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technicolortheshow · 4 years

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BOHREN & DER CLUB OF GORE

My Bloody Quarantine part 1

The last six months have been pretty shit, hey? It looks like there is no future anymore... global warming, COVID-19, Australia on fire, wars... shall I go on?

ANYWAY, we are not here to talk about a stupid government led by a buffoon with a mop in his head (ops!) but to praise one of the bands who kept me company during this bloody quarantine of mine: BOHREN & DER CLUB OF GORE. This German act, in fact, hung out with me during the several nights of insomnia, which, trust me, were devastating, loooooong and cold. Cigarettes after cigarettes, wine after wine, I thoroughly enjoyed the discography of the quartet and I thought it was time to write something about them.

Because of the slow-moving and nocturnal nature of their music, a doom jazz plenty of end-of-the-world ballads, or, in their words "unholy ambient mixture of slow jazz ballads, Black Sabbath doom and down-tuned Autopsy sounds", I happily matched their records to these apocalyptic months. Just like a dark noir by Leo Malet, or a Terry Gilliam dystopian movie, Bohren & Der Club of Gore managed to convey, over the last 25 years, a deep sense of ethical abandonment and claustrophobic imprisonment. There is no future in the music of the German band, no escape from reality, which is doomed and looped into an endless limbo. A not long time ago - which now seems AGES ago, to be honest - I went to the White Cube for the latest Kiefer’s exhibition. I believe that the combination of BCG music and Kiefer’s artworks pretty well.

Over the last months, while listening to them, between a Medoc and a Nebbiolo, I was picturing the band in a smoky “bar at the end of the world”, channelling some kind of Tom Hillenbrant’s dystopian political setting or a Lynde Mallison’s grey cold painting. The best description, though, comes from the band website: “Dear friends of nighttime drives, remote bridges to nowhere and empty multi-storey car parks”. Club Silencio state of mind, indeed.

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The ensemble has constantly been releasing high-quality records since 1994, with the first doom jazz album called MOTEL GORE - albeit the first release was a 1992 cassette filled with post-hardcore noise published under the name of Langspielkassette. MOTEL GORE is, as someone brilliantly described it “audio pointillism”. I think this similitude is accurate: the band did draw tiny dots of obscure, eerie, music on canvases of sound. “Die Fulci Nummer” drives me mad, with its spectral adagio: it’s so good it would’ve been great in the Fulci’s masterpiece Non si Sevizia un Paperino. “Cairo Keller” is charming and evocative, reminding me of a possible soundtrack for Lovecraft The Nameless City. Extra points for the brilliant reference of the cover.

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in 1997 BCG published MIDNIGHT RADIO, two hours of lynchian-LA-night-driving-without-a-destination soundtrack. if it is true that its predecessor "Gore Motel" is more song-oriented, and therefore a lot easier to listen to - it’s evident that Midnight Radio is more rewarding in its own special way: it’s a journey in the darkest corner of your mind. Yes, because the journeys BCG offers are not only external but often internal. The band has developed over the years a therapeutic dialogue between the listeners and their consciousness. Jungian jazz music anyone? LET’S DEBATE!

By the way, while writing this article, I’ve realised how difficult is to talk about BCG music without quoting several cliches - everyone always ends up referring to the same stuff:” car parks”, “night drive”, “Lynch”. But I have to admit, in this case, it’s definitely true! Listening to BCG can really inspire these topics under our skins, as trivial as it sounds! The point is: they do it better than anyone else, they have been doing this forever and they represent the top in this particular sub-genre. With the results of a cinematographic component in their music that leads to these night drive scenarios, post-modern inner state of minds. Bravo!

Let’s go back to Midnight Radio, to BGC and their discography. It’s undeniable that their music fits perfectly in the set of the SLOW TV/MUSIC/YOUTUBE movement. From The Norway train to this 1986 Canadian TV show called “NIGHT WALK” (which, by the way, looks freaking awesome), from Andy Warhol’ “SLEEP” to Kiarostami or Tarkovsky cinema, the slow movement has left an imprint to contemporary culture. Arguably, BGC, with their long holistic records, is part of the movement. Calming the listeners and bringing them into a meditative state of mind, without being mindfulness - luckily. The point is: BCG makes you think about yourselves, finding out that you are someone you should be scared of! Know yourself, fear yourself!

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All that Jazz came in 2000 with the thrilling “SUNSET MISSION”, thanks to the help of saxophonist Christoph Clöser. In this record the band opened up the sound, literally letting some fresh air to enter their music, easing the claustrophobic moods of the previous albums. A hint of lounge-ness came in, due to the mellow, yet sophisticated, sax of Mr Clöser. It is still quintessential BCG, with the nihilism of the band raising up form the bass. Slow, reiterated bass lines are running through the record, giving to Sunset Mission a gloomy, hypnotic cadence. The liner notes include a quote from Matt Wagner's Grendel comic book, which reads: "Alone in the comforting darkness the creature waits. As confusion reigns on this hellish stage, the deafening grind of machinery, the odious clot of chemical waste. Still, the trail of his ultimate prey leads through this steely maze to these, the addled offspring of the modern world.

According to many people, 2002 ‘BLACK EARTH” is BCG masterpiece. I don’t know yet, as I REALLY like them all. What I can say is that Black Earth sounds a lot more accessible, with an even more developed sense of ‘lounge-ness’ which was not so evident in the previous records. Blach Earth is a good record. Perhaps the trick here is the balanced tempo of the saxophone. Perfectly played within the songs at the right time, Christoph Clöser’ sax conveys an open jazzy sound. One of my favourite directors ever is Jean-Pierre Melville, his movies are everything I like in term of style and plot. Noir a là Dashiell Hammett, but French and without hope - give me more of this, Hollywood, please! Enough of fucking Marvel heroes, give me noir hard-boiled movies!

Black Earth could have easily been the perfect great soundtrack for Mr Melville’s movies - especially, IHMO, Bob le flambeur. Think about it: a french man, with a cigarette in his mouth, gambling his life for a young woman, in a dirty Marseille, with the BCG slow tempo doomed jazz. yasss please, give me more. Or a glacial Alain Delon killing his lover for money.

Black Earth was followed up, in 2005, by “GEISTERFAUST”, which is considered a slower than ever version of the former album. In Ghost Fist (this is the translation) Bohren & Der Club of Gore has stripped down its sound to the bone, becoming more gentle and less aggressive without any compromise. 5 songs only, named after the 5 fingers of the hand, for an hour of dark jazz. Again, excellent quality.

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I have been buying BCG on CD, I think this music on vinyl does not sound perfect UNLESS you have an extremely high-quality sound system, Like some classical music issue, where you need to hear the pianissimo of the piano and single notes, BCG music deserves a very clean medium, I would say CD is the best.

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Jazz de nuit again on their seventh album “DOLORES” published in 2008. This record is pure Badalamenti, pure Lynch in the night. Within the ten songs of Dolores, the core idea of slow-music is even more highlighted, with no guitars at all on the whole album and a sedated keyboard-based mood. In 2009 the band released a 10 minute EP called “MITLEID LADY”. it is strange, because, albeit recorded just after Dolores, it sounds way more gloomy and somehow different. It is BCG but has another level of sophistication compared to the previous record. This step further in the direction of stylistic accuracy is confirmed two years after, in 2011, with another EP, this one named “BEILEID”. The cover of the record is a reference to the famous Edward Gorey, or at least I believe.

The record includes the cover of "Catch My Heart" by German heavy metal band Warlock, with vocals from Mike Patton. I believe this is the only song with a singer in the entire catalogue of the band. Beileid is a cinematic mood-changer composed of pained saxophone solos, and ghostly string sections, an album that will sweep your mind away into dreamland. A must-have IHMO.

In 2013 the ensemble released “PIANO NIGHTS” probably the warmest record of the band. The Piano obviously helps a lot in making the sound softer and brighter - candle lighted rigorously. A German Gothic feast, with a touch of Teutonic expressionism - who remembers the movie The Hands Of Orlac. BCG should definitely play the soundtracks of this movie. A twisted, dark, thriller with Gothic and expressionist elements. After many years, the band introduces the

Finally, in 2020, the band published “PATCHOULI BLUE”. A pristine, unique, summa of their work, which manages to sound similar to other releases of the band, yet unique, with something different, like a small accent. 50s noir glam, Badalamenti, German Gothic, Slow-Movement philosophy are all elements we can find in this record, but there is something else: a hint of electronic, which can possibly open new territories to the band. I am curious to see if they will become a techno ambient act in the like of Gas (joking).

Aristotle once said that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I guess this is the whole point in BCG’s music. The synergy the band has been consistently showing over the last 3 decades, and the constant refinement of their own skills.

VIVA BOHREN!

#bohren #bohren & der club of gore #gothic #german #noir #leomalet #melville #alain delone #jazz #ambient #doom jazz #angelo badalamenti #lynch #mulholland drive #gas #grendel #nightmoves #anselm kiefer #expressionism

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the-end-of-art · 5 years

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Dancing with Professors by Patricia Nelson Limerick

In ordinary life, when a listener cannot understand what someone has said, this is the usual exchange:

Listener: I cannot understand what you are saying.

Speaker: Let me try to say it more clearly.

But in scholarly writing in the late 20th century, other rules apply. This is the implicit exchange:

Reader: I cannot understand what you are saying.

Academic Writer: Too bad. The problem is that you are an unsophisticated and untrained reader. If you were smarter, you would understand me.

The exchange remains implicit, because no one wants to say, "This doesn't make any sense," for fear that the response, "It would, if you were smarter," might actually be true.

While we waste our time fighting over ideological conformity in the scholarly world, horrible writing remains a far more important problem. For all their differences, most right_wing scholars and most left_wing scholars share a common allegiance to a cult of obscurity. Left, right and center all hide behind the idea that unintelligible prose indicates a sophisticated mind. The politically correct and the politically incorrect come together in the violence they commit against the English language.

University presses have certainly filled their quota every year, in dreary monographs, tangled paragraphs and impenetrable sentences. But trade publishers have also violated the trust of innocent and hopeful readers. As a prime example of unprovoked assaults on innocent words, consider the verbal behavior of Allan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind," published by a large mainstream press. Here is a sample:

"If openness means to go with the flow,' it is necessarily an accommodation to the present. That present is so closed to doubt about so many things impeding the progress of its principles that unqualified openness to it would mean forgetting the despised alternatives to it, knowledge of which makes us aware of what is doubtful in it."

Is there a reader so full of blind courage as to claim to know what this sentence means? Remember, the book in which this remark appeared was a lamentation over the failings of today's students, a call to arms to return to tradition and standards in education. And yet, in 20 years of paper grading, I do not recall many sentences that asked, so pathetically, to be put out of their misery.

Jump to the opposite side of the political spectrum from Allan Bloom, and literary grace makes no noticeable gains. Contemplate this breathless, indefatigable sentence from the geographer, Allan Pred, and Mr. Pred and Bloom seem, if only in literary style, to be soul mates.

"If what is at stake is an understanding of geographical and historical variations in the sexual division of productive and reproductive labor, of contemporary local and regional variations in female wage labor and women's work outside the formal economy, of on_the_ground variations in the everyday content of women's lives, inside and outside of their families, then it must be recognized that, at some nontrivial level, none of the corporal practices associated with these variations can be severed from spatially and temporally specific linguistic practices, from language that not only enable the conveyance of instructions, commands, role depictions and operating rules, but that also regulate and control, that normalize and spell out the limits of the permissible through the conveyance of disapproval, ridicule and reproach."

In this example, 124 words, along with many ideas, find themselves crammed into one sentence. In their company, one starts to get panicky. "Throw open the windows; bring in the oxygen tanks!" one wants to shout. "These words and ideas are nearly suffocated. Get them air!" And yet the condition of this desperately packed and crowded sentence is a perfectly familiar one to readers of academic writing, readers who have simply learned to suppress the panic.

Everyone knows that today's college students cannot write, but few seem willing to admit that the professors who denounce them are not doing much better. The problem is so blatant that there are signs that the students are catching on. In my American history survey course last semester, I presented a few writing rules that I intended to enforce inflexibly. The students looked more and more peevish; they looked as if they were about to run down the hall, find a telephone, place an urgent call and demand that someone from the A.C.L.U. rush up to campus to sue me for interfering with their First Amendment rights to compose unintelligible, misshapen sentences.

Finally one aggrieved student raised her hand and said, "You are telling us not to write long, dull sentences, but most of our reading is full of long, dull sentences."

As this student was beginning to recognize, when professors undertake to appraise and improve student writing, the blind are leading the blind. It is, in truth, difficult to persuade students to write well when they find so few good examples in their assigned reading.

The current social and judicial context for higher education makes this whole issue pressing. In Colorado, as in most states, the legislators re convinced that the university is neglecting students and wasting state resources on pointless research. Under those circumstances, the miserable writing habits of professors pose a direct and concrete danger to higher education. Rather than going to the state legislature, proudly presenting stacks of the faculty's compelling and engaging publications, you end up hoping that the lawmakers stay out of the library and stay away, especially, from the periodical room, with its piles of academic journals. The habits of academic writers lend powerful support to the impression that research is a waste of the writers' time and of the public's money.

Why do so many professors write bad prose?

Ten years ago, I heard a classics professor say the single most important thing_in my opinion_that anyone has said about professors. "We must remember," he declared, "that professors are the ones nobody wanted to dance with in high school."

This is an insight that lights up the universe_or at least the university. It is a proposition that every entering freshman should be told, and it is certainly a proposition that helps to explain the problem of academic writing. What one sees in professors, repeatedly, is exactly the manner that anyone would adopt after a couple of sad evenings sidelined under the crepe_paper streamers in the gym, sitting on a folding chair while everyone else danced. Dignity, for professors, perches precariously on how well they can convey this message, "I am immersed in some very important thoughts, which unsophisticated people could not even begin to understand. Thus, I would not want to dance, even if one of you unsophisticated people were to ask me."

Think of this, then, the next time you look at an unintelligible academic text. "I would not want the attention of a wide reading audience, even if a wide audience were to ask for me." Isn't that exactly what the pompous and pedantic tone of the classically academic writer conveys?

Professors are often shy, timid and fearful people, and under those circumstances, dull, difficult prose can function as a kind of protective camouflage. When you write typical academic prose, it is nearly impossible to make a strong, clear statement. The benefit here is that no one can attack your position, say you are wrong or even raise questions about the accuracy of what you have said, if they cannot tell what you have said. In those terms, awful, indecipherable prose is its own form of armor, protecting the fragile, sensitive thoughts of timid souls.

The best texts for helping us understand the academic world are, of course, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Just as devotees of Carroll would expect, he has provided us with the best analogy for understanding the origin and function of bad academic writing. Tweedledee and Tweedledum have quite a heated argument over a rattle. They become so angry that they decide to fight. But before they fight, they go off to gather various devices of padding and protection: "bolsters, blankets, hearthrugs, tablecloths, dish covers and coal scuttles." Then, with Alice's help in tying and fastening, they transform these household items into armor. Alice is not impressed: " Really, they'll be more like bundles of old clothes than anything else, by the time they're ready!' she said to herself, as she arranged a bolster round the neck of Tweedledee, to keep his head from being cut off,' as he said, Why this precaution?" Because, Tweedledee explains, "it's one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle_to get one's head cut off."

