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jonismitchell · 4 years

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hey arden do you have any book suggestions? i don’t have any preference/specific genre i’m looking for but i just need something new to read while in quarantine :)

you’re in luck! i happen to be a massive nerd and i’m going to compile a gigantic list of recs for you. here we go.

the only classics worth reading: i want to preface this by saying i did not pick these books because they are written by women. they are just good and they happen to be by women. this reinforces my theory that only women can write.

emma by jane austen: better than pride and prejudice by a long shot. the characters are funny, the romance is swoon worthy (don’t think too hard about the age gap), it says very smart things about society, and i could write an essay on how it revolutionized fiction.

wuthering heights by emily bronte: my all time favourite book about how awful people are and how the cycle of abuse perpetuates itself. it’s absolutely exceptional in every respect. i won’t go into too much detail because i don’t want to give anything away, but you should definitely read this book.

jane eyre by charlotte bronte: i’m not saying i’m a bronte sister stan, i’m just saying i’m a bronte sister stan who can’t be bothered to take five seconds to copy the accent. anyway, i read this book when i was a wee lass and i stole it from an apartment in nice. the characters are genuinely amazing, and it’s an early feminist book, which i think is fantastic.

the handmaid’s tale by margaret atwood: you don’t get more feminist classic than this. set in a dystopian future where women are only valued for their ability to procreate, atwood examines gender roles and still delivers a brilliant adventure story. if you end up liking this, try the power by naomi alderman, which essentially tells of the opposite society.

the bell jar by sylvia plath: an introspective story about mental illness. it’s the type of writing that i feel hits hard at about any age, and i remember feeling really haunted after finishing the whole thing in a night. definitely high up on my list of amazing novels.

feel good books: sometimes, we need to read something that’s not revolutionary but still radical. don’t worry, i got you. here’s the lasagna of novels.

finding audrey by sophie kinsella: this book is funny, heartwarming, and makes you think. as someone with anxiety, i felt really represented by a lot of audrey’s behaviours. her mom is lowkey nuts, but i feel like that shouldn’t impede your enjoyment of the book.

the shadowhunters series by cassandra clare: LISTEN. objectively cassandra clare is a terrible person. objectively these books are not good. but they are amusing! they are comforting! they are interesting! also, there are a million of them. start with the infernal devices: clockwork angel, clockwork prince, and clockwork princess. set in old old london, this series features the only valid love triangle ever, girls who like to read and kick ass, and boys who are soft and play the violin. next, head to the mortal instruments, which is pretty much drinny fanfiction. don’t think too hard during these and you’ll have a good time. after that, read the short story collections the bane chronicles and tales of shadowhunter academy. if you got really into the lore (like me) these books are funny and a little captivating. finally, get to the highlight of this whole thing, the dark artifices. the one true love of my life, emma carstairs, stars in this brilliant trilogy about forbidden love. yes, it’s super corny, but all these books are super corny. if you can’t get enough of the universe (or accidentally got hooked) try out the collection ghosts of the shadow market. once you finish that, you can read the first books in the new series(es), red scrolls of magic and chain of gold. all of these books are jam packed with magic and vaguely plagarized demons. not brilliant, but a fun ride.

emma mills books: emma mills writes cute happy contemporary romances and i can’t recommend her enough! first & then tells the story of a jane austen obsessed nerd who crushes on a jock. which could actually be about me, and if you trust my judgement, you probably like me enough to read this book secretly written about me. foolish hearts gives theatre kids and boy band stans alike a chance to feel represented in what could be one of the sweetest (and funniest!) romances of all time. famous in a small town gives band kids and people who are clarinet-sized a chance to shine, and includes a country singer who struck me with her similarities to taylor swift. (our song is even referenced in the novel!) by far my favourite would have to be this adventure ends, which is hilarious and heartbreaking and talks about fanfiction without looking down on it. all of these books are definitely feel good and will make you believe in heterosexual romance.

mildly upsetting fantasy: just fantasy trilogies that will hurt you.

the poppy war by r.f. kuang: wonder what harry potter would be like if the magic system was complicated and the murder was high? no, like high on opium? and the plot was based on chinese military history? look no further than the brilliant work of art that is the poppy war. this book is by far the best fantasy out there, i cannot exaggerate that enough. also out is the equally compelling sequel the dragon republic, and the final book in the trilogy is set to hit shelves this year. please please please read this amazing book.

six of crows by leigh bardugo: six dysfunctional criminals try to steal from the most heavily guarded prison in the world. what could go wrong? this novel is intelligent and witty, and will keep you on the edge of your seat as you’re dragged into this scheming and brilliant world. in my opinion, this is the only valid book in the grishaverse. this and its equally well plotted sequel, crooked kingdom.

the gilded wolves by roshani choski: this one is definitely similar to six of crows in its funny and smart main cast. the magic system is super unique and the plot is endlessly enjoyable. it’s also set in old old paris! so france is always fun. there are also tons of mythology references and disaster bisexuals. and apparently the sequel (the silvered serpents) comes out july of this year.

scythe by neal shusterman: the first book on this list by a man, wow! i’m so inclusive. anyway, this genius trilogy is set in a world where humanity has solved almost every single problem, except overpopulation and corruption. an elite order called scythes are tasked with killing and managing the order of death. it’s like the hunger games went took a political science seminar. everything spirals out of control very quickly and the characters are so great. the sequels are called thunderhead and the toll respectively, and the overarching tale is gripping.

the cruel prince by holly black: i’m not kidding when i say this is the only faery book that matters. this book stars a human girl who grows up in the magical world and more violence than is statistically necessary. but it’s good! this is also a trilogy (every book on this list is the first one in a trilogy, i am the worst, i’m sorry) and the sequel the wicked king is quite possibly the best scheme-y magic politics thing i’ve ever read. and the final book, queen of nothing, doesn’t disappoint by a long shot.

contemporaries no one talks about

the boy who steals houses by cg drews: this book has autistic representation! and it’s written by book blogger paperfury, who is even more of a delight on the page than she is on the internet. be warned, this book includes heavy mentions of abuse and graphic violence that are unavoidable. but it will break your heart and stitch it back together again. also, waffles.

some boys by patty blount: this book deals very candidly with the aftermath of rape and public pressure. it is also one of my favourite books of all time for its treatment of ‘bro culture.’ and the heroine, grace, is incredibly strong. i read this book in maybe fourth grade? and it essentially inspired me to start giving a damn about social justice. so yeah, there’s that. (i also haven’t read it since fourth grade, so someone will have to tell me if it holds up).

emergency contact by mary choi: i’m rereading this for the second time right now and it’s still really awesome. it tells the story of an unlikely friendship, big dreams, and does it all through a really interesting narrative voice that manages to effectively capture two very different people. it is yet another romance, but it’s really wonderful and heartwarming. (unlike the other two books in this section).

children’s books that treat kids like people

a series of unfortunate events by lemony snicket: this is quite literally my favourite series of all time. it’s upsetting and kind of wrong once you think about it a lot, but it’s also maybe the best thing ever written. i literally cannot explain how much i love these books. there are thirteen books, so you’re definitely in for a good, long time.

the mysterious benedict society by trenton lee stewart: three books about propaganda and smart kids and found family. i literally do not know what else you want out of a series. it’s fun and there’s only a little bit of kidnapping, so it’s very family appropriate compared to the other books on this list.

wuh luh wuh

the seven husbands of evelyn hugo by taylor jenkins reid: i KNOW no one shuts up about this book but you really should read it. like, there’s nothing that will ever top the narrative. the drama, the glamour, the girls who love girls, you know? all the components of a brilliant novel. it’s also got some truly poetic prose and genuinely beautiful moments. the reason everyone talks about this book is because it’s amazing. send tweet.

girls of paper and fire by natasha ngan: (massive trigger warning for sexual violence) haha! another violent fantasy book that’s part of a trilogy! thought you escaped that, didn’t you? this magic system is brilliant and the book is so good. it’s a breath of fresh air into young adult fiction. and did i mention it’s a wlw romance? i read this during a math class and had to go to the bathroom to cry when i finished it, because there was finally a heroine in a fantasy novel who i could see myself in. there’s also a sequel, girls of storm and shadow, that is equally amazing.

it’s not like it’s a secret by misa suigura: wlw girls with soft poetry vibes. complicated family lives. candidly dealing with racism, sexism, and homophobia. this book is really good. simply read this book.

i have even MORE book recs but i decided to cut myself off because this is the longest thing i’ve ever written for tumblr. hope you enjoy!

