Preoccupations

Super-Cannes: 'actors in our own self-referential drama'

John Preston, reviewing Super-Cannes in the London Evening Standard, quoted by Stephen Moss in the Guardian:

Ballard loves to go that bit further out than anyone else, to nose around the outer limits of human behaviour and to rub up against the inconceivable. What ought to be daft becomes instead extremely disquieting. His is a world in which anything has become possible. In this twisted scheme of things, it comes to seem quite logical that the one upright citizen in Eden-Olympia [Ballard's suburban madhouse] should be a mass murderer. Morality has disappeared, so has sanity, and all that's left is a kind of institutionalised madness. Reading Ballard is like viewing the world through a completely new set of lenses.

I've quoted Ballard himself before. Here he is on tourism and travel:

Travel is the last fantasy the 20th Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself. There's nowhere to go.

On Cronenberg's A History of Violence:

The title, A History of Violence, is the key to the film, and should be read not as a tale or story of violence, but as it might appear in a social worker's case notes: "This family has a history of violence." The family, of course, is the human family, a primate species with an unbelievable appetite for cruelty and violence. If its behaviour in the 20th century is any guide, the human race inhabits a huge sink estate ravaged by unending feuds and civil wars, a no-go area abandoned by the authorities, though no one can remember who they are, or even if they exist. …

On Blair:

Perhaps only damaged actors can lead modern societies down the crooked paths that they prefer.

Having come to Ballard very late, I've recently finished Super-Cannes — and it's not yet left me alone. Tim Adams' Observer review catches some its darkness and power:

… Eden-Olympia, Europe's ultra-sophisticated answer to Silicon Valley in the hills above the French Riviera. The business park is the world's first intelligent city, one horribly logical conclusion of a corporatised continent in which 'freedom was the right to paid work, while leisure was the mark of the shiftless and untalented'; dreams here come equipped with airbags, and the only sounds are the whispers of sprinklers on lawns and the effortless combustion of computer-navigated German sports saloons.

The city is home to techno-chic supernationals - Ciba-Geigy and Siemens, Mitsui and Monsanto - and to the Euro-elite of chief executives who control their strategies, a post-leisure class which derives its excitement from the imposition of systematic efficiencies. There is no need here for law or religion; Eden-Olympia polices itself; decisions are corporate not ethical, and sex is something one watches on customised adult channels.

Ballard carefully constructs this serpentless paradise in perfectly engineered sentences. His images come together with the satisfying hiss of Japanese micro-hydraulics. 'There was a vast car park concealed behind a screen of cypresses, vehicles nose to tail like a week's unsold output at a Renault plant,' he writes. 'Somewhere in the office buildings the owners of these cars were staring at their screens, designing a new cathedral or cineplex, or watching the world's spot prices. The sense of focused brain power was bracing, but subtly unsettling.' …

Ballard unravels the secrets of his post-industrial elysium with panache, leading us into a society which is both an exaggerated parable for our times and a chill piece of futurology. Along the way there are some signature themes: Ballard's books always feel as though they are shot on security cameras and spotlit by police flash photography; their violence is both sterile and graphic. The worlds he describes are frequently immunised against human emotion. And in Eden-Olympia that deficiency has become a potentially fatal threat.

Much more there. (Adams is good on Ballard's satire: 'His satire, however extreme, is always convincing because its governing ideas inhabit every detail. He sees a strain of totalitarianism running through particular dehumanised philosophies of engineering and design and management; sees the potential for dictatorship in the absence of democracy engendered by the colossal power of corporations.')

Just now, I found a long piece (essay and interview) by Jason Cowley:

The twin engines driving so much of British contemporary fiction have long been a kind of enfeebled realism-with its class and social anxieties-and nostalgia. But Ballard operated outside this loop. The drowned worlds, scorched cities and overgrown jungles of his early fiction; his focus on the media landscape of global celebrity and stylised catastrophe; his exploration of the connections between sex, eroticism and death; his fetishism of motorways, highrises and car crashes-almost alone among contemporary British writers, Ballard wrote about the 20th century in its own idiom. As a result his work is exaggerated, pumped-up, often preposterous; a prose surrealist mining a strange, blurry, psychopathological landscape. It is hard to believe in his fictional world precisely because it is so invented, so radically imagined. Like the paintings of Dali, Max Ernst and de' Chirico which he so admires, Ballard transports you into a fabulous realm, at once real and hysterically unreal.

You can read a Ballard novel without believing a word of what is written. Yet something lingers disturbingly in your imagination, something to do with his understanding of the inherent instability of the contemporary condition-as if we are all actors in our own self-referential drama, as if we are all trapped within a set of immense inverted commas.

So, I'm just starting out on Ballard, after some initial flirtation, and from Super-Cannes so many scenes and ideas and conversations stick in the mind. One I made a note of early on was the scene in the car-park — an 'impromptu piece of garage theatre':

Two Eden-Olympia limousines were making their way down the circular ramp. The chauffeurs stopped their vehicles on the third level, slipped from their driving seats and opened the rear doors, giving their passengers a ringside view of the ugly tableau being staged in an empty parking space.

Or there's this, from much later in the book:

Eden-Olympia's great defect is that there's no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems. … Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any Messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won't walk out of the desert. They'll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.

Penrose's deranged vision of 'a carefully metered measure of psychopathy', the answer to the 'suburbanisation of the soul' that 'has overrun our planet like the plague', is explored by Penrose and Sinclair in chapter 29, 'The Therapy Programme'. This is Penrose:

A  controlled psychopathy is a way of resocialising people and tribalising them into mutually supportive groups. … Violence is spectacular and exciting, but sex has always been the main hunting ground of psychopathy. A perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us "buying"? Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world.

