Things to keep in mind:
The secret of storytelling.
They tell you you’re supposed to do that; that’s what you should do. I think what music can offer is the feeling of forward motion, also the feeling of accumulation of information, of sensations, of feelings, like we’re going somewhere. When I say “feel like,” I don’t mean to suggest that it’s not real, but that it’s the work of the imagination, which is what narrative is.
We can create the sensation of community through the accrual of actions, and that’s often the clichéd way that it’s talked about, as someone taking a solo—Sonny Rollins taking a solo, having his motific development as formal logic—and that’s great for lots of reasons. But I don’t really like to feel like I’m forced to listen to it in a certain way, or that there is one master reading of performance. I think what we want from performance is multiplicity, which is lots of ways in and through it, because it’s for lots of people, and it was created by lots of people, often.
I find myself skeptical of music that forces you to have a certain experience, emotional reaction, or specific constructive arc of experience. But performers should still take care of that, to a certain extent—how does it add up?
What you want from performance, because we’re all in a room together, is that somehow we’ve gotten somewhere at the end, together. You could call that a sense of narrative, but it’s not so obvious how that happens. One way it happens is by everyone caring about it happening.
—posted 3152 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of elementalism.
Here is an audience sensitive to the sheer elements of the English language… Translate their playfulness and serious use of the sheer elements of language into the terms and understandings of a five-year-old and you have as intelligent an audience in rhythm and sound as the maddest poet’s heart could desire.
—posted 3160 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of integument.
But now she is conspicuous among Lydian women
as sometimes at sunset
the rosyfingered moonsurpasses all the stars. And her light
stretches over salt sea
equally and flowerdeep fields.And the beautiful dew is poured out
and roses bloom and frail
chervil and flowering sweetclover.96.7 “rosyfingered”: an adjective used habitually by Homer to designate the red look of Dawn. I think Sappho means to be startling, but I don’t know how startling, when she moves the epithet to a nocturnal sky. Also startling is the fecundity of sea, field and memory which appears to flow from this uncanny moon and fill the nightworld of the poem—swung from a thread of “as sometimes” in verse 7. Homer too liked to extend a simile this way, creating a parallel surface of such tangibility it rivals the main story for a minute. Homer is more concerned than Sappho to keep the borders of the two surfaces intact; epic arguably differs from lyric precisely in the way it manages such rivalry.
—posted 3170 days ago
Clear and unentailed.
One tries not to lift the curtain here too much, but it’s not as if one doesn’t lift curtains. You might have to do a bit work to piece the one with the other, but I did speak with the delightful host of Cabbages & Kings, a podcast I commend to your attention, and the results of which are available for your listening pleasure. (There are also some footnotes.)
—Work proceeds apace on no. 27, “ – tends to crumble – ”, which, well, titles do have a way of doing what they do? —I feel the need to mention the Patreon at this juncture, if only because patrons have seen the images for the next few covers, and I’d hate for you to miss out if you haven’t.
—posted 3192 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of ishq.
Ishq makes us human. It makes us responsible and slightly better human beings than we were before. All lovers are not ideal humans, nor always nice, but the one who is in love does imagine a better world. When you are in love, you discover the many nooks and corners of the city. In some places, you hold hands as you walk. In others, you walk alongside but slightly far apart. Lovers want to transform the city into one of their imagination. The city of their memories is not one of Ghalib’s poetry. Woh sheher ko jaante bhi hai or jeete bhi hai. They know the city as well as live it. Within them, the spirit of all the seasons finds a resonance. Those who are not in love, they do not inhabit the city.
Jis tan ko chhooa tune us tan ko chhupaaoon
Jis man ko laage naina, woh kisko dikhaaoon
—Rudaali, 1993We cannot even allow this feeling of love to express itself. Meera, you are from this country, aren’t you? Love makes us a little weak and circumspect. And if a human being is neither, he can turn into a monster. To love is not to just say “I love you.” To love is to know someone and, for that, one has to know oneself. It is the month of February, but don’t waste all your energies in hunting for a lover. Look for yourself, too, and your city. Hunt for those dreams, too, which you want fulfilled for someone else’s sake.
—posted 3206 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of streams.
The academics write in their paper that: “Studying characteristics of the sentence-length variability in a large corpus of world famous literary texts shows that an appealing and æsthetic optimum… involves self-similar, cascade-like alternations of various lengths of sentences.”
“An overwhelming majority of the studied texts simply obey such fractal attributes but especially spectacular in this respect are hypertext-like, ‘stream-of-consciousness’ novels. In addition, they appear to develop structures characteristic of irreducibly interwoven sets of fractals called multifractals.”