#angxlsrolltheireyes #book recs #asking with you

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uglyducklingpresse · 6 years

Text

Ephemeralism, Sequentiality, and Writing By Hand: Emma Clayton in conversation with Constance DeJong

2017 marks the 40th anniversary of the initial publication of Constance DeJong’s long out-of- print novel, Modern Love. Critically acclaimed in its time, Modern Love is now back in print, in a new facsimile edition co-published by Ugly Duckling Presse and Primary Information. On April 4th 2017, DeJong performed from the novel at The Kitchen, where she had performed a one-hour radio version of the novel in 1978. Amid these notable happenings, UDP intern Emma Clayton spoke with DeJong at Hunter College, where she is a Professor of Art/Combined Media. Her work is represented by Bureau Gallery, NYC.

Could you speak about the role re-articulation, repetition, and recurrence play in your work?

You know, it’s a strategy or a device, almost a structuring device in a time based medium, which of course performance is, but I actually think books are too. At the time that I was writing Modern Love it was almost a popular idea among artists a bit older than me who had used it in a way that I found very interesting. There were examples from performance—Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown using repetition and restart. The soundtrack that I played in the Modern Love performance was written by Philip Glass, there again involving repetition, although he wasn’t the only composer using repetition. Even among visual artists, you know, repetition in the work of Warhol and in painters and such. When I was in my late twenties and started writing that book I certainly had absorbed it by osmosis, and then by more than osmosis considered it as a way to sort of reset the narrative. By that I mean the narrative is, for want of a better word, moving forward, but repetition is useful to reset it back, and then move with a different forward continuity from the repeated place. And that as a strategy, especially for maybe the first third of Modern Love, was very useful, because it’s polyphonic, there’s more than one strand of narrative going on. I was also interested in memory, and it’s also a kind of memory device—you repeat something, but on the second or third repeat you’re actually in a completely different place.

Within that forward moving narrative and then jumping back, and with writing the book serially, did you employ any type of writing structure?

No, I just wrote into the dark. Which I still do, perhaps now with a tiny bit more ease. The seriality wasn’t serial in the way that sometimes means seriality, like in visual arts. The seriality was a way for me to be engaged in the project. Almost, I put the gun to my own head to produce it and it was a way of manifesting the work into the world. I designed and printed and distributed each issue of this serial by mail. I was maybe of a nature that, the serial just suited me temperamentally. What, I’m going to wait around for the keepers of the gates to say “yes darling, do come in, we think you’re worthy”? You know, at that time, maybe I still am, I was more like fuck you, who are you, you know. So producing this serial was agency.

Forward motion, like a propellor...

Yeah, get into the world. I started performing it, which was another way for it to be in the world. And I thought about 19th century novelists. They often had agents or publishers who published the serials but I’ve always been enchanted by how you (one of the public), would subscribe. You would pay into a subscription for so and so serial, say George Elliot’s or Dickens'. It’s a really interesting, call it business model if you will, but it can also be a very self sufficient and independent way of doing things, which would all happen digitally now.

In an interview with Jennifer Krasinski for BOMB Magazine you said ‘narrative is sequential, you can’t escape it’. When you perform, do you see that as a way of escaping that sequential narrative, through the interruptions you can play with, with music for example?

No I don’t. I just think it’s a reformulation of a kind of sequentiality (if there is such a word). I think the escape, so to speak, from sequential can happen, but in environments where one can escape, which I’ve done in navigated works. You, as a user, navigate the work on the computer, mouse driven, and the piece, which is made of narrative, resets itself every time you turn it on. You venture, as it were, through a sequence of whatever happens in that moment. There isn’t a meta sequence. So that’s a true escape. Within that, on a smaller scale, there’s the sequential. You, the user, can’t rewrite every one of my sentences, you know what I mean. There are moments of sequential. I’m working with Triple Canopy on something for the internet, and that can have programming that does something similar—where there isn’t a meta sequence. There are modules and the module is a sequence, but the experience of the module is multiple sequences. So that’s a true escape. I’m often working on a project base with the performances. So there’s a core of material, almost always written language, ideas, and subject matter, from which comes a book, some objects, a performance, etc. In performance, for me, the doing and differentiating from the fixed sequence of that same material in book form, is something I really enjoy doing. You called it this seamless arrangement—it’s almost this kind of adaptation.

A completely reformulated work...

Yeah, and I do it in different ways. In seemingly more casual adaptations than the one I did at The Kitchen (2017), I will seem as if I’ve left the formal text. But it’s a moment of adaptation. As soon as I finished writing Modern Love I decided to make an audio version of it—an adaptation, it isn’t word for word. So right away I stepped into adapting my own material. I wanted to make a radio program, adapting it for multiple speakers. I asked Philip Glass to write some thematic music, and I got a residency with one of the world’s great audio engineers—Bob Bielecki, my first sound engineer, genius. We would call it now perhaps an audiobook, or a podcast. I thought it would be on the radio. A total folly, because the BBC makes some space for drama and books, but we don’t. Certainly at the time it was almost non-existent. Now that exists as podcasts—often an independent venture.

I didn’t, and still don’t, have a sense of ‘the primary work is the text’—I think all the various parts of the project are in play. I don’t make a hierarchy out of it. I’ve always had a relationship to the material that is fluid, which isn’t really about the escape from sequence, but it is a kind of malleable and porous way of working that is with me even now.

On reading Modern Love, and thinking about that porous nature and the disruption of narrative, I couldn’t help but draw parallels with the work of Chris Kraus, I Love Dick especially, and I know that you were colleagues and friends with Kathy Acker (also noted for her interruption of narrative). I was wondering how you think about those parallels, or whether you see relations between your works?

Of course. I’m a reader as much as a writer. It wasn’t that long ago that Chris interviewed me for her book, the Kathy Acker book [After Kathy Acker, Semiotext(e), 2017) and brought back to my mind things I hadn’t thought about for a very long time. I think something that Kathy and I shared, which came from each of us separately as opposed to coming out of us knowing each other, and I hope this doesn’t sound too nerdy and odious, was this notion of the constructed ‘I.’ The constructed first person singular being constructed as a multiplicity not a singularity. It’s a bonafide narrative strategy we had in common and importantly, with some urgency in our respective narratives. In my work very differently than Kathy’s. Kathy identifies that construct as a multiple, as do I, but Kathy identifies that first person singular with her own name as well, which at that time was very original. Now it’s been done to tedium and I wanna kill the young hipster so called post-modern person who does it again like ‘oh it’s so clever and my name’s on the cover and I’m the character.’ It’s sad how a bonafide, vivid, and urgent construct becomes whittled into a cliche, in one’s own lifetime. It’s groaning. That’s perhaps my problem. Perhaps I should see it from a different vantage point which is that, no, that’s a bonafide contribution and invention to narrative writing and just other people are using it, it doesn’t belong to a couple of individuals or one person. But I don’t. Perhaps it’s because the writing itself, in which that is borrowed and used, is unsatisfactory at large. But that was a

shared view of narrative and, in my case, it was a shared view of self. Now, there I think Chris and Kathy go on a street that I don’t walk on. Because my first-person self is a multiple package that changes, and is not autobiographical. In my work, I have no interest in examining that constructed first person singular as a self that might be considered to belong to a ‘real life’. That has become almost a genre, this bio-fiction, which has evolved over some decades. It’s in I Love Dick and it’s in Chris’ writing. I think there’s a bit more artifice in Kathy’s approach to that. There’s a tremendous amount of artifice in my approach to it. I’m happy to be the queen of artifice. I will wear that tarnished crown, or cross.

