy for SF to dream up convenient stellar drives and beeping tricorders — it is much harder to conceive and execute a narrative experience that is truly futuristic or that hypothesises how future generations might expand and experience the structures of narrative beyond superficial trends. Because narrative too should also undergo paradigm shifts if it is to be truly futuristic.
Considered the deep-time projection of SF speculation, I’m starting to detect a new trend of late: the basing of scenarios on near-future technology and materials recognisably closer to our current computer/communications/travel capacities (for instance Red Planet, Star Trek Enterprise); and thereby the emphasising the gadgetry of SF and not the science or its sub fields of physics, astronomy, biology etc. One of the curious misconceptions of SF is its nominal definition. Science only ever plays a minor contextual role in SF worlds, a vaguely explanatory system or philosophy of concepts and understanding. SF has always downplayed the conceptual/theoretical schema of Science to offset its physical, technical manifestations. The paradigm of technological change is one we can readily identify with since our own gadgets advance fast and often. Science, in the broadest sense, is inconveniently both too specialised and (at least, on its outer rims) far too hypothetical to create a solid picture of where we’re at in the universe. Between quantum physics and string theory there’s little to base a consistent projection of the future on. We experience our present in terms of technological progress rather than the distant, epoch-bending shifts of paradigm that define the Science of our reality. Who cares about the science.
The modern SF consumer identifies with the fancy gadgets that are not conceptually far removed from his mobile phone. The feeling I get is that the Science of SF has slowed down, that it has adopted the conservative measures of the Next Generation, establishing limits and developing diplomacy instead. The early trend in SF was to project further and deeper into the future — the current trend is to draw back. Either because SF can get pretty abstruse or because the same old plots don’t complement the future-ideas in a relative sense, or because we’ve reached some unspoken limitations about what is humanly knowable that we can only resort to deliberate ambiguity (think 2001, Solaris). It could also be due to the phenomenon that gave rise to the Clock of the Long Now — because our rates of technological change are so rapid, we’ve been experiencing a shortening of time and the corresponding sense of the future. Technology has not really given us more leisure time or space, it has crammed more time and media in, thereby shortening it. We have trouble conceiving and sympathising with perspectives of deep time, just as there are few if any institutions that encourage the long view into the future, with planning and thinking that works in terms of millennia rather than four-year terms. (Corporate and optimistic SF like The Next Generation could be argued to act like a mildly comforting narcotic here. More on that later too.)
In the Buck Rogers era, the future was an arbitrary number. As though, looking at an SF projection of a thousand years from now, we can imagine all these great achievements but still have to dabble with shitty plots about heroes with guns. I’d like to believe that a consciousness of narrative’s current limitations (in terms of genre forms) inform this shortening time-scale in SF. We’ve exposed and exploded all genre limitations in the last century, but seemed incapable of generating truly new paradigms of story. At least we might bring plot-reprocessing to new lows, say the cynics — but that is already happening consistently. One of the most effective sub-genres of SF is CyberPunk, which banks heavily on the idea that there’s not going to be much of a future anyway — and in a loose sense this has somewhat come about. We have stopped speculating and interpreting possibilities of deep future time. It could be the lack of visionaries in science and art. It could be the lack of dreaming beyond Humvees and home renovation. It could be the tired old narratives.
I understand that for a SF television show especially, the story has to adhere to basic rules and the science has to be bite-size. But I want more hypotheticals about how future generations process and arrange information, about how they will participate in culture and whether any new forms and genres will peak and level out, with only their media or delivery changing occasionally like ours do; or whether a true paradigm shift can occur in the process, structure and experience of narrative. Whether a truly Other narrative is possible. Or whether our burgeoning rates of technological change will continue to shorten our perspective of time. Future writers and directors might correctly diagnose our technological obsession and salvage or redefine our experience of time and narrative in some way.
But how, for instance, will future generations solve the problem of solitude? Argue from non-gadgetry principles.
Star Trek Virtues
I read Star Trek (from the Next Generation on) as Technological Utopianism. It is fiercely optimistic about the course of humanity and our ability to right ourselves after the worst global calamities. As with any SF, it tells us more about our present than our future. It surreptitiously proves that idea so beloved in America: that technology will a) give you hope, b) set you free and c) conquer all enemies. I love its easy formula and characterisation and occasional brushes with hard science and sheer impossibilities. I willingly drop into its broad leaps of faith and convenient technical glosses. I like the high regard its scientists are held in. I even tolerate the endless Picardisms about what makes Humans so unique when confronted by some uncomprehending alien entity. I love the excellent and subtle sound engineering. I love all the things that make it a formulaic franchise.
The Next Gen is riddled with utopian attitudes to the future. Its Federation of Planets is friendly to all races and species, tolerant and open to all under a comfortable banner of free trade and exchange. Its most important ethical achievement is the Prime Directive — a doctrine of non-involvement and isolationism. None can establish contact with a new species that hasn’t yet mastered interstellar travel through warp technology. Future technologies shall not contaminate or hasten lesser technologies, it says. A benign but technologically-keyed argument, implying the universality and fixity of all physics and the end or rather limitation of major paradigm shifts once this warp business is achieved. All hunger, energy problems and other capitalist side-effects have in the meantime been eradicated from Earth. The humane utopia has been achieved. All rejoice.
At the head of this advancement is the Enterprise, a rather executive flagship which acts as arbitrator and vehicle of diplomacy as well as cultural explorer, researcher and enforcer of the new universe. It is almost odd that this shiny executive ship can carry out its egalitarian mission of trade and tolerance (without capitalist side-effects) whilst functioning on a rigid naval slash militarist structure of hierarchical rank and command (with StarFleet its parent company). I know it’s probably a carry-on from Roddenberry’s days in the navy; but it begs performative contradiction to base a tolerant, humanitarian system of exchange on an authority-driven system of command. It’s a bit like asking generals and admirals to be good-will ambassadors and statesmen. Humanity doesn’t spring from authority. Those ethics consultants must’ve had their big come-uppance in the future; or the discreet absence of government and politicians (but not lawyers and a love of courtroom dramatics) could be another positive indication. Again, on the level of human reality this is all bollocks and dreaming; as entertainment it’s endearing to see such an attempt at true and tolerant nobility. The assumption is that humanity has advanced somehow, without of course speculating on the specifics or mechanics of this achievement.
One of the plusses of turning Star Trek: Enterprise into a prequel of sorts (after the Deep Space 9 and Voyager franchises) is that it throws all this future context into near-future relief. With many notable exceptions, this older Enterprise looks much like a modern submarine on the inside: there’s cramped space and bulky bulkheads compared to the Next Gen’s comfortable quarters and boardroom veneers. The retro-technology of ST: Enterprise is still future-technology slash fantasy for us, just given that edge of the almost-reachable. The production designers and tech-wonks of the series have relativised the scale of ST technical advancement in the new series; implying a real scale of growth and not some absolute or ultimate state of end-technology. For the franchise, this means technological scalability and new-product flexibility. And it also means ST:E can be nicely mercenary about its hunger for technology; alternatively leveraging trade with new toys and getting a handle on them risky transporters and replicators. It’s still a case of ‘they’ve got bigger guns and shields than us’ and the usual impossible odds, but never mind that.
And there’s also the elements of standard ST formula: every franchise must have talent in a catsuit, a rational agent offset by a more animalistic one, a doctor and some inexperienced ensigns, hostile aliens with devious (technologist) plans, tech-jargon and tech-limitations, the prestige of officers and the captain and some kind of inane mythology of the ‘chair’ of command. With plenty of lessons in humanity along the way.