Here, in the brothers' anxieties and fears, we have an exact analogy for the problems of academic writing. The next time you look at a classically professorial sentence_long, tangled, obscure, jargonized, polysyllabic_think of Tweedledum and Tweedledee dressed for battle, and see if those timid little thoughts, concealed under layers of clauses and phrases, do not remind you of those agitated but cautious brothers, arrayed in their bolsters, blankets, dish covers and coal scuttles. The motive, too, is similar. Tweedledum and Tweedledee were in terror of being hurt, and so they padded themselves so thoroughly that they could not be hurt; nor, for that matter, could they move. A properly dreary, inert sentence has exactly the same benefit; it protects its writer from sharp disagreement, while it also protects him from movement.

Why choose camouflage and insulation over clarity and directness? Tweedledee, of course, spoke for everyone, academic or not, when he confessed his fear. It is indeed, as he said, "one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle_to get one's head cut off." Under those circumstances, logic says: tie the bolster around the neck, and add a protective hearthrug or two. Pack in another qualifying clause or two. Hide behind the passive_voice verb. Preface any assertion with a phrase like "it could be argued" or "a case could be made." Protecting one's neck does seem to be the way to keep one's head from being cut off.

Graduate school implants in many people the belief that there are terrible penalties to be paid for writing clearly, especially writing clearly in ways that challenge established thinking in the field. And yet, in academic warfare (and I speak as a veteran) your head and your neck are rarely in serious danger. You can remove the bolster and the hearthrug. Your opponents will try to whack at you, but they will seldom, if ever, land a blow_in large part because they are themselves so wrapped in protective camouflage and insulation that they lose both mobility and accuracy.

So we have a widespread pattern of professors protecting themselves from injury by wrapping their ideas in dull prose, and yet the danger they try to fend off is not a genuine danger. Express yourself clearly, and it is unlikely that either your head_or, more important, your tenure_will be cut off.

How, then, do we save professors from themselves? Fearful people are not made courageous by scolding; they need to be coaxed and encouraged. But how do we do that, especially when this particular form of fearfulness masks itself as pomposity, aloofness and an assured air of superiority?

Fortunately, we have available the world's most important and illuminating story on the difficulty of persuading people to break out of habits of timidity, caution, and unnecessary fear. I borrow this story from Larry McMurtry, one of my rivals in the interpreting of the American West, though I am putting the story to a use that Mr. McMurtry did not intend.

In a collection of his essays, In a Narrow Grave, Mr. McMurtry wrote about the weird process of watching his book Horsemen Pass By being turned into the movie Hud. He arrived in the Texas Panhandle a week or two after filming had started, and he was particularly anxious to learn how the buzzard scene had gone. In that scene, Paul Newman was supposed to ride up and discover a dead cow, look up at a tree branch lined with buzzards and, in his distress over the loss of the cow, fire his gun at one of the buzzards. At that moment, all of the other buzzards were supposed to fly away into the blue Panhandle sky.

But when Mr. McMurtry asked people how the buzzard scene had gone, all he got, he said, were "stricken looks."

The first problem, it turned out, had to do with the quality of the available local buzzards_who proved to be an excessively scruffy group. So more appealing, more photogenic buzzards had to be flown in from some distance and at considerable expense.

But then came the second problem: how to keep the buzzards sitting on the tree branch until it was time for their cue to fly.

That seemed easy. Wire their feet to the branch, and then, after Paul Newman fires his shot, pull the wire, releasing their feet, thus allowing them to take off.

But, as Mr. McMurtry said in an important and memorable phrase, the film makers had not reckoned with the "mentality of buzzards." With their feet wired, the buzzards did not have enough mobility to fly. But they did have enough mobility to pitch forward.

So that's what they did: with their feet wired, they tried to fly, pitched forward, and hung upside down from the dead branch, with their wings flapping.

I had the good fortune a couple of years ago to meet a woman who had been an extra for this movie, and she added a detail that Mr. McMurtry left out of his essay: namely, the buzzard circulatory system does not work upside down, and so, after a moment or two of flapping, the buzzards passed out.

Twelve buzzards hanging upside down from a tree branch: this was not what Hollywood wanted from the West, but that's what Hollywood had produced.

And then we get to the second stage of buzzard psychology. After six or seven episodes of pitching forward, passing out, being revived, being replaced on the branch and pitching forward again, the buzzards gave up. Now, when you pulled the wire and released their feet, they sat there, saying in clear, nonverbal terms: "We tried that before. It did not work. We are not going to try it again." Now the film makers had to fly in a high_powered animal trainer to restore buzzard self_esteem. It was all a big mess. Larry McMurtry got a wonderful story out of it; and we, in turn, get the best possible parable of the workings of habit and timidity.

How does the parable apply? In any and all disciplines, you go to graduate school to have your feet wired to the branch. There is nothing inherently wrong with that: scholars should have some common ground, share some background assumptions, hold some similar habits of mind. This gives you, quite literally, your footing. And yet, in the process of getting your feet wired, you have some awkward moments, and the intellectual equivalent of pitching forward and hanging upside down. That experience_especially if you do it in a public place like a seminar_provides no pleasure. One or two rounds of that humiliation, and the world begins to seem like a treacherous place. Under those circumstances, it does indeed seem to be the choice of wisdom to sit quietly on the branch, to sit without even the thought of flying, since even the thought might be enough to tilt the balance and set off another round of flapping, fainting and embarrassment.

Yet when scholars get out of graduate school and get Ph.D.'s, and, even more important, when scholars get tenure, the wire is truly pulled. Their feet are free. They can fly whenever and wherever they like. Yet by then the second stage of buzzard psychology has taken hold, and they refuse to fly. The wire is pulled, and yet the buzzards sit there, hunched and grumpy. If they teach in a university with a graduate program, they actively instruct young buzzards in the necessity of keeping their youthful feet on the branch.

This is a very well_established pattern, and it is the ruination of scholarly activity in the modern world. Many professors who teach graduate students think that one of their principal duties is to train students in the conventions of academic writing.

I do not believe that professors enforce a standard of dull writing on graduate students in order to be cruel. They demand dreariness because they think that dreariness is in the students' best interests. Professors believe that a dull writing style is an academic survival skill because they think that is what editors want, both editors of academic journals and editors of university presses. What we have here is a chain of misinformation and misunderstanding, where everyone thinks that the other guy is the one who demands, dull, impersonal prose.

Let me say again what is at stake here: universities and colleges are currently embattled, distrusted by the public and state funding institutions. As distressing as this situation is, it provides the perfect setting and the perfect timing for declaring an end to scholarly publication as a series of guarded conversations between professors.

The redemption of the university, especially in terms of the public's appraisal of the value of research and publication, requires all the writers who have something they want to publish to ask themselves the question: Does this have to be a closed communication, shutting out all but specialists willing to fight their way through the thickest of jargon? Or can this be an open communication, engaging specialists with new information and new thinking, but also offering an invitation to nonspecialists to learn from this study, to grasp its importance, and by extension, to find concrete reasons to see value in the work of the university?

This is a country in need of wisdom, and of clearly reasoned conviction and vision. And that, at the bedrock, is the reason behind this campaign to save professors from themselves and to detoxify academic prose. The context is a bit different, but the statement that Willy Loman made to his sons in Death of a Salesman keeps coming to mind: "The woods are burning boys, the woods are burning." In a society confronted by a faltering economy, racial and ethnic conflicts, and environmental disasters, "the woods are burning," and since we so urgently need everyone's contribution in putting some of these fires out, there is no reason to indulge professorial vanity or timidity.

Ego is, of course, the key obstacle here. As badly as most of them write, professors are nonetheless proud and sensitive writers, resistant in criticism. But even the most desperate cases can be redeemed and persuaded to think of writing as a challenging craft, not as existential trauma. A few years ago, I began to look at carpenters and other artisans as the emotional model for writers. A carpenter, let us say, makes a door for a cabinet. If the door does not hang straight, the carpenter does not say, "I will not change that door; it is an expression of my individuality; who cares if it will not close?" Instead, the carpenter removes the door and works on it until it fits. That attitude, applied to writing, could be our salvation. If we thought more like carpenters, academic writers could find a route out of the trap of ego and vanity. Escaped from that trap, we could simply work on successive drafts until what we have to say is clear.

Colleges and universities are filled with knowledgeable, thoughtful people who have been effectively silenced by an awful writing style, a style with its flaws concealed behind a smokescreen of sophistication and professionalism. A coalition of academic writers, graduate advisers. journal editors, university press editors and trade publishers can seize this moment_and pull the wire. The buzzards can be set free_free to leave that dead tree branch, free to regain to regain their confidence, free to soar.

#patricia nelson limerick #larry mcmurtry #education #writing #academia #grad school #university #college

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almostarchaeology · 4 years

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The Moggalithic antiquarian: party political broadcasts from stone circles

By Kenny Brophy (the Urban Prehistorian)

If a poll of Conservative members showed a majority of them were druids, Boris would be straight down to Stonehenge to dance naked for the seasons (Mark Steel, Independent, 28 March 2019)

Stanton Drew’s stone circles may not vibrate as wildly in the English consciousness as their easterly cousins at Stonehenge, however, they remain seriously impressive pieces of Neolithic kit. (Weird Walk, The Face 4.001)

Standing

Jacob Rees-Mogg, standing in the General Election, is standing in front of a standing stone. The parliamentary candidate (and current incumbent) for North East Somerset is asking everyone to vote Conservative in the December 2019 General Election in order to deliver Brexit. He is wearing a double-breasted great coat, almost invisible glasses, and a baby blue rosette the same size as the Nebra Sky Disk.

What was this WTF moment all about?

Was it just an innocent bit of eccentric electioneering fun that just happened to take place with a megalithic backdrop?

Or perhaps the film was an appeal to a certain kind of voter who craves the nostalgic fantasies of the English countryside, windswept standing stones, comical ‘scrumpy and western’ bands like The Wurzels, and Brexit?

Or was this short film altogether something more sinister?

I will ponder awhile on these questions during this post, but the reaction to the video was of even more interest to me.

#BrexitPrehistory

This troubling little video has garnered a good deal of attention. It initially dropped on 2nd December 2019 via Rees-Mogg’s own twitter account (with approximately 369,800 followers on the eve of the General Election ten days later). At the time of writing (13th December 2019) it has been viewed almost three quarter of a million times, and this is only on the Twitter platform.

The film is a particularly egregious example of what I have come to call #BrexitPrehistory (for it was not really about the election, it was about ‘getting Brexit done’) and it indicates the increasingly casual ways that prehistory is being used to make arguments for Brexit by leavers. However, the video also became a focal point for a lot of anti-Brexit (‘remainer’) sentiment, something I would also like to unpick here.

My contention is that we should not be using a prehistoric stone circle to make any kind of points about contemporary political and social challenges although it can be tempting to do so.

Stone circles like Stanton Drew, the one chosen by JRM as his backdrop, are neither leave or remain monuments. Yet, problematically, social media reaction to Rees-Mogg’s piece to camera suggests it might be both.

Petrified

First, let’s consider the video itself. It lasts all of 35 seconds, with a further final five seconds taken up with ‘Get Brexit Done’ and ‘Conservative Party’ branding.

JRM stands in front of one of the standing stones of Stanton Drew. The megalith is partially obscured by his torso and head, and he speaks while performing some half-hearted hand and body gestures. His stiff delivery style mimics the standing stones behind him, his petrified voters, a captive audience.

He narrates the following election message in his curious posh robot voice:

Adge Cutler sang the famous song: 'When the Common Market comes to Stanton Drew.'

I'm here by the standing stones in Stanton Drew, thought to be 4,500 years old, some of the most important stones in this country.

And I want to get the Common Market out of Stanton Drew.

We must get Brexit done. Only the Conservatives can do that - a majority Conservative Government can get out of the European Union and make Brexit happen by 31st January.

Please vote Conservative and get the Common Market out of Stanton Drew.

This little vignette was based on the title of an Adge Cutler song, performed by his band The Wurzels, on the theme of joining the Common Market and the impact it might have on Stanton Drew, the village (not the adjacent prehistoric monument of the same name). Both just happen to be in Rees-Mogg’s North East Somerset constituency for which he was, at the time, standing for re-election, and has since been re-elected with a decreased share of the vote.

The song, 'When the Common Market comes to Stanton Drew', is, depending on your perspective full of outdated, sexist, and racist, sentiments about foreigners and their stereotypical traits. Not to say geographically challenged as to the composition of Europe.

In the evenin' times I s'pose, we'll sip of our vin rose, Just like they do in the Argentine And we'll watch they foreign blokes, with their girt big 'ats and cloaks, Flamingo-in down on the village green. We'll 'ave to watch our wenches when they dark-eyed lads gets here, And the local boys'll 'ave to form a queue, They'll say "Ooh la la, oui oui," instead of "How's bist thee?"

Or as I have also seen it expressed, the song is a rather quaint musing on the exotic effects of becoming more closely integrated with Europe, and is in fact pro-European in sentiment, a parody of the prejudices of rural Little Englanders (oh the irony).

And the Druids Arms won't close till ver' nigh two, And we'll all drink caviar from a girt big cider jar, When the Common Market comes to Stanton Drew!

Wikipedia more neutrally notes that in ‘…response to opening up of trade with Europe, Adge suggests what might happen to Somerset culture when Europeans come over’.

This slice of ye olde Englande nostalgia fits well with the JRM brand, apparently au fait with what the working class oiks get up to in their pubs and barns, using deliberately anachronistic terminology, and always wearing at least one item of clothing that belongs to clown.

In reality this is all a bit attention seeking, self-promoting an eccentric film in an election campaign where, by all accounts he had been side-lined by the Conservative Party machine for being too ‘off-message’ even for the Tories. He is, as the Daily Mirror describes him, a ‘disgraced Tory toff’.

Rees-Mogg smacks of a man who likes his stone circles rural, just like WG Hoskins. After all, this was indeed a sylvan spot before all those pesky roads, factories, and voters appeared in the surrounding landscape.

‘Views of Stanton Drew AD 1784’ (source: Dymond 1877)

Note that Rees-Mogg stands in such a position that the camera can only see the rural behind him, and no telegraph polls, roads, or other modern clutter. Another angle would have revealed a different temporal dynamic. He wants you to imagine this photo could have been taken in 1819 or 1919 because his persona is all about a timelessness that stems from a fear of change, of his privilege being undermined by progress.

Memes and mocking

Responses to the film have been largely restricted to social media, with almost no mainstream news commentary. On Twitter there has been a mixed bag of bemused, amused, and angry reactions, as well as some fine memes; a lot of this commentary has come from archaeologists, unsurprisingly.

Recumbent Rees-Mogg (Jonathan Last, @johnnythin)

Voting Conservative gets more Stonehenge (me! @urbanprehisto)

Response by @herbieherbie10 on Twitter

Others had some fun with the fact that the policy and belief system of Rees-Mogg is an anachronism, of the past, although it seems a little unfair to tar the people of the Neolithic with the same brush as this upper class twit.