Towards the end of the novel, and despite himself, Sinclair remembers 'the brutal hazings at the RAF flight school, and how they had energised us all': 'At Eden-Olympia, psychopathy was being rehabilitated, returned like a socialised criminal to everyday life'.

Ballard, interviewed in 2004:

My real fear is that boredom and inertia may lead people to follow a deranged leader with far fewer moral scruples than Richard Gould [in Millennium People], that we will put on jackboots and black uniforms and the aspect of the killer simply to relieve the boredom. A vicious and genuinely mindless neo-fascism, a skilfully aestheticised racism, might be the first consequence of globalisation, when Classic Coke® and California merlot are the only drinks on the menu. At times I look around the executive housing estates of the Thames Valley and feel that it is already here, quietly waiting its day, and largely unknown to itself. … I suspect that (as I pointed out in Super-Cannes) the human race will inevitably move like a sleepwalker towards that vast resource it has hesitated to tap - its own psychopathy. This adventure playground of the soul is waiting for us with its gates wide open, and admission is free. In short, an elective psychopathy will come to our aid (as it has done many times in the past) - Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, all those willed nightmares that make up much of human history. As Wilder Penrose points out in Super-Cannes, the future will be a huge Darwinian struggle between competing psychopathies. Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase - everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood ...

Elsewhere, Jason Cowley writes of the character, Paul Sinclair, through whose eyes Super-Cannes is told:

In his quest to uncover the truth … he becomes a kind of detective of the self: the more he discovers about Eden-Olympia, the more he discovers about his own potential for deviance and violence, and the more alienated he feels.

Reading Ballard is a peculiarly enriching experience. Every sentence is absolutely characteristic. His novels, at their best, resemble surrealist tableaux, representations of tortured interiority, and Super-Cannes is one of his best.

 

Technorati tags: Ballard, J G Ballard, Super-Cannes

W H Auden

This month sees the centenary of Auden's birth (21 February). Here's the conclusion to a piece by James Fenton in today's Guardian:

That he was a great public poet, despite his misgivings about the role, has always been acknowledged. But he was also a great lyrical poet, his achievement in love poetry being without equal in the century.

He worked through every poetic form he could find, rejecting only a few he found too trivial. He tried counting syllables. He tried counting the number of words in the line. He invented (as far as English was concerned) a discursive style that could accommodate the language of prose and the concern of science. He wrote many song lyrics. He always bounced off poetic influences, and he felt wretched when he couldn't find the next influence. In 1968, for instance, he was listening to the Beatles (he liked "She's Leaving Home", or was it "Eleanor Rigby"?) in search of something to be influenced by. 

He appears to have felt (he says something to this effect), on completing a poem, that he would never be able to write another. And that must have been a nightmare to him, since he was always moving on to the next task, suffering failure sometimes, and aware of a widespread rejection of his later work, knowing himself often attacked, and unwilling to speak up in his own defence. He had a private, even secret, generosity to match the public generosity, the copiousness of his achievement. An enviable gift, then, although not always an enviable life - unless we say that in some cases the gift is indeed the life, and that the suffering is all part of the gift.

The W H Auden Society has a listing of events scheduled to mark the centenary (here) and links from its main page to Wikipedia: 

A highly accurate, thoroughly revised version of the Wikipedia.org entry on Auden was posted in 2007. This site strongly recommends that online researchers make reference to this specific archived version of the page rather than to current versions, which may be less accurate or may be subject to vandalism.

(The non-archived Wikipedia Auden page is here!) 

Back in October last year, the Independent reported on the failure to prepare properly for this anniversary. It's great, then, to see that Melvyn Bragg is remembering the writer on The South Bank Show (11 now 18 February, ITV, 11.10pm): 

It's been suggested that the centenary of the birth of W.H. Auden is in danger of passing without notice but not as far as the South Bank Show is concerned. Melvyn Bragg visits Hadrian's Wall, the northern boundary of the land betweenSwaledale and Northumberland, which Auden wrote of as his "great good place." He will examine the paradox of the Auden who fled to America in 1939 saying "No God willing I never want to see England again" and the ‘English Auden' who was never able to sever himself from his roots. Auden's words continue to reverberate around us from the Stop the Clocks sequence in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, and the way his September 1st 1939 became the mourning song of New York after the terrorist attacks in 2001. 

Contributors include: Alan Bennett, Shirley Williams and Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, with Auden's verse read by John Woodvine.

And I'm delighted to find that the Stephen Spender Memorial Trust and the British Library are holding 'An evening of poetry with James Fenton, John Fuller, Grey Gowrie, Richard Howard, Andrew Motion, Sean O'Brien and Peter Porter' to celebrate the centenary: 

Wednesday 21 February 2007 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Wystan Hugh Auden, one of the most significant — and prolific — poets and writers of the twentieth century. The Stephen Spender Memorial Trust and the British Library celebrate Auden's centenary with an evening of poetry readings that reflect the enormous breadth and wonderful technical variety of Auden's published output, including poems from the 1930s that chart 'a low dishonest decade', and his later work published while resident in the United States. 

Natasha Spender writes:
This tribute to Auden on the anniversary of his birth is offered by younger poets whom he encouraged and who became his lifelong friends: Andrew Motion, the present Poet Laureate, who as an Oxford undergraduate knew him; the American Richard Howard, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize by him; Grey Gowrie, who knew him through Auden's niece, Anita; and Peter Porter, John Fuller and James Fenton, who saw him on his annual London visits for Poetry International. Only Sean O'Brien, 20 when Auden died in 1973, did not know him. 