And like so much entertainment, it’s fiercely American in wanting to make you feel better about yourself and the world. I used to think this feel-good side-effect was just a by-product of the neat characterisations and even neater plot resolutions, on top of all that utopian escapism. But now I’m fully convinced that the warm glow and slightly fuzzy meditativeness of the new Star Treks comes from some incredibly subtle sound engineering. Every room, scene and setting has its own unique sonic signature, its own shade of white noise hum or ominous but mild throb or natural air effects. Air conditioners tend to sound the same in any room, but ST has gone that extra yard in applying cinema-quality sound engineering to the feel and critical ambience of every room and setting. And it’s a very comforting hiss and hum. It’s textured and sculptured static, it’s the subtlest of colourings working on the level of minimally-perceived detail — if you pay close attention (with headphones) you notice the detail but otherwise they’re comfortably absorbed in the viewing experience. It adds a level of complexity and depth to the tone and feel of the series. And it’s one of the crucial motivators to make me want to explore sound engineering fully. I’d have my own tonal static generators running all the time.
Author/Authority
The biography is a form of portrait. It seeks to render a (once-)living and fallible character accurately and completely, to create a better and fuller picture than memory alone can muster. Authors of biographies aim for the most definitive and authoritative air, for the widest possible scope to deal with every anecdote and psychological foible which can be attributed or sourced to a single person. To present their subject objectively and exhaustively, like a photograph which can forever be expanded to reveal newer levels of depth and detail — the effect of which often reveals more of the biographer’s reach for authority than the subject has objectivity to offer. To me there’s a fraudulence here — in the claims to authenticity and objective authority — for what are essentially works of writing like any other. There’s a leap of presumption made by readers in turn which buys into the myth of the Most Complete and Authoritative Work Yet — a presumption riding the comfortably wide gap between pure and well-nigh impossible written objectivity on the one hand and speculative, interpretative fiction riding the coattails of fame, a famous persona rendered by gossip and tabloid innuendo, on the other extreme. For the bio sits somewhere in between, between lies and precise truth. Most biographers choose to fill the gap with as much of themselves as they can master (style, presentation, the authoritative and editorial conclusion). The process of biography is not unlike shadowing and ghosting for nothing — beside being a narrative, a biography is always a dual character accounting. In turn, biographers enjoy the same authorial perks and popularity as hardcore fiction writers do with their readers.
It’s a double trade-off considering the difficulties of accurately rendering character and identity in print, creating yet more print, and more detailed circles of speculation. The facts of a person (as much as they can be recorded) become representations, which are then annexed by further interpretations which beget more definitive interpretations by other biographers and commentators, which all then feed into the broader discourse about a subject: his work and influence, relations and friendships, coincidences and appearances and parallels and a thousand other streams tied in. Perspectives from the family, lovers, friends and associates, minders and hairdressers, astrologers and trainers, whomever could possibly claim a degree of intimacy — the thinner the better it seems, pushing the bio closer to tabloid gossip. But which in the end only look like so many stories and historical novels neatly arrayed on shelves.
The patent aura of fiction seems to have entered these great reads. From the way these books are written to the way they’re marketed and consumed, little seems to separate them from novels. Or rather, the slightly fraudulent claims to truth and clarity they purport seem hollower than ever.
Here’s my proof of fraudulence:
- The many and secret forces which shape a personality, which constitute identity, are inexplicable. If we could add up the net effects of personal psychology, origins and culture, circumstance and life event — everything that could possibly go to constitute the manifold facets of identity, we’d still have an incomplete frame or gestalt to explain and render that particular person.
- Therefore all biographies which claim to paint authoritative or exhaustive pictures along this supposedly objective line must/should concede this essential shortcoming in their attempt — which, since they don’t, makes biographies suspect failures, or, at best, fictional representations. All supposed truth and fact, when represented, involve approximation, editing, metaphor and perspectival slant, ie the tropes of fiction.
- Or, at the very least, biographies should admit that narrative-fictive concerns like readability, action-packing, intrigue and dramatic characterisation and conflict are just as important to their authoritative concerns.
So much for a quick character sketch of the biography.
There is of course no palliative course of action which can be undertaken here without seeming petty and pedantic, and I don’t mean to offer any directly. Biographies exist expressly because we trust their authors and their claims to thoroughness, intimacy and objectivity, not the work. The Author Function is just as relevant here. We (I mean the biography-reading public) are just as likely to be true to the biographer’s brand as to the novelists’. And especially where there is debate about the future of the novel, we often miss the glaring fact that it is biographers who have taken over the reins and carriage of the classical novel. Only they have the cash incentive and easy footwork to deal with what Norman Mailer called the ‘bitch’ medium, willing to carry on the themes of grand narrative and character drama. Our modern novels, in turn, read like so many biographies. Manqué biographies.
*****************
I had an idea, in thinking about profiles and biographies, to exploit this (occasional) nearness to fiction and personally-motivated perspective to the full by writing against the journalistic approach of objectivity and observation — that is, not by interviews and direct access, by reasonable quote and assured rendition, by chumming up the distance between profiler and subject (faithfully noting the subject’s habits and quirks, facial and expressive peculiarities, his tone-setting background and contexts, entrances and departures, the usual stab at upbeat ending etc) but by taking that distance for granted. Never by reconciling the work and the man for a mealy audience hungry for drama and gossip, but by sheer extrapolation from works alone. To take the subject’s works as the real biography, unified by personality. Reliant, therefore, on the profiler’s skill and imaginative force as a writer to render character by what are, ultimately, fictive- or narrative-oriented techniques (in journalism) anyway. To draw a biography without apparent facts. To use the intuitions of the reader-interpreter, the paint abstractly. To paint knowing-interpretatively.
[Actually, this partly came in reaction to a profile of New Yorker profiler John Lahr (who’s profiled Roseanne, Mike Nichols, Sontag, Spielberg et al, to drop names). Lahr habitually spends several months shadowing a subject in building up his piece. And I mean closely — he follows them down, follows them out amongst friends and colleagues; on the crapper and off — which I think is totally admirable and warranted when it comes do doing the footwork for a biographical portrait, as any portrait is complex and broad. The qualities and essences of a person only come across slowly, indirectly, in a long and gradual conversation of interaction and collaboration, where a mere hour is never enough. Fair nuff. As a journalist, this lends credence to Lahr’s opinion and weight in other fields of comment. But the method is by no means as absolute as it seems, nor might it be the healthiest from a creative POV. Lahr is at least masterful at reducing or effacing his own presence from the profile; to which I’d say, why not all the way?]
One learns everything one needs to know about Mailer from his novels and extended biographies in fiction. One doesn’t need to know how ugly the real character of Agatha Christie really was. One perceives Ballard fully from his range. As with Hemingway. There will always be room for the full journalistic approach — but I’d be interested in reading a profile of an artist (preferably a helpfully reclusive one) where the writer consciously and unhesitatingly announces his profile an appreciation of identity by exegesis alone. At least then the presence and quality of the interpretation would come to the acknowledged fore (remember every representation is an interpretation). The distance between his subject might also incline the writer to greater honesty because it’s his reputation that’s on the line, character-wise, as there’d be no safe nook or editorialising vantage point from which to dismiss the artist and his personal faults or failings. The entire narrative premise would sink like a turd. Because the writer can keep more of himself, he doesn’t have to condescend to effacement in the hope of seeming objective.
A biographical painting based purely on the works, an hermeneutic biography. Its nearness to criticism could lead to alarmingly academic thinking, but with the accent on imagination and the explicit acknowledgement ‘I never met him’ and ‘This is almost a fictional characterisation’ — coupled with the fact that no artist wants to be nailed or packaged into a reductive and often misrepresentative column anyway, might lead to a profile which even the subject might want to read for its divergence, otherness and honest fiction. So much better than all that feigned intimate acquaintance.
Especially when considering that what we consider ‘an author’ is usually a multiple construct or projection anyway. The author of his own fiction might grin and chortle to recognise the same fiction from another storyteller’s POV.
Thursday
Letter to Gabe in LA
I’ve been keeping a kind of distanced view of the whole US election campaign with all its dirty tricks and blatant misrepresentations etc, mostly thru Tom Tomorrow, AlterNet and cartoonist Steve Bell in the Guardian etc. Nothing on the truly Hunter S Thompson scale of sheer addiction in ‘72. It’s like a storm in the distance, you only hear the occasional thunderclap here in Ireland. People are still flapping about the new inverted commas Socialist government in Spain. Even Australia is doing its bit for the “Alliance” that indirectly caused the attack by urging ‘Spain's newly elected Socialist Government not to pull its troops out of Iraq, saying such a move could be interpreted as a victory for terrorism.’ This is classic spin. This is the worst kind of US-toadying, and it begs going into the shambles that is the cause for war with Iraq, and frankly I don’t have time for that here.
But the sad thing about the year-long election process in the States (and this is by no means limited to the States alone) is that it’s all based on personality politics and PR and ad/advertorial slander of the most blatant kind. It’s the furthest thing from intelligent debate on real issues, from dialogue and concern and foresight; in essence, the furthest thing from participatory democracy. It’s more like conspiratorial mediation. Sorry to sound slightly excessive here, but it’s an extreme thing in itself, and I’m sure this is obvious to you guys already. How does one overhaul a system (from the primaries to the TV debates up) that is inherently flawed, skewed, bought-out and open to the biggest lobbyists and campaign contributors? Why wasn’t there more of a concerted push for election reform after the last election fiasco? Simply put, because I think the American system (in the broadest sense) is in nature a republican system. Compare the way Bill Clinton was hounded and George Bush never at all, even though he is a much riper candidate for proper investigative hounding. GWB is the least accountable president of all time I think. All those promises to fund the NY firefighters and then cut, all that flipflopping about the 9/11 investigation, flipflopping about everything else, I mean this is a scandal compared to the profits Boeing and Haliburton and Lockheed are raking in. This is the greatest obscenity of our age, an obscenity masquerading as spin. Like Redford says, listen to the speeches and substitute ‘Industrial interests’ for the ‘American people’. The people are being taken for a ride while on the surface they seem to be spoken for. Why isn't there more debate on the imminent militarisation of space, the revamp of the arms race, the dreadful state of American interventionism and diplomacy and corporate corruption and social and welfare inequality...
I think it sad to see how the concerted push for youth voting and voter awareness (even on MTV) is not offset with an effective range of voting options (and sadly Ralph Nader never was an option). Republican or Republican-lite as the saying goes; one person holding both puppets (Bill Hicks); or the general feeling of uselessness which many feel by not choosing to turn up. Sad how people’s best interests can be bent and abused by mediated rubbish. Something George Lakoff said about politics in America is pertinent: frames trump facts. No matter how pressing or significant the facts, if the frame of debate within which they are viewed is skewed, then you can forget the facts because people’s minds are constrained already (his example has to do with the perception of taxes as either a necessity or burden when it comes to election spin).
Further to the mediated/deliberate constraint of debate, as though the American public are condescendingly incapable of handling more than one or two issues per election, I hate the way it does always turn into a single election-winning issue. It looks like it’s gay marriage this time. And then watch the misrepresentation of American freedoms: if you support another’s right to self-determination and belief, then what gives you the right to say it’s a crime, or godless and worse, and change the constitution? It used to be race-baiting, and now it’s gay-baiting. How far we’ve travelled.
Spain sets a rather disturbing precedent: everyone’s saying how Bin Laden has now directly affected Western democracy (this in itself is a misrepresentation: the people voted against their government because of its speed in blaming ETA, and since 90% are against the war in Iraq which for them is the reason for the latest attack). I think this might be an indirect warning to the States for election times. Of course the Bush junta will take any attack on US interests or land as an excuse for martial law and worse excesses of intervention, cronyism and what have you. Like Thatcher in 83 or 84, turning a war into full re-election potential, and cutting off real debate in the progress (by becoming more authoritarian all along: see the way only one senator voted against the usa patriot act because he wanted time to READ it). This is the way it has always been, it seems. Bush I think will play it cosy for a while and wait for something nasty to come his way, then ride it all the way.
But, if even Howard Stern is against you, then surely you’ll have little chance of re-election. Right?
Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos, as they say in space.
I’ve been keeping a kind of distanced view of the whole US election campaign with all its dirty tricks and blatant misrepresentations etc, mostly thru Tom Tomorrow, AlterNet and cartoonist Steve Bell in the Guardian etc. Nothing on the truly Hunter S Thompson scale of sheer addiction in ‘72. It’s like a storm in the distance, you only hear the occasional thunderclap here in Ireland. People are still flapping about the new inverted commas Socialist government in Spain. Even Australia is doing its bit for the “Alliance” that indirectly caused the attack by urging ‘Spain's newly elected Socialist Government not to pull its troops out of Iraq, saying such a move could be interpreted as a victory for terrorism.’ This is classic spin. This is the worst kind of US-toadying, and it begs going into the shambles that is the cause for war with Iraq, and frankly I don’t have time for that here.
But the sad thing about the year-long election process in the States (and this is by no means limited to the States alone) is that it’s all based on personality politics and PR and ad/advertorial slander of the most blatant kind. It’s the furthest thing from intelligent debate on real issues, from dialogue and concern and foresight; in essence, the furthest thing from participatory democracy. It’s more like conspiratorial mediation. Sorry to sound slightly excessive here, but it’s an extreme thing in itself, and I’m sure this is obvious to you guys already. How does one overhaul a system (from the primaries to the TV debates up) that is inherently flawed, skewed, bought-out and open to the biggest lobbyists and campaign contributors? Why wasn’t there more of a concerted push for election reform after the last election fiasco? Simply put, because I think the American system (in the broadest sense) is in nature a republican system. Compare the way Bill Clinton was hounded and George Bush never at all, even though he is a much riper candidate for proper investigative hounding. GWB is the least accountable president of all time I think. All those promises to fund the NY firefighters and then cut, all that flipflopping about the 9/11 investigation, flipflopping about everything else, I mean this is a scandal compared to the profits Boeing and Haliburton and Lockheed are raking in. This is the greatest obscenity of our age, an obscenity masquerading as spin. Like Redford says, listen to the speeches and substitute ‘Industrial interests’ for the ‘American people’. The people are being taken for a ride while on the surface they seem to be spoken for. Why isn't there more debate on the imminent militarisation of space, the revamp of the arms race, the dreadful state of American interventionism and diplomacy and corporate corruption and social and welfare inequality...
I think it sad to see how the concerted push for youth voting and voter awareness (even on MTV) is not offset with an effective range of voting options (and sadly Ralph Nader never was an option). Republican or Republican-lite as the saying goes; one person holding both puppets (Bill Hicks); or the general feeling of uselessness which many feel by not choosing to turn up. Sad how people’s best interests can be bent and abused by mediated rubbish. Something George Lakoff said about politics in America is pertinent: frames trump facts. No matter how pressing or significant the facts, if the frame of debate within which they are viewed is skewed, then you can forget the facts because people’s minds are constrained already (his example has to do with the perception of taxes as either a necessity or burden when it comes to election spin).