Response by @snegreid on Twitter

We could be here all day having fun with this video and you can do so by looking at the many, many replies to the original tweet of the video.

‘Built by immigrants’

However, responses did not simply consist of cheap laughs at the expense of a feckless Tory MP. Some suggested that this short film was essentially a dog-whistle nod to the alt-right and far-right viewer of the video. In light of recent media coverage of far-right groups using megaliths in the south of England for rites and ceremonies (covered nicely in this blog post by Howard Williams), the choice of a stone circle could be viewed as at best naïve, or absolutely intentional, depending on your level of cynicism.

Archaeologists such as Cathy Frieman pointed out that it was important we acknowledge the tone of the video, and that it is no laughing matter.

Response by @cjfrieman on Twitter

In this respect should we be more careful about giving such tweets and political propaganda the oxygen of publicity? Certainly, it was interesting to see some responses on Twitter that we should not keep retweeting the original post (either to take the piss or offence) because this helps with the stats for the tweet and increases its visibility. When TV presenter and archaeologist Alice Roberts retweeted this, with a critique (of more below), she fired this little film into the timelines of over 200,000 of her followers. I am in a sense guilty of doing the same thing in this blog post, and it is the case that even mocking memes ensure a person, image, and message spreads across the internet like a virus.

Another theme that emerged in responses to the Rees-Mogg film was the apparent irony of using as a pro-Brexit backdrop a prehistoric monument that was ‘built by immigrants’ and which suggested we had close connections with Europe in prehistory.

Alice Roberts for instance tweeted: ‘How extraordinary that Rees-Mogg chooses to stand in front of a megalithic monument – which speaks so strongly of connections across prehistoric Europe – to make an isolationist statement!’

Charlotte Higgins, chief culture writer of The Guardian (38K followers), tweeted: ‘Get the hell out of my favourite stone circle which, by the way, was built by immigrants’.

Response by @chiggi on Twitter

I don’t want to especially pick on these commentators, as the immigrants trope was suggested by lots of respondents, coming from a place with the best of intentions. And it reminds me of Jeremy Deller’s 2019 street artwork in Glasgow, Built by immigrants, which espouses a similar sentiment.

Jeremy Deller, Stonehenge artwork, Glasgow

Prehistory it seems is a blank canvas upon which we can project whatever we want to, fit into our belief systems, and bounce around within our echo chambers. And while I much prefer a narrative that supports partnership, immigration, and communal labour, over separationist and divisive arguments, I can’t help but feel uneasy about any attempts to use the prehistoric past to support or even justify our own belief systems.

The prehistoric story of stone circles should not be used to score political points.

Arguments that stone circles such as Stonehenge and Stanton Drew were ‘built by immigrants’ and had close connections to Europe and therefore we should retain those relationships today and into the future are, to my mind, as problematic as contrary arguments that, for instance, we have a long tradition of turbulent relationships with Europe, and that Brexit-like schisms are not a new thing.

Reactions to the film suggest leave and remain arguments are both claiming a form of legitimacy deep into prehistory, in the shape of Stanton Drew, which to my mind is both illogical and inappropriate.

Such arguments have become increasingly fuelled by ancient DNA (aDNA) and stable isotope studies that suggest mobility in prehistory was commonplace especially when converted into newspaper headlines and stories. Yet our understanding of prehistory is complex and contested, and contrary views also exist. It is possible for instance to argue that at least some elements of Stanton Drew were constructed in the late Neolithic period (30th to 25th centuries BC), a time of ‘late Neolithic isolation’, even a Neolithic Brexit, according to archaeologists such as Richard Madgwick and Mike Parker Pearson. If we follow this line of argument, Rees-Mogg was correct – Stanton Drew is a leave monument. And, suggestions that stone circles are a common monument type across Europe, thus suggesting cultural connections, smacks of culture-historical thinking. No idea exists in isolation and the Brexitisation of prehistory is becoming tortuous.

The Brexit hypothesis

The use of Stanton Drew as a backdrop and theme for a political announcement about Brexit, and critical reactions to this that I have seen in social media are both symptomatic of what I have previously called the Brexit Hypothesis:

The proposition that any archaeological discovery in Europe can – and probably will – be exploited to argue in support of, or against Brexit (Brophy 2018: 1650).

Our discourse has become so entrenched in Brexit-thinking that we struggle to consider this stone circle without it becoming a synecdoche for our moral, ethical, political, beliefs. In fact, responses should have focused entirely on the wilful and inappropriate appropriation of a prehistoric megalithic enclosure for political ends as some contributors, such as Cathy Frieman, did indeed do.

Are we – the progressives, the liberal left, remainers – in danger of wanting to have our cake and eat it? At this politically dispiriting time, this is understandable.

A polarisation

There is always a depth and complexity to such issues, and this is reflected in the invisible, complex archaeology at the Stanton Drew circle JRM chose as his megalithic pulpit. An amazing geophysical survey in 1997 revealed a collection of concentric timber circles within the stone circle, and an external henge ditch. Hundreds of oak posts stood here in the Neolithic period (Davis et al 2004).

Stanton Drew geophysics results (source: PAST)

The visible megalithic Stanton Drew must be understood in the context of the organic invisible Stanton Drew. The visible political posturing must be read within the context of the invisible underlying currents given off that can perhaps be picked up on should receptive equipment be suitably attuned. As with actual, so with metaphorical geophysics: these undercurrents can be positive and negative. Rees-Mogg is attracting and repelling at the same time. That is what populist politicians – and magnetometers – do.

His deliberately divisive message is having the desired polarising effect.

The choice of site, the words, the message, of this short video are very much in the antiquarian tradition.

He is the Moggalithic antiquarian.

JRM the antiquarian, words from Dymond 1877

This is played out through his superficial understanding of the archaeological site, and an inability and unwillingness to interpret outwith his own value system. JRM uses the stone circle to valorise his world view and force that view upon others.

Yet stone circles can and should be kept out of our Brexit battles. They are no more an indicator of what Jonathan Last, in another great response to far-right use of prehistoric monuments, has called, ‘a conservative, nostalgic narrative of a lost rural England’, than they are surviving traces of an ancient utopia of free movement and European cultural cohesion.

Stone circles should be testament to the sophistication of Neolithic people. Stone circles should continue to be a source of wonder, mystery, the otherness of the past as demonstrated in Weird Walks zine #2. Their weird walk route around Stanton Drew, documented in the pages of this zine and The Face, is a wonderful counterpoint to the weird stiffness of the Rees-Mogg polemic. The stones should be hugged, and the stone circle is to be enjoyed, as is the visit to the Druids Arms pub afterwards.

Weird Walks Stanton Drew (source: Weird Walk #2 (2019), 30-1)

Prehistoric sites cannot, and should not, be viewed through a Brexit lens, whether leave or remain.

We need to get back to seeing such ancient monuments through a camera lens and our own eyeballs.

We must take back our wonderful prehistoric monuments from the grasping hands and propaganda machines of opportunistic politicians, and avoid falling into their sinister traps.

***

Works cited:

Brophy, K. 2018. The Brexit hypothesis and prehistory. Antiquity, 92: 1650-58. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2018.160

David, A 1998 Stanton Drew, PAST 28. (Newsletter of the Prehistoric Society). Available online https://www.ucl.ac.uk/prehistoric/past/past28.html#Stanton

Davis, A. et al 2004 A rival to Stonehenge? Geophysical survey at Stanton Drew, England. Antiquity 78, 341-58. DOI: 10.1017/S0003598X00113006

Dymond, CW The megalithic antiquities at Stanton Drew, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 33: 297-307.

***

Thanks to guest blogger Kenny Brophy. Follow Kenny on Twitter @urbanprehisto.

Read more by Kenny on his own blog, The Urban Prehistorian, and a previous guest post here.

#archaeonews #urban prehistory #Jacob Rees-Mogg #UK general election #brexit

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lfir47 · 3 years

Text

3 assignment from 1st to 5th march

Bahadur Yaar Jung Quotes From his Speeches

‘‘Most testing or the difficult times in the life of political organisations [freedom struggle] is when seeds of dissent and misunderstandings are sowed amongst them, People considered as close associates are turned into strangers, atmosphere of distrust are rising like storm, Our nest[country] is on fire, the very leaves are fanning the fire who were our trusted allies, These are the testing times of your abilities to discern and think clearly’’.

‘’I am against British [rulers] and yet not against them, As Hindustani [Indian] I am against the imposition of British rule over India, I have the desire to free India, To get rid of their autocratic hold sooner than later, It is my birth right and I take pride in it in a similar way to any free and proud Britisher would take pride in the fact that they are free of German intrusion and force,

Will British tolerate that France or Germany would rule over them, if the answer is No! [Never] Then they should equally respect our desire for freedom as well.’’

Author writing-

Last year we faced the same situation, But, this year he was permitted to give his speech on one condition, that he would write his speech, give one copy of the same to the Residency [British authority] Bahadur Yaar Jung did not agree to the terms and rejected it.

In this regard he has revealed the secrets of many characteristics of humanity, this is a fact when someone gets to enjoy the fruit without making any efforts their potentiality and abilities gets rusted, they loses their self-worth, and dignity, which are vital to for his [identity] as responsible individuals and citizens.

Courage and self-worth are foremost, the habit of inaction or sedentary life effects these qualities the most. The person suffers from inferiority complex……

‘’You must have come crossed the stories and lives of kings and rulers, What kind of treacherous, cruel and heart hearted wolf in sheep clothing [ animal in human form] they can be.

One can witness them in histories of all countries, When provoked would not hesitate to murder their own fathers, gouged the eyes of their beloved children, poisoned their drinks, including their own brothers, nephews, nieces, uncles, aunts, son in laws, none were spared. If their pride is wounded or ego is hurt would ravish the honour of their mothers, daughters and sisters. The short, they would do things which are beyond the imagination. This is found in all countries china, Arabia, India, Iran, Rome, France, Britain, one worse than the other.’’

‘’I have step forward [lead] and unmasked their faces, my task is done, from here begins your task to discern.’’

Field of enquiry- Bahadur Yaar Jung quotes

It is Historical, political, relational, urban, social, identity, commentary, language and text.

Methodologies- Intervene, Translate, observe, Document, Repeat, Depict, illustrate, Abstract, narrate and imagine.

Outcome- Political, Critique, Time [historical] specific, translate, uncanny, and relational.

I was so busy with my side of work, forgot to ask someone to check if my work is upto mark or needs some changes, as I have tried my best to be close to the original as much as possible. I wanted to capture his sound in English. To be equally effective in the 'other' language, and in similar situation as speeches are given with future kept in perspective.

Field of enquiry - Politics of invisibility

Field- Urban, social commentary, realism, psychology, identity, public, relational, language and text.

Methodologies- Interact, imagine, observe, document, duplicate, abstract, construct, miniatuarise/scale and depict.

Outcome – critique, decorative, humour, collections mimetic, political, uncanny, optical and illusionary.

Field of enquiry - Hybridity and gaps within integration

Field of enquiry- Urban, historical, social commentary, cultural, public/private, realism, psychology, identity, and relational.

Methodology – Intervene, interact, imagine, observe, replicate, document, appropriate, construct, deconstruct, abstract, craft and narrate.

Outcome- Celebrate, critique, nostalgic, political, cultural and social commentary.

Questions-

How effectively does each work address your field of enquiry?

My works all start with nothing set as what field they are going to address, initially I look around and browse what topics, issues, pictures, art seems to resonate with me and then I start to expand some research about it, as I want to be engaged with my art pieces for very long time, it has sustain my interest for longer period so that I could really settle down in my field of enquiry.

All three fields of enquiry deals with relational, how people live, their struggles and challenges. We have to collaborate with each other in spirit of tolerance, collaborations and continues flow of dialogue to understand and appreciate each other more.

Is it too obvious or obscure, strength and weaknesses of your work?

Yes, it sits more towards being not too detail, effort has been applied from the beginning of my works that it should have more clarity and sound to my works. Yet more can be done.

As I was exploring the topic of invisibility I should have focused on the blurring of images as well rather than expanding the tiny, small as insignificant, or too small to be noticed.

Dealing with historical personalities one cannot do justice, as the material is limited, my art struggles to expand in this piece of work[ Bahadur yaar jung].

Strength and weakness-

I sort of work in similar field of enquiry and could not break from it, all my pieces share the political, social and relational aspects, Feminist, Artificial, Kitch and many other fields remain unexplored that is my weakness, My strength is that each work shares similar field of inquiry and methodology and sits closely to each other.

Does it open up to new ways of thinking in your field of inquiry or does it merely illustrate the existing knowledge?

The idea always remain that we all struggle to expand and bring a new twist to the art of expression. As there are multiple mediums, and many issues that can be tapped into, We tryTo speak our best to have an individualist mind without fear and with clarity can help in making art which would look new yet somehow familiar as well.

Contemporary art is more contextual, complex and very personal at all levels. It is important to remain in a state of restlessness and somewhat detached from consumerism, being down to earth can help in many ways.

How engaging did you find each approach[ methodology]?

There has been some common features of my three art pieces which allowed the methodology to develop all the three, like construct, imagine, observe, document, abstract, craft to name the few.

Especially the translating piece took lot of effort, reading, re reading, looking up again and again, writing, re writing, thinking, and lots of referring back to dictionary. forming sentences just like the speech, long and free flowing.

Everything had to look effortless, fluid and transparent for the audience to see.

How do the three art works operate together? do they become more interesting

Do they double up or compete with each other?

All the three art works have different field of inquiry, yet they have some of the features common, like political, relation, psychology, identity, urban to name the few.

They look quite interesting as some of the outcomes are not the same. They have many traits which are similar, They do not double up, but sits closely to each other and strengthen each other in the studio space.

There is the element of competing for attention as well

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doomandgloomfromthetomb · 6 years

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Meg Baird Interview — 2007

Sunday interview! This one was conducted way back when via email. Dear Companion is still great! In fact, most everything Meg Baird does is great -- have you checked out the Heron Oblivion live LP?! Wow. I also hear rumors of an upcoming collab LP with harpist extraordinaire Mary Lattimore.

With her lovely-from-start-to-finish solo debut Dear Companion (Drag City), Meg Baird takes a break from her duties in the Philadelphia psych-folk collective Espers. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, though. The ten songs here are deeply rooted in traditional song forms (from age-old British Isles ballads to Appalachian laments), as well as the 60s and 70s singer-songwriter era (from Jimmy Webb to New Riders of the Purple Sage). With a few of Baird's own originals mixed in, Dear Companion stands as one of the best all-acoustic records since Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator). Mostly comprised of Baird's high, pure vocals and intricately picked guitar, the album conjures up the timeless and universal nature of the best folk music. We chatted with Meg about her inspirations, obscure Canadian folksingers and Bob Dylan's amphetamine-fueled ramblings.

Whether it's performed by the Everly Brothers, Bob Dylan, Norma Waterson, Michael Hurley or by you on Dear Companion, "The Cruelty of Barbary Allen" is one of those songs that always stops me in my tracks. What do you think it is about this 500+-year-old song that gives it such a powerful resonance even today? How did you come to record it for the album?

