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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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