Would you therefore say that the self you consider in your work is located externally rather than introspectively?

No, I don’t think it’s a binary like that. We are creatures of both and then some. To overuse the word porous, I think some of us have a lot of porosity between internal and external, or a different sense of balance and at times, prioritizing so-called external events overstates the externalized in a way—as if they’re not products of the mind and of thought, to call those interior. I’ve thought a lot about those distinctions simply by it being brought to my attention by people noticing it in the work. What does one call an event? Does the event have to be describable in language as, ‘she walked across the room?’ I want to acknowledge multiple presences.

It can be experienced without notation and delineation...

It’s experiential. It’s quite hard, but I’ve been trying to use it in writing. I’m really interested now in how we discount, for some of us, a third of our life—sleep and dreaming. I’ve become really intent on this huge event, dreaming, that’s been discounted in our culture for a really long time. We are at a time with brain science and neuroscience, but most of the investigation of the workings of the so-called brain are very mechanical and material—as if there it is, a body of cells. It’s like a line was drawn in the sand after Jung and Freud, and very few people have ventured into that sand again.

It’s like taboo...

It is! In terms of considerations of the interior or exterior, and the construction of self and/or this construction of the first person singular ‘I’—one almost never reads of dreams when thinking about the constructed elements. One almost never finds dream experience within narrative. Do you? Can you think of any examples?

No, apart from the classic ‘she woke up and it was all a dream...'

Yeah, it’s been made a cliche. We’ve not been interested in, we’ve not investigated, we don’t know. We don’t have a language for it. It’s fascinating. Such a huge part of the day.

True, we don’t have any kind of interrogative linguistic framework or line of questioning around that.

I’ve been doing serious research, and there’s almost nothing. There’s a lot of new age, wonky con-artist stuff. And I’ve found some interesting writing from the late 19th century, when there was a moment where people wanted to take on dreams in a serious way. But it is a poverty.

How are you beginning to negotiate that—the taboo realms of these subjects which are cliched primarily? I was also wanting to ask you about how you negotiated the difficulties in dealing with the topic of love?

Well, I think it’s kind of important to tread the taboo. At the time I wrote Modern Love, one was oppressed by notions of love voiced upon the culture, period, but especially on women concerning paradigms and expectations. So some of that conscious negotiation was

going on, which included mocking and making fun of the paradigms, and of the self in my narrative that was trying to throw them off. We all got mocked in Modern Love. I have a strong aversion to narrative that scolds me, that tells me what things are, how to do and live. That adheres to a perspective, a dogma, that didacticism. So in Modern Love you don’t come upon a new oppressing set of paradigms—that women will be this. The work is certainly a lived moment, and continues to be—urgent environments and realities. They stand in for more particular environments and settings, such as a certain room, or a city by name. But you know, the world of ideas is an environment, and a location as well. It’s a temporal location. It may have attributes that aren’t material, but it is a location.

In a way, that agency and urgency forms a context, the need to do.

Yeah, and I think that, if you want a little more about your previous question—Kathy and I lived in the same neighborhood, she sublet my apartment you know, we talked. There was an urgency. Again, manifested in narrative, in fiction, very differently in her work from my work. Certainly she and I shared that. I’m sure other writers of our age and of that time did as well, but I didn’t know that many others. I think a thing that’s in I Love Dick, and in Constance, and Kathy, was the inclusion of material that wasn’t an obvious constituent of the ‘fictional narrative’. Now of course, Melville in Moby Dick has tracts about whales, and Bram Stoker in Dracula has tracts that are informational, historical, research based. But that was a fairly uncommon element of fiction writing. I think it still is very pronounced in my work, where there is a heterogenous kind of material—that there is not a singular strata of what participates in a fiction narrative. I think that was coming very to the forefront in my work and Kathy’s work. There’s a veering off, and that’s kind of interesting.

Thinking about this urgency, what makes you so eager to traverse mediums? The not staying within one communicative medium, in reference to working across forms, how you spoke about working from a core and fragmenting out.

I really can’t say. You would think that I would have had an insight about that. I think it’s partly to do with my understanding of language as a time based medium. I hear it sonically, I write it sonically, I produce it in terms of rhythms, I produce it highly constructed. That sounds like audio-video, and performance, to me, as much as the page. And even the page is something that I have always had a visual relationship to. I’m a pain-in-the-butt demon to work with because I have ideas about what the page should look like. That’s as much as I understand. That there is a sharing of time-based. That’s all I know.

What type of anchor points do you use within time, and your experience of it, yourself?

It’s not static, it’s not a fixed point. I’ve been thinking recently about becoming an elder. And not just becoming one, but anchoring myself to time as, ‘Oh, I am an elder’. And an elder’s relationship to time is very acute. There aren’t tomorrows. When you’re thirty there’s tomorrows and then some. That’s a relationship to time that’s very different than there not being futurity. I rather like it. I like it a lot. It makes things very vivid. I think probably for almost everyone, what you call the anchor to time, changes—if we get to live a bit of decades. I was thinking about that sense of time we almost lose, that non-time time of the inquisitive child—you can look at something, and you can look at it, it seems like hours. We almost don’t retrieve that at other times in our life. It’s really an interesting temporal relationship.

Thinking about language as a time-based medium, and then your work with performance, and this idea of location, I was interested by your decision to locate voice outside person, or within objects. For example, in Modern Love there is the passage where the protagonist is in India and the environment almost becomes the voice and character that is playing out. Also, thinking about your piece Pillow Talk (2003).

Those are two different things. But to answer one—I have a longstanding interest in the inanimate animated by mind and animated by language, which we all do and have done. It’s so accessible and common to all of us, but I’ve kind of pulled it out of the fabric to think about it, to make works not about it, but to make works be that. They’re vessels of memory. Inanimate things are archives of the invisible. I’ve been interested in unthreading those invisible things. And different cultures with different belief systems approach that notion of the inanimate very differently, and how the inanimate is animated by mind or language. A work of mine from 2013 called SpeakChamber, involves three different cultural belief systems that negotiate that place. I should be finished with it, but I’m working on some spoken texts now, for these things I call ‘talking photographs’, which is what Pillow Talk is, and damn. There I am again. With an object that is a vehicle for simply being an object in a present moment, but is also an object whose biography involves Mao and China and the cultural revolution and you know, here we go. Because I don’t write or think in stories, these become the ignition of narrative, from an idea not from a story. But, in that segment of Modern Love, that’s more about polyvocal narrative—you have a preceding vocality, that’s probably identified by an ‘I’, or a character by name, and then suddenly that vocal isn’t what’s vocalizing. It becomes an unnamed vocalizing. And then by the end it actually moves into a third person narrative because it says ‘the woman was traveling alone in India. She was eating ice-cream because it was her birthday’. You are the reader. You know that’s the ‘I’ character that you already have met in the book. But that’s language’s potential for a slight of hand. Again, I don’t do that as a technical feat. To talk about that interior/exterior thing, we do it all the time in our mind. Thinking, daydreaming, wandering about. I mean you’re somebody else, you’re thinking for somebody else, an old version of yourself, you’re remembering, and you’re not confused. It’s not confusing to live in a vocal polyphonic environment. And it’s something that has engaged me in my writing, and continues to.

I haven’t quite thought of it like that before. That when it’s made so concrete on a page, when not stating subject or voice, it appears confusing, but it’s something that we experience very fluidly all the time.