My version came from an amalgamation of Michael Hurley's version from Sweetkorn and another from a Jean Ritchie recording with a totally different melody — these are my two favorites. I learned this one just for Michael actually. About three years ago, he agreed to try and record a few songs for a few days with Espers during a stop on his spring east coast tour — just to see what happened. This was one of his top recommendations to try so of course I learned it just in case.

Perhaps the resonance of this song is a little bit cumulative? For a contemporary listener, if you've made a decision to actually forgo your healthy cynicism for all the maudlin associations genuinely attached to this sort of material, then you are listening with a pretty well primed imagination. The main storyline here is so straight — two young ones eventually killing themselves over a misunderstanding in a lover's quarrel. But the way each scene unfolds gives us all the vantage point to protest "No, don't do it, it should all work out!" just like we would in any horror film or melodrama. It's a very unifying populist pastime to hope that it will all work out, when we know that it won't. This experience can so easily become twisted into pure manipulation, but here it can feel wonderful — like a chance to just experience a feeling in a spectrum of feelings. The colors in this world seem so vibrant, the perception of history so vibrant. You've made these scenes all yourself, and they seem safe from being diminished by the elements.

Listening to Dear Companion (not to mention your work with Espers) I'm reminded of this old quote from Dylan: "What folk music is... is based on myths and the Bible and plague and famine and all kinds of things like that which are nothing but mystery and you can see it in all the songs … All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels … and seven years of this and eight years of that and it's all really something that nobody can touch ... (the songs) are not going to die." What do you think – is this an accurate summing up of the so-called folk tradition, or was Bob just blazing on amphetamines when he said that?

Probably your last theory about amphetamines is true, but aside from that, this is a pretty adept description of mystery in folk song. Although it is a really amped up, exceptionally urgent description, it also seems in keeping with a tone used very commonly at that time. His urgency especially makes sense with the last line, about how "(the songs) are not going to die." Maybe I agree with this very believably passionate depiction of being moved by this music, but perhaps I don't get to share in his blazing confidence in its immortality.

What/who was the album/song/artist that really turned you on to folk music? What made you think: "I want to do something like this."

I'm sure it is a really long, ongoing series of events, but one flash moment like the one you describe, particularly in relation to straight traditional music, happened when I was 19 (reasonably well-versed in the college radio canon of the time) and my sister Laura took me to a Sheila Kay Adams performance. I certainly did not ever think that I could do anything quite like that, but it literally opened up a world of possibilities of what music and performance can do, in addition to helping me see ways around some of the obstacles that can come up around identity hang-ups concerning audience, format and other limitations sometimes imposed by self-flattery. I got a chance to meet her a few years ago and tried to thank her and tell her about this experience I'd had, but all I did was burst into tears like a crazy person. Hopefully she understood something good in my maligned attempt to communicate my extreme appreciation.

The spare, uncluttered sound of Dear Companion really makes it stand out from much of the music being released today. Was making such an austere record your intention going into the recording process? Do you imagine that your subsequent recordings will continue in this vein, or do you have string sections and trumpets and backup singers in your future?

Sparsity and warmth were definitely guiding intensions. I used overdubs to add some imagination to the record and save it from being too literal. By the final mix, I thought it would be fun to think of vocal and guitar overdubs as my only allowed effects or "tricks" For this reason, I got a great kick out of selecting only one brief moment of Space Echo-drenched electric. With the rest of the record being so spare, it was a really enjoyable method to try and emphasize this effect to its maximum.

I don't know yet how I'll record the songs I'm writing for the next record. I'm sure that I will want to try something new, but seeing now just how clearly I totally over-thought the sparsity issue, I guess that new approach could really take any shape.

I'm familiar with a few of the artists whose songs you cover here – Jimmy Webb, New Riders of the Purple Sage – but Fraser & Debolt are completely new to me. What can you tell me about them and this fantastic song you've included, "The Waltze of the Tennis Players"?

I know very little about Daisy Debolt, Allan Fraser or Ian Guenther much other than that they are Canadian and they made this completely amazing record together that a good deal of people seem to truly love. (I think that the "hit" was their knockout version of "Don't Let Me Down") "Waltze" in particular must be one of the most imaginative songs on the subject of courtship that I have ever heard. The whole record is incredibly tender, raw and earthy; seemingly fueled by the same kind of human will and warmth that keeps a person alive through the winter. Despite how outwardly folky this record is, it has always reminds me a great deal of Dead Moon. A really nice, in-depth fan Web site is maintained for Fraser & Debolt.

Tell me a bit about the recording process for Dear Companion. What did your Espers band mate Greg Weeks bring to the proceedings? Were there songs that you attempted but that didn't make the final cut?

I recorded this album on a few long, spare afternoons during the recording of [Espers'] II. My plan was to prepare madly for the taping sessions and get everything on tape in very early takes. I had been playing some of these songs for years, some only for a month, but all of them required a great deal of rehearsal for these sessions.

Greg brought his incredibly adept engineering ears, great gear sensibility and some really gutsy approaches to the recording levels that wound up having a pretty interesting effect over the whole record itself. It was also great to have someone so talented to bounce tracking ideas off of and to double check on my performance quality. We work together all the time, so of course Greg was able to really help me keep to this goal of recording these songs very quickly and comfortably with little fuss or ramp up time.

I dropped the bridge from "Waltze" because the original creates a level of blasting off that I truly couldn't pull off to any good effect. Among other missed selections, my version of Peter Hammill's "(On Tuesdays She Used to Do) Yoga" will just have to remain mine for private enjoyment.

Now that the album is soon to be out in stores, what are your plans? Are you going to play any solo shows? What's next for Meg Baird!?

I have lots of plans, unfortunately none of them so well formulated to tell you anything specific. I have a very busy imagination, perhaps too busy, and Espers is quite busy at the moment as well. Despite all of this, I definitely am trying to arrange some public performances timed near the release in late May.

#meg baird #espers #heron oblivion #sunday interview

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onlinelingo · 7 years

Text

SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: CHARACTERISTICS OF “INTERNET ENGLISH”- PART ONE: THE MEME

We would at first like to more closely observe the widespread phenomenon of the meme. The term was first coined by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene”:

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'. [DAWKINS, 1976]

While it is highly doubtful that Dawkins intended for this term to become so popular, it is not by definition far from what the famous internet memes are. Nevertheless, it is possible that they are simply called memes due to the French word (not unlikely, given the “relatable” factor that goes into memes), and the above study has simply been connected to it due to its more academic roots.

One way or the other, one could without much effort conclude that a meme is a piece carrying cultural reference, be it old or new. It is oftentimes said that the internet meme is the Web Community’s “inside joke”. Once that thought is given consideration, the definition of a meme as an inside joke makes the most sense of all.

The understanding of memes requires understanding of context, or at least of the fact that this or that piece of culture has acquired this status. Given the internet’s fast-paced world, some memes fall into oblivion fairly quickly, while some remain strong in the internet’s subconscious. Because of that, it is fairly easier to point out which have had a long lasting effect, and are here to stay- at least online.

Interestingly enough, the ephemerons nature of the internet meme has prompted the creation of several website dedicated to keeping track of them, be it widespread or extremely obscure.

Website knowyourmeme.com relies on search engines, collocation examples and history of memes online. There, one can easily look for memes that have directly affected speech patterns of teenagers, both online and between one another. Here are some characteristics shared by most memes that rely on language, a category which includes incessant repetition of seemingly random phrases, words or symbols; interaction between two texts, and a slight change in definition of commonplace expressions.

FLEXIBILITY

Having apparently come from a faux celebrity twitter account, the sentence “I came out to have a good time and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now” soon exploded online- and, since then, it’s been adapted into numerous situations and different contexts. Here are some examples:

Source: http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/785/428/2d3.jpg Visited in 14/03/2017.

Source: http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/785/423/466.jpg Visited in 14/03/2017

Source: http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/796/293/bb5.pngVisited in 14/03/2017

From looking at these images, one can conclude that this specific phrase has been separated from its original source and applied to numerous contexts familiar to the intended audience. The humor, then, is in the challenge of applying this phrase to any situation. It is, above all, an exercise of reference crossing and inter-textual thinking.

What one can see from examples A, B and C is the common use of elements from pop-culture, historical relevance, and contemporary matters. It is fairly easy to understand their referencing to, respectively, the Harry Potter series, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the demotion of Pluto’s status as a planet (which has, since then, been reestablished).

META-LANGUAGE

In early 2016, a meme featuring everyday words carrying trademark symbols emerged online and instantly came into everyday use. The popularity of the meme seems to have arisen from the way it takes advantage of the ™ symbol to suggest a corporatization of the word to which it is added. Because it usually stands for a brand, adding ™ to the end of words or concepts gives it a sense of false authority, or, in some cases, of someone or something acting exactly how it is expected of them (stereotypically speaking); so much that it has become a concept to be patented and sold.

E.g.:

Source: http://life-goes-on25.tumblr.com/post/143350223380/alexthefuckingfeminist-bug-free-season-is-over Access on March 19th, 2017

Source: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/onlinelingo. Access on March 19th , 2017

From both these instances, one can visualize a pattern. In the first example, the trademark used after “Bug-free” accentuates its functional nature, as if winter- the season they are referring to- was brought to us as a courtesy of Bug-free™.

Now, on the second example, the uses of the trademark are stretched even further when a clear parallel is drawn between straight people and what the OP calls a particular brand of straight people who feel the need to advertise and promote their heterosexuality. It is also interesting to note the use of capitalization, which separates people who are straight from Straight People, the brand.

The third commenter seems to illustrate this difference with the use of “the” as a marker. By referring to a particular brand of white gay people as the White Gays, the user is talking about a group of gay people that has “whiteness” as its primary qualifier, and to which the subject is attached. “White people who are gay”, or “Gay people who are white”, on the other hand, are sentences whose build suggest an afterthought, therefore forming, as opposed to subjects, predicates.

What is interesting in this whole linguistic process is how much words can challenge and tear meaning apart in the online world. The addition of the trademark symbol is more than playful mockery; it is an open criticism of the empty status some words seem to have acquired. The fact that we need a marker to tell the empty brand from the serious meaning of a word must indicate something about our society- although, this is not something we should be getting into.

Ultimately, the point seems to be that ™ indicates irony at its fiercest form- the word has been through various states, from subtle and airy to icy, but it has finally come full circle and completed a 360. All in all, the word seems to be the same, and yet we know it just came straight from being ressublimated, lighter and not quite as meaningful as before.

This is why we have pointed out meta-language as one of the most frequent and, dare I say, essential characteristics of the word-based meme. Whoever uses this newfound resource of irony is actively exercising meta-language even if through one word, for this word is aware of itself and the context in which it’s situated, and the word itself is a parody of the meaning which it conveys. If intertextuality needs meta-language in order to work, meta-language needs only a self-aware text which allows for “intra”- textuality.

It’s been said that memes like proverbs become clichés after a while, but the point of a meme has always been to become a cliché. A successful meme is, effectively, one that is repeated, imitated- mostly, due to the logic consistently present in its absurdity.

While it does seem like a ridiculous thing to write, memes are transcendental in that which makes the meme completely aware of its absurd nature, so that mockingly we shelter it in language.

METAPHORICAL SWITCHING

Metaphorical switching, according to Fishman, is a sudden shift in variety in the middle of a conversation. This can be in order to create emphatic irony, confusion, or simply emphasis. In late 2015, a meme on Tumblr took advantage of the humorous potential of this phenomenon- by creating the "me, an intellectual" meme (here’s a compilation our team has organized).

Not only does this meme aim to point out the dissonance between high and low prestige varieties, it also works, inadvertently, as a means of social criticism. In its most realized, the "me, an intellectual" meme mocks academic jargon and Oxford English by insinuating that elitism. Let us take a look at some examples now.

You: chill, bro

Me, an intellectual: please allow your core body temperature to decrease, my sibling.

You: What's new scooby doo

Me, an intellectual: what is currently occurring scoobert doobert

You: Burger King

Me, an intellectual: sandwich monarch

In I1, we can observe the metaphorical switching of an informal phrase, "chill", meaning to "cool off" (temper-related). By switching to "decrease your core body temperature", OP is taking an idiom which does rely on some level on real life scientific facts (cool off=calm down), and resublimating it to the descriptive literalism of scientific terms, along with an exaggerated academic vocabulary. Observe how the "intellectual" speech is riddled with latin derived words. That is because for two centuries French was the only language allowed to be officially spoken in England, which led to other French- related varieties of already existing words. These varieties were descendant from Latin and were more associated with noblemen and higher classes, whereas the common people went on using the words derived from Old English (descendant from the Anglo-Saxon). This divide remains even nowadays, which explains why Latin sounding words are more academic and everyday vocabulary is still mostly originated from Anglo-Saxon. See, for instance, the similarities of the English word "hound" and the German word "Hund". More abstract concepts, however, like "example", derive from the French "Exemple". In German, this word is completely different (one would say "Zum Beispiel").

In I2, the dissonance between the first and second sentences relies on a Pop Culture reference- namely, to the song in the opening credits of the Scooby Doo cartoon. When OP changes that recognizable reference, it makes absolutely no sense. This occurs mostly due to the phrase's symbolic weight and the subsequent disregard the second one has for it.

Likewise, in I3, one would have to understand the reference to fast food chain Burger King- hence, why it would be ridiculous to refer to it as "Sandwich Monarch". This might be the most critical of the three instances, because it reaches an entirely new level of elitist absurdity.