He used to stay with us or his brother John, and to all the children — Anita and Rita Auden, Matthew and Lizzie Spender — he was a beloved bachelor uncle who invented games and shared their passions for Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, introducing a benevolent bossiness into our liberal households.

There are other events going on (see the Auden Society page), but it's not at all what should have been done for Auden. Essentially, this looks like a rescue job by friends and (close) admirers.

 

Technorati tags: Auden, W H Auden

Frank Kermode

John Sutherland interviews Frank Kermode in today's Guardian:

Looking back over the field he has dominated for half a century, Kermode's words are unminced. Universities, he says, "are being driven by madmen". And education in general "is being run by lunatics". The recent A-level and GCSE statistics, I point out, would indicate that at one level, at least, his subject is increasingly popular. "Well," he replies, "I don't know what they call 'English' now. I can understand the attractiveness of it. But I don't hold the view that reading English is a soft option, or at least it shouldn't be. It should be a severe option, restricted to those people who are qualified to do it." … Is he suggesting that English should be re-engineered to be more in line with currently unpopular "hard" subjects - like physics? "Yes. I discovered just today, for example, that it's no longer compulsory at GCSE to take a foreign language. This seems to me to be a monstrous decision." I remind him of a staff meeting at UCL where, gloomily, he acquiesced to the administration's instruction that O-level Latin be dropped as a requisite for incoming students. "We had no choice. Latin has been getting abolished now for two generations."

In one of his recent LRB pieces he recollects a period in the 1950s when studying English literature was not just regarded as important, but as the most valuable intellectual and moral activity a civilised man or woman could pursue. What went wrong? Does he feel any personal responsibility? "I don't suppose I could claim either credit or blame for the collapse of my subject. It's partly the extinction - no, that's too strong a word - the fading of the influence of figures such as FR Leavis [the Cambridge critic]. The notion that the study of English had powerful ethical implications, powerful social implications, has gone. We just don't have it any more.

"Looking back at the study of English in universities over the years the first thing that occurs to me is how very important the subject once seemed. In America the New Criticism - a school led by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren - argued that the close study of poetry was a supremely valuable thing. This was a view that was then accepted generally. And the leading academic literary critics were, in those days, very famous people. Think, for example, of Northrop Frye. Frye's is now a name that you never hear mentioned but which was then everywhere. CS Lewis, who is now famous for fairy stories, was then famous for being a scholar. Tolkien too was famous for being a scholar, not for elves and so on. There is no prestige associated any longer with being a good critic. There are people writing now who seem to me likely to be as good as those critics I've been mentioning but they won't be as famous nor as influential. There's some very good scholarship in the subject still going on. There's also an immense amount of rubbish. …

"[Theory] attracted quite a lot of opprobrium. I never thought it should be taught to undergraduates. In those days teaching graduates what was then essentially French theory was exciting, as long as you were in control of what you were doing. I'm reminded of what Wayne C Booth (another of those once-famous critics) said: 'The really difficult thing is to understand why one has to work so hard to understand something that you do every day without the slightest difficulty' - reading a book, that is.

"I don't at all think that the time we spent on Theory was wasted. One of the great benefits of seriously reading English is you're forced to read a lot of other things. You may not have a very deep acquaintance with Hegel but you need to know something about Hegel. Or Hobbes, or Aristotle, or Roland Barthes. We're all smatterers in a way, I suppose. But a certain amount of civilisation depends on intelligent smattering".

Technorati tags: Frank Kermode, English Literature, universities, criticism, critics

On Music

Armando Iannuci, speaking at the Royal Philharmonic Society awards last Tuesday, as reported in yesterday's Observer:

We need to wake up to the fact that people are now asking basic questions. Why are we musical? Why did people write symphonies? Why do we have the string quartet? They seem child-like, these questions, but they're there to provide us with the opportunity to enthuse and explain and demonstrate the answers we first stumbled upon in our musical journey and which encouraged us to make that journey in the first place. …

I think we should at all times keep trying to ask and to answer the most basic of questions about music, about the arts. What are they there for?

For me they're not there for any other reason than to remind us that, no matter where we are, whether we're learned, in prison, poor, successful, alone or average, our material circumstances are not all that we have, that we can see beyond ourselves, that we're human and are therefore dignified. That's my answer. I'm sure each of you has a different one. I just wish we all had more opportunities to express them.

A bit of a gap

At my school, the last three weeks or so of the term that's just died are dominated by mock exams for the final year GCSE and A Level groups — and therefore, for us, the teachers, by marking. Hence, in part, my silence. This last week (the start of our holiday), I have been absorbed in things literary: John Burnside came and read for us a few weeks back, and then I wanted to finish his new book, the memoir about his father, A Lie About My Father, before he read from the book at the end of the Oxford Literary Festival (event 136, yesterday).

This is a great book and one that exhausted me: for all the difference between our backgrounds, there is enough in common between my father and John's for the effect to be both illuminating and draining. Blake Morrison reviewed John's book well in the Guardian, but it's to Hilary Mantel in the LRB that I keep going back:

The book ends as it begins, with Halloween, or rather in the light of the day following, as the writer leads his small son along the quay of a small Scottish fishing town on the east coast. We see that this is the child for whom the phantom of fatherhood must be raised. The writer leaves us with a final sharp picture of the man of lies whom the book has transfigured into truth. He sees him, on a distant night, standing on the edge of woodland; white shirt visible against the dark, a cigarette in his hand, he is captured in a moment which holds, on an indrawn breath, all the events and non-events of his life, all that happened and all that ever could. He did not want to die in public, but that was his unheroic fate: collapsing at the Silver Band Club, on his way to the cigarette machine. An ordinary man with an ordinary death, a nameless man with thoughts that few would care to name, he is now one of the ‘spirits’ who ‘feed our imaginations’. To move from the interiority of this memoir back to what passes for ordinary life is like surfacing from under the sea, reshaped by its strong and unforgiving currents. It is a book by a master of language, pushing language to do what it can. Fastidious, supple and unsparing, it is a book about lies that is more true than you can say.