Yes, we do. And you’re not alone. I’ve had my time to dwell on it because it’s a part of my work and of me so, I’ve lived in that room for a while. And now in that room is dreams, and people who contact us from the dead. The work I donated to the auction [Ugly Duckling Presse’s Art Auction, May 2017] is spirit writing. I’ve been making a project called Nightwriters, which is basically an insomniac narrator whose bed is under a sky light. The only thing she has to do is look through the skylight and get really interested in stars and she starts drawing them and making asterisms and her hand becomes guided by, or inhabited by, something. So three astronomers come through the skylight and spirit write and so she, and therefore we the readers, become acquainted with three women who most of us haven’t heard of: Caroline Herschel, Annie Jump Cannon, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt— three major astronomers. So now in that room of polyphony are the ‘voices’ of these spirit writers. I know it was always a con, spirit writing, but I think it’s interesting that we even, as a culture, as a species, invent these things.

There’s desperation in there.

Yeah, they reflect this desire, and a loss. And my drawings are chalk on black paper because the con artists in the séances doing spirit writing would often use chalk boards—it was a trope of séances. I think it was because then they could wipe it off and not get arrested.

Reading about your new work, and the spiritual side of it, I was considering your close working relationship with Tony Oursler, and wondering whether that influence has come from working with him throughout your career? Or has it always been something very intrinsic to yourself?

No, no, it was something that cemented a friendship more than 30 years ago. It was a common interest, and believe me, there aren’t that many people, especially at the time, who would have a ‘serious’ conversation about those seemingly absurd belief systems. I knew things he didn’t know and vice versa, and we have continued that conversation for over 30 years. Maybe some people will know of Tony and Imponderable (2015 - 2016), which is a recent, spectacular work at MoMA. 5-D film work, also big archive, also 500 page book with many essays in it about some of the beliefs and practices that he’s been interested in for most of his life. One of the interests that we also share is in the invisible histories—the discredited and ignored. Something like spirit writing, at times is also fueled by specific, topical events. The Civil War spurred con artists into both spirit writing and spirit photography, preying on the grief of the country which had never lost that many people to a war. It was a death consumed, death obsessed nation. If you weren’t obsessed with civil rights you were obsessed with the death produced by the Civil War, and in that context certain so-called spiritual ideas came on. Yet if now you are reading about the Civil War, it’s very unlikely that you would read a section about that part of the history of the nation and of that time. They’re willfully and maliciously ignored, hierarchy-ed down.

Do you have any idea why it’s at this point in your work that you’re coming to start to really try and work with these spiritualities?

I can’t say that I do. I’m offended by people being superficial about so-called spirituality. And I have private interests that have remained private for most of my life and it’s very willful on my part to turn that around—which I did a little bit in SpeakChamber. It came from a commitment to the material that I was mentioning earlier, about this investigation of the inanimate. And to knowing a community of Tibetans for decades, and having travelled and so on, I was aware of an astonishing belief system that is unknown to us. Where an inanimate thing is penetrated and co-habited by the mind, and by repeated practice and visualization and, it’s not correct to call it prayer, but it’s a thinking. That slapped me in the face in 1977 when I first encountered it. It really was a jolt and I never put it down. So with SpeakChamber it was like OK, if I’m really getting down on this interaction between the animate and the inanimate, and want a heterogeneous approach to it, there’s this glaring example that I know. A very old friend idea I activated. Amateur astronomy is another old friend, a huge part of me, and I wanted these three astronomers to have place in a narrative that I’m writing. And I’ll be god-damned if I’m gonna write a researched, historical fiction where I make them walk around and talk and wear clothes and be this thing called a character. Characters are abhorrent. I don’t get it as a device. So I had to get them into the narrative. Spirit writing was how I could draw them literally into the narrative. This is my folly, and everyone can have a good laugh—to me that is a very legitimate way to locate in the narrative, through the hand that’s drawing. Much more legitimate than this creaky, clanky old thing called character that has to walk and wear clothes.

Very concrete formulations...

Yeah, although never go to the bathroom somehow. And I had spirit writing at hand because I had a huge, ongoing, years old interest in it. I actually have an engagement with handwriting, period. I have a fascination with it, with handwriting and artists who make their work with handwriting. Which is rather unusual, but there are a few.

That intrigues me. Looking through your work, it’s so much placed into technologies, for example your current project, ‘Radios’. How does that weave together?

They’re ideas that coexist and I don’t think they’re in conflict with each other. The handwriting and the ever-changing technology I’ve had to learn for wanting to make a certain work—just co-existing interests. Thinking about handwriting now is different to 20 years ago, simply because it’s really disappearing. I have students now who aren’t taught to write by hand.

How do you feel about that?

Well you know, we do lose things and things change things. Generally, if one is living in a moment where something is disappearing, people get very upset and up in arms and it’s the end of civilization or something. But I’ve read a lot about technology over time. This is in my bag right now [DeJong pulls out a book]—Haunted Media, Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television by Jeffrey Sconce, which is a really interesting book about belief systems which inform the rise of certain technologies. For me, the rise or the appearance of new technologies has been in my life since birth, so other things have dropped off. It’s just how it is. It doesn’t alarm me.

Does it affect the way you think about making work? Within your work there seems to be thoughts on broadcast or dissemination or communication. Do you have to very directly think about those terms of communication, or do you find you just flow with the media?

Well, communication is a snaggy word. If I thought about communication I would probably be a greater participant in social media or have a podcast. So I don’t think of it that much as communication—isn’t that interesting? I think of it as form of function and materializing work. I am working on something where there would be a more regular audio presence on the internet. A performance stops and starts and then it’s gone. But the internet is not discreet. It’s just there. Always and anyone.

There’s something about placing the ephemeral, you dealt so much with that...

I am, I am an ephemeralist.

To take an ephemeral moment and place it somewhere that then is, not always broadcast, but accessed at different points.

Yeah, and it’s a very different kind of time-based time. I mean, now in our culture and in several other cultures we know about personal access. Every day, every hour of the day — we don’t even think about it. It’s actually not that old.

Going back to that idea of communication, when I used that term I was more thinking about it in terms of your ability to feed your ideas through certain mediums, and the reception of this in a particular way. Has that had to change? Have you enjoyed the reception changing?

Oh I see. You reminded me that I want to back up to —I’ll try to say this very simply. I was never burdened by what a writer is. Which in my culture, and especially in my city, New York City, it is very conservative and rigid. It’s so constricting. I had an interest and ambition, an engagement with how language could act, how language could perform, where language could operate, where it might be sited. Now those things involved having to invent the locations and the sitings and hence—‘she makes talking objects!’, and talking photographs and public artworks and language infested, language infused things. That precedes an involvement with technology. The involvement with technology is necessitated by this investigating where language might go other than the page. One has ideas for forms and then to make those—I had to know and learn and become familiar with technology so I could use it. I wouldn’t say that I’m interested in technology. I’m not somebody who’s going to start writing essays about the role of technology in culture and what’s happened to handwriting. I might. Until recently that wasn’t the interest—it was need to know. I learned, I taught myself, I took little tutorials, I paid people to teach me. Often, a technological part of a work will be truly beyond me. So I collaborate with technicians frequently, and work together with their knowledge to make the idea happen. The one time that technology interested me, and that I went after it, was for the escape from the sequential—when mouse-driven navigation came into being. That’s what it presented itself to me as—an interesting escape, and another way to construct narrative. So right away it was the technologies that could do something. I think it was Stephen Vitiello who introduced the idea of Tony Oursler, Constance, and Stephen collaborating, and then that collaboration ended up being a commission of Dia’s (1995). Before our collaboration, Dia’s commissions were concrete. There was that tradition—an exhibition for a year of material work, mostly men, minimal. But the new director, Michael Govan, was very receptive to the idea of a digital work. So there was a vehicle, a way to make that work. It was a very new coding, it was painful. Just made our hair fall out how long and hard it was. Then we were fools because we thought that CD-Roms had entered the world as a way of experiencing time based work. Wrong. They vanished. They were like 8- track audio tapes. They were here and gone. Now it could just be on a cloud. You can still find a CD player but you can’t find the hardware and software to drive a CD-Rom.

And it doesn’t bother you that that access has been lost now?