-------------------------

Part (2)

Part (3)

Read the full series: O

#our series on internet english #part one #1 #meme #a Meme™#tumblr meme™#trademark meme #me an intellectual #i came out to have a good time

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thewebofslime · 5 years

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Beto O’Rourke, the presidential candidate, once belonged to an obscure but influential band of computer hackers who helped set the scene for Anonymous and the high-profile hacktivists of the modern digital era. As a teenager in the 1980s, O’Rourke joined the group called the Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC), named for a Texas cattle slaughterhouse. He spent a few years affiliated with CDC, posting on primitive internet message sites and becoming casually acquainted with some of the most well-known hacker activists of that early generation. Joseph Menn, a hacker historian who wrote an upcoming book about Cult of the Dead Cow, revealed O’Rourke’s membership in the group in Reuters on Friday. The 46-year-old O’Rourke hasn’t actively participated in CDC in years, falling off after he left for Columbia University at age 18. Its members kept his secret for a long time, though, only agreeing to talk publicly about the history after O’Rourke himself spoke with Menn for his book. The former Texas Congress member already enjoys a certain cool-kid reputation. He’s the skateboarding punk rock bassist who can now claim associations with an influential cadre of early digital activists, who have taken on Microsoft, Chinese censors, and the Church of Scientology. He doesn’t appear to have been deeply involved or to have participated in any of the group’s better-known stunts. But there is something fitting about O’Rourke’s membership in a group that was known for its communications savvy — “a flair for spectacle” as one expert put it — more than its technical proficiency. “CDC wasn’t pumping out tech. It was really about trying to get the word out there that hackers could do good in the world,” Gabriella Coleman, a McGill University professor who has written about hacker anthropology and culture, told me. “CDC had cultural cache. They were like the punk rock band of the hacker world.” The Cult of the Dead Cow coined the term “hacktivism” for politically motivated digital activism. Its biggest stunt targeted Microsoft at the height of its powers in the 1990s in a bid to force the software giant to fix security holes in its programs. CDC ethos could be found in Anonymous, the first hacktivist group to really break out and influence real-world politics. Now they’ve given us Beto, the first hacker candidate. The Cult of the Dead Cow, explained In those days, when the Cult of the Dead Cow was founded in the 1980s, there were a few different kinds of hackers: the truly nerdy programmers with all the technical wizardry, the security professionals who wanted a private and safe internet, and the early hacktivists, who saw the internet as a tool for change (and had a real mischievous streak). CDC was part of the latter caste: While some of their members did have strong tech chops, they were better known for their ability to draw media attention with a penchant for the ridiculous. They came up with a word for it: hacktivism. They declared war on the Church of Scientology in 1995, furious about the church’s attempts to censor online content. They went after Chinese censors for the same reason. In 1998, they pulled off their most audacious move: releasing a program called Back Orifice that allowed remote users to control somebody else’s computer through Microsoft Word. The goal was to force the software giant to improve its products’ security — an altruistic aim, though not everybody agreed with CDC’s methods. “Some of the people totally think it was reckless,” Coleman said. “Others thought it was really helpful. This was a moment when vendors would not fix the patches. This was a stunt to get Microsoft to fix it.” They otherwise spent a lot of time posting political theories or amateur fiction onto chat sites known as BBSs (bulletin board systems), primitive forms of the messaging apps like Slack today. CDC did tend to be more overtly political than its contemporaries. At an institutional level, they were strongly in favor of informational freedom; as individuals, they tended to be liberal or even leftist, Coleman said. The hacktivist ethos that CDC pioneered later informed the work of groups like Anonymous, which notably targeted the Church of Scientology, a longtime Cult foe, with its first major action. They have even been subsumed into parts of the establishment: One of the members later led the military’s futuristic Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “They were a really important early kind of group, establishing those hacktivist tendencies,” Coleman said. “In terms of widespread popular appeal, that really came with Anonymous.” Beto O’Rourke’s time with the Cult of the Dead Cow, explained You should read Menn’s full article for an exhaustive history and discussion of O’Rourke’s relationship with the CDC. He also related on Twitter how he discovered the connection. In brief, O’Rourke had wandered into the bulletin board systems where CDC lived, starting one about punk music. It was there he was linked up with the loose collection of posting boards that made up CDC, where its members mingled. He appears to have used stolen high-speed internet and frequented pirating sites for games, a history that suggests O’Rourke was well-versed in the early digital native culture that preceded social media. “That was significant that he was on these boards. It’s not something most people knew about,” Coleman said. “You’d have to have a kind of geeky inclination to end up there.” Menn flags a few notable posts from O’Rourke’s time on the CDC boards, writing under the name Psychedelic Warlord. There was one in which he discussed “a money-less society (or have a society where money is heavily de-emphasized).” In another, he wrote a disturbing piece of short fiction about running over a couple of children in the middle of the street. O’Rourke also fought with another poster who identified as a Nazi, challenging the poster’s notion that Adolph Hitler was misunderstood. O’Rourke described what his time inside CDC had meant to him like this to Menn: “I was really at the margins, but I very much wanted to be as cool as these people, as sophisticated and technologically proficient and aware and smart as they were,” he said in the interview. “I never was, but it meant so much just being able to be a part of something with them…understanding how the world worked – literally how it worked, how the phone system worked and how we were all connected to each other.” It’s difficult to know how much his time with CDC still informs O’Rourke’s worldview. Menn notes he’s been outspoken in favor of net neutrality and savvy in his use of social media to push the Beto brand. That the other CDC users did not speak to the press any earlier in O’Rourke’s career is a testament to “the very strong code of ethics” among the people in these groups, Coleman said. “It was a kind of club of people who were very interesting and very smart, who liked to intervene politically,” she said. “I do think it’ll be interesting, now that the cat’s out of the bag, how it’s gonna be associated with his team or treated by the hacker community.” There might not be much more to learn about O’Rourke and the Cult of the Dead Cow. It does track with his overly online persona and confirms his past flirtations with more fringe cultures. It probably does not explain whether or not he supports Medicare-for-all. But it’s still a new wrinkle in the back story of a candidate whose campaign seems premised almost entirely on his personal charisma and self-created narrative.

#TheWebOfSlime

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the-end-of-art · 5 years

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Poetry is almost the only way we can escape from the vicious constipation of moral relativism

POETRY IS THE ART OF PREJUDICE: An interview with Jack Gilbert

(Note: Originally transcribed from a tape-recorded conversation between Jack Gilbert and Gordon Lish, at Gilbert’s San Francisco apartment, July 18, 1962)

LISH: In your poem “Quality Is a Kind of Exile” you mention a lady asking what poets are like between poems. If the question were asked specifically about you and you had to give a prose answer, what would you say?

GILBERT: I’d be evasive. It’s the sort of question that can only make a fool of you.

LISH: But if you had to answer?

GILBERT: If I had to? Well, I’m a little like a mongrel dog, I guess. Not the sickly kind, or the savage or woe-begone kind. But the shorthaired, off-white type you still sometimes see trotting along in the city. Obviously on his own. The kind that survives.

LISH: Not a lap-dog?

GILBERT: Wait. Let’s not get this started off wrong, full of terse clever answers. It was my fault; that sounds pretty precious about the dog. I didn’t mean it like that, but it’s a hard question to answer quickly. I just mean that I’m not respectable. I’m thirty-seven years old and a kind of failure. I don’t really have an occupation. Most of the time I wander around looking at the trees. Or the concrete. And trying to understand and to have my life. And love. Kind of an urban Walden. I’ve never worked at a job more than six months at a time in my whole life. And most of those were in steel mills or washing dishes or selling Fuller Brushes. I’ve evaded all the adult responsibilities of marriage, a home, a car, a regular job, children, furniture, a bank account for emergencies, pipes, guns, and all the rest. While other people have been coping with their responsibilities as husbands and citizens and PhD’s, I’ve been off looking at the sea and trying to write a poem. Or living in the mountains. Or on the Lower East Side.

LISH: But you’re not part of the Beat Movement?

GILBERT: God, no! And I don’t go in for freakish behavior nor esoteric knowledge.

LISH: What do you conceive your world to be then? What audience do you write for, for example?

GILBERT: I suspect I’m like most poets in that I write with a vague audience in mind made up of a few friends multiplied and a bunch of heroes—most of whom are dead.

LISH: But certainly some poets have a more general public in mind?

GILBERT: Maybe so, but remember that the contemporary artist’s audience is not the same one aimed at by Edwardians and Victorians. One of the things that defines modern poetry is its separation from a general audience. Not because the poet wants it that way, but because what he wants to do pushes him beyond the scope of the bus driver.

LISH: All poets?

GILBERT: Well, just about all serious poets today are beyond the reader of good will who is inexperienced in current literature. It used to be there was usually something for anyone with a minimum education. If you listened to music, you could wait for the tune to come around again. Today you’d wait a long time. Or in painting, you could enjoy the way a lemon peel was imitated or be moved by the scene of a young boy saying goodbye to his mother before going off to the big city. You might not know anything about painting, but you’d remember when your boy Walter went off. In poetry you could enjoy the sense of beauty without any idea of the meaning—the lovely, hypnotic beauty-bath. But poets aren’t trying to do this anymore. Nor good composers, nor sculptors, nor novelists, nor architects. They are trying to do something different, and it involves the nature of poetry and the audience both.

LISH: What specifically is this difference?

GILBERT: In the old days, poets tried to create beauty, and to please. Most of them, anyway. Today, the major talents aren’t interested in creating beauty—not in the ordinary sense, and certainly not in the sense of providing recreation. Poetry before the First World War was usually an elevating experience taken dutifully after a good meal in the better homes; rather like going to church each Sunday to sit worshipful and empty-headed. Instead of providing instant-uplift or a passive sense of nobility, the poets now are trying to interest and disturb.

LISH: Surely this kind of poetry has been with us a long time.

GILBERT: I don’t mean it’s a new thing. However, I doubt if it’s ever been so predominant. And there is a difference between the serious art of today and art in the past in that our art is harder to misuse. You look at the painting elements in a painting today or you go home. You read contemporary poems as poetry, and actively, or you leave it alone.

LISH: I assume this would be your answer to the accusation of limiting your readers by the geographical, historical, mythological, and personal references in your poems.

GILBERT: It depends. I don’t believe in poems as cross-word puzzles—poems created as victims of the New Criticism. There should be a public level of the poem available to an educated reader who is willing to contribute a fair amount of thinking. On the other hand, there are some things you have a right to expect him to look up. Helot, for example, if he doesn’t know. But if a poem has too much of this, its function breaks down—becomes a game of scholarship.

LISH: Or of vanity.

GILBERT: Especially of vanity. Not always, though. Not all poets who go in for this sort of thing are trying to create the illusion of profundity by an illicit obscurity. Some are entirely sincere. Just as some of the surrealists are, or the word-manipulators, the logomaniacs.

LISH: Are you equating the pedant poets with the surrealists and the logomaniacs? Aren’t some of these people legitimately experimental poets?

GILBERT: Of course. But I’m tired of the kind of experimental poetry we’ve been getting. I don’t say it’s not poetry. There isn’t any one correct way to write poetry. Poetry is a word like love: an endless confusion of different things all warped into one word because no vocabulary of discrimination exists. So I’m not saying my way of writing poetry is the way. But I am admitting my weariness with the great body of poetry which is nothing more than a curious manipulation of words, what Kenneth Tynan has called literary masturbation—a sterile effort to force words to breed. After one or two pages of surrealistic poetry my mind just stubbornly refuses to be polite. Wallace Stevens put it very well when he said that the trouble with surrealism is that it invents rather than discovers. It’s a kind of trick anybody can learn who has imagination. You just throw your mind slightly out of focus so everything seems different. Or better yet, you learn to set your mind wrong so that each item is mechanically related to an inappropriate neighbor. It’s great when you’re starting out in poetry and words are a kind of fascination. But how can a poet sustain an interest in this kind of thing. Wait a minute, I was just reading something by Samuel Johnson. Here it is: “The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight awhile, by that novelty of which the satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted.”

LISH: And yet your poetry isn’t devoid of experiment. For example, I’ve noticed in your poetry a peculiar distortion of line—as if the language were strange to you, new—especially this poem “The Poetry Line”.

GILBERT: All good poets today try to wrench the language, to freshen it. But my main concern with form is different. I’m concerned with how to make poems work. I think any group of my poems will show a range of solutions. Many poets have one or two ways to write a poem. The poem to them is like a cake-decorator where you put your different materials into the same bag each time and squeeze. The cake will be decorated differently each time, but the method is the same. My greatest difficulty is not finding subjects or language or conceits, but in finding the poem.

LISH: This would be a preoccupation with form rather than language then?

GILBERT: Yes, but obviously not form in the sense of sonnets or sestinas. In fact, I think the major esthetic problem in the 20th century is the attempt to escape Form with a capital Fto form in lower case. At the beginning of the century with the idea of Art for Art’s sake, with the influence of Flaubert, with the distaste for a world in which falsification had become standard, many poets went in for what Yeats called technical sincerity. They found truth in an esthetic technology. Recently poets (and artists in the other arts) have become discontent with Form as an object. They no longer are content to create a pretty, well-made thing. They want to make a poem that extends beyond the museum of perfection. Often they don’t particularly care how it looks—if it’s shaggy or messy or incomplete or exaggerated—as long as it has the effect on the reader that the poet intends. In fact, he may deliberately include the anti-poetic in order to prevent misunderstanding. He doesn’t want the reader coming along collecting jeweled phrases. I’ve talked to a number of the best writers working today about this. Some at length, like Pound, or some just briefly, like Saul Bellow, and I’ve found over and over that they want to escape the inhibiting quality of Form as a hieratic, imposed felicity. They want to devise a form that allows them to do things. Pound expressed it by saying his greatest contribution to younger poets was enabling them to get things back into poems—to make historical references, for example. This recurring groping for an open form can be traced through the whole history of European literature.

LISH: But your poetry shows considerable concern with form in a more direct sense.

GILBERT: Sure. Any poet must be concerned with it. I would expect any poem of mine to meet all the tests of craftsmanship. And obviously form in this sense can never be separated from the other concern. And still, in some peculiar way, they are separate. No one has ever been able to say exactly how, but it is nevertheless true that a preoccupation with the formal construct produces a lesser poetry. Primary poetry deals with life. This is, of course, the most old-fashioned of positions. It has been repeatedly denounced by all the best modern critics like Northrop Frye, Warren and Wellek, Wimsett, and the rest. I always have the feeling they are annoyed that poems are written by people instead of being spontaneously generated out of the accumulations of books in the great solemn libraries. It’s an inconvenience. They remind me of the people who confuse technology with sex.

LISH: How does your attitude affect your poetry?

GILBERT: I am far more concerned with content than most poets, I think. I assume I manage all the technical elements adequately, of course. But usually my poems are caused by and impulse to communicate some part of my life rather than to please. I don’t want the reader to finish the poem and say how lovely it was. I want him to be disturbed. Even miserable. I don’t envy Spenser the slightest bit. I do envy the man who wrote Lear. And yet…it’s so hard to get it straight. At the same time I am always deeply concerned with the poem as a made thing. Always. Like something chopped out of stone that won’t weaken. But not as a decoration. Not a recreation. There are two kinds of poetry finally. The kind that gives delight, and the kind that does something else. Delight is fine. But in Lear or Oedipus there is something else. It’s a delight, too, but of a kind so different that it is misleading to use the same word. The first is recreation; the second change man. It is a grave misunderstanding to come from a performance of Lear concerned primarily with technical felicities. Ideally, one should cry at a good performance of Lear. If the critic can’t cry, he should be unfrocked.

LISH: Doesn’t this kind of approach set you apart from a lot of contemporary poets?

GILBERT: Maybe so, but an awful lot of the poems I see published remind me of the correspondence between Marx and Engels. Engels was always writing elaborate letters filled with ingenious, painstaking comments on Marx’s theories equating them mechanically with some current scientific thought. And Marx (or the reader) kept writing back, Dear Fred, please send the money.

LISH: But you go beyond just insistence on a relation to life in your poems. You seem preoccupied with moral values. Isn’t it true that most contemporary poets no longer accept the ideal of right and wrong?

GILBERT: Who knows? Surely it’s an exaggeration to say most. But it is true that a great many poets now shy away from this kind of subject in favor of a kind of genre verse. Partially I think this is the result of a moral paralysis that is current. But isn’t it also because they don’t have a sufficient motivation for writing? Isn’t a great part of poetry now being produced to support an established reputation? The poet is actually tired of poetry, but he must turn out poems to qualify for prizes, grants, and academic positions. What’s he going to do? He manufactures verse. And it’s a lot easier to deal with a small subject when you’re getting by on merely careful technique. And if he’s a man teaching at a university, as he probably is, and married to a wife he courted years ago, and has several quite healthy children…what’s he going to make his poems out of? He makes them out of books or he makes them out of the incidents of a normal, commonplace life. If he goes sailing off Long Island on Sunday afternoon and he wants to write a poem after dinner, he will probably write a poem about sailing off Long Island.