It was a great pleasure to hear John and to have so many friends together: Tim, Colin and Molly, Olly and Ben, Karl, Mark and Georgie … Like that evening when John read at Radley, a couple of weeks back, this one wound up in the wee hours.

The day before, Karl and I had gone to hear Tim talk (event 97; capacity audience) about his latest book, What is the Point of Being a Christian?, and yesterday afternoon we'd taken in Tsotsi, a profoundly moving film — the book of which I'd read over two decades ago. (See also this Guardian piece.)

Tonight, I had the chance to read John's as yet unpublished sequence of poems centred on/inspired by Saint-Nazaire (which he read at Radley a few weeks back). My head is full of these beautiful, resonant poems — annunciation, tradition (Eliot!), the 'actually loved and known' …

On Molly's recommendation, I've just ordered Keeping Mum and am about to start on Memoir — and then news tonight that John McGahern has died. A bit of a gap.

Technorati tags: John Burnside, Molly McGrann, Timothy Radcliffe, Tsotsi, John McGahern

Labyrinths and Internet

Fascinating, and frustrating, posting at things magazine: I'm not sure why the advent of 'global communications technology' is seen as leading to the demise of reliquaries, and I certainly don't date the going of the 'divine on the defensive' to about a 100 years ago — that's being going on since at least the sixteenth century. As Cornelius Ernst (see here, paras 6 & 7; Tim's address), my favourite twentieth century theologian, puts it: 'I cannot think of a single clerical philosopher of real distinction since the Middle Ages (and whether it is appropriate to speak of any medieval thinker as a 'philosopher' is of course problematic)'.

But I was interested by this (thanks to Matt Webb for drawing my attention to it):

The internet feels like a giant reliquary at times. … The web is also like being stuck in a giant uncatalogued library, with every dusty shelf offering up hidden treasures; you just have to hunt for them. Our mental picture is a combination of the Gormenghastian, before the great fire, and the octagonal library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. The latter was apparently inspired by the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, a brutalist construction by Mathers and Haldenby, in collaboration with Warner Burns Toan & Lunde. The library does have a medieval aspect , a fortress of knowledge (according to the Wikipedia, one of its nicknames is 'Fort Book'. It's also the subject of the widespread 'sinking library' urban legend).

Eco's fictional medieval library was strongly influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, in particular the Argentinian's Library of Babel, an unfolding, labyrinthine, almost infinite space, that apparently contained all knowledge:

'When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope.'

… Perhaps the internet is also best understood as a dual system (and not just the DOS vs Mac hierarchy that Eco playfully compared to religion back in 1994). We suggest that rather than just a cabinet of curiosities (the traditional wunderkammer remains a popular web metaphor), the internet is in fact a combination of reliquary and labyrinth, both a maze of one's own making and a receptacle for wonder, a place where getting lost is a self-conscious act, portals act as balls of twine, to be unwound or ignored at your peril.

The internet as 'a receptacle for wonder': I linked last year to something Matt Jones posted about awe and wonder and the net. The image of the net as labyrinthine library containing all knowledge makes me think of Dante's great image in the Paradiso (Canto XXXIII; Borges' fantastical library of course recalls this, in deliberately distorted form), when he looks into the heart of the eternal light and 'Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe' ('Nel suo profondo vidi che s' interna, / legato con amore in un volume, / ciò che per l'universo si squaderna', Temple Classics translation).

'Reliquary' I am less sure about. I think it more useful at this point to do more work on the net-as-memory (individual +) and on what light might be (unexpectedly) shed upon this by studies such as Penelope Reed Doob's The Idea of the Labyrinth — which dedicates some pages to the relationship between labyrinth imagery and medieval understanding of memory and memory practices (on which, I recall, there's Mary Carruthers' book, The Book of Memory, amongst much else). Gabriel Josipovici years ago drew attention to the labyrinth as 'the favourite image of modern literature', 'the mazes of Kafka, Proust, Beckett, Borges and Robbe-Grillet' (The World and the Book). It takes me further than I meant to go in this post, but I can't resist quoting this from Gabriel's book:

In place of Dante's ordered journey we find ourselves involved with heroes who wander without map or compass along paths which are endless for the simple reason that we would not recognise the end even if we came to it. … there is no emergence for the heroes of modern fiction from the labyrinths of reflecting mirrors and demonic analogy. At the end they are no nearer the exit than they were at the beginning. All they have done is move through all the arteries of the labyrinth. Yet this, if they but knew it, is both the exit and the answer. … the writing was the travelling.

Unlike Dante, we have no vantage point from which to 'look back, standing on solid ground, over the winding uphill way, with its little figures of men and women dotted about at various stages of their own ascent' (The World and the Book). The internet, without end, is our own faithfully reflecting mirror, or demonic analogy.

Guy Blakeslee: influences, friends … and more (much more)

kultureflash for 6 July carried a small, pithy notice about the then-upcoming summertime gig by Entrance that I went to and wrote about here. That short notice and a brief conversation with Guy Blakeslee after the gig led me to discover a raft of new music over the summer.

When we heard him in Bristol, Guy sang a powerful, unaccompanied cover piece, 'No More, My Lord'. He'd heard it first on the Goodbye, Babylon collection — an anthology of Gospel and 'American roots music' that, he told me, has had a big impact on singers. Subsequently, I listened to that collection and now, for me, it sits alongside the Alan Lomax collections, Prison Songs — from where the eponymous Goodbye, Babylon is taken. (I came across the two Lomax CDs following a recommendation by Tom Waits.) This term, I am teaching again Morrison's Beloved and there's material on Goodbye, Babylon which will be as valuable a teaching resource as the material I already use from The Black Book that Morrison edited in 1974 ('a landmark scrapbook of hidden history', Guardian).

Simultaneously, I have been taking on board a lot of new ideas about the Blues and the development of music in the last century. I really wish I knew more about this, though. Something of the voice on the track 'Jesus is getting us ready for the great day', from Goodbye, Babylon, reminds me of Jagger's carefully fabricated transatlantic voice in 'Prodigal Son', Beggars Banquet, 1968. There are numerous other cross-references to be made: eg, 'You've Got to Move' — Goodbye, Babylon, CD 3, track 9, Emma Daniels and Mother Sally Jones — was covered by a number of artists before the Stones recorded it in 1971. (Some day soon I must read Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful and, for slightly different reasons, Evan Eisenberg's The Recording Angel. Neither book is going to throw light on the artists I'm talking about here, but both are clearly important — about music traditions in the last century and how the recording industry has shaped and influenced taste.)

There are further interviews with Guy Blakeslee at In Music We Trust and Sponic, and there's a review of Wandering Stranger in Stylus. The other big discovery of the early summer was Devendra Banhart (interviewed here by soundgenerator). I'm off the Astoria to hear him next month. My friend, Joe, tells me that DB is a mesmeric singer/performer.

To do now: listen to a lot more of Skip James, a key influence on Guy Blakeslee; find out much more about John Fahey and Revenant Records, and the Soledad Brothers (I somehow stumbled over these in the summer, too) …  I have more to post soon about DB, Vashti Bunyan, Animal Collective, Antony …  And, since the mansion is endlessly capacious, I must lay my hands on as much as I can find of Cat Power (on Matador Records) — thanks, Gabby, for the additional shove to get on and do this. And thanks to Jamie McKendrick and Archie (F) for telling me to listen to more Leadbelly (another Lomax link). Now, if it weren't for the day job …

Culture catch-up

The last few days:

• To the Oxford Playhouse to see the ETT in Hamlet. It left me unmoved — a decent, clean and clear production with Ed Stoppard in the lead. A BBC page says of the ETT and this production: 'ETT is renowned for the clarity and style of its work … This new production of Hamlet will stay true to the company’s ethos of producing raw, direct and passionate theatre'. I agree with the clarity bit, but no, there was little that was 'raw' or 'passionate'. I couldn't find any review of the production last week (when I went), but Michael Billington panned it on Friday in The Guardian:

… the English Touring Theatre offer us a middle-of-the-road, Jacobean-costumed version that has nothing fresh to say about the play. I have no problem with the period setting; it is the failure to investigate either the human relationships or the political context that troubles me. … this is set-text Shakespeare shrouded in decent dullness. When you recall that ETT began 12 years ago with Alan Cumming's capriciously eccentric Hamlet you feel that the company has dwindled into respectability.

There was an interview with Ed Stoppard in The Independent (conducted prior to the production).

• I finally got around to watching the film of The Madness of George III, The Madness of King George. I always feel with Bennett that there are much greater dramatic depths to be plumbed than he permits himself to look into. I saw the original stage production and prefer that greatly for its tightness, focus and energy — the central performance of Nigel Hawthorne being allowed to occupy its proper place.
• Robert Crawford came to read at school on Wednesday evening and stayed the night. It was a good reading to which some of those present responded warmly. Robert opened with 'Chaps', of which the Literary Encyclopedia says:

In the militaristic-toned poem “Chaps”, Crawford uses repetition and language reminiscent of the stiff-upper-lip Englishman to convey a sense of how maleness has historically been perceived as both macho and a necessary element in the constitution of the British imperialistic project:

With his Bible, his Burns, his brose and his baps,
Colonel John Buchan is one of the chaps,
With his mother, his mowser, his mauser, his maps,
Winston S. Churchill is one of the chaps.

Even the rhyme scheme and parallelism in this poem seems to play into the requirements of an essentialized British Empire. The regimentation of language is one of the dangerous consequences of imperialism and one that denies voices from breaking through and interacting with others. The refrain that Crawford employs has a similar effect: “Chaps chaps chaps chaps/ Chaps chaps chaps chaps”.

The marching regularity is emphasized but so too is the gender. A “chap” is not just any old male, it is a male who has been shaped by a past that requires that he behave in a particular way and communicate his gender in a fashion that must reflect the superiority and power of the state.

A concern with language, communication and identity marks much of Robert's work.

Later that evening, we joined up with Jamie McKendrick for supper. Conversation naturally focused on poets and poetry, but Jamie and Robert are both interested in the visual arts. Jamie spoke of his admiration for Plath's drawing of Ted Hughes, recently sold by Bonhams.

Copyright © 2002-2005 Bonhams 1793 Ltd

• Friday saw some of us go to catch Seth Lakeman on tour (St Mary's Church, Marlborough). I'm not in to English folk music much, but Seth Lakeman came to prominence earlier this year when he was nominated for the Mercury Prize and we felt we should go and hear him. (He also hit the headlines last year when he launched his new album at Dartmoor Prison.) He is a fine musician, the solo pieces he played being exceptionally powerful. As a trio they worked very well together, with marked mutual understanding, and his drummer proved a great hit with our party — photos. If he's to gain more fame and following, his music will inevitably have to shift somewhat. Acoustic now, he is already being described on the web as 'folk-rock' and on his own website as 'indie-folk'. One to watch.

Layered, furcating stories in time and space

Kim posting Stories in Urban Spaces and my happening to be re-reading Borges (in the Andrew Hurley translation), made me go back to 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (1941).

Borges' narrator, Yu Tsun, is the great-grandson of Ts'ui Pen, a 'governor of Yunan province … who renounced all temporal power in order to write a novel containing more characters than the Hung Lu Meng and construct a labyrinth in which all men would lose their way'. Ts'ui Pen is murdered after 13 years of work on these labours, and what survived was a 'novel (that) made no sense' — and 'no one ever found the labyrinth'. Early in the story, Yu Tsun, on the run, reflects that 'all things happen to oneself, and happen precisely, precisely now. Century follows century, yet events occur only in the present; countless men in the air, on the land and sea, yet everything that truly happens, happens to me.' Choosing a name from a phone book (the reason for which choice only becomes fully clear at the end of the story), he finds himself at the house of the famous Sinologist, Stephen Albert. Improbability is heaped on improbability (after all, this is anti-literature, no matter that it is also literature of exquisite skill, intelligence and inventiveness), and Stephen Albert is not only intimate with the life and work of Ts'ui Pen but has, he believes, cracked the secret of both novel and labyrinth: they are one and the same. Ts'ui Pen had left a fragment of a letter: 'I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths'. Stephen Albert explains to Yu Tsun:

'I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.' Almost instantly, I saw it — the garden of forking paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'several futures (not all)' suggest to me the image of a forking in time, rather than in space. A full rereading of the book confirmed my theory. In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-to-disentangle Ts'ui Pen, the character chooses — simultaneously — all of them. He creates, thereby, 'several futures', several times, which themselves proliferate and fork. That is the explanation for the novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger knocks at the door; Fang decides to kill him. Naturally, there are various possible outcomes — Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they can both live, they can both be killed, and so on. In Ts'ui Pen's novel, all the outcomes in fact occur; each is the starting point for further bifurcations. Once in a while, the paths of that labyrinth converge: for example, you come to this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another my friend.

… 'The Garden of Forking Paths' is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by Ts'ui Pen. Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities. In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. In this one, which the favouring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my home; in another, when you come through my garden you find me dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost.

Life as layered narrative, diachronically and synchronically; shared and individual, typical/general and unique — knowledge fundamental to our sense of being human. The advent of technologies which could allow us to interact with place and time raises questions that are profoundly old. (Kim's questions towards the end of her post made me think of urban plays, from medieval pageants to contemporary community projects — The Dillen, for example.) The extension of all this, in and through new technology, into new "theatres" of play, entertainment and education … The possibilities for grass-roots up development, for social and communal initiatives which bypass official or authorised pictures of the polis … 'infinite stories, infinitely branching' (Borges, 'A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain', 1941).

But in Borges, 'infinite stories, infinitely branching' suggests a weariness and meaninglessness. (Ecclesiastes, 12.12: 'Of making many books there is no end and much study is a weariness of the flesh'.) This melancholy may even embrace the world. 'The Library of Babel', 1941, conceives of a universe, the Library, as 'unlimited but periodic': 'If an eternal traveller should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder — which, repeated, becomes order: the Order'. In this story, the librarian finds this an 'elegant hope'; this reader finds the thought dispiriting.

Will a glut of gorgeous visualisations and interactive, highly social "games" deepen our melancholy — too much meaning to be finally meaningful? Or, instead, will the glamour of technology encourage us to forget and to take again the picture for the world? I doubt there will be anything new in the range of answers we come up with to either of these questions.

In 1984, Harold Fisch published A Remembered Future and wrote of how art can give us 'the unappeased memory of a future still to be fulfilled'. More recently, Heaney has written of how 'We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. The best it can do is to give us an experience that is like foreknowledge of certain things which we already seem to be remembering. What is at work … is the mind's capacity to conceive a new plane of regard for itself, a new scope for its own activity' ('Joy or Night', 1990, in The Redress of Poetry, 1995). New ways of presenting layered narratives, as yet but 'tiny glimmers' (Kim's phrase), will acquire their maturity as art when they allow us to conceive a new plane of regard for ourselves as both unique and typical, simultaneously liberating us from the lonely egotism of Yu Tsun, where 'everything that truly happens, happens to me', and the merely 'unlimited but periodic'.

Red: subject as collage

Anne Carson, classicist (McGill University, Montreal; also Calgary, Princeton, Emory, Michigan, Berkeley …), poet and painter. Author of: Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay and Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan (criticism); at least six collections of poetry — Glass, Irony and God, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours, The Beauty of the Husband, Decreation: Essays, Poetry and Opera; Short Talks (chapbook); Fragments of Sappho and Electra (translations); The Mirror of Simple Souls (libretto) … My list is no doubt incomplete. Ian Rae in The Literary Encyclopedia (entry dated 2001) says: 'She lives alone in a rented apartment in Montreal where she continues to write, using one desk for her academic projects and one for her poetic endeavours. … Carson has also begun producing one-of-a-kind books consisting of photographs, paintings, and poems that she compiles by hand and distributes among friends'.