It doesn’t bother me, oddly. Also, the prospect of correcting it is beyond me. I’m really busy and the prospect of taking that on as a project is hugely time consuming. But it’s interesting— there’s three of us and no one is bringing this thing on fire as an idea. It’s strange.

I feel like we live in a world where we are constantly trying to grapple to hold onto things. It’s funny, I feel you can tell you’re a time-based medium artist because you’re fine that things have been and gone and its done it’s thing—when artists are often so precious about work and preventing the deterioration of work.

Yeah, yeah. Partly initiated by the reissue of Modern Love, I’ve been thinking about old work. I live on many streets. One of those streets is the visual art world and it started me thinking about ‘wow, people have retrospectives,’ you know, at a certain age and a certain accumulation of work. I thought up a notion of a time-based retrospective that I’ll do next season, wherein, instead of there being an exhibition where all the work is in one place at one time, there are performances over time that address all of the work in different combinations of programming the nights. So to do that I had to go into a closet and dig out all the old formats for the performances that I did. They start with cassette videos this big [shows with hands] and move forward into mini DV tape—that’s the most current. There’s one thing that’s on a card. So everything before the card, even if it’s digital, still has to be re- formatted. It all has to be re-formatted. To go onto media players. It’s such a job.

For more information about Modern Love and to order a copy, click here.

Well-known for her contributions to downtown New York's performance art and media art scene of the 1970s and '80s, and considered one of the progenitors of media art, or “time-based media,” Constance DeJong has worked for over three decades on narrative form within the context of avant-garde music and contemporary art. DeJong’s writing extends off the page through the body, resonating out of objects and into the space of the theater. DeJong extends her prose writing into multiple forms— performances, audio installations, print texts, electronic objects, and audio and video works. In 1983, DeJong composed the libretto for the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha. Since 1983, she has collaborated with Tony Ourlser on numerous performance and video works. DeJong has also been a writing collaborator with The Builder’s Association on SuperVision, 2005. Her books include Modern Love, I.T.I.L.O.E., and SpeakChamber and her work is included in the anthologies Up is Up, But So is Down: Downtown Literary Scene (NYU Press), Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT), and Wild History(Tanam). She is a recipient of awards from NYSCA for Media Production, NYFA for New Genres, and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Media Production, among others. She has exhibited and performed both locally and internationally at venues such as the Walker Art Museum, the Wexner Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in New York at The Kitchen, Threadwaxing Space, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Dia Center for the Arts. DeJong teaches at Hunter College for the MFA and BA in Fine Arts.

#constancedejong #modern love #read #author interviews

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krishnaprasad-blog · 4 years

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Karnataka is the outlier in peninsular India—the only state in the South that the BJP has managed to come to power, by hook and by crook. Twice.

There is a plethora of political reasons for this, including caste realignment, but there can be little doubt that the Kannada media has played a hands-on role in paving the way for the Hindu nationalist party to gain a foothold, and then obtain a stranglehold, in a progressive state known for pioneering social reforms.

Politically invested media owners, slimy media houses, ideologically indoctrinated editors, anchors and reporters—and community and mutt affiliations—have steadfastly, subterraneously and perhaps irredeemably communalised the Kannada media landscape like in no other state below the Vindhyas.

***

The fundamentalist bread-and-butter issues—Idgah maidan in Hubli; Bababudangiri in Chikamagalur; Tipu Sultan in Mysore, etc—have hogged headlines and dominated the discourse in Karnataka for the better part of the last two decades.

But Mangalore occupies a very special place. Despite its high literacy and syncretic culture, Mangalore has been command central of the Hindutva laboratory on the west coast from around the 1992 demolition of the Babri masjid.

It has also been the testing ground for the sangh parivar’s pet themes: love jihad; moral policing; gau raksha.

The Kannada news media has played its dutiful part in foregrounding this drip-feed. In the process, it has also helped stereotype the minorities, spawned anti-intellectualism, and subconsciously conditioned the minds of voters, present and future.

(As the IT capital of the country, Karnataka is fittingly the motherboard of “fake news”, with overt and covert political-business support. And it was in Bangalore, of course, that the journalist Gauri Lankesh was shot dead in her home.)

***

The breathless coverage of the discovery of a “live bomb” at Mangalore airport on Monday, January 20, leading up to the “surrender” of the “suspect” two days later, January 22, offers a window into the manner in which mainstream Kannada media is dangerously feeding the fears and fantasies of the “majority”—and feeding off it.

It makes for a revolting spectacle.

The reported facts of the Mangalore “live bomb” case are:

1) Mangalore police said CISF personnel found a black unattended backpack near the arrival terminal of the airport around 9 am on January 20.

2) The suspected “bomb”, found in a steel box in the bag, was defused around 5.30 pm, some 3 km away from where it was found.

3) CCTV footage released by the police showed the possible suspect, a middle-aged man wearing a cap, arriving in an autorickshaw.

4) No arrest was made till end of day.

Yet, with nearly no other facts at their command, the Kannada newspapers of the next day were speculating on the motive behind the purported “attack”, pointing at a wider “gameplan”, and essentially indulging in loud dog whistling that left little to the imagination on who and what they were hinting at, if not targetting.

And who it would eventually benefit.

***

The No.1 Kannada daily is Vijaya Karnataka from The Times of India group.

Its editor is Hariprakash Konemane, a former personal assistant to Pramod Mutalik, the Bajrang Dal leader who founded the Sri Rama Sena, which hit the headlines in 2009 for attacking young men and women in a pub in Mangalore, citing a threat to “Indian values”.

Vijaya Karnataka‘s lead headline on January 21 was more opinion than reporting, a familiar failing of the news media trying to keep with social media often by copying it.

“Pauratvakke pratikara?” read the VK headline (below) straight-up.

In plain English, was the Mangalore bomb “revenge” for the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)?

The un-bylined news report, citing unnamed sources, was pure speculation:

“After the killing of two people in police firing in the anti-CAA protests in Mangalore, there was much talk that there would a big attack. Was the Mangalore bomb a part of that plan?”

Vijaya Karnataka did not stop there.

A breathtaking editorial (below) in the same issue said that there was no doubt that the “bomb” was the handiwork of a “well-trained group of terrorists”. And, “looking at the manner in which the bomb had been wired and placed”, it also concluded that it was a “sophisticated bomb”.

VK wondered loudly if only locals were involved or “international organisations” were behind it.

“It should be investigated if there was a connection between the suspected anti-social elements who took part in the anti-CAA protests in Mangalore and the bomb,” concluded the VK editorial.

“It’s inexcusable if the masterminds behind the “bomb” made use of the CAA protests for their dastardly act.”

When the police zero in on a local Hindu, Aditya Rao of Manipal the next day, Vijaya Karnataka goes all quiet. Its headline (“bomb-ge spotakha twist”) now talks of an “explosive twist to the ‘bomb'”, although the twist is more to its own artifice and prejudice.

As the Twitter handle “@NoumChomsky” pointed out, there is no talk of #CAA in the VK report on day two, after the police have started rounding up suspects.

And when the “suspect” Aditya Rao improbably walks into the state police chief’s office in Bangalore, 300 km away, and turns himself in on the morning of January 22, Vijaya Karnataka relegates the news to two columns with the bland headline: “Bomber surrender”.

The identity of the suspect, Aditya Rao, is revealed only in the strap below the headline.

***

The editorialisation of the Mangalore “live bomb” and the fear-mongering is a trend disturbingly visible across Kannada newspapers.

The second-largest selling Kannada daily Vijaya Vani—owned by former BJP MP and MLA Vijay Sankeshwar who owned Vijaya Karnataka before selling it to the Times group in 2006—doesn’t take the CAA route but links it to January 26.

“Bomb bhayotpadane (bomb terrorism)” says the headline (below), with ‘bhaya‘ (fear) in red.

“Attempt to spread massive fear before Republic Day,” asserts the strap above the headline.

A “reality check” at bus and railway stations after the airport incident is the Vijaya Vani lead on day two (below). By now, police have zeroed in on nearly a dozen suspects. The rumoured detention of an “unemployed” individual, Aditya Rao of nearby Manipal, gets a cursory single-column mention in the lead package, .

When the mysterious “surrender” of Aditya Rao is announced in Bangalore on January 22, Vijaya Vani triumphantly claims the suspect gave himself up because he was “afraid of being shot by the police”.

For the record: Vijay Vani‘s founder Vijay Sankeshwar was decorated with the Padma Sri in this year’s Republic Day honours list. He had met Narendra Modi on January 14. Sankeshwar’s son Anand Sankeshwar “interviewed” Modi before last year’s general elections.

Also for the record: Vijaya Karnataka‘s editor Hariprakash Konemane was a 9 pm presenter at Dighvijay News, a TV news channel launched by Sankeshwar, before he hopped over.

***

Kannada Prabha, the daily newspaper which the BJP Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar bought from the New Indian Express group in 2011, called the improvised explosive device in Mangalore “massive”, putting its weight at 10 kg.

“Karnataka trembles to biggest live bomb,” screamed the double-decker headline (below).

Like Vijaya Karnataka, Kannada Prabha had an editorial (below) on the day after the incident.

Although the “bomb” was safely defused, KP said it was clear that a “team of terrorists” was active in the state. It linked the discovery of the Mangalore “bomb” to a spate of reports of alleged “terrorist” activities against the backdrop of the anti-CAA protests.

Kannada Prabha declared that the time it took the police to defuse the “bomb” (nearly 8 hours) was proof of its sophisticated nature. It is a cause for alarm that such men are on the soil of Karnataka. Since it was an act of terror, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) would be involved, Kannada Prabha said.

(The unemployed “suspect”, Aditya Rao, who was instantly branded as “mentally disturbed” by the state’s home minister Basavaraj Bommai, later claimed he had picked up the procedure to assemble the “bomb” from YouTube.)

Kannada Prabha momentarily stepped off its high-octane coverage on day two with the strap line above the headline (below) grandly claiming, apropos of nothing, that initial investigations showed “No involvement of Islamist terrorists”.

***

Hosa Digantha, a suspected sangh operation, which magically produced a 32-page special edition to mark the Supreme Court judgment on Ayodhya last November, had surprisingly sober coverage on page one vis-a-vis its peers.

“Sajeeva bomb patthe” (live bomb found) was the bland headline (below).

But a local supplement in Manalore titled ‘Sangam‘ expectedly had blanket coverage of the “bomb” incident, with the insinuatory headline “Bandralla angalakke” (colloquial for “and so they have arrived”).

A box item on the front page of the supplement patted itself on its back, harking back to a story three days earlier (below) which spoke of the “threat” posed by “thousands” of unidentified people “without names and without addresses” all over the coastal belt.

But the Mangalore “bomb” was too juicy for balance and nuance. On day two, Hosa Digantha reported exclusively that the alleged airport “suspect” also had the Manjunatheshwara Temple in nearby Kadri, in his eyesight.

“Kadri devala guri?” read the lead headline (below), with a box item suggesting that the 30,000-40,000 devotees attending the Brahmotsava festival at the temple could have been at risk.

In an editorial (below), Hosa Digantha lambasted former chief minister H.D. Kumaraswamy for making light of the “bomb”.

HDK’s cardinal crime in the newspaper’s eyes was to point out that the purported “bomb” did not have a timer (as it did not go off for 8 hours till defused) and seemed amateurish given the kind of shimmery (“minimini“) powder found in it.

“When it comes to national security, politicians must be one with the army and the police. Instead, Kumaraswamy is handing out judgments that there was nothing in the “bomb”. This is not the first time he is doing so. He had done the same when seven SDPI persons were arrested in Bangalore,” the editorial said.

(“Socialist Democratic Party of India” is now the red rag in BJP-ruled Karnataka, with talk of banning it for its alleged links with the Islamist Popular Front of India”)

But when the “suspect” surrendered, and it turns out to be the “unemployed and mentally disturbed” Aditya Rao, Hosa Digantha crunched the development into a two-column story below the fold. It also handed him the benefit of the doubt. The alleged bomber, said the paper, was “frustrated with the system”.

***

The January 21 front page of Vishwa Vani, edited by Vishweshwar Bhat, a former officer on special duty to the late Union minister Ananth Kumar, who was previously editor of both Vijaya Karnataka and Kannada Prabha, has vanished from the paper’s website without explanation.

But a screenshot taken from Twitter (below) shows that it too jumped the gun and attributed the Mangalore “bomb” to the anti-CAA protests and the police firing which claimed two lives.

When Aditya Rao surrenders, Vishwa Vani talks of the man who had scared the “entire nation”. The paper reveals that Rao had made similar prank calls to the Bangalore international airport when he failed to secure a job in the airline industry.

The newspaper also front pages state home minister Basavaraj Bommai’s questionable claim that the alleged “suspect” was “mentally disturbed”.

***

Among the big dailies, the only speck of what could pass off as balanced coverage came from the No.3 Kannada daily Praja Vani of the Deccan Herald group, which refrained from linking it to the anti-CAA protests in Mangalore and the police firing, or to the ensuing Republic Day.

In fact, on the day after the incident, the paper placed the Mangalore “bomb” story below its own exclusive of the homes of Kannadigas being razed by suddenly and suitably overactive Bangalore civic authorities who thought they were “Bangladeshis”.

The coverage of the Mangalore “bomb” on the subsequent two days in Praja Vani was similarly sans sensationalism but far from probing. Kannada journalism is now at that delicate stage when even routine, matter-of-fact reporting seems an act of heroism.

***

The only other Kannada publication that showed sound news judgement and refused to brand the “bomb” or speculate on the motives was the Mangalore newspaper Vartha Bharti.

Its headline, like that of Hosa Digantha and Praja Vani, was as-is:

“Explosive found at airport”.

A box item on page one of Vartha Bharti also answered the apprehensions of Vijaya Karnataka and Kannada Prabha. Outdated equipment, it revealed, was the reason it had taken nearly eight hours for the “sophisticated bomb” to be defused.

Vartha Bharati was the only mainline Kannada newspaper to carry Aditya Rao‘s name prominently in its headlines (below), both when the police were looking for him and when he “surrendered”.

Vartha Bharti was also the only Kannada newspaper to call out the rest of the Kannada media for their unbridled fear-mongering.

On the day after the incident, January 21, the paper said in an editorial (below) that the state seemed to be suddenly overrun by “maadhyamagalu shrishtisiruva ugraru” (media-created terrorists), after the attempts to quell the anti-CAA protests had failed.

“It is the duty of the police to clarify on the fake and imaginary stories of terrorists on the loose in Mangalore that have been published in a number of publications. Instead, by remaining mute, the police is validating the fiction,” the editorial said.

After Aditya Rao‘s formal “surrender”, Vartha Bharti followed up its outrage at the bias in the media coverage with another searing editorial.

“On the surface, it looks like the Mangalore ‘bomb’ incident was a premeditated conspiracy involving sections of the media, the police and the sangh parivar.

“Aditya Rao‘s role was small. There is no doubt that the media turned a small explosive into a massive bomb.

“If spreading hatred against members of another community, and if spreading fear in society are signs of mental disturbance, then this incident proves that newspapers and TV news channels are suffering from it,” the editorial (below) thundered.

“In just one day, the people of the state have realised who the real terrorists who are trying to destroy our society are. Today, Aditya Rao is in custody. But those who turned his small explosive into a massive bomb are getting ready for new explosions. If Aditya‘s name had been Adil, the same media would exploded homes all day.

“Therefore, the time has come to conduct these media personnel to a mental test and to supply the necessary medicines.”

***

In contrast to the rage of Vartha Bharti, the coverage of Udaya Vani, the other local Kannada newspaper headquartered out of Aditya Rao‘s hometown Manipal, was placid with Aditya Rao‘s name taking a low profile in the strap line .