LISH: A small poem?

GILBERT: Oh, he’ll mention Charon at the end to make it seem big, but he is probably tired after a long day and he contents himself with making a respectable poem rather than trying to do anything to the reader. He’s unlikely to be what the Elizabethans admired so much, an over-reacher. You aren’t likely to get a big-boned poem straining its limits.

LISH: And you think this is the case with most poets today?

GILBERT: It seems to be true of most poetry today. Probably it has always been true of most poets. And it is only fair to say that all poets would like to write great poetry. It is also true, though, that if ninety-nine percent of the poets writing today stopped publishing, it would not be a loss. It might not even be noticed. We are in danger today of the kind of misguided tact that has so hampered modern British poetry. A kind of insidious conspiracy of courtesy. If there could be a truly unmalicious literary pogrom, it would do more for American literature than even making them publish anonymously. Or how about another way? You know how in the Congressional Record they have all those speeches that were never actually delivered in Congress? They save everybody’s time by waiving the reading and just print it so the people back home can see it and be satisfied their Congressman is making his voice heard. Suppose we publish a huge book called The Very Finest American Poetry of 1962? Everyone will waive the poems being actually published anywhere except in those thousands of pages of unreadable tiny print. And each poem who sends in something will automatically be issued a certificate saying he has published so-and-so many poems in 1962, and they have been declared to be the very finest of the year. It will be signed by all the right people. Then the poet can just turn this over to the head of his department when culling time comes around. The reward of promotion will be for the greatest number of certificates—and these will be given for assiduity, just as now. And he can get duplicates to send his mother, or to show his wife’s friends, or to send to the Fulbright and Guggenheim and Ford people. Or to have lying around when he has a girl up he’s trying to make.

LISH: Do you think these people who are involved in poetry to further their careers or who make mild poems out of trivial material are dangerous to the reader?

GILBERT: Mostly in being dangerous to themselves and other poets—in that they reduce poetry to something toilet-trained and comfortable. They pretend poetry is just like everything else, only fixed up funny. Like sex. Everybody understands now that sex isn’t really dirty. A little odd at times, but certainly nothing to be disturbed about. Like the sensible books on technique say. And it’s good for you. Rosy, reasonable sex. Well, it isdirty. And fantastically intimate. A kind of insanity. Of course, they often feel the same way about insanity. It’s kind of like the common cold now. And they can’t get over the secret feeling that their friend really knows, at the bottom, how silly he’s being. Someone once said to Blake that after all when he looked at the sun he saw a bright copper penny like the rest of us. Blake replied that when he looked at the sun he saw a choir of singing angels.

LISH: You feel the poets really don’t know the difference?

GILBERT: Who knows anything about poets? But I remember talking recently to a poet who teaches at the University of California who kept saying how it’s all nonsense to criticize professors for not having enough life in their poems. Take him for example, he said. One of his favorite things was to go walking up and down the main street of Oakland at night. Now I’m not making fun of him. He is quite intelligent and talented, and he sincerely believes he’s getting close to the brute reality of non-academic life walking up and down there in Oakland. It’s admirable that he wants to reach reality, but it scares me to think a man so intelligent can become so insulated that he isn’t even aware how far he is from the demon world of actuality.

LISH: What poets do you think are in touch with that demon world?

GILBERT: First let me take back that bit about the “demon world.” It sounds like the dark-world-of-unnamable-evil out of somebody like Huysmans or Lovecraft. And let me say that most poets have had contact with the world beyond the academy and domesticity when they were young or in the army or on their year tour of Europe. But how many of them have recently lived for any time really with hunger or corruption or danger or ecstasy or madness or the alien or romance or physical labor or poverty or anything? Or evil? Directly, I mean.

LISH: All right, but what poets do you admire?

GILBERT: In the world, or writing in English, or just in America.

LISH: Let’s say just American.

GILBERT: It’s hard to answer. I admire some things in many, many poets. You remember in The Lost Weekend how the guy is hurrying down the street full of ain and he sees a new book by F. Scott Fitzgerald in a window and he stops and crouches down to read what he can of the two pages that are half open? In the middle of his hurry and unhappiness? Well, I’ll tell you the people I’d crouch down like that to read. Pound and Eliot, of course. And Williams. And Frost. And Auden, if I’m allowed both him and Eliot. And Marianne Moore. Lowell and Duncan and Wilbur and Creeley. Shapiro and once upon a time Ginsberg. And Laura Ulewicz and Richard Hazley and Gerald Stern and William Anderson and Jean McLean. And others I’ll think of later. It’s a fine century for poetry.

LISH: Doesn’t that contradict what you were saying before?

GILBERT: I hope not. It’s exactly because I think we are in one of the great centuries for poetry that I feel so strongly. The last fifty years has been a golden age for English poetry. But it’s a constant race against being inundated with proficiency. We are in danger from a glut of mediocrity of an extraordinary high calibre. The problem is to write the poems that matter. Too many poets are concerned with poems as art objects. It’s a clever kind of juggling. It’s beautiful, and very difficult, and even admirable. But it mustn’t usurp the center of poetry. We will never get people like Chaucer or Villon or Dylan Thomas or Baudelaire or Blake or Homer or Sophocles or Shakespeare by making merely beautiful things. We’ll get them only from a poetry that is significantly involved with life. And I don’t mean domestic life. Certainly the poetry must also be technically competent, but the important thing is to exceed this. So many poets now seem to aim at the adequate poem rather than the important one.

LISH: Doesn’t this dearth of important poetry at the moment owe, in part, to the feeling of many poets that life no longer holds significant subjects? What do you, for example, consider significant material?

GILBERT: All the conventional subjects for poetry. Love, death, man, virtue, nature, magnitude, excellence, evil, suffering, courage, morality. What is the good life. What is honor. Who am I.

LISH: But isn’t that just the point? Aren’t the conventional subjects too confused and wearied from a surfeit of examination and the blurring of values?

GILBERT: That’s why poets shirk.

LISH: They try something more manageable?

GILBERT: Not only that, but they don’t have enough experience or involvement to try the other. It’s what I was saying before. Most of the poets are trying to earn a living and support a family. That usually means teaching school. And after a while, it means teaching school comes first. Poetry comes second. You meet very few poets whose lives are devoted primarily to writing poetry. The may love poetry, and respect it; they may be competent, well-trained, well-meaning, good people. But you don’t become a great poet in your spare time. Besides, nice guys seldom write exciting poetry.

LISH: But even if that’s true, doesn’t part of the reluctance to deal with large moral problems come from the complexity of the problems today—obsessed with relativism, wanting to be fair, to be objective? No longer understanding all of anything, especially the major values?

GILBERT: That’s true, but it’s exactly why poetry is crucial now. Poetry and the novel have largely taken over the function of philosophy for us. Philosophy is locked up in epistemology and can’t get out. No philosopher asks any more: What is the good life? What is justice? They deal with technical problems about cognition and even more with a kind of verbal paraphernalia. Poetry seems almost the only device we have for persisting at problems without their being mysteriously transformed into an abstract game. It seems almost our only escape from the blind alley of sophistication where comparative anthropology and psychiatry have led us, seeing that there are so many sides to any question that it is impossible to have convictions. Poetry is almost the only way we can escape from the vicious constipation of moral relativism. Because poetry is the art of prejudice. If prejudice is the inability to discuss a conviction calmly, then poetry is prejudice. Prose is rational and fair. It works out an idea and gives all the evidence. Poetry doesn’t. It doesn’t argue, it demonstrates.

LISH: Then you do see absolutes. That is out of fashion, isn’t it?

GILBERT: I think most good poets see absolutes, but they mistrust themselves because they think they’re not being fair. Well, poetry isn’t fair. Poetry, at it’s best, doesn’t try to be fair. Poetry is one-sided, and being one-sided, it can say what truth is. As the art of prejudice, poetry eludes the modern situation where everything seems true and nothing seems to matter very much. The poet has a way of thinking that, peculiarly, breaks through the ambush of qualification and gets to the other side where you so often can see the truth all along but can’t find your way through the jungle of intellectual ceremony.

LISH: Somehow this seems a lot like the attitude of the Beat poets.

GILBERT: Well, it is true that one of the reasons the Beat Movement got so much attention (outside of their gift for publicity) was that their intellectual crudity helped them to break through the impasse of sophistication and establish some contact with subjects that mattered in a real world. Just as the Italian Renaissance was possible partly because the people in Florence were provincial. It could never have happened in Byzantium.

LISH: You say the beats were intellectually crude.

GILBERT: Yes, but that doesn’t mean dumb. Let me make it clear that I’m not attacking them. It’s pointless for people to keep kicking them now when the whole thing is in such disrepute. Five years ago, people in the universities hated the movement but were secretly fascinated. Now they are genuinely contemptuous and indifferent. It is useless to attack it or defend it now on doctrinaire grounds. It’s more important to evaluate it; not only fairly, but with knowledge. It was the most important literary movement of a quarter century in America. Why did all that talent and opportunity come to so little?

LISH: Why, then?

GILBERT: Mostly because of inadequate character and the repudiation of intelligence. Most of the poets in the movement are incapable of maturity. Any examination of the work of, say, Ginsberg and Corso (and Kerouac in prose) show a failure to grow. In fact, they are dedicated to the opposite. They apotheosize all the infantile qualities: impulsiveness, resentment of discipline, incapacity for self-discipline, short attention span with a consequent preoccupation with the moment, mistrust of authority and order, egocentricity, and all the rest. At first this gave their work the freshness and energy that’s usual when gifted children start out in any field: poetry, tennis, science, music, chess, whatever. But it also has a similar tendency to come to nothing. To predictably pass through a stage of exaggeration and a kind of hysteria, followed by bitterness, and finally a withered passivity. They are like those insects that get arrested at the larvae stage. I forget their name. They have all the parts, but they just don’t continue. If you want a case in point, read the interviews involving Ginsberg and Corso and Burroughs in the Journal for the Protection of All Beings. It’s sad and rather frightening to see people of such native talent ending up in such juvenility. And it’s not just in that one example. Almost anything they do now shows it. Look at Ginsberg’s piece in Pa’lante where he’s approaching middle age lost in a hopeless confusion of the most elementary philosophical problems.

LISH: And you say this failure of character goes along with the repudiation of intelligence?

GILBERT: Yes, in favor of some kind of intuition. I think intelligence has produced almost everything that is noble in man. Of course, when I say intelligence, I don’t mean just syllogistic logic. I mean the total capacity for perception and understanding available to man. Logic, intuition, gestalt, common sense, empathy, and all the rest. They want to rely on primitive, clumsy impulsiveness alone. Anyone who has lived where intelligence hasbeen replaced by intuition (such as Apulia or Mexico or India) knows how quickly life becomes diminished to something close to the animal. These people feel more at ease in those conditions. They evade the complexity life really has; and they can escape awareness of themselves into sensation. When you realize how little these people like being themselves, you begin to understand why they want to escape consciousness.

LISH: But I thought the idea was to arrive at a greater awareness of the self. And to be more open to love.

GILBERT: They talk a lot about love, but they experience almost none. Neither for people nor the world. Their natural condition is unhappiness. And because they have so little genuine appetite for the world, they go in constant fear of boredom. That’s why they are quiet so little. After all, there is something radically wrong when you have to go to always more violent and stranger devices to get a response. A man who delights in the world isn’t so dependent on drugs and alcohol and novelty. And the sad thing is that even so they manage to squeeze our always less response. If you’ve been to any of their parties, you must have noticed how much it was like an hysterical woman straining for an orgasm synthetically. And the poetry is the same. Almost none of it stands up under rereading. In the first place, it all ends up sounding curiously anonymous. And in the second place, despite the cult of energy, all that violence of language and image seems curiously slack after six months. The poems just don’t wear well.

LISH: None of it?

GILBERT: Certainly some remains. Parts of Howl and Kaddish, for example. And besides, it depends on who you mean when you refer to the Beat Movement. It’s as Procrustean a word as academic. I certainly am not talking about Creeley or Duncan or Olson. And I think Whalen and Snyder will produce important poetry. But for the rest, if you travel around America, you find the reputations of five years ago washed up like great dying whales. And beginning to stink.

LISH: There’s that figure whales. Whales and elephants and Alcibiades. What precisely do you mean by whales?

GILBERT: You know without my telling you that no poet means precisely anything. It’s not a one-to-one relation. That’s allegory. It means a lot of things. For one, it’s the impossibly literal world. And it’s what you can’t reduce to the human scale. For me, trying to think about a whale, that endlessness down in that infinity of depth, in darkness, moving around—with a mind inside it…

LISH: Doing things.

GILBERT: Yes, and silent. I can’t make any adjustment to it. Like Lawrence said: “I said to my heart, who are these? / And my heart couldn’t own them.” He was talking about fish. And he says someplace else in the poem: “There are limits / To you my heart; / And to the one God / Fish are beyond me.” Whales in this sense, the sudden sense of the alien nature of the universe not translatable into human terms. But what particularly interests me is the sense of magnitude. It’s out of scale, and not just physically. It threatens my life, the formulations on which I operate. I have to redo my mind. There’s a poem by Rilke where he goes along describing a statue. All of a sudden, for no reason, he breaks off and says: You must change your life. When I think about whales, it’s the same in a way. Or elephants or love.

LISH: Or Alcibiades, evidently.

GILBERT: Or Alcibiades. He was the Golden Boy of 4th century Athenian culture. Pericles was his guardian, Plato his teacher. A fine athlete, a brilliant general, handsome, marvelously intelligent, popular, everything. A summation of the Golden Age. And what happened? He went bad. He was vain, treacherous, selfish, sacrilegious, debauched, dishonest, and a traitor twice over. His aid to the enemy during the Syracuse campaign destroyed Athens. Just about the finest product of the most notable civilization man has accomplished, and it turned out like that. This haunts me like the whales. Like the irrational East haunted the Greeks. Like the irrational still frightens the French. It is so much the problem today. It is so often our most endowed people who go wrong—become corrupt, sexually distorted, criminal, mad. I don’t mean just because of irrationality, or course. You might just as well call it Evil as it has been so often called to simplify things. But whatever the name, it is clear that Cordelia has little relevance for us except as a lost Eden. What concerns our time is Goneril. That’s why insanity, homosexuality, and semi-criminality are so common among poets. These prevent him from escaping into the obliviousness of normal life. Especially in modern times, the poet often has a built-in inability to succeed, so he is forced to associate with whales.

LISH: And you intend to continue to live with them by choice?

GILBERT: Well, I’m not crazy, queer, or crooked (Ai! Is there any group I haven’t offended?)…anyhow, I don’t know about it being by choice. Certainly after this interview I’m not likely to be tempted by either the universities or the foundations. It’s a choice in that I prefer whales and love and the rest; but then Heraclides said a man’s fate is his character. In any case, I intend to go on wandering around having my life and watching for whales—willingly. And with delight.

LISH: One final thing. Before the Yale printing of Views of Jeopardy, you were almost completely unpublished and unknown, weren’t you?