I've just finished Autobiography of Red, the first book of hers I've read. It is a long poem, wrapped around with mock-academic material which nevertheless is steeped in learning. At its heart lies the story of Geryon, 'a strange winged red monster who lived on an island called Erytheia', The Red Place, and whose story was once told, in a very long lyric poem, by the now largely forgotten and prolific author, Stesichoros (born c 650 BC): three-bodied Geryon and his cattle, the object of attention of Herakles' tenth labour. In the proem, Carson writes: 'If Stesichoros had been more of a conventional poet he might have taken the point of view of Herakles and framed an account of the victory of culture over monstrosity.' Barbarians outside the citadel: the Other. Instead, Stesichoros' poem tells the story 'from Geryon's own experience':

We see his red boy's life and his little dog. A scene of wild appeal from his mother, which breaks off. Interspersed shots of Herakles approaching over the sea. A flash of the gods in heaven pointing to Geryon's doom. The battle itself. The moment when everything goes suddenly slow and Herakles' arrow divides Geryon's skull. We see Herakles kill the little dog with His famous club.

For credits and detailed notes, click on each photo

Stesichoros' poem survives now only in fragments (Geryoneis, "The Geryon Matter"), no passage longer than 30 lines — 'papyrus scraps … (which) withhold as much as they tell'. I understand that, along with confusion of genres, collage has always been important to Carson, and it is no surprise that for her the fragments of Stesichoros' poem make for 'a tantalizing cross-section of scenes, both proud and pitiful'. Moreover, Stesichoros, famed in antiquity ('most Homeric of the lyric poets' — Longinus), evidently fascinates Carson. In the proem she says of adjectives that they 'seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being'. The proem continues:

Of course, there are several different ways to be. In the world of the Homeric epic, for example, being is stable and particularity is set fast in tradition. When Homer mentions blood, blood is black. When women appear, women are neat-ankled or glancing. … The sea is unwearying. Death is bad. … Homer's epithets are a fixed diction with which Homer fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumption. There is a passion in it but what kind of passion? "Consumption is not a passion for substances but a passion for the code," says Baudrillard. So into the still surface of this code Stesichoros was born. And Stesichoros was studying the surface relentlessly. It leaned away from him. He went closer. It stopped. "Passion for substances" seems a good description of that moment. For no reason that anyone can name, Stesichoros began to undo the latches. Stesichoros released being. All the substances in the world went floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved. Or a river being root silver. Or a child bruiseless. … Or Herakles ordeal strong.

Autobiography of Red started life as prose, but 'Carson was dissatisfied with the result and broke down the novel's structure into distinct sections: an essay on the Greek poet Stesichoros, translated fragments of Stesichoros' Geryoneis, a lyric sequence based on the Geryoneis, a palinode, a mock interview, and two appendices. The novel's seven sections recall the seven sections of the Greek nomos or lyric performance for which Stesichoros was famous' (Ian Rae).

The scholarly wrap-around has been called 'a wickedly parodistic parallel universe to the novel inside it--a time-machine recasting, with the tart, dry humor of one of Borges' scholarly-fantastic inventions' (Elizabeth Macklin, Boston Review). Kate Moses, writing in Salon, notes 'the seemingly incongruous elements of Western canonical references and contemporary autobiography, making each seem both fresh and unquestionably related'. What lies at the centre is 47 chapters, Carson's own tale of Geryon. Of these chapters, between one and seven pages long, Macklin has commented:

(they) are in alternating long and short lines, short lines reading at first like reconsiderings of the long-afterthoughts, emendations. The form soon comes to seem almost a supplementary punctuation, an accurate respiration for the semi-skeptical tone, sometimes for emphasis. Although rhymeless, the chapters are narrative lyrics, with their own titles: "Ideas," "Sex Question," "Hades," "Pair."

Carson's own tale of Geryon takes place nowhere near Erytheia. Macklin again:

"Geryon lived on an island in the Atlantic," his autobiographer writes, although elsewhere the place can sound Canadian. "Every second Tuesday in winter Geryon's father and brother went to hockey practice. / Geryon and his mother had supper alone." It's at 3 a.m. in a bus depot that Geryon meets Herakles, in Chapter 7 ("Change"), which begins: "Somehow Geryon made it to adolescence."

Reworking Stesichoros, Carson presents the Geryon/Herkales relationship as,

a (contemporary) destructive love affair … Hercules does not kill Geryon, he breaks his heart. Her Geryon is a winged red monster but also a gifted American boy. … Sexually abused by an older brother, inarticulately attached to his chain-smoking mom, he becomes a photographer. His redness and wings stand for creativity, its power and its pain. (''Everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated him'' to ridicule.) Since Hercules is Action Man, unreflective testosterone personified, their relationship is inevitably fraught. (''Jesus,'' says Hercules, ''I hate it when you cry.'' He wants Geryon to enjoy sex, as he does himself, without the awful complexity of thinking.) So this poem is about knowing and loving a man who has a good time with you, but will never know you back. Geryon's redness is his inmost being, his selfhood, but Hercules dreams about him in yellow. ''Even in dreams he doesn't know me at all,'' Geryon thinks. Hercules exists ''on the other side of the world''; Geryon arcs his back alone in torment, ''upcast to . . . the human custom of wrong love.'' Ruth Padel, NYT

At this point I found myself thinking of Iris Murdoch and her Romanes Lecture (Oxford) for 1976, published subsequently as The Fire and the Sun. Carson, too, has explored Eros in a non-fictional work, Eros the Bittersweet (1986):

Carson begins with Sappho's description of desire as “bittersweet” and argues that “[a]ll human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies”. Noting that the Greek term eros signifies “want” or “lack”, Carson develops a theory of desire in which Eros mediates between subject and object, deferring the attainment of desire, but also creating the desire for desire. Carson then applies this quasi-Derridean theory to ancient Greek lyric and romance, all the while formulating the ideas on desire that would come to dominate her poetic output. (Ian Rae)

The poem's narrative and lyrical power absorbed my interest right until the end:

After the affair he lives a ''numb life'' until, years later in Buenos Aires, he bumps into Hercules again. Hercules, with his new Peruvian boyfriend, Ancash, takes Geryon to an Andes village whose inhabitants believe winged red people are volcano survivors -- people who have been in flame and lived. Here the sexual triangle triggers violence, but ultimately a healingly creative insight. For unlike Stesichoros, Carson is interested in Geryon's survival through art. Geryon's photographic lens is a wonderfully rich image for what Carson herself is doing in her book. As Stesichoros got his sight back by reinterpreting myth, Carson's reinterpretation turns myth into the recording and surviving of pain through the viewfinder of poetry. Like ''Lava Man,'' a volcano survivor whose veins hold ''ocher-colored drops that sizzled when they hit the plate,'' Geryon comes through volcanic passion and out the other side. He is the eyewitness of catastrophe survived. (Ruth Padel)

*****

Aleatoric Art! Ian Rae says that the essay is a “try” for Carson, a medium of experiment. Stalking these essay-poems for me is the spirit of Montaigne's Essais, 'classical skepticism  … with all its anticipations of Wittgenstein' (Stephen Toulmin). (Carson has also written 'Irony is not enough' — link below). Scepticism of course extends here to embrace literary genre, too — Rae again (on Glass, Irony and God): 'The poems in this collection showcase Carson's talent for combining seemingly incompatible genres (such as the lyric and essay) and subjects (such as TV and Socrates)'. John Kinsella on Red: 'Its intertextual weaving of popular culture, myth, sexual comment, theory and narrative, is greatly accomplished. It’s a verse novel in effect, though some might call it prose. It operates on tensions in the process of “translation” and mythology, narrative and the moment in time. … This is a metatext in which Geryon analyses his own life, his own “being written”.' Ruth Padel:

The images, connections and ideas -- the whole well-stored mind pulsing behind this book -- are as extravagant and sweet as Stesichoros, and push the lyric, as he did, beyond conventional bounds. The poems are meditative as well as narrative: they reflect on photography as sexual learning (''Got your lens cap?'' asks mom, as teen-age Geryon flies out the door), on volcanoes and Emily Dickinson, on the Platonic image of wings as the creative aspect of love. Whether or not the beloved is worth the pain, wings lift the true lover's soul into immortality. … Carson varies their tone wonderfully, in perfect control all the way from dry wit to high poeticism (''A winter sun had thrown its bleak wares on the sky''). She counterpoints domesticity with ecstasy, the profound with the bizarre. (An all-night tango singer is an off-duty psychoanalyst; an encounter with guerrillas is reflected in the eye of a roast guinea pig; passengers clutch toothbrushes on a night flight over the Andes while Hercules pleasures Geryon under the Aeroperu blanket.) And Carson writes in language any poet would kill for: sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender, brilliantly lighted.

In Red, Carson writes of Stesichoros' poem:

… the fragments of the Geryoneis itself read as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and some scraps of meat. The fragment numbers tell you roughly how the pieces fell out of the box. You can of course keep shaking the box. "Believe me for meat and for myself," as Gertrude Stein says. Here. Shake.

*****

From 'Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros':

Geryon lay on the ground covering his ears The sound
Of the horses like roses being burned alive …

Arrow means kill It parted Geryon's skulls like a comb Made
The boy neck lean At an odd slow angle sideways as when a
Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze

From 'Autobiography of Red':

Voyaging into the rotten ruby of the night became a contest of freedom
and bad logic. …

He burned in the presence of his mother.
I hardly know you anymore, she said leaning against the doorway of his room.
It had rained suddenly at suppertime,
now sunset was startling drops at the window. Stale peace of old bedtimes
filled the room. Love does not
make me gentle or kind, thought Geryon as he and his mother eyed each other
from opposite shores of the light. …

It was the year he began to wonder about the noise that colors make. Roses came roaring across the garden at him.
He lay on his bed at night listening to the silver light of stars crashing against the window screen. Most
of those he interviewed for the science project had to admit they did not hear
the cries of the roses
being burned alive in the noonday sun. Like horses, Geryon would say helpfully,
like horses in war. No, they shook their reads. …

Your are interested in justice?
I'm interested in how people decide what sounds like a law.
So what's your favorite law code?
Hammurabi. Why? Neatness. For example? For example:
"The man who is caught
stealing during a fire shall be thrown into the fire." Isn't that good?—if
there were such a thing
as justice that's what it ought to sound like—short. Clean. Rhythmical. …

I will call it "Origin of Time",
thought Geryon as a terrible coldness came through the room from somewhere.
It was taking him a very long while
to set up the camera. Enormous pools of a moment kept opening around his hands
each time he tried to move them.
Coldness was planing the sides of his vision leaving a narrow canal down which
the shock— Geryon sat
on the floor suddenly. He had never been so stoned in his life. I am too naked,
he thought. This thought seemed profound.
And I want to be in love with someone. This too fell on him deeply. It is all wrong.
Wrongness came like a lone finger
chopping through the room and he ducked. What was that? said one of the others
turning towards him centuries later. …

We are amazing beings,
Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,
night at their back.

*****

• ' "swimming at noon always reminds me of Marilyn Monroe" - Etruscan saying' can be read here
• 'Tango II' from The Beauty of the Husband, and part of 'Irony Is Not Enough: Essay On My Life as Catherine Deneuve (2nd draft)' from Men in the Off Hours here
• 'Tango XII' from The Beauty of the Husband, 'Here’s Our Clean Business Now Let’s Go Down the Hall to the Black Room Where I Make My Real Money', here
• 'And Reason Remains Undaunted', here