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And the Hubli-based Samyukta Karnataka was no different.

***

Admittedly, journalism is a human exercise, and many mistakes do happen in the speed of reporting.

But the decidedly slanted coverage of Kannada newspapers, which had nearly 12-14 hours to stitch up reporting unlike 24×7 TV news channels, and the rush to instant judgement, points to a deeper systemic problem in Kannada journalism.

Across the board, the uncritical coverage reveals a near-total lack of skill sets in as basic a field of reporting as crime, or in writing editorials. Obvious questions that the newspapers ought to have asked of the government and the police on the spurt in incidents since the BJP came to power lay buried.

A merry-go-round where reporters and editors jump jobs and swap positions at different organisations every few years, and place chelas and chamchas, proteges and relatives in charge while leaving, appears to have coloured a vast portion of the Kannada media canvas in one uniform shade.

And it isn’t white.

Or green.

Or blue.

***

Also read: Bangalore journo in plot to kill editor, columnist?

9 lessons a “terror-suspect” journalist learnt in jail

A Hindu bomber detonates the Mangalore ‘bomb’ in the face of Kannada news media. And a newspaper suggests mental tests and medical treatment for the ‘real terrorists’: embedded editors, owners and TV anchors. Karnataka is the outlier in peninsular India---the only state in the South that the BJP has managed to come to power, by hook and by crook.

#BJP #Churumuri #Hosa Digantha #IJR #Indian Journalism Review #Kannada Prabha #Mangalore Bomb #Narendra Modi #Praja Vani #Rajeev Chandrasekhar #RSS #Samyukta Karnataka #Udaya Vani #Vartha Bharti #Vijay Sankeshwar #Vijaya Karnataka #Vijaya Vani #Vishwa Vani #Vishweshwar Bhat

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essaysbyalexa · 6 years

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A Mercurial Player

Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet is not completely original, strictly speaking, as this theater adaptation is based on Arthur Brooke’s 1562 poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet. That is not to attack Shakespeare’s creativity, or accuse him of plagiarism—to do so would conflate the modern notion of “intellectual property” with the looser conception of authorship and ownership in Shakespeare’s time—but rather to suggest that any discrepancy between Brooke’s poem and the play stands out as a deliberate choice. With regards to major plot and structure, Romeo and Juliet is actually quite faithful to Romeus and Juliet, save for the recasting of a single character: Mercutio. He is present in Brooke’s poem, but is only mentioned in passing as a rival suitor looking to seize Juliet’s hand in marriage between his own icy palms.[1] Brooke’s Mercutio has no dialogue and is described as “courteous of his speech, and pleasant of device”—certainly not at all characteristic of Shakespeare’s Mercutio, who has an abundance of spoken lines and is often conducts himself in a less than courteous manner.[2] This change does not alter the course of the play as a whole, as it ultimately ends in the same tragedy of lovers, but certain events are considerably different, and Mercutio’s presence is integral to the play. Therefore, as one of the few deviations from the original source material, it follows that Shakespeare’s decision to emphasize and embellish the role of Mercutio in his version of the story is of great significance.

Everything Mercutio does is a theatrical act, both in the sense that he is a character in a play and quite a “character” to the inhabitants of Verona. Although Romeo had no choice but to disguise himself in order to attend Capulet’s party, it was completely unnecessary for Mercutio to follow suit. In fact, he was formally invited to the party, and was explicitly listed on the invitation given to Peter, as the servant was requested to contact “Mercutio and his brother Valentine,” among others.[3] Thus, he attended the party as a gatecrasher purely for its own sake—perhaps in solidarity with Romeo and Benvolio, perhaps as a sort of performance, but not to protect his identity. He delights in the melodrama of it all, calling for “a case to put [his] visage in,” and jokes about covering his own “visor for a visor,” excited to hide behind a mask and assume a new persona.[4] However, as it happened, Mercutio’s masked persona was indistinguishable from his normal self. Perhaps his failure to mask his personality is because his everyday disposition was already an affectation, or because he was already as theatrical as possible—or perhaps he forgot. Either way, Mercutio’s pointless disguise could not mask his trademark wit. In his excitement to attend the banquet, Mercutio chides his friends’ sluggishness and complains that they are “burn[ing] daylight,” which Romeo remarks is untrue.[5] Mercutio takes Romeo’s lack of excitement as his failure to understand a figure of speech, to which Mercutio responds with a whimsical pair of rhyming couplets explaining that they “waste [their] lights in vain,” and therefore must be on their way.[6] It is ironic, but not out of character, that Mercutio “clarifies” his previous statement with an even more complicated remark; though he may be acting facetiously by further cloaking his language in lyric, both Romeo and the audience are made aware that everything Mercutio does is a form of performance.

Mercutio is markedly more theatrical than any other characters in the play; sarcastic, gratuitously poetic, and witty to a fault, he is always acting for the sake of an audience. This audience is actually twofold: partly he performs for the citizens of Verona, but he also performs for the people of England who are watching these Shakespearean plays. Mercutio’s very presence is what makes Romeo and Juliet distinct from Brooke’s poem, what transforms the poem into a play—other characters in Romeo and Juliet speak in verse and use elevated language, but Mercutio sets the standard of theatricality and inserts himself into the events of Romeus to make it distinctly Romeo. Even within the play, other characters are perplexed by his lines: Mercutio goes on a tangent about Tybalt’s excellent fencing skills, “the immortal passado, the punto reverso, the hai!”—to which Benvolio simply replies, “The what?”[7] In some sense, Mercutio is Shakespeare’s creative force acting directly upon the Brooke poem, an interloper who is both the character and the actor playing him.

Mercutio’s death at the hands of Tybalt is purely Shakespeare’s creation, and it is this death that “furnish[es] an entirely different motive from that assigned by Brooke for Romeo’s slaying of Tybalt,” though the end result is ultimately the same.[8] Mercutio’s death almost feels staged—not just as a scene in a play (although of course it is), but artificial in a way that other scenes are not. Tybalt originally intended to fight Romeo, but falls for Mercutio’s taunt and duels with him instead. Immediately upon Tybalt’s entrance, Mercutio becomes aggressive, threatening to bring out his “fiddlestick” that “shall make [Tybalt] dance.”[9] As a neutral party between the feuding families of Verona, Mercutio’s hostility stems not from the fact that Tybalt is a Capulet; Mercutio is personally offended by Tybalt’s word choice, taking “consort” as an insult, even though the rather simple Tybalt likely meant nothing by it.[10] In a play full of deep-seated familial hatred and ancient vendettas that would rightfully warrant a thirst for bloodshed, Mercutio is so volatile that the remotest chance of being insulted is grounds for a swordfight. He does have some stake in the familial rivalry, given that his two close friends are Montagues, but this is not what motivates him to bait Tybalt into a fight—he simply wants to be part of the action, a participant in the great battle waged upon the stage. To him, fencing is “simply music carried out by other means,” which proves irresistible to one “for whom all is sport, artifice, masque, wit-contest or body-contest.”[11]

Playing the role of an actor, Mercutio believes that the fight’s pre-scripted outcome will guarantee his victory; at first, this does seem to be the case, but Romeo’s well-meaning yet unexpected intervention threw everything out of balance, allowing Tybalt to deliver a mortal blow. This is one of the few times in the play we see Mercutio “break character” by being completely serious, even if just for a moment. His accusatory remark towards Romeo is buried under humorous quips, but is ultimately quite blunt: “Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm.”[12] This rare moment of sincerity betrays Mercutio’s genuine surprise, for he had not considered the possibility of defeat; this was not written in the script, so to speak. Or rather, it was written in the script for everyone but Mercutio himself, who is suddenly clueless with regards to the stage directions of the players around him. Now Mercutio finds his role reversed, leaving him wounded on the stage floor while the actors around him continue reading from the script. One literary critic suggests that his death could either be “a consequence of the exceptional vitality of his character,” or else serve a greater function within the play—but these do not have to be mutually exclusive possibilities.[13] Mercutio’s death was necessary lest he overshadow the titular characters’ presence, but also very clearly marked the play’s transition from mild humorous tension to outright tragedy. In his last hour, Mercutio attempts to jest that Romeo will “find [him] a grave man,” punning on his ever-encroaching end, but ultimately ends on a note of bitterness as he casts “a plague a both [Montague and Capulet’s] houses.”[14] And yet, for all his grandeur, Mercutio dies an unceremonious offstage death. Romeo then kills Tybalt, leading to the same tragic chain of events that befell Romeus. For all Shakespeare’s intervention and adaptation, the play ends just as the poem did.

Dead by the third act, Mercutio is by all means a secondary character never even written into the original narrative. Yet, through his commanding presence and theatricality, Shakespeare propels Mercutio to the forefront of the cast, if only for a brief time. If Mercutio seems like an odd character to be in a tragedy, that is because he was never supposed to be in the story in the first place, or at least not as more than a passing reference. Though Mercutio may be more suited for a comedy, his inclusion in the play is distinctly Shakespearean—to have a character with elevated language, clever allusions, and a sense of metatheater is Shakespeare’s trademark, even if said character cannot live through the whole play. Looking beyond the overt misfortune of the eponymous lovers, Romeo and Juliet is tragic in part because such an effervescent persona was snuffed out so suddenly. Whereas Brooke’s poem presented the story as unilaterally doomed, Shakespeare’s play is made all the more depressing by the stark contrast between its most dramatic and humorous aspects and its unavoidably grim conclusion.

[1] Brooke, Arthur. Romeus and Juliet. (lines 261-2: “That frozen mountain ice was never half so cold, / As were his hands…”)

[2] Ibid, line 256.

[3] Act One, Scene Two, line 68.

[4] Act One, Scene Four, lines 29-30.

[5] Act One, Scene Four, line 43.

[6] Act One, Scene Four, line 45.

[7] Act Two, Scene Four, lines 25-7.

[8] Law, Robert Adger. “On Shakespeare’s Changes of His Source Material in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’” Studies in English, no. 9, 1929, page 89.

[9] Act Three, Scene One, lines 47-8.

[10] Act Three, Scene One, line 45.

[11] Albright, Daniel. “The Veronese Social Code.” Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres, NED - New edition, Boydell and Brewer, 2007, page 42.

[12] Act Three, Scene One, lines 101-2.

[13] Utterback, Raymond. “The Death of Mercutio.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 2, 1973, page 105.

[14] Act Three, Scene One, lines 97, 105.

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krishnaprasad-blog · 4 years

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Karnataka is the outlier in peninsular India—the only state in the South that the BJP has managed to come to power, by hook and by crook. Twice.

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It has also been the testing ground for the sangh parivar’s pet themes: love jihad; moral policing; gau raksha.

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It makes for a revolting spectacle.

The reported facts of the Mangalore “live bomb” case are:

1) Mangalore police said CISF personnel found a black unattended backpack near the arrival terminal of the airport around 9 am on January 20.

2) The suspected “bomb”, found in a steel box in the bag, was defused around 5.30 pm, some 3 km away from where it was found.

3) CCTV footage released by the police showed the possible suspect, a middle-aged man wearing a cap, arriving in an autorickshaw.

4) No arrest was made till end of day.

And who it would eventually benefit.

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The No.1 Kannada daily is Vijaya Karnataka from The Times of India group.

Vijaya Karnataka‘s lead headline on January 21 was more opinion than reporting, a familiar failing of the news media trying to keep with social media often by copying it.

“Pauratvakke pratikara?” read the VK headline (below) straight-up.

In plain English, was the Mangalore bomb “revenge” for the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)?

The un-bylined news report, citing unnamed sources, was pure speculation:

“After the killing of two people in police firing in the anti-CAA protests in Mangalore, there was much talk that there would a big attack. Was the Mangalore bomb a part of that plan?”

Vijaya Karnataka did not stop there.

VK wondered loudly if only locals were involved or “international organisations” were behind it.

“It should be investigated if there was a connection between the suspected anti-social elements who took part in the anti-CAA protests in Mangalore and the bomb,” concluded the VK editorial.

“It’s inexcusable if the masterminds behind the “bomb” made use of the CAA protests for their dastardly act.”

As the Twitter handle “@NoumChomsky” pointed out, there is no talk of #CAA in the VK report on day two, after the police have started rounding up suspects.

The identity of the suspect, Aditya Rao, is revealed only in the strap below the headline.

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The editorialisation of the Mangalore “live bomb” and the fear-mongering is a trend disturbingly visible across Kannada newspapers.

“Bomb bhayotpadane (bomb terrorism)” says the headline (below), with ‘bhaya‘ (fear) in red.

“Attempt to spread massive fear before Republic Day,” asserts the strap above the headline.

Also for the record: Vijaya Karnataka‘s editor Hariprakash Konemane was a 9 pm presenter at Dighvijay News, a TV news channel launched by Sankeshwar, before he hopped over.

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“Karnataka trembles to biggest live bomb,” screamed the double-decker headline (below).

Like Vijaya Karnataka, Kannada Prabha had an editorial (below) on the day after the incident.

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Hosa Digantha, a suspected sangh operation, which magically produced a 32-page special edition to mark the Supreme Court judgment on Ayodhya last November, had comparatively sober coverage on page one vis-a-vis its peers.

“Sajeeva bomb patthe” (live bomb found) was the bland headline (below).

“Kadri devala guri?” read the lead headline (below), with a box item suggesting that the 30,000-40,000 devotees attending the Brahmotsava festival at the temple could have been at risk.

In an editorial (below), Hosa Digantha lambasted former chief minister H.D. Kumaraswamy for making light of the “bomb”.

(“Socialist Democratic Party of India” is now the red rag in BJP-ruled Karnataka, with talk of banning it for its alleged links with the Islamist Popular Front of India”)

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But a screenshot taken from Twitter (below) shows that it too jumped the gun and attributed the Mangalore “bomb” to the anti-CAA protests and the police firing which claimed two lives.

The newspaper also front pages state home minister Basavaraj Bommai’s questionable claim that the alleged “suspect” was “mentally disturbed”.

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The only other Kannada publication that showed sound news judgement and refused to brand the “bomb” or speculate on the motives was the Mangalore newspaper Vartha Bharti.

Its headline, like that of Hosa Digantha and Praja Vani, was as-is:

“Explosive found at airport”.

Vartha Bharati was the only mainline Kannada newspaper to carry Aditya Rao‘s name prominently in its headlines (below), both when the police were looking for him and when he “surrendered”.

Vartha Bharti was also the only Kannada newspaper to call out the rest of the Kannada media for their unbridled fear-mongering.

After Aditya Rao‘s formal “surrender”, Vartha Bharti followed up its outrage at the bias in the media coverage with another searing editorial.

“On the surface, it looks like the Mangalore ‘bomb’ incident was a premeditated conspiracy involving sections of the media, the police and the sangh parivar.

“Aditya Rao‘s role was small. There is no doubt that the media turned a small explosive into a massive bomb.

“Therefore, the time has come to conduct these media personnel to a mental test and to supply the necessary medicines.”

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And the Hubli-based Samyukta Karnataka was no different.

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Admittedly, journalism is a human exercise, and many mistakes do happen in the speed of reporting.

And it isn’t white.

Or green.

Or blue.

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Also read: Bangalore journo in plot to kill editor, columnist?

9 lessons a “terror-suspect” journalist learnt in jail

#Anand Sankeshwar #Churumuri #Gauri Lankesh #Hariprakash Konemane #Hosa Digantha #IJR #Indian Journalism Review #Narendra Modi #Praja Vani #Rajeev Chandrasekhar #The Times of India #Udaya Vani #Vartha Bharti #Vijay Sankeshwar #Vijaya Karnataka #Vijaya Vani #Vishwa Vani #Vishweshwar Bhat

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