GILBERT: Before sending the manuscript to Yale, I had submitted poems to editors only twice in the twenty years I’d been writing poetry.

LISH: And now you have been nominated for next year’s Pulitzer Prize competition.

GILBERT: That’s true. And it makes me happy in a shamelessly uncomplicated way. To be nominated, I mean. I’m thinking of writing a poem, though, called “How It Feels to Be Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize Competition the Season Robert Frost Published His First Book in Fifteen Years.”

(https://unsaidmagazine.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/jack-gilbert-interviewed-by-gordon-lish-1962-from-issue-one-of-genesis-west-part-one/)

#Jack Gilbert #Gordon Lish #poem #poet #poetry

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postmarxistwitch · 5 years

Text

The Real World of Ideology, Joe McCarney 1980

The Burden of Social Theory

AN obvious way to try to meet the needs of social theory is to conceive of ideology as a form of group consciousness. That is to see it as a form of consciousness whose distribution is distinctive of a social group and which arises in some genetically intelligible way from the common situation of its members. Ideologies may then be individuated in terms of the groups to which they belong. Conceptions of this sort are common enough in non-Marxist sociology. What distinguishes the ‘Marxist’ version is the assumption that, where ideology is concerned, the appropriate groups are the basic or primary ones in the social formation. Ideologies are to be identified as those forms of group consciousness whose ‘subjects’ or ‘bearers’ are social classes. At the heart of this approach is an assumption about the distinctiveness of the mode of genesis of ideology. The key to understanding is to see it as a particular kind of socially determined thought: the primary function of the concept is to collect forms of consciousness in terms of their origin. From the standpoint of Marx’s position all of this may be said to constitute a kind of genetic fallacy. Its influence has, nevertheless, been both wide and deep, and will often force itself upon our attention in the course of the discussion.

To begin with, it may be well to distinguish the thesis that ideology serves class interests from the thesis that it is determined by class interests. This latter claim may be taken in a number of ways. To see it as an instance of the genetic fallacy, it has to be allowed some theoretical significance. The idea would be that this particular kind of determination is to be incorporated within the definition of ideology. It is commonplace to find such a view attributed to Marx.[1]Yet it is neither stated nor implied in his writings, and, moreover, there is nothing esoteric about the views he actually held. They find expression again and again in remarks like those in The German Ideology on ‘the distorted form in which the sanctimonious and hypocritical ideology of the bourgeoisie voices their particular interests as universal interests’.[2] Later in the same work he speaks of ‘German liberalism’ as ‘empty enthusiasm, the ideological reflection of real liberalism’, and adds that its ‘liberal phrases’ are ‘the idealistic expression of the real interests of the bourgeoisie’.[3] The talk of ideological forms ‘voicing’ or ‘expressing’ class interests may be taken as a standard formula for Marx’s conception of the relationships involved here, and is, of course, entirely in line with the thesis developed in the previous chapter of this essay. The relationships are assumed to operate not in a genetic mode but in one that is expressive and functional in the way now familiar to us. The central idea is not that ideology is necessarily engendered by class interests, but that it necessarily serves as the medium in which their conflicts are articulated.

The thesis of determination by interests may be taken in another way, as a kind of empirical generalization. It would then amount to the claim that while ideological forms may be distinguished independently of their origins, still, where these are concerned, class interests must in fact be assigned the dominant role. In assessing this view it would be well to avoid a risk of confusion by moving it out of the shadow of some large-scale, substantive generalizations to which Marx is indeed committed. There is, after all, a widespread and well-founded impression that he attached considerable significance to the possibility of giving a genetic account of the varieties of social consciousness. This reflects a determination not to allow them to function as primary units of explanation, but rather to represent them as requiring in their turn to be understood by reference to more fundamental levels of the social structure. The classic source of such impressions is, once more, the ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. There one learns: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’[4] This is a difficult saying and its difficulties have been widely canvassed. However, what needs to be said now should not encroach on any of the disputed territory. It is, firstly, that however the determinant is precisely to be conceived, it is clearly a complex totality of some sort, the configuration of all the forces at work in a particular field. An exclusive concern with ‘interests’ could only be an undialectical isolation of individual factors here. Moreover, what is said to be ‘determined’ is men’s consciousness as such, a category that extends well beyond the scope of the ideological, however that is defined. Hence, although the formula does, no doubt, encompass ideology it tells one nothing distinctive about it. The position is similar in regard to another general thesis often extracted from the ‘Preface’. This is the idea that ideology is to be assigned to a superstructure erected on a ‘real foundation’, ‘the economic structure of society’. Clearly, the real foundation could not with any plausibility be reduced to a matter of class interests alone. Moreover, to do justice to Marx’s conception of ‘the whole immense superstructure’ it has to be seen as including many items, such as legal and political relations, which are not simply forms of consciousness at all. Nor will all of the forms of consciousness it involves fit naturally under the rubric of ideology. As was noted earlier, the chief clue which the ‘Preface’ provides to the character of the ideological forms is that in them men become conscious of the social conflict and fight it out, and large areas of the superstructure of consciousness must surely lie outside the scope of this conception. Thus, the ‘Preface’ does indeed encourage the view that ideology is susceptible to a genetic explanation of a particular kind, but this is a fate it shares with non-ideological forms of consciousness and with much else besides. Nothing is revealed there about the specific conditions of its production.

The discussion does, however, suggest that in trying to understand those conditions it might be well to look beyond the horizon of ‘interests’. Such a suggestion is easy to reinforce from elsewhere in Marx’s work. The tendency to inflate the notion into a universal genetic principle is one for which he had little sympathy. It is a tendency associated in The German Ideology with utilitarianism and specifically with Bentham, a philosopher ‘whose nose had to have some interest before it would decide to smell anything’.[5] About the philistinism of the implications for theory Marx is as scathing as Kant or Nietzsche. His explanation of the ‘apparent stupidity of merging all the manifold relationships of people in the one relation of usefulness’ is that it arises ‘from the fact that, in modern bourgeois society, all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation’.[6] In its later stages at least, utilitarianism is seen as a crudely reductionist doctrine reflecting the grosser aspects of bourgeois society. Once the general doctrine is rejected, it becomes possible to think of the role of interests in a piecemeal way, distinguishing cases where it is significant from ones where it is not. It seems natural, for instance, to invoke such a contrast in characterizing the transition in bourgeois thought from ‘disinterested inquirers’ and ‘genuine scientific research’ to ‘hired prizefighters’ and ‘the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic’.[7] Moreover, in so far as this transition does illustrate the contrast, it serves to remind one of the danger of neglecting its other pole, of underestimating the influence that class interests may exert in practice. Ideology is, after all, to be defined in relation to such interests, and although the relation is not genetic, it may well be that of all forms of consciousness it is genetically the most susceptible to their influence. Indeed, on Marx’s account, this is in fact dominant in certain admittedly degenerate, phases of bourgeois thought. Hence it may be that some contemporary theorists have reacted too far against vulgar-Marxist or Stalinist views of the mechanical derivation of ideology from interests. The result is a failure to give adequate recognition to the actual role such interests may play. As a corollary of this, it may be noted that an understandable distaste for conspiracy theories has sometimes left too little room for the role of conscious calculation in the genesis of ideological forms. But clearly such forms may be created and sustained through the co-operative and co-ordinated efforts of those whom Marx calls the ‘active, conceptive ideologists’. Here, as elsewhere, a great merit of his approach is that it does not obscure the perception of simple truths.

These issues may be taken a little further in connection with the treatment of his predecessors in political economy. There is a fairly straightforward sense in which class interests may be said to have had a determining influence on the theories of Malthus. He is, as depicted by Marx, consciously led by the desire to promote such interests. Thus, he ‘only draws such conclusions . . as will be “agreeable” (useful) to the aristocracy against the bourgeoisie and to both against the proletariat’.[8] In doing so he ‘seeks to accommodate science to a viewpoint which is derived not from science itself (however erroneous it may be) but from outside, from alien, external interests’,[9] and to this end he ‘falsifies his scientific conclusions’.[10] Ricardo, on the other hand, is consistently presented as one of the ‘disinterested inquirers’ who are motivated by factors internal to the scientific enterprise, love of truth and desire to extend the boundaries of knowledge. There is frequent acknowledgement of the ‘scientific honesty’ which will not permit him to trim to any alien considerations. Nevertheless, it is also clear that Marx is fully alive to the ideological significance of Ricardo’s work, and any satisfactory account of the matter must be able to do justice to that awareness. He is presented over and over again as arguing ‘from the standpoint of developed capitalist production’,[11] and the central doctrine of the ideology of the political economist, the belief that the laws of bourgeois economics are laws of nature, is explicitly attributed to him.[12] The crucial fact, which Marx does not fail to point out amid all the tributes, is simply that, regardless of questions of motivation, ‘Ricardo’s conception is, on the whole, in the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie ...’.[13] It is this fact that determines, in the way our argument makes clear, its significance for ideological inquiry. Thus, the difference between the ways in which class interests impinge on the formation of the thought of Ricardo and of Malthus is not reflected in any comparable difference at the level of ideological status: the fact that the one contributes to bourgeois ideology and the other primarily to that of the aristocracy is not significant here. This case may therefore be taken as reinforcing the view that such status is independent of the genetic role of interests.

It also poses problems for other versions of the genetic thesis. Thus, for instance, there is another level of determination which it might be tempting to invoke. It consists in the factor of class situation in general, ‘the whole conditions of life of a particular class’, and of the formative influence of class membership on the consciousness of individuals. This is a wider notion than mere ‘interests’. It encompasses all the forces that impinge on the class, the complete perspective that unfolds from its location in the process of production. As such it represents a genuine dialectical totality. Yet it is not so comprehensive as to be simply identical with the ‘real foundation’ of society, the economic structure as a whole. It is a factor which, as we shall see, does function for Marx as an important determinant where forms of social consciousness are concerned. The point to insist on here is that it is not through the category of ideology that its influence is conceptualized. So far as his practice of ideological analysis is concerned, the formation of consciousness by class situation has no special theoretical significance. Thus, considerations of class origins do not determine the ideological status of ideas. Furthermore, there is no requirement that ideologists should be members of the class whose interests they serve. Malthus, ‘the parson’, was not himself an aristocrat, and ‘hired prizefighters’ are in the nature of the case available to the highest bidder. These are, of course, merely instances of the general truth that ideology is to be understood through its mode of efficacy and not its mode of genesis. It should also now be evident that Marx is not committed to any particular substantive thesis as to how in fact its various manifestations arise.

Ideology is, it appears, an unpromising subject for genetic inquiry in that the unity of the forms is not constituted from a standpoint that would make it theoretically fruitful. Nevertheless, the habit of genetic thinking has been strong in this area. It has frequently been assumed that causal or quasi-causal explanations are peculiarly appropriate to it. Such an assumption has tended to have a debilitating effect on ideological inquiry. In vulgar-Marxist versions it encourages the view that its central task is to trace ideas to their roots in the social background and, thereby, both to explain them and to dispose of their power, to explain them away. In the study of culture this easily leads to a philistine reductionism that altogether fails to do justice to the kind of autonomy and complexity that the phenomena possess. Marx’s standard procedure, as exemplified in the treatment of utilitarianism and of classical political economy, offers no encouragement to such a tendency. In it the genetic explanation of the ideas is dialectically interwoven with the process of bringing to bear on their contents the full resources of science and logic. It is important not to sacrifice any of the elements that contribute to the richness of this strategy.

Once the habit of thinking genetically is broken, the conception of ideology as a form of group consciousness loses its main support. There is no longer any rational basis for attempts to correlate ideologies and classes on a one-to-one basis. Such attempts seem in any case bound to fail when confronted with reality’s wealth of the bizarre. Marx’s conception enables one to appreciate this spectacle without an intellectual surrender to it, without losing sight of the principle of unity of the phenomena. Thus, there are correlations to be established between the distribution of ideological beliefs and class membership. Bourgeois ideology may well have a tighter grip on the bourgeoisie than on other classes. But there can be no guarantee in advance of this, and in important areas one may suspect that it will not be so. The ideological force of beliefs may. actually be enhanced where they rest lightly on the class whose interests they serve: such inner freedom may confer greater ease in their exploitation. Religious beliefs provide the standard illustration here. The combination of ruling-class scepticism and the piety of the subjected is familiar from many periods. In the contemporary world it is bourgeois ideology which provides the greatest difficulty for any naively sociological approach. Success in accommodating all its fantastic shapes must surely result in a loss of the determinacy needed to saddle the results on a single bearer. If, on the other hand, the data are tailored neatly enough to achieve this with some plausibility, it can only be at the cost of more or less arbitrary limitations of content. From the standpoint of Marx’s position all such attempts are quite misconceived. Ideologies are not the sort of things that can in any significant sense be said to have ‘bearers’. No doubt in every case there will be empirically discoverable groups of subscribers to the beliefs that constitute them. But, as will by now be clear from this discussion, their identity is not to be secured by reference to the existence of such groups, and nothing of theoretical importance turns on their discovery.

This point may be developed by putting the lesson of the discussion in another way. It is that to follow Marx in dealing with the ideological it is not enough to insist on the vital significance of classes. The context within which it has to be located is specifically that of class struggle, a field of force constituted by a network of antagonistic relationships. It cannot be adequately delineated by attempts to establish connections with classes as entities conceived of in abstraction and in isolation from one another. The use of the concept in intellectual inquiry, as classically demonstrated in his work on French history, is to theorize certain aspects of the dynamic processes that make up the class struggle. The controlling impulse behind the tendencies we have been considering is to abstract the concept from this specific context and employ it on the terrain of general social analysis. This can only be done at the cost of a break with Marx’s conception. It is a price which non-Marxist sociology has always been perfectly willing to pay. The problems that concern us here arise when the break goes unnoticed by Marxists or when attempts are made to reap the benefits without acknowledging that it has taken place at all. The possibilities of confusion and self-deception are then endless. An attempt will be made later to explain why it was that ideology came to embark on its general sociological career. For the present we must turn to consider an issue that now presses with some urgency, that of its relationship with class consciousness. The denial that ideology is a form of group consciousness raises it in an acute way, for on one interpretation class consciousness is itself just such a form.

A background may be supplied here by recalling some commonplaces concerning Marx’s treatment of the question of social class. The first is that there is no full-scale, systematic discussion of it in his writings: the manuscript of Capital breaks off at what appears to be the critical point. Equally familiar is the idea that in his scattered remarks on the subject there are two distinct tendencies to be discerned. On the one hand, class is conceived of in terms of an ‘objective’ criterion, the location of groups in the process of production. On the other, he sometimes introduces a ‘subjective’ factor by requiring a certain level of consciousness for any such group to constitute a class. This duality is not the result of simple blindness or confusion. He is well aware of its existence and sometimes marks it with terminological devices, as when he contrasts a class ‘as against capital’ with a class ‘for itself’.[14] Elsewhere, he adopts the convention of different points of view: considered in one way certain individuals form a class, while considered in another they do not.[15] It may be understandable that he feels no great need to say what is the real meaning of the term, but such tolerance of ambiguity has proved a source of difficulty for his successors. In particular, the lack of a satisfactory body of theory at this level has bequeathed an unstable basis for the discussion of the nature of class consciousness. Moreover, the discussion has naturally tended to reflect the tensions of the legacy that is available. For those who emphasize the ‘subjective’ criterion it becomes essential to designate the level of consciousness that is in part constitutive of class existence. A great deal of significance may then be attached to the differences between this ‘true class consciousness’ and the actual state of consciousness of groups defined by their relation to the mode of production. The concern with ‘objective’ aspects, on the other hand, encourages a different spirit in the handling of the issues. There is less theoretical pressure to mark off strict boundaries within a hierarchy of forms of consciousness. The ‘spontaneous’ consciousness of the members of the class is less likely to be devalued by contrast with what is higher or more authentic. Amid these complexities the characteristic preoccupation of classical Marxism has been to contest every tendency to lose sight of the distinction between class consciousness as such and the merely empirical. This is so at least in the case of such thinkers as Lenin and Lukács, and their versions of the distinction need to be considered in some detail.

The argument of What is to be Done? revolves around a contrast between ‘the consciousness of the working masses’ and their ‘genuine class-consciousness’.[16] The former arises spontaneously from the historical experience of the workers and finds political expression in the trade-union struggle.

The latter, which Lenin identifies with socialist consciousness, involves an awareness on their part of ‘the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system’;[17] that is, a grasp of the nature of the class struggle. Such a consciousness is not to be achieved spontaneously, but only as the result of theoretical work, and in fact is in the first instance brought to the workers from outside, from its source among intellectuals of bourgeois backgrounds. Within this framework the term ‘ideology’ is used simply to denote the intellectual armoury by means of which the class struggle is conducted. The ideological status of ideas depends solely on the nature of the interests they serve and is quite independent of their origins or distribution, the intentions of their sponsors and all other considerations. Their serving of interests is a matter of the forms of praxis they license or enjoin. Hence arises the insistence that ‘all worship of the spontaneity of the working-class movement ... means ... a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers’.[18] The point is later restated in the clearest terms: ‘the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology ... for the spontaneous working class movement is trade-unionism ..’.[19] Socialist ideology, it appears, arises outside the range of the spontaneous consciousness of the workers, and trade- unionism, which arises within it, is to be accounted among the ideological resources of the bourgeoisie: Lenin speaks explicitly of ‘the bourgeois (trade-union) ideology’.[20] It is evident from all this that for him ideology is not in any sense a mode or aspect of group consciousness, and the moral that classes are the beneficiaries of ideology, not its bearers, could scarcely be more clearly drawn. It is also clear that so far from distorting or abandoning Marx’s conception of ideology, as has often been claimed[21] he has penetrated right to the heart of it and given an exemplary instance of its application. It is true that What is to be Done? offers a highly polarized view of the political situation. The battle lines are tightly and comprehensively drawn: ‘the only choice is – either bourgeois or socialist ideology’[22] and ‘to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology’.[23] But Lenin’s use of the concept of ideology is logically tied to his perception of class interests, and in What is to be Done? the interests of the workers consist in the early overthrow of the existing system and in that alone. Everything that detracts or diverts attention from the task serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. It is perfectly possible for Marxists who perceive the reality of class interests differently to differ correspondingly in their application of the concept of ideology. Some might, for instance, be less ruthless in assigning trade-unionism to the bourgeois side. This need not signal a theoretical disagreement, but rather a different assessment of the state of the conflict in a particular historical situation.

In History and Class Consciousness the distinction we are exploring is introduced in the following way:

By relating consciousness to the whole of society it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and feelings which men would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess both it and the interests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society. That is to say, it would be possible to infer the thoughts and feelings appropriate to their objective situation.

Given this possibility, it emerges that ‘class consciousness consists in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions “imputed” (zugerechnet) to a particular, typical position in the process of production’. ‘This analysis’, it is added, ‘establishes right from the start the distance that separates class consciousness from the empirically given, and from the psychologically describable and explicable ideas which men form about their situation in life.’[24] In an essay written many years later, and used as a preface to the English edition of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács was to assert that by the notion of an ‘imputed’ class consciousness he ‘meant the same thing as Lenin in What is to be Done? when he maintained that socialist class consciousness would differ from the spontaneously emerging trade-union consciousness in that it would be implanted in the workers “from outside” ...’.[25]This claim is hard to accept just as it stands. Obviously, Lenin’s distinction is only applicable to the proletariat, while Lukács’s works, in principle at least, for all classes. But even in the case of the proletariat the two sets of terms do not precisely coincide. Its empirically given consciousness will not always be identical with trade-unionism, a form characteristic of a relatively advanced, though still pre-revolutionary, stage of development. Moreover, since the imputation of authentic consciousness is not simply that of the consciousness which a class ought ideally to have, but is limited by the objective possibilities of the historical situation,[26] what is imputed to the proletariat will not always amount to a socialist consciousness. This too is only appropriate at a certain stage of development. It appears that the one distinction could at best only be thought of as a special case of the other, its expression in the conditions of mature capitalism. Nevertheless, when the necessary qualifications are made, Lukács is right to claim a connection. The common factor is the determination to establish and maintain the significance of the gap between true class consciousness and the spontaneous or empirically given. It is, moreover, a determination which has deep roots in the tradition to which both writers belong. It arises naturally, as we have seen, from the general logic of Marx’s treatment of class and class consciousness. There are also quite direct and specific links that may be traced. As an epigraph to the essay on ‘Class Consciousness’ Lukács uses a well-known passage from The Holy Family:

The question is not what goal is envisaged for the time being by this or that member of the proletariat, or even by the proletariat as a whole. The question is what is the proletariat and what course of action will it be forced historically to take in conformity with its own nature.[27]

In the original, Marx had gone on to claim that ‘a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity’.[28] Thus, he distinguishes between the ideas that some or all members of the proletariat happen to have at any moment and the consciousness appropriate to the historical role of the class. Clearly, we are at this point in touch with an important and enduring theme in the classical Marxist tradition. There seem to be no good grounds for impugning the orthodoxy of Lukács’s contribution to it.[29]

On the face of it, the view of ideology presented in History and Class Consciousness fits with equal ease into the pattern set by Marx and Lenin. Its credentials are easy enough to establish. Ideology is consistently placed in the context of ‘the central fact of capitalist society: the class struggle’.[30] The references to it are suffused with the appropriate kind of imagery: one reads of ‘ideological weapons’, of ‘ideological self-defence’, of ‘ideological leadership’, of ‘ideological champions’, of ‘ideological crisis’, of ‘ideological defeat’, of ‘ideological capitulation’ and of the ‘social conflict reflected in an ideological struggle for consciousness’.[31] The impression left by such unity of tone is clear and striking. Lukács, like Marx, is prepared to invoke the notion of ideology only in connection with the class struggle, and, given this, requires no further conditions to be met. Such a conclusion is borne out by the treatment of his own theoretical position. Historical materialism is described as ‘the ideology of the embattled proletariat’,[32] and Marxism as ‘the ideological expression of the proletariat in its efforts to liberate itself.[33] Evidently he is prepared to regard any set of ideas as ideological, provided only that it has a role in the primary social conflict. Thus we find ourselves in the same conceptual universe as in the discussion of Marx and Lenin. The elements are, of course, handled in a distinctive way, but this need not raise any doubts about the larger identity. A tradition in this respect embracing Marx, Lenin and Lukács might now be thought to be firmly established. It must, however, be acknowledged that such a conclusion would be hard to square with some recent influential criticisms of Lukács. These are worth considering in detail, and not merely in order to make our conclusion secure. They are important because of the standpoint from which they are delivered: this lies at the heart of the most significant tendencies in contemporary Marxist accounts of ideology.

The case brought by Nicos Poulantzas revolves around the charge that Lukács has an ‘historicist’ view of ideology. What this amounts to in detail may, by now, have a familiar ring. In the historicist picture ideologies appear as ‘number-plates carried on the backs of class-subjects’. Each ideology is presumed to stand in a genetic relationship to a class and its character is entirely determined by that relationship. In this conception ‘there can be no world over and beyond the ideology of each class’, and so the ‘various ideologies each function as it were in a vacuum’. Poulantzas’s main objection is that the conception is unable to account for, or even acknowledge, the complexity of the patterns of dominance and subordination in any actual society. On such a view, ‘it would be impossible (i) to establish the existence within the dominant ideology of elements belonging to the ideologies of classes other than the politically dominant class and (ii) to account for the permanent possibility of contamination of working class ideology by the dominant and petty-bourgeois ideologies’. Indeed, it makes it ‘impossible to see the effects of ideological domination by the dominant ideology on working-class ideology’.[34]

Poulantzas’s critique moves at a rarefied level, untroubled by any specific references to Lukács’s writings. What is essentially the same case has been developed in a less magisterial way by Gareth Stedman Jones in writing on the Marxism of the early Lukács’.[35] There the points made by Poulantzas are repeated and developed in a number of ways. Once again the emphasis is on ‘the drastic and crippling simplification’ which Lukács’s view of ideology imposes. In order to fit in with it ‘historical development is pared down to a simple procession of economic-ideological totalities expressing the life conditions of successive class-subjects’. ‘The necessary complexity of any given social formation’ is, Stedman Jones affirms, ‘annulled from the outset by this imaginary parade’.[36] The Lukácsian view of the genesis of ideologies comes under specific attack: ‘For Lukács, the dominant ideology in a social formation will be a pure manifestation of the ideology of the dominant class, and the ideology of the dominant class will be a pure reflection of the life conditions and conception of the world of that class.’ Such a view is thought by Stedman Jones to be entirely mistaken, and he quotes Poulantzas to drive the conclusion home: ‘the dominant ideology does not simply reflect the life conditions of the dominant class-subject “pure and simple,” but the political relationship in a social formation between the dominant and dominated classes’.[37] In the case of the dominated classes, he continues, ‘Lukács’s model leads to even more serious results’. For there is ‘no room in it for conceiving the possibility of a dominated class which does not possess a consciousness which is neither “ascribed,” nor that of the ruling class, but is uneven and impure’. The truth, however, is that ‘history is littered with examples of this impurity in which radical proletarian class instinct is often deeply overlaid by bourgeois ideological veneers of different sorts, or in which genuine proletarian ideology is mixed with contaminations from allied, rather than enemy classes – peasants or urban petty producers, for example’. Stedman Jones cites some fairly familiar historical examples to show what he has in mind, and concludes that ‘Lukács condemns all this to silence.’[38]

A convenient starting point for assessing the Poulantzas-Stedman Jones critique is provided by the question of ‘ideological contamination’ and, in particular, its implications for the dominated classes. The complaint against Lukács is that he is unable to see these effects or has to condemn them to silence. Such blindness and deafness are, it is supposed, the natural outcome of his basic assumptions. Hence, the study of these symptoms should throw some light on the organic source of the disease.

A first reaction might well be to conclude that the allegations are entirely groundless. For Lukács is fully alive to the significance of phenomena which it would be natural to subsume under ‘ideological contamination’ and which are so treated by his critics. He refers to these phenomena explicitly and with the utmost seriousness on many occasions. He is, that is to say, much occupied by the contaminating influence of bourgeois ideology on the proletariat. His admiration for Rosa Luxemburg derives in part from her campaign for ‘its ideological emancipation from its spiritual bondage under opportunism’.[39] He warns of the danger that it might ‘adapt itself ideologically to conform to ... the emptiest and most decadent forms of bourgeois culture’.[40] He speaks of the power of non-proletarian ideologies ‘within the proletariat itself,’[41] and insists that ‘the mere fact of victory does not free the proletariat from contamination by capitalist and nationalist ideologies’.[42] Such references are far from representing an enforced recognition of facts that cannot be theoretically assimilated. On the contrary, ideological contamination of this kind has a vital place in the intellectual scheme of History and Class Consciousness. A basic assumption running throughout the work is that: ‘As the product of capitalism the proletariat must necessarily be subject to the modes of existence of its creator.’[43] Yet the prospects of the revolution depend on its success in shaking off this inheritance. For ‘the proletariat has been entrusted by history with the task of transforming society consciously’.[44]

Its revolution is uniquely ‘the revolution of consciousness’: the achievement of true class consciousness is the precondition for fulfilling its historical role. To put the point in terms of the distinction with which we began: the outcome of the final battle ‘depends on closing the gap between the psychological consciousness and the imputed one’.[45] Hence arises that ‘terrible internal ideological crisis’ of the proletariat to which reference is made again and again.[46] The process of closing the gap, and so overcoming the crisis, is precisely one of sloughing off ideological impurities, of eliminating the traces of contamination by alien ideologies. The largest issues, the fate of the revolution and with it that of humanity in general, depend on its successful completion. It seems fair to conclude that not only is Lukács able to acknowledge and theorize the phenomenon of ideological contamination, but it has in truth a central place in his view of the historical process. Indeed, it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that, from one point of view, History and Class Consciousness is a treatise on the nature and significance of such contamination and on the means by which it is overcome.

Some part at least of the case against Lukács has now evaporated. It will not do to say that he cannot conceive of the possibility of a dominated class whose consciousness is uneven and impure. For him this seems rather to be the normal condition of the proletariat in bourgeois society. It may be, however, that recognition of this does not suffice to dispose of the anti-historicist critique. For that contains a number of elements it does not clearly distinguish. At times it appears that Poulantzas and Stedman Jones interpret ‘ideological contamination’ in another way. They are concerned rather with the situation in which a class ideology might be said to be ‘impure’ in that it derives from heterogeneous sources. The trouble with Lukács would then be his mono-factorial view of the genesis of ideologies, their springing into existence as pure reflections of the historical situation of isolated classes. The charge is not that he cannot recognize the effect on psychological consciousness of alien ideologies, but that he cannot recognize the effect on an ideology of elements that arise outside the ‘life conditions’ of its class, from outside the range of the determinants of its spontaneous consciousness. Understood in this way, ‘ideological contamination’ turns out to be a sort of converse of the phenomenon discussed previously. The first comment to be made about it is that Lukács, quite clearly, holds no such simple-minded view of the genesis of ideologies as a general thesis. He is no more committed than is Marx to any such view. Historical materialism is, after all, ‘the ideology of the embattled proletariat’ and Lukács is as aware as anyone that it was originally brought to the proletariat ‘from outside’. But Poulantzas and Stedman Jones do not seem inclined to press the general charge here. Their interest is rather in the treatment of the dominant class and it is in this light that their objections deserve to be considered.

#marxism #marxist ideology #marxist philosophy #karl marx #ideology #political ideology

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shannon-jeanna · 6 years

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What does it mean when the “perfect novel” is misogynistic, petty, and utterly unremarkable? Just that it’s by a white man.

As I browsed the University of Texas Press’s fall catalogue, a title jumped out at me: The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel (October 15). When I read the blurb, I became incensed. It was a biography of John Williams, the author of Stoner, the unlikeliest bestseller of the 2000s. Stoner was originally published in 1965 and reissued by NYRB Classics in 2006, and then re-reissued in 2015 in a lavish hardback edition. It was reviewed and lauded widely. In the New York Times Book Review, Morris Dickstein called it “a perfect novel.”

Stoner is not a perfect novel. It’s not even a particularly well-written novