Saturday 29 January 2011

The Persuasivenes of Hyperbole

Watching Mad Men makes me think about adverts more. Perfume is really the perfect thing to advertise because it's impossible to advertise. It's about bypassing the actual product completely. It's selling an idea. What's so fantastic about advertising is the audacity of the ideas it links to the most banal products (and what products are not banal?). There's a naivete, almost. The heights of fantasy are just so soaring that it's actually quite thrilling to experience.

There's a Lynx advert in the cinema that is maybe the most perfect expression of this that I've seen (even more because it's not actually perfume, but perfume's ugly cousin, deoderant). Everything about it is brilliant. I mean, just watch it. I didn't even get, first time round, that the music is a choral version of Sexy Boy. It is self-conscious in a way that perfume adverts often seem not to be. But it is not a joke either, it's not actually ironic. It's hyperbole, which is - isn't it? - the essence of the radical.

Friday 28 January 2011

Orpheus and Writing

I'm currently writing an essay (or another iteration or part of an essay) that defines the scope and essence of my thesis project. So I am thinking about where we locate (that is both place and find) the meaning of works. Yesterday in my discussion group we were talking about Skinner, and his insistence on 'intentionality' being the fount of meaning. But that runs contradictorily to the dictum I read yesterday too, and which seems true to me:
the writer is in a profound sense ignorant of the centre towards which his work tends and the feeling of having attained it is always illusory. [Simon Critchley, Very Little... Almost Nothing]
The writer, Critchley recounts from Blanchot, is like Orpheus, and his work or his meaning is Eurydice. He is constantly, deeply and passionately tempted to turn and look at her, even knowing that he will lose her in the moment that he does so. In other words, I want to know the meaning of my work, my project - the centre towards which it tends - and my supervisor kind of wants to know that too; but perhaps it would be better not to pay too much attention to that; any centre I thought I identified would be only an illusory one anyway.

Wednesday 26 January 2011

Short Things

Quest for free books (review copies): partial success. <50%. PDF version of a short book. I'll write about it when I've read it.


New project: I'm going to set up a student theatre group that will produce the complete theatrical work of Samuel Beckett.

Tuesday 25 January 2011

Learning to Read Philosophy

My mum started a maths and philosophy degree back in the day. Like me she's interested in many philosophical questions. Who isn't? But she gave up on the philosophy because the reading was incomprehensible. It's a little bit like R.G. Collingwood's experience as a boy of (if I remember rightly) eight, as quoted by Fred Inglis in The History Man, when he recalls picking up Hegel (I think, presumably in English!). He understood each word, but he couldn't understand the whole. He felt as though it was talking about something important, that was for him, but he could not access it.

That is the frustrating experience of reading philosophy. It's written in a kind of code. Now every academic discourse (and just every discourse) is in code. But that of philosophy does have its special character, its special feeling. There tend to be a lot of capitalised words. Maybe that's German influence. It also signifies that the words being used don't mean exactly what we think they mean. That is most of the trouble, I think (and it doesn't necessarily apply just to the capitalised words).

Apparently "philosophers are the smartest humanists." I think that's based on test scores at the point when decide on their undergraduate specialism: so, clever people choose to be philosophers. I can believe that, I think I can accept it. But I wonder if that means philosophy's code-language is harder to crack. It's easy to dismis discourse written in codes we can't understand. But like the boy Collingwood, I want to understand. I'm reading a philosophy book now. I like it very much at the points I can access it, which is certainly not everywhere. I have to persevere. It's humbling.

Saturday 22 January 2011

Noises Off

[This is the third in a series on comic-strips.]

The line between reality and fantasy is never quite so sharp, though, is it? Real life is artificial, just as 'framed' as the scenes comic-strips present. It doesn't happen at a steady pace. It is a series of reiterations, with occasional dramatic intervention. The time-lapse between frames in a comic-strip is open to our interpretation, it could be a second or a lifetime. And at the end of the strip, what then? There'll be another one tomorrow or next week, but in that world, in those three or four frames, there is a whole life played out that looks like eternity.

Think of the edges of the universe. Our lives are boxed in just like Calvin's or Jon's, and sometimes the frames are drawn without lines. Usually we're just so big, we take up just so much of everything. But sometimes the cartoonist pans out, sees us from further off, brings more space into view. It crowds around us like the silent and invisible air. We are alone, much more alone than when the frame holds only ourselves and not so much space, when someone else could be just off-stage, waiting to come on.

Friday 21 January 2011

Absence and Space

[This is the second in a series about comic-strips.]

At garfieldminusgarfield.net you will find Garfield strips with the eponymous cat photoshopped out. The results are utterly plausible. To my taste they are funnier and more moving than the originals. But the effect of exorcising Garfield himself is to excavate a new space around Jon, space that would otherwise be filled by his feline ego-projection. Alone with just the empty echoes of his own mind, Jon is set suddenly and terrifyingly adrift.


Garfield without Garfield is 'non-canon', but a sort of Calvin without Hobbes occurs deliberately in Watterson's strips. When somebody else enter's Calvin's space to share the frame with him, Hobbes' personality and form momentarily dissolve. The effect of seeing the stuffed toy, with its mournful expression and inanimate posture, is somewhere between bathos and pathos. But like the stand-up comic's pause, it is so fleeting that you might miss it. Reality is just too much to take for longer than a moment.

The gap between imaginary, fantasy, ideal - and real, the sadness and sometimes the hope that fills that gap is what good comic-strips (and good stand-up comedians) express. There is a painful, yearning sort of pleasure in confusing our realities. That is the essence of the joke. It makes us laugh to have the whole construction brought down by a punchline, to be free for a moment from the tension of imagination.

Passion is in the Syntax

Further to the post on pauses, exhibit A:
Lineation in poetry is of course a form of punctuation. Punctuation is silence—laden, rhythmic silence—as in Mozart’s purported remark (which I cannot find in any of my Mozart books) that the most important part of music is “no music.” The caesura for us in English is an immensely abbreviated version of what the Selah was to the psalmist: Pause here. Weigh this. (Sometimes the caesura isn’t all that brief: most readers of English poetry know the percussive fountain-jets of silence separating the phrases in John Webster’s “Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.”) I remember that when I first read Yeats’s saying that passion is in the syntax, I didn’t understand what he meant, but I think I do get it now, and would add that punctuation too is one of the most emotional instruments poets have (and that not all punctuation has been invented yet, I am sure).

- Gjertrud Schnackenberg, interviewed on her book Heavenly Questions

Thursday 20 January 2011

Audible Blankness

[This is the first in a series of posts I am writing to turn into an article I said I would write for a new Oxford art magazine. I will add illustrations when I scan them in.]

Comic strips do something funny with space. The conceit of the frame encloses scenes so arbitrarily that it also somehow implies the vastness of what is beyond the frame. Sometimes in Calvin & Hobbes, Watterson will take away the borders of one frame in the strip, when Calvin is standing alone and silent, and in those open frames he can express all the aloneness and the silence in the universe.

In stand-up comedy, timing is everything. I'll say more than that, it's the pauses that are everything. The best part of any routine is the spaces in it, where they come, how long they last, how they are introduced and broken. Samuel Beckett knew. It's the pauses that give good stand-up its character, its basic tone, which is a fundamental melancholy, based on the recognition of how hard it is to really talk to anybody. Words are a constant losing effort to suspend our disbelief; pauses, reality.

The blank frame is the comic-strip's pause. It often expresses disbelief, or a growing suspicion of something amiss. Sometimes it is the time it takes for one party to realise that a joke or trick has been played on him, by another character, or by life. It is the moment poised between hubris and tragedy, the top-of-the-rollercoaster moment that makes us ask, is there still a way out? while knowing that there is not.

Wednesday 19 January 2011

Stories/Ourselves

This:
Civil usage is the battleground for the story we are deciding to tell ourselves about ourselves. Literature is the place where we replace the story we tell ourselves about ourselves with the truer and often darker story about ourselves that we don’t want to be caught telling ourselves about ourselves.

Tribute

[I added this link because I felt bad about the poor quality of the following and I wanted to share some writing that was really personal and really good. It is an essay with photos about the part of life lived on the internet.]

So the other day I wanted to write up a story that I was thinking about the previous week. It was about listening and talking and love and asking questions, it was going to be in third person, maybe mainly through dialogue, I don't know. I couldn't write it, or I didn't anyway. There was something in it that was a mood that I had been in when I thought of it, and I wasn't in that mood any more, I was in quite a different mood. What do you think that says?

Is writing like acting, is it about accurately recreating moods, experiences, feelings that you don't actually have right then? Is that what acting's about? And of course actors have different ways of doing that. There's a short story around that I've seen mentioned a couple of times, called "The Method," that (I haven't read it) seems to be about a method writer: like a method actor, you know? I guess it's just another way of saying I want to have an interesting life so I can write about it. You have to actually write that down before you realise how wrong it sounds.

But maybe I am something like a method writer, which is also like an excuse for saying that I couldn't write this story when I wasn't in that mood. Or maybe I'm too harsh on myself here: maybe it's just that I was in a new mood that was very strong, which was brought on by an event. It seemed to colour everything I did. I read some articles and maybe poems and I found them terribly affecting (although it appears that I can hardly remember them now). I was listening to the Carter Family all day, and it seemed wonderful to me, and melancholy, and longing: it seemed like my mood.

* * *

In my red book I have an outline for something, for this post, that I cannot now seem to write. Not right now. I'll transcribe some of the notes:
ambivalence of mood in music (lyrical music); construction of mood; wise music, art/vision, memory, smell, food [senses] // happy/sweet{melancholy} - love; (choice of something over happiness) - refusal of blissful ignorance - what about fearful ignorance? // loss, separateness - God / religion - love with promise of completion/eternity // reversed kind of love

Tuesday 18 January 2011

Catechism

I liked this poem so much that I had to stop reading the magazine it was in to work out how I could save a copy of it, and who the author was. Here.

The World's Minor Improvement

One of my medium-term projects is to read lots of the work of cultural historian Fred Inglis, in view to doing an in-depth interview with him this spring. I've been in touch and he seems up for it. So last week I read his 1982 book Radical Earnestness: British social theory 1880-1980. Of course it's the title that got me. I still think it's fantastic, the best part of the book - but the book itself has lots of good parts too. Here are some:
"...the idea of a university is powerless without the material realities of membership and friendship, as well as the rather harder and more wintry virtues of solitary independence, resistance, doggedness, and the absolute resolution to get on with the task in hand and not to be bought out by the cosy privileges and soft snobberies which are still amply available to bright young-to-middle-aged academics." p.viii

"Well, this small book can influence very little indeed, but I intend it for the world's minor improvement." p.5

"The more developed our personal self-awareness, the more we acknowledge how partially we know what a realized fulfilment would be like, and the more we strive to transcend the existing moral life and create a new, superior one." p.34

"It is in this way that historical language is a magic language, and the historian, like the poet, becomes a magus. For to redescribe the past successfully is to see it differently; it is to reorder the action of memory, either personally or collectively and therefore and quite literally to change the way one understands things and acts upon them." p.41

"...the deep difficulty of knowing what to do: of keeping your being and your culture, your feelings and your history in a sufficient union, for yuou to be able to shake off sheer fatigue and bitter frustration, and know what your purposes are." p.185

Saturday 15 January 2011

Heroism and Anxiety

For Whom the Bell Tolls wasn't quite what I expected. My expectations had been mainly formed by people calling Hemingway a misogynist and chauvinist, an exponent of rugged manliness, toughness, emotional and sexual and political bluntness. I suppose I could see all of those things (especially the misogyny).

But For Whom the Bell Tolls is a book about uncertainty. It is no less neurotic than a good teen anxt book: I nominate Martin Amis' The Rachel Papers. The point of For Whom the Bell Tolls is how it goes inside heroism, inside determination and finds there doubt and anxiety and struggle. I said it was about uncertainty but I could also say it is about hope, in the sense that hope is the problem or mystery that is asked and not solved.

Hope in this book is dangerously double-edged, something to fight against and then occassionally to surrender to, but only momentarily, and then to pick one's pack up and resume fighting. Hope is a woman in this book. Hope is uncatchable and unreliable and indispensable and strange and wonderful, and no matter how many times you say to yourself that it's not to be trusted, you'll die for it anyway.

* * *
Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, orange, and gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color. For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always and to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

Friday 14 January 2011

Happy Beautiful Sad

These were the opening lines of the introduction to Essays on Education in the Early Republic (1965). They struck me funny. I had been thinking of David Lodge and Changing Places a few days ago.
Anyone who has been to California recently knows that he is in the presence of the future. He may not like everything that he findss there, but he cannot escape a deep sense that this is where we have been heading all along - a world where everyone is young, including the aged and retired, and where no one works, except teachers. Californians either play in the sun or go to school, and many of them do both at the same time.




I wish I had more money to buy books. I would only buy new books, magazines, things you can't get from libraries. I just found this journal, part-free online; Caketrain:
You got sick on bad milk from a bucket, wore that flannel scarf through all the fevers that came. Like some old wash woman. Around your neck like a noose. As if wrung to the ceiling and sky. And it was funny when you put it over your mouth like you‘d been kidnapped in a movie, but I hated it over your eyes like a firing squad was coming. A luxury of bullets, the detailed ripping of smoke and red, and you, finally still.

- from "Farm," by Corey Zeller

What is psychology and what is ideology?

People are telling me my thesis project is unclear. I will now address one area of possible confusion: what do I mean by a "psychological" approach anyway, and how does that differ from the "ideological" approach that was so much practiced at the end of the last century (or whenever)?

Firstly one major problem (which is not my fault) is that ideology is an unclear concept whose definitions sometimes contradict. Clifford Geertz' influential model makes it something like a language (a system of metaphors) which contains an implicit politics or world-view. Now I have already talked about the role of metaphor in my project. To this extent the two concepts are very similar then.

However there seems to me a key difference, although a potentially problematic (and interesting) one. It is that ideology is constructed publically, and psychology privately. You can already see that this depends on the contestable notion of a separate public and private. To admit that is to admit that ideology (in this reading) shares some of its nature and explanatory power with psychology. But the emphasis of my project is on the strong role of the closest and most closed structures of life (i.e. the family) on the production of political thought, whereas I read ideology as being concerned with more distant and open structures: for Geertz perhaps e.g. economic life; for Skinner, very clearly, intellectual discourse.

So a Skinnerian approach to the Federalists would try to find the main strands and forms of their engagement with intellectual traditions and (Pocock's) 'political languages': so far so obvious. Contrastingly, my project will ignore (or touch only obliquely) many of these rhetorical engagements, instead consciously looking for echoes of the family and coming of age in Federalist thought, in the belief that these points are inherently important to notions of politics and social life.

If an ideological approach deals with the relationship of a group's thought to the thought of past groups, a psychological approach deals with the relationship of that group's thought to its own (private) practice and experience.

Wednesday 12 January 2011

Narcissus the Romantic

When you write about yourself, is it a bit like peeling off a layer of yourself and looking at it? How much does it remain part of yourself? When you look at yourself in a mirror how much is it yourself that you're looking at, and how much some other person you are seeing from outside, who other people also see as you? In other words when we see other people we know that what we see is a simulacrum made in a collaborative process by them, us, society, and everything; and when we see ourselves it is the same thing.

The White Castle, which I just read in Wales, takes as its epigraph this line of 'Marcel Proust, from the mistranslation of Y. K. Karaosmanoğlu':
To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery, to believe that we will begin to live only through the love of that person - what else is this but the birth of a great passion?
I don't remember whether this is making the same point in Proust (I can imagine that it does), but by the end of Orhan Pamuk's book it seems to refer to self-love. What writer isn't fascinated by (and in love with) his own mysterious self? Maybe I'm slow (and particularly self-absorbed) but I did not appreciate this reflexive theme until quite near the end of the 150 pages. Which makes it all the more interesting to go back and find a sentence like this,
A man would be as spellbound by someone knowing the smallest details of his soul as he would by a nightmare.
Of course! Of course it's ourselves who we are spellbound by, and who are our own nightmares.
He did not even want to think how terrible the world would be if men spoke always of themselves, of their own peculiarities, if their books and their stories were always about this.
Well by this point I had got the point, or something of it. But what follows the last-quoted line of course as a refutation. 'He' thought that, 'But I did not!' Otherwise the book would hardly have been written. But here is perhaps the thing: it's obviously not that we should celebrate self-absorption, but maybe that we should understand from this - from our efforts at self-understanding - that we are actually less different and less separate than we thought, that the same mystery inheres in other people, that we can conceive for them the same fascination and the same passion as we do for ourselves.

It is unclear if there are two people or just one person in The White Castle. The diagnosis must be simultaneously schizophrenia, and love.

Friday 7 January 2011

The Year Before the End

The Awl did an eclectic sort of series about 2011 being the last year because of the Mayan calendar 2012 apocalypse thing. Here are excerpts from the two pieces I really liked.
Going to Zero

[...]

Until now, I did nothing. And now this. This. This thing that you're reading. This is the only thing I've done, maybe in my whole entire life. And just look at it. If there really was a god, he or she would right now strike you dead where you are sitting or standing for handling or even associating with something as pitiful as this. Until now, I did nothing. Now, I write. And it's not enough. It's still, properly speaking, doing nothing, and the vanity with which I hold on to every word here is so gross and pitiable that were we standing here face-to-face I couldn't bear to look you in the eye.




Possible Resolutions for the Apocalypse Year

If I knew the world was coming to an end, I would fuck with impunity. I would crunch birth control pills between my teeth like they were pink Pez all day long... I would try to feel good all the time. Life would no longer be the continuing mission of seeking out a quiet frequency on the radio dial or keeping my side of the street clean. I would be an entirely external creature, using anything besides my sense of self to sustain a delirious high.

I would allow the creeping nihilism I’ve kept mostly at bay to erupt like a geyser. My moods would be ruled by the strength of pills, the barrels of booze, and the decadent oblivion of crime, money and sex. After 365 days I’d be burnt to such a magnificent and malignant crisp that I’d welcome death.

Except. On the day the news first broke that it was all going to end, I would get on a flight to ______. I’d go to your apartment, the one I used to have a key to. I’d bang on the door until you opened it. I’d fall at your feet. I’d beg. I’d plead. I’d promise. I’d cry. I’d remind you that it couldn’t last more than a year.

If you let me in, I would never leave again.

Wednesday 5 January 2011

Music "Criticism"

I know this is supposed to be embarrasing, but I just watched the video for Taylor Swift's song "Mine" for the second time. The first time was new year's day when I was linked to it because of her unusual way of pronouncing the word 'yes'. But that long sentence is just an excuse. I don't care; it's really good!

Things I love about it:
  • her hair, especially back, around 1'34''-1'40
  • her "acting" - actually the little nod at 1'46''
  • the line "you made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter" (even though - or perhaps even more because - it doesn't make perfect sense in relation to the story of the song/video)
  • the proposal scene, 1'57''-2'06'', especially that nod appearing again at 2'05''
  • the 'good-bye' miming action at 2'39'' - when did miming in this way become a pop music 'thing'?
  • its celebration of family happiness as life's essential goal (e.g. from 3'14''-3'24'') - true to its country extraction
  • the 'fists in the air' pose at 3'36''


Tuesday 4 January 2011

Monday 3 January 2011

These Things I Also Wish

Here is a five-minute project for the New Year season (and another good preliminary for my narcissistic Manifesto For My Life!): recategorising somebody else's "50 Things I Wish I Wouldn't Do" according to myself.
9. I wish I wouldn’t have hair that never seems to fall naturally and gracefully that way the hair of attractive people does.
25. I wish I wouldn’t be incapable of dancing, laughing uncontrollably, yelling, screaming, fighting, or losing an argument without feeling embarrassment and shame.
44. I wish I wouldn’t feel averse to physical contact with my close friends.
45. [Maybe?] I wish I wouldn’t by my nature be the type of person that is fundamentally and/or inescapably ‘alone’ in a very real, terrifying sense of the word.

Saturday 1 January 2011

New Year's Resolution #2

Ooh, ooh, I have another one. Every time I get out of the shower, open my eyes before wiping them with the towel. I never do this. I have sensitive eyes, I guess, I can't really keep them open under water or when the shower is running, and I was never very good at opening them even having emerged from the water or the shower. But that's kind of an unmanly thing. What would it have been if Daniel Craig as James Bond had sensitive eyes? So I will train myself.

New Year's Resolution

I just thought of one to add to the list. Come up with an interesting, if not exciting, way to describe my thesis in one sentence. No, resolutions don't have to be ongoing things. I've noticed that people who do English always have really cool one-sentence-theses. I was talking to someone about being a student the other day, I gave my current boring-sounding thesis spiel, and she switched the conversation by saying that her friend is doing a PhD 'on tales told after midnight' - that is, ghost stories and stuff. Then today I read of someone working on 'on hunger and art in Samuel Beckett, Paul Auster, and J. M. Coetzee.' I don't think it's just that topics in literature are just more interesting, although maybe that's a bit true. At least they won't get jobs (ouch! mean!).