The other works most comparable to multifractals, the academics found, were A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar, The USA trilogy by John Dos Passos, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño and Joyce’s Ulysses. Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu showed “little correlation” to multifractality, however; nor did Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
The academics note that “fractality of a literary text will in practice never be as perfect as in the world of mathematics”, because a mathematical fractal can be magnified to infinite, while the number of sentences in a book are finite.
“It is not entirely clear whether stream-of-consciousness writing actually reveals the deeper qualities of our consciousness, or rather the imagination of the writers. It is hardly surprising that ascribing a work to a particular genre is, for whatever reason, sometimes subjective,” said Drożdż, suggesting that the scientists’ work “may someday help in a more objective assignment of books to one genre or another.”
—posted 3219 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of bingeing.
In my view, Aristotle misconstrues what epic is trying to do. The episodes aren’t a distraction, they’re the whole point. The overarching story provides a narrative and thematic frame for the episodes, allowing multiple stories to come together into a larger, cohesive whole. The frame narrative is necessarily sparse and even boring, as Aristotle’s famous reductive summary of the Odyssey illustrates, but it’s necessary to keep the episodes from being purely episodic, arbitrarily juxtaposed narrative fragments.
At its best, binge-watchable serial drama is trying to be an epic. Within each season, we have an overarching plot that makes room for several narratively and thematically related episodes. The story of Don Draper’s secret identity gives us a window into the worlds of Peggy and all the other beloved supporting cast, just as Tony Soprano’s quest to become the undisputed boss opens up a narrative world full of fascinating characters.
I’ve written before about Main Character Syndrome, the phenomenon of viewers becoming bored and even resentful of the main character of the framing narrative, and I believe that the fundamentally epic structure of binge-watchable serial drama explains why that is such a constant pitfall. It’s a difficult balance to keep the framing narrative thin enough to allow for rich episodic side-trips but compelling enough that you don’t get impatient with it. Arguably even Homer fails on this point — once it comes time to settle accounts with the primary story of Odysseus coming home to claim what’s his (the beginning of book 13), it feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room.
The balance is easier to strike within a single season, as the Mad Men and Sopranos examples make clear.
—posted 3227 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of language.
Interestingly, the work which MacFarlane looks at which breaks most obviously with this conception of precision is the one which is often cited as an ur-text for the lyrical prosaic form practiced by the present crop of nature writers: J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine. In the chapter dedicated to him, MacFarlane immediately offers a sign which serves to distinguish Baker, remarking that he reveals himself to be “a good writer but a rather bad birdwatcher”. Throughout this chapter, despite a couple of extremely tenuous attempts to tar him with the same brush, the word precision is curiously absent. Baker’s myopia is both literal and linguistic. He is a brilliant writer but he is anything but precise. Instead his prose seems to stem from urgency, disorientation, and desperation. His landscape is one which is drawn with compass points but no more, it remains loose and elusive. His peregrinations are cartographically inchoate. Baker continually upsets the even, leisurely syntax and spacing of his fellow nature writers, his prose is an expressionistic and feverish thirst which seemingly cannot be quenched. He often turns nouns into verbs and adjectives, wilfully ignoring the conventions of language, painting his observations in loose obsessive strokes. His prosaic obsessiveness recalls the pictorial desolation of Van Gogh: the falcon’s kill is his yellow paint and, at one stage, we worry he might decide to eat. One does not need to know that Baker was suffering from a slowly encroaching paralysis, or that he was sacrificing his own financial stability and health in his search: his hunger is evident on every page. Like Federigo degli Alberighi in the Decameron, Baker spends the whole of his substance: he has nothing but the falcon.
What sets Baker apart then is that, for him, writing has a transformative aspect. His desire is to become the peregrine. In this sense, unlike the other writers in Landmarks (and unlike its author), Baker’s writing is not a (re)-turn towards nature but a turning away from it. Baker seeks to shed the humanity which he finds so abhorrent but it is not nature which allows him to do this: it is writing. Baker wishes to negate the distance between the human and the animal, to lose his physical form and become the animal he hunts. At some point the all-seeing ‘I’, that solid conquering subject which plants nature writing so firmly within the turf of the political status quo, begins to slip. Baker recognises the exteriority of his being to that of nature and that he must turn to something else if he is to try to express this separation. In this sense his prose is an act of ritual, of magic, of re-enchantment. There is something prehistoric about it. Like those painters who daubed the walls of Lascaux in order to commune with the animalistic existence which still haunted them, Baker seeks to use his words in order to shed his human form, to gain, in Bataille’s words, ‘the silence of the beast’, and take flight. But, most importantly, he recognises that this ritual, this turn towards language, too can only be a failure. The ‘We’ of communion with the hawk is illusory and Baker knows he will always remain part of the ‘we’ who ‘stink of death’. Writing and the material cannot be connected, there is space between them. By not recognising this disjunct, the preservation of these words, these memories of landscape, may too easily function as their memorial.