Further to the mediated/deliberate constraint of debate, as though the American public are condescendingly incapable of handling more than one or two issues per election, I hate the way it does always turn into a single election-winning issue. It looks like it’s gay marriage this time. And then watch the misrepresentation of American freedoms: if you support another’s right to self-determination and belief, then what gives you the right to say it’s a crime, or godless and worse, and change the constitution? It used to be race-baiting, and now it’s gay-baiting. How far we’ve travelled.
Spain sets a rather disturbing precedent: everyone’s saying how Bin Laden has now directly affected Western democracy (this in itself is a misrepresentation: the people voted against their government because of its speed in blaming ETA, and since 90% are against the war in Iraq which for them is the reason for the latest attack). I think this might be an indirect warning to the States for election times. Of course the Bush junta will take any attack on US interests or land as an excuse for martial law and worse excesses of intervention, cronyism and what have you. Like Thatcher in 83 or 84, turning a war into full re-election potential, and cutting off real debate in the progress (by becoming more authoritarian all along: see the way only one senator voted against the usa patriot act because he wanted time to READ it). This is the way it has always been, it seems. Bush I think will play it cosy for a while and wait for something nasty to come his way, then ride it all the way.
But, if even Howard Stern is against you, then surely you’ll have little chance of re-election. Right?
Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos, as they say in space.
I found an interesting article about 'The Rules you work by' on EDge.org: www.edge.org/q2004/q04_print.html recently.
This is interesting because, like all questions that seem to cross the boundaries between fields of inquiry or addressing the shortcomings thereof, it seems to be the natural domain of another science: in this case I’d say that of philosophy. What Lykken alludes to in my reading of his law is the power of Will — in the broadest sense, as a phenomenon in itself. Philosophy has been thinking on the issue for centuries.
Science has been able to make personality mappings, neurological analyses of the brain’s composition, and has gone some way to explaine the interaction of these to form consciousness and thought. But it has kept relatively quiet on the wider differentiations of subjectivity amongst people, like for instance their relative willpowers, and why some people are tireless mental workers and others seem to lack the ability to marshal their abilities consistently despite talent or desire.
One need only look at the world of artists (one cannot get more subjective than that) to see the difference at work in an extreme form: some artists are masters of expression and can work systematically and consistently for all hours – they are in fact workers of expression. There are other artists, however, who work almost purely on an inspirational basis, whenever the mood or idea takes them – they are often unstable or riddled with doubt or fragile in other ways and consequently fashion their lives around this unpredictability with bohemian airs. But what if this difference could be expressed simply as a difference of willpower, of the ability to apply and execute demanding tasks with determination and consistent force. Or, as Lykken calls it, mental energy.
And anyone who’s ever had to write an essay due the next day will recall those midnight dialogues of self, of having to force the brain to generate perceptive sentences and correct deductions from references and research; of all the distractions, little breaks and indulgent snacks and the perpetual fact of tomorrow’s deadline and the possibility of extending it etc. One is really struggling with Will in a way that obviously defies essay planning and practice, one smarts against the necessity and urgency of working on demand at such a late and unprofitable hour. I mean there’s no one else to blame of course; it’s that having to apply oneself against the body’s need for sleep that drags out the hours. You find yourself thinking ‘if only I had more willpower and attention I would’ve started this essay weeks ago…’ It comes down to an issue of discipline, but really that implies a certain mastery of will as well.
At least, in those quiet midnight hours with the blank page in front of me, that is the time I start to think of the Will as possibly some universal force, say as Schopenhauer conceived it and Nietzsche extended to a theory of power. Some common motivating force in the universe which can also be applied to the small and particular; a common explanation for movement and action above and below. And that if one had a tap into such universal Will then one could also pump out several thousand seemly words on any topic at all. Which is of course childish reasoning fed on a steady intake of caffeine and exasperation.
But it takes that air of desperation to fully appreciate mental energy — and how little we appreciate its workings or sources and conditions. I think it is something subtler than motivational force like the millions of deluded positive therapies out there in New Age land. It’s a question of learning mental work, learning to exercise the brain and creating good habits and environments. But it’s also an issue of understanding action in the sense that thought can be an act. Every action in the world has its origin in a thought, in one simple combination and expression of idea. And if this is the primary or only way in which we truly affect the world, then it’s also the way to appreciate mastering one’s own life and actions. From the wilful control of thinking up. And by turning on that little edge of necessity in all one’s actions.
Mental work = discipline = will.
- "Lykken's First Law:
The quality of one's intellectual productions is a function of the product of talent (e.g., intelligence) times mental energy. Although there are many and varied tests for assessing intelligence, psychologists have not as yet even attempted to construct a measure of individual differences in mental energy."
This is interesting because, like all questions that seem to cross the boundaries between fields of inquiry or addressing the shortcomings thereof, it seems to be the natural domain of another science: in this case I’d say that of philosophy. What Lykken alludes to in my reading of his law is the power of Will — in the broadest sense, as a phenomenon in itself. Philosophy has been thinking on the issue for centuries.
Science has been able to make personality mappings, neurological analyses of the brain’s composition, and has gone some way to explaine the interaction of these to form consciousness and thought. But it has kept relatively quiet on the wider differentiations of subjectivity amongst people, like for instance their relative willpowers, and why some people are tireless mental workers and others seem to lack the ability to marshal their abilities consistently despite talent or desire.
One need only look at the world of artists (one cannot get more subjective than that) to see the difference at work in an extreme form: some artists are masters of expression and can work systematically and consistently for all hours – they are in fact workers of expression. There are other artists, however, who work almost purely on an inspirational basis, whenever the mood or idea takes them – they are often unstable or riddled with doubt or fragile in other ways and consequently fashion their lives around this unpredictability with bohemian airs. But what if this difference could be expressed simply as a difference of willpower, of the ability to apply and execute demanding tasks with determination and consistent force. Or, as Lykken calls it, mental energy.
And anyone who’s ever had to write an essay due the next day will recall those midnight dialogues of self, of having to force the brain to generate perceptive sentences and correct deductions from references and research; of all the distractions, little breaks and indulgent snacks and the perpetual fact of tomorrow’s deadline and the possibility of extending it etc. One is really struggling with Will in a way that obviously defies essay planning and practice, one smarts against the necessity and urgency of working on demand at such a late and unprofitable hour. I mean there’s no one else to blame of course; it’s that having to apply oneself against the body’s need for sleep that drags out the hours. You find yourself thinking ‘if only I had more willpower and attention I would’ve started this essay weeks ago…’ It comes down to an issue of discipline, but really that implies a certain mastery of will as well.
At least, in those quiet midnight hours with the blank page in front of me, that is the time I start to think of the Will as possibly some universal force, say as Schopenhauer conceived it and Nietzsche extended to a theory of power. Some common motivating force in the universe which can also be applied to the small and particular; a common explanation for movement and action above and below. And that if one had a tap into such universal Will then one could also pump out several thousand seemly words on any topic at all. Which is of course childish reasoning fed on a steady intake of caffeine and exasperation.
But it takes that air of desperation to fully appreciate mental energy — and how little we appreciate its workings or sources and conditions. I think it is something subtler than motivational force like the millions of deluded positive therapies out there in New Age land. It’s a question of learning mental work, learning to exercise the brain and creating good habits and environments. But it’s also an issue of understanding action in the sense that thought can be an act. Every action in the world has its origin in a thought, in one simple combination and expression of idea. And if this is the primary or only way in which we truly affect the world, then it’s also the way to appreciate mastering one’s own life and actions. From the wilful control of thinking up. And by turning on that little edge of necessity in all one’s actions.
Mental work = discipline = will.
Saturday
Moving right along from Elvis to Hendrix —
how much more remarkable his appearance in his time? OK, like the times were just right, the blues context was established, the UK was so firmly in love with the US whilst the US was segregated up its own ass, and continues to be so today. One could argue all night about a scene whether it's storyville or swingin london or a bunch of nerdy terrorists ganging up in the cinematheque — but Hendrix is such a rich anomaly of talent and 'show them how to do it' and intense drive and creativity. As, erm, elsewhere, I think Hendrix was the first to really extend genial talent with electric amplification and the sheer loud excitement of cutting the sound-flight envelope. I remember once seeing a compilation of you know, 'classically' psychedelic music from the 60s, the really trippy stuff with poss. some Floyd on it, and they tacked on Voodoo Chile at the end of it — as though besides cheap rights they wanted to tap into the signal importance of this guy with just one track. I mean imagine sitting out tripping in the grass with your friends, there's violence and love in the air to such a liquid extent your eyes feel like popping out (and let me post-preface that by saying how hard it is to talk about love and hippie shit in this day and age and not sound like a complete moron; let's say those times weren't ripe for irony-as-lifestyle yet. I'd suggest H.S. Thompson's take on the scene (cf Fear n Loathing, on acid and San Fran) to be a fair and honest indicator, irrespective of whether Wolf lumped him in with the other New Journalism lumpkins — which is another essay altogether, very muchly because of its failure to understand Gonzo as preemptor of the whole journalism-fiction thing, ie conscious involvement with the creation of one's story, and a generation of PoMoronics ever after — though note, New Journos just celebrate themselves, like almost any young writer in the 90s — Gonzo just takes this to the rational, original extreme); you could be drafted any minute (and what does that feel like, I mean to the conspiracy nut generation? Drafting frightens the shit out of me and I think it a failure of society, to be at John Howard's beck and call, for example, when there's already so much transparently wrong with him and this world, when everybody knows without winking irony that he serves as Dubya's bushy-eyed lap- and attack dog, as well as economic underdog when trade tariffs are decided); you know, it's a simple question of humanity, you got these really great drugs going round yer system, and some leather-faced president decides to shoot students and send them off to a body-bag conflict for an ideological threat as selfish as it is overstated, and you just say No Fucking Way (as though by instinct you're anticipating the fat grooviness of rock music like Sabbath about 3-4 years from now, and the long hair and the bong-ons and the sheer underclassness of it all — you just know it's going to be yours), you're sitting there in the grass and someone pops on a bootleg of Voodoo Chile and it feels like knives are cutting up everything you see into thin slices, and the world is screaming in pain — though you know underneath that it's good, that the world has to be destroyed so it can be created again anew, and this guy is singing about imminent death with the most brazen attitude as though he's saying goodbye to a neighbour in the morning, and it feels like he's playing with a power beyond anything you've heard before, louder than any of the fuzzboxes your friends brought home and cranked thru their puny Vox amps until their parents screamed to cut the racket, it's like an aural apocalypse of sorts, like souls in turmoil and death triumphant; you're feeling all this, right, you know that the world's still the same place and that your friends are likely to be feeling the same way about these crazy sounds even though it's just a tape ... I mean, it's almost sheer impossible to recreate the hard core impression of the arrival of Hendrix in the full context of the mid-sixties, especially for us pristine CD sound-obsessed consumers with our teen demographics and serious irony and sincerity. As a generation we look positively inhuman next to Jimi. But the UFOs, what about the flying saucers? Your man Jimi was way big into conspiracy theory man! Well, you can stick that up your X-Filed pipe and smoke it too. The only way to describe the genius and absolute talent of Jimi is to say he was an alien in the first place. Which is a statement about ourselves more than anything.
how much more remarkable his appearance in his time? OK, like the times were just right, the blues context was established, the UK was so firmly in love with the US whilst the US was segregated up its own ass, and continues to be so today. One could argue all night about a scene whether it's storyville or swingin london or a bunch of nerdy terrorists ganging up in the cinematheque — but Hendrix is such a rich anomaly of talent and 'show them how to do it' and intense drive and creativity. As, erm, elsewhere, I think Hendrix was the first to really extend genial talent with electric amplification and the sheer loud excitement of cutting the sound-flight envelope. I remember once seeing a compilation of you know, 'classically' psychedelic music from the 60s, the really trippy stuff with poss. some Floyd on it, and they tacked on Voodoo Chile at the end of it — as though besides cheap rights they wanted to tap into the signal importance of this guy with just one track. I mean imagine sitting out tripping in the grass with your friends, there's violence and love in the air to such a liquid extent your eyes feel like popping out (and let me post-preface that by saying how hard it is to talk about love and hippie shit in this day and age and not sound like a complete moron; let's say those times weren't ripe for irony-as-lifestyle yet. I'd suggest H.S. Thompson's take on the scene (cf Fear n Loathing, on acid and San Fran) to be a fair and honest indicator, irrespective of whether Wolf lumped him in with the other New Journalism lumpkins — which is another essay altogether, very muchly because of its failure to understand Gonzo as preemptor of the whole journalism-fiction thing, ie conscious involvement with the creation of one's story, and a generation of PoMoronics ever after — though note, New Journos just celebrate themselves, like almost any young writer in the 90s — Gonzo just takes this to the rational, original extreme); you could be drafted any minute (and what does that feel like, I mean to the conspiracy nut generation? Drafting frightens the shit out of me and I think it a failure of society, to be at John Howard's beck and call, for example, when there's already so much transparently wrong with him and this world, when everybody knows without winking irony that he serves as Dubya's bushy-eyed lap- and attack dog, as well as economic underdog when trade tariffs are decided); you know, it's a simple question of humanity, you got these really great drugs going round yer system, and some leather-faced president decides to shoot students and send them off to a body-bag conflict for an ideological threat as selfish as it is overstated, and you just say No Fucking Way (as though by instinct you're anticipating the fat grooviness of rock music like Sabbath about 3-4 years from now, and the long hair and the bong-ons and the sheer underclassness of it all — you just know it's going to be yours), you're sitting there in the grass and someone pops on a bootleg of Voodoo Chile and it feels like knives are cutting up everything you see into thin slices, and the world is screaming in pain — though you know underneath that it's good, that the world has to be destroyed so it can be created again anew, and this guy is singing about imminent death with the most brazen attitude as though he's saying goodbye to a neighbour in the morning, and it feels like he's playing with a power beyond anything you've heard before, louder than any of the fuzzboxes your friends brought home and cranked thru their puny Vox amps until their parents screamed to cut the racket, it's like an aural apocalypse of sorts, like souls in turmoil and death triumphant; you're feeling all this, right, you know that the world's still the same place and that your friends are likely to be feeling the same way about these crazy sounds even though it's just a tape ... I mean, it's almost sheer impossible to recreate the hard core impression of the arrival of Hendrix in the full context of the mid-sixties, especially for us pristine CD sound-obsessed consumers with our teen demographics and serious irony and sincerity. As a generation we look positively inhuman next to Jimi. But the UFOs, what about the flying saucers? Your man Jimi was way big into conspiracy theory man! Well, you can stick that up your X-Filed pipe and smoke it too. The only way to describe the genius and absolute talent of Jimi is to say he was an alien in the first place. Which is a statement about ourselves more than anything.
Hendrix, part the second (or third)
I guess, to put hi-falutin spin on the matter, that sonic dissonance has strong parallels with political or social dissonance. Ask any musical modernist of the Schoenbergian mould. And so all the countercultural kiddies of the 60 identified with their alternative freak-out father figure, the one with the suggestive tongue motions and 'affectionate' guitar style. But it's obviously more than that; it's not just contextual association with the kids and their parent's wars, there's almost something symbolic, something important in all that feedback, all that shuddering noise — and I'm not talking about any biographical acid-fuelled desire to crank it (though this may be the main reason, in the same way George Clinton prompted Funkadelic to let the hair down, get the big amps and play 'real loud, real emotional'). It's like Jimi just loved being in all that noise, surrounded by its aural solidity as it were — I mean his guitar technique is such that he could always control it from being just so much squealing noise — it's like he was at home in it, he wanted it. Because noise is quickly fatiguing. And of course it's a lot more fun painting sheets of noise when you're audience is chemically-keyed. All those trademark hammer-ons, says Eric Burdon, I think, synchronised with the phase-pitches of acid in your mind — hence Jimi's wild pointed yeah's to the audience when he spots the trippers synching to the sounds. (This is also so much background. I think our modern guitar pyrotechnicians are just as likely to kick out contempt for their audience as sympathetic experience, let alone guitar picks. How far we've travelled.) But then why the queasy impact of the Star Spangled Banner, the feeling that the partnered noise is all about destruction and things coming apart at the seams — and this purely sonically? Where else does this happen? Heavy metal is just rhythm. Neil Young's live outros are just rumbling drones of noise. Noise orchestras are just that. Any guitarist playing the Banner now seems like any another American. Or was Jimi way more keyed to the delicate hypocrisies and iniquities of America, its multi-racial dualities which could be played on with a dash and twist of noise? More probing, say, than a punk rocker cranked to 11 singing 'bout dole queues? Let's look at it this way. American artistic culture strongly driven by action (as you all know), by things that move (cf Hunter S.) or which ring up mobility. And in the broader sense then, the genius of action has raw physical talent which dominates his ability to explain it, he acts purely from ability and not from ideas or artistic conception, a sensibility of doing. Everything from jazz improvisers to Elvis, living in the act. With Jimi, I think, his talent was so vast, so controlled that he claimed the sonic world of noise with it — because he could. Noise was the complete antithesis of clean guitar chops and phrases, all Les Paul and Chet Atkins, and Jimi just commanded the whole expressive gamut, made it answer and act responsively. And in a clichéd nod to the loneliness of the genius, I'd say that the noise was a throwback to Jimi's massive talent hailing it's own massive equal. Finding himself in it. True, he never stayed in feedback for very long, but began using it (in solos) to abet his playing, using it as a groundswell for phrasings and segues between. That is, not just as someone who's mastered the electric guitar (and even that as though for the first time in history), but who was a complete guitarist — in the full technical sense, ability-instrument-pedals-effects-amplifier-studio — in addition to all that feedback and unpredictability. And to get really sentimental, I think the noise was actually comforting as an expressive aid in dealing reactively-musically with the idiocy and extremes of the 60s scene. It's not just the dark side of a massive talent, to get even more sentimental, but a comfort with opposites and negations, a wider ability to integrate and hence work out the hypocricies and iniquities behind the familiar melodies and niceties. Jimi's prime action was always musical first, and political secondarily. His own blues-based world, when he had to resort or escape to it, was laden with noise but then again so was the world he moved in.
Hendrix, third return
My anecdotal memory of Hendrix interviews is slight but forceful:
1. A B&W TV interview in which a remarkably juvenile-sounding Hendrix talks about his songs — actually, it may have been a press conference, which setting all the more seems a strange place to talk about songwriting abilities — and he talks about his unhappy songs, all his depressive or down songs (that's right, I think Manic Depression was the cue question) and his inability, inate-seeming, to write happy or positive numbers. Of the kind the McCartney 60s might identify with more readily. The speaking tone was on-tour fatigued & honest.
2. Again B&W, talking about the wah peddle and how it's kinda cool because it has no notes but pure sound. Burning of the Midnight Lamp was the cue — no, actually, this one was the juvenile-sounding one. I think he was being interviewed by a journo of the 'what's your fave colour' mould.
3. There's also a colour interview on the Dick Cavett Show (?) tacked with a performance of Isabella, with comments I can't quite recall at the mo but which were much more pointed and intelligent. Beyond the silken threads my memory fails. Always rely on your first impression, I say, because repetition brings everything back to the banal, especially with interviews.
Oh and there's the truckloads of interviews with Noel Redding sodding on about insecure Jimi and friends in the studio, Jimi losing masters, Jimi too spaced to play in Germany. Forget all that. Funnily enough, the only person I've heard interviewed about the interesting soul of Hendrix is Flea. Waxing like a fan in love of course, but brave enough to mention the spirit of the man and the soul of the music, its beauty.
Like Brian writing songs (see Friends liner notes), everything is keyed to the 'feel', everything comes from that. I say that Jimi wrote songs from the soul, from innate feel of ability. I must've mentioned this elsewhere. OK we can also talk of roustabout love on the road, yer foxy women and little lover misses. And your acid dreams and noisescapes. But notice, never songs of personae or ironic put-on: subjectively, Jimi is remarkably consistent. Music to caress and move into. Angels, emotional colours. Something like the feeling of pursuit mixed with constrained unhappiness, something to route all yer unfulfilled-biographic-romanticism into. Your 'what ifs' and 'could've beens' jazz. One of my electric dreams is Miles and Jimi up on stage together — that's cultural shift right before your eyes — jazz, the ultimate ability and form, and electricity, force, melodic weight in the Hendrix corner.
But back to initial impressions. There's plenty of titty later. To be honest, all I could think about when hearing Midnight Lamp for the first time on groove-worn vinyl (the track had been over-played) was the jarring difference of the song on a blues-based album. I suppose any harpsichord will do that. But at the same time it's a consummate 60s track. A song with intensities and emotive peaks and trippity sounds… and which yet is about solitude. Which, on pristine CD relistens grows beyond the initial 'drag' — the fatiguing familiarity of solitude, distance and repetitive tripping. It's not an argument or a wisened song of broken hearts and commitment spurned, no 50s schtick. But then again how many 60s songs deal so directly, in expressive terms, with solitude? Where is the hallmark unity and experience of the time? It's definitely one of the signature Hendrix tunes — with distinct and tensed forces — the extraordinarily tough drums and deeply melodic bass (I mean for a pop single, what drumming!). I've seen the doco with Chas (I believe) pushing the levels and isolating the track — but I've never heard anyone talk about the song openly, I mean, what can you say, Jimi was lonely? Solitude is very difficult to talk about, in musical terms especially — and instead of a gentle self-rocking lullaby he made this almost scathing, heavy track — the wah rhythm chops really are explosions; the wavering, spinning backing chorus; the burn. Jimi obviously dealt with the issue intensely, he makes his enemy powerful. Had solitude been expressed with anything as remotely tough; had music ever illuminated and yet fought against solitude so strongly? And all within such a simple, melodic framework.
Amidst the emphatic acid allusions & tropes & associations (ever-falling dust, someone who'll buy & sell for me), it's all still highly atypical, as though acid brings out the essential solitude, harbinger of future rooms of mirrors, and not all the love children chanting smile on yer brother. Which prompts me to say, necessarily, that at no point, no matter how intense the Yellow Sunshine or Ohms happen to be, is it ever purely acid doing the talking. Acid alone doesn't give you the nobility to deal with solitude eloquently. Like any diversion-distraction-bender, drugs are as much a conduit (and I say very bent conduit) for illuminating elements or combinations of self that previously wouldn't have raised a giggle. But it does make for peculiar word-association styles (Feel Flows eg), particular self-mirror externalisations, it does bring out flavours and intensities of loneliness otherwise dormant (Maggot Brain).
My anecdotal memory of Hendrix interviews is slight but forceful:
1. A B&W TV interview in which a remarkably juvenile-sounding Hendrix talks about his songs — actually, it may have been a press conference, which setting all the more seems a strange place to talk about songwriting abilities — and he talks about his unhappy songs, all his depressive or down songs (that's right, I think Manic Depression was the cue question) and his inability, inate-seeming, to write happy or positive numbers. Of the kind the McCartney 60s might identify with more readily. The speaking tone was on-tour fatigued & honest.
2. Again B&W, talking about the wah peddle and how it's kinda cool because it has no notes but pure sound. Burning of the Midnight Lamp was the cue — no, actually, this one was the juvenile-sounding one. I think he was being interviewed by a journo of the 'what's your fave colour' mould.
3. There's also a colour interview on the Dick Cavett Show (?) tacked with a performance of Isabella, with comments I can't quite recall at the mo but which were much more pointed and intelligent. Beyond the silken threads my memory fails. Always rely on your first impression, I say, because repetition brings everything back to the banal, especially with interviews.
Oh and there's the truckloads of interviews with Noel Redding sodding on about insecure Jimi and friends in the studio, Jimi losing masters, Jimi too spaced to play in Germany. Forget all that. Funnily enough, the only person I've heard interviewed about the interesting soul of Hendrix is Flea. Waxing like a fan in love of course, but brave enough to mention the spirit of the man and the soul of the music, its beauty.
Like Brian writing songs (see Friends liner notes), everything is keyed to the 'feel', everything comes from that. I say that Jimi wrote songs from the soul, from innate feel of ability. I must've mentioned this elsewhere. OK we can also talk of roustabout love on the road, yer foxy women and little lover misses. And your acid dreams and noisescapes. But notice, never songs of personae or ironic put-on: subjectively, Jimi is remarkably consistent. Music to caress and move into. Angels, emotional colours. Something like the feeling of pursuit mixed with constrained unhappiness, something to route all yer unfulfilled-biographic-romanticism into. Your 'what ifs' and 'could've beens' jazz. One of my electric dreams is Miles and Jimi up on stage together — that's cultural shift right before your eyes — jazz, the ultimate ability and form, and electricity, force, melodic weight in the Hendrix corner.
But back to initial impressions. There's plenty of titty later. To be honest, all I could think about when hearing Midnight Lamp for the first time on groove-worn vinyl (the track had been over-played) was the jarring difference of the song on a blues-based album. I suppose any harpsichord will do that. But at the same time it's a consummate 60s track. A song with intensities and emotive peaks and trippity sounds… and which yet is about solitude. Which, on pristine CD relistens grows beyond the initial 'drag' — the fatiguing familiarity of solitude, distance and repetitive tripping. It's not an argument or a wisened song of broken hearts and commitment spurned, no 50s schtick. But then again how many 60s songs deal so directly, in expressive terms, with solitude? Where is the hallmark unity and experience of the time? It's definitely one of the signature Hendrix tunes — with distinct and tensed forces — the extraordinarily tough drums and deeply melodic bass (I mean for a pop single, what drumming!). I've seen the doco with Chas (I believe) pushing the levels and isolating the track — but I've never heard anyone talk about the song openly, I mean, what can you say, Jimi was lonely? Solitude is very difficult to talk about, in musical terms especially — and instead of a gentle self-rocking lullaby he made this almost scathing, heavy track — the wah rhythm chops really are explosions; the wavering, spinning backing chorus; the burn. Jimi obviously dealt with the issue intensely, he makes his enemy powerful. Had solitude been expressed with anything as remotely tough; had music ever illuminated and yet fought against solitude so strongly? And all within such a simple, melodic framework.
Amidst the emphatic acid allusions & tropes & associations (ever-falling dust, someone who'll buy & sell for me), it's all still highly atypical, as though acid brings out the essential solitude, harbinger of future rooms of mirrors, and not all the love children chanting smile on yer brother. Which prompts me to say, necessarily, that at no point, no matter how intense the Yellow Sunshine or Ohms happen to be, is it ever purely acid doing the talking. Acid alone doesn't give you the nobility to deal with solitude eloquently. Like any diversion-distraction-bender, drugs are as much a conduit (and I say very bent conduit) for illuminating elements or combinations of self that previously wouldn't have raised a giggle. But it does make for peculiar word-association styles (Feel Flows eg), particular self-mirror externalisations, it does bring out flavours and intensities of loneliness otherwise dormant (Maggot Brain).
- Is a little more than enough
It really doesn't bother me too much at all
That same old fireplace
And I continue, alone
Lonely, lonely, my mind.
Sunday
Marvin, Stevie & Jimi
Sure What Goes On was on Stevie’s mind during Inner Visions, what with all the social commentary and the like, but look at the differences in the musicality: the casual introduction of moog lines, freshly conceived in Talking Book I believe; but also in the way the music recorded: intimate and clean, funky and immediate, as opposed to WGO’s wide open strings and sublime atmospherics and even more sublime bass grooves, with the drums way down in the back of the mix: which on top of the gospel layerings draw a listener to ask Is the rhythm in Marvin’s voice or in the sheer spirituality of the music? (-— the Gospel Artifice). WGO is a unified social album— concerned and affected: all its notions of love are a communal outreach, a love of people. IV views the world through a lover’s eyes, through a single aware soul (conscious, reincarnate), moving toward a personal higher ground. Marvin’s album statement is a group dynamic. In the two and occasionally three backing vocal overdubs that Marvin layers behind his own lead, there is the same love and relation as between Marvin and the bass of James Jamerson, between the motive and soul of his lyrics and the flying idea of the strings. It’s a unification of word intent and cadence: the biblical primality of the gospel choir, the sharing of suffering and bearing your brother; everyone’s going to make it this time. But between these two albums...
As in Hendrix, the electric organic: to return from the absolute frontier of feedback and noise or pure energy, return again to melody and rhythm, mimics the primality of becoming: something from nothing, art from an inchoate chaos. A precise pinpoint of what I mean: from about 6:40 on track six of the Woodstock performance there is a conditional space/noise leading to a return of figure at exactly 7:29 — that is wonder, that is the spirituality of music. I really don’t think there has been as radical a musician since. His layering of the riff, now in one register, then another, is a very jazz trick: yer not playing chords composed of notes, but doubled chords of melody/riffs, Coltrane.
Sure What Goes On was on Stevie’s mind during Inner Visions, what with all the social commentary and the like, but look at the differences in the musicality: the casual introduction of moog lines, freshly conceived in Talking Book I believe; but also in the way the music recorded: intimate and clean, funky and immediate, as opposed to WGO’s wide open strings and sublime atmospherics and even more sublime bass grooves, with the drums way down in the back of the mix: which on top of the gospel layerings draw a listener to ask Is the rhythm in Marvin’s voice or in the sheer spirituality of the music? (-— the Gospel Artifice). WGO is a unified social album— concerned and affected: all its notions of love are a communal outreach, a love of people. IV views the world through a lover’s eyes, through a single aware soul (conscious, reincarnate), moving toward a personal higher ground. Marvin’s album statement is a group dynamic. In the two and occasionally three backing vocal overdubs that Marvin layers behind his own lead, there is the same love and relation as between Marvin and the bass of James Jamerson, between the motive and soul of his lyrics and the flying idea of the strings. It’s a unification of word intent and cadence: the biblical primality of the gospel choir, the sharing of suffering and bearing your brother; everyone’s going to make it this time. But between these two albums...
As in Hendrix, the electric organic: to return from the absolute frontier of feedback and noise or pure energy, return again to melody and rhythm, mimics the primality of becoming: something from nothing, art from an inchoate chaos. A precise pinpoint of what I mean: from about 6:40 on track six of the Woodstock performance there is a conditional space/noise leading to a return of figure at exactly 7:29 — that is wonder, that is the spirituality of music. I really don’t think there has been as radical a musician since. His layering of the riff, now in one register, then another, is a very jazz trick: yer not playing chords composed of notes, but doubled chords of melody/riffs, Coltrane.
David Foster Wallace
If I had to bookend the 20th Century from a literary point of view I'd be inclined to put Ulysses on one end and Infinite Jest at the other. The former opened up the way for writerly experimentation and media integration, and the latter seems to close these off. At least in the sense that DFW is attempting to resuscitate the shuddering PostModernist hulk of contemporary writing that Ulysses triggered in the first place. Which is not to say there's some weird narrative closure between the two like a horse and cart across history, or that each are typical products of their respective age — which are both somewhat true — or even that complementary readings can be made. I mean DFW is reanimating the vibrancy of prose with intelligence and verve, making the novel seem a worthy investment again, a medium that rewards patient effort and involvement. And doing so in a way that is strikingly contemporary and ironic and critical without all the wet-newspaperisms of PoMo flogging and sass-less reference. Here come the cliches: refreshing, young, invigorating, smart, impish, delightful, satirical, dry & sophisticated, witty, urbane and media-savvy cool. All true in their own blazon but commentless in the face of his acute powers of novelisation, of interpreting the novel for hyper- or post-mediated times...
If I had to bookend the 20th Century from a literary point of view I'd be inclined to put Ulysses on one end and Infinite Jest at the other. The former opened up the way for writerly experimentation and media integration, and the latter seems to close these off. At least in the sense that DFW is attempting to resuscitate the shuddering PostModernist hulk of contemporary writing that Ulysses triggered in the first place. Which is not to say there's some weird narrative closure between the two like a horse and cart across history, or that each are typical products of their respective age — which are both somewhat true — or even that complementary readings can be made. I mean DFW is reanimating the vibrancy of prose with intelligence and verve, making the novel seem a worthy investment again, a medium that rewards patient effort and involvement. And doing so in a way that is strikingly contemporary and ironic and critical without all the wet-newspaperisms of PoMo flogging and sass-less reference. Here come the cliches: refreshing, young, invigorating, smart, impish, delightful, satirical, dry & sophisticated, witty, urbane and media-savvy cool. All true in their own blazon but commentless in the face of his acute powers of novelisation, of interpreting the novel for hyper- or post-mediated times...
DH Lawrence
Funny, but only in reading do i not get the impatient feeling that film, bands, and often cds give me, the feeling of yeah, fine, that's great, I'm sick of merely participating, i wanna be doing, making it. It's an immersion.
Realising that there is no artistry as such, let alone genius or romantic myths of voices and inspirations, or airs, but purely the cultivation of a sensibility, of an ear, an eye, of a knowledge of what works well and how affects are constructed realistically, of acquiring a perception that isn't the same but somehow akin to a perspective of art, a divine in-between, generative, neither wholly pragmatic nor purely accidental, ideal, coincidental. A sensibility that approaches a current of greatness on one hand and faux-religion on the other. Lawrence is canny and dated by all standards, but his conception, his yearning for a vital and importantly organic structure to literature, failed though it may be in the attempt (such obvious equation with spring buds and colliery black death, and the endless battle of the sexes), yet always radiated by opposition, conflict and flux... is immense. As opposed to Miller's constant concern for what writing is and how begun, with the fluid itself, Lawrence never mentions it, but is always insistent upon the pure creation, the merge and rebirth with the darkness... with the reach for organic relation. And he capped it all off with an ironic, smarmy and yet tender book about fucking... The mystery of it is large, and hence the criticism is doubly gorged with wild speculation, and diverse ranges, claimed privilege of perspectives, Freudian hacks and feminists, yet never complete, total, because DHL is in many ways the modern enigma, unexplainable: we can only do him justice by deepening the mystery. The conflict in him is never either/or, he is always above it in some way, proof of an abstract spirituality, somehow greater than what he presents, and yet cloying in his snarling, and picking at the 'dirty little secret' with insistent give em what they want insistency. Enlarging the drives, explicating them, attempting to do justice to them for a new way of life, aligned with nature yet not regressive, a whole new architecture; not filling them with theory, analysis; opening them to rot, if need be, out in the open... the terms of revival are desperate of course, of the need for a rebirth, of a new aristocracy which noone would want to follow. An yet steering clear of the whole Messiah bag... That he could alternate between feminine and masculine with such... alacrity, penetrative insight... immense (is there not in JC an immense effeminate aspect?). The meaning of Lawrence is greater than any single idea, theory, or set of theories. Only a greater enigma. Or rather, greater relation.
Funny, but only in reading do i not get the impatient feeling that film, bands, and often cds give me, the feeling of yeah, fine, that's great, I'm sick of merely participating, i wanna be doing, making it. It's an immersion.
Realising that there is no artistry as such, let alone genius or romantic myths of voices and inspirations, or airs, but purely the cultivation of a sensibility, of an ear, an eye, of a knowledge of what works well and how affects are constructed realistically, of acquiring a perception that isn't the same but somehow akin to a perspective of art, a divine in-between, generative, neither wholly pragmatic nor purely accidental, ideal, coincidental. A sensibility that approaches a current of greatness on one hand and faux-religion on the other. Lawrence is canny and dated by all standards, but his conception, his yearning for a vital and importantly organic structure to literature, failed though it may be in the attempt (such obvious equation with spring buds and colliery black death, and the endless battle of the sexes), yet always radiated by opposition, conflict and flux... is immense. As opposed to Miller's constant concern for what writing is and how begun, with the fluid itself, Lawrence never mentions it, but is always insistent upon the pure creation, the merge and rebirth with the darkness... with the reach for organic relation. And he capped it all off with an ironic, smarmy and yet tender book about fucking... The mystery of it is large, and hence the criticism is doubly gorged with wild speculation, and diverse ranges, claimed privilege of perspectives, Freudian hacks and feminists, yet never complete, total, because DHL is in many ways the modern enigma, unexplainable: we can only do him justice by deepening the mystery. The conflict in him is never either/or, he is always above it in some way, proof of an abstract spirituality, somehow greater than what he presents, and yet cloying in his snarling, and picking at the 'dirty little secret' with insistent give em what they want insistency. Enlarging the drives, explicating them, attempting to do justice to them for a new way of life, aligned with nature yet not regressive, a whole new architecture; not filling them with theory, analysis; opening them to rot, if need be, out in the open... the terms of revival are desperate of course, of the need for a rebirth, of a new aristocracy which noone would want to follow. An yet steering clear of the whole Messiah bag... That he could alternate between feminine and masculine with such... alacrity, penetrative insight... immense (is there not in JC an immense effeminate aspect?). The meaning of Lawrence is greater than any single idea, theory, or set of theories. Only a greater enigma. Or rather, greater relation.
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