What, then, is it which ultimately makes the language of Landmarks an act of preservation in its most pejorative sense: pickled, sweetened, displayed? Is it its refulgence, its fertility, its abundance? Certainly, that constitutes part of the problem, but what seems to underlie this fecundity is the assumption of a direct correlation between landscape and language. Despite the weak protestations MacFarlane offers, he never questions the assumption that reality, a reality full of objects to be conquered and collected, is merely there. It lacks the interrogative lacuna, the space between, which literature requires. The problem with MacFarlane’s language, and the language of nature writing, is that it posits a direct relationship between the sounds and syntaxes of our words and the natural world of our experience.
—posted 3263 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of æsthetics.
Having pored over a stack of past issues, I would argue that F--rie endeavors to cultivate in readers a quality of attention that registers the most diminutive details, that perceives the world as though under a spell. In an article about throwing “a magical midsummer night’s dream party,” the writer suggests inscribing guests’ names on “small leaves, bark, or beautiful pieces of fruit like green apples or small Japanese eggplants.” And in a homage to green tea, editor at large Laren Stover writes, “If you have a glass teapot, you can watch the pearls release and open like magical tendrils, mermaid’s hair or seaweed unfurling, deepening the water to emerald green.” This state of amplified, granular awareness, in which time slows as you watch the “undulating ballet in your teapot,” is one I have otherwise only achieved with psychedelic drugs.
F--rie’s overarching æsthetic, which I’ve spent more time parsing than I care to admit, is rather hallucinogenic itself: a mash-up of Medieval, Renaissance and Victorian influences, with hints of Celtic and classical Greco-Roman mythology and a little neo-paganism tossed in for good measure. F--ry tales, with their familiar signifiers and peculiar, unsettling dream logic, are useful shorthand for understanding the magazine’s visuals. The models sport scarlet Little Red Riding Hood cloaks or spectral white Miss Havisham frocks; they lie supine on leafy forest floors or gaze into the middle distance from snowy, windswept landscapes. In one 18-page spread shot by the Russian photographer Katerina Plotnikova, adolescent women in poufy-sleeved taffeta dresses embrace foxes and elk. (The editors have a fondness for interspecies images.) What’s startling about the photos is the élan with which they yoke together an innocent childhood id with ambitious, adult-word production: Thus a model in a lace-bodice gown wraps an actual fox around her neck like a fur stole; and 17th-century women with powdered bouffant wigs picnic at the bottom of the ocean while a pair of puffy white poodles look on.
—posted 3271 days ago
Four on the floor.
But why dwell on what’s been and done and gone, baby, gone. —The first draft of no. 26, “ – only borders lie – ”, is 16,375 words long. Short, for a first draft, but that’s good, that’s good: there are a number of scenes here that need not to be what they are, and I need room to swing a machete. (There’s a whole character running around in there that paradoxically enough there isn’t enough room for; patrons will know more what I mean.)
But so much for having five in the pocket by the time we launch, ha ha.
But we weren’t gonna dwell! —Well maybe a little. —Of all the chapters of vol. 3 to be written thus far, this one, the fourth one, the one that was just going to be a simple monster-of-the-week bughunt, and maybe a memory palace up on Mount Tabor, maybe, this one has ended up being by far the most different, as perhaps you’ll see when it’s released. —But for all that, I’m still where I was going to, in the strictest terms of characters A and points B and facts C in time for the various events D; and yet, having gotten where I was going by zigging this way, instead of that, well. —I’m not sure, I guess, what happens next?
Which is pretty much mostly where I was the last time I wrote one of these, back in April—a mere 203 days ago. (Don’t do the math. It’s gruesome.) —I think the next scene, the first of no. 27, “ – tends to crumble – ”, I think it’s going to start in that blue attic, which is mostly just a painted-over memory of that white attic, the one I glimpsed that time I went to a Hallowe’en party dressed as the Fool, and the woman dressed as Death slipped me some acid; later, we hung out in a cemetery. —It was the nineties. You know how it was.
—posted 3312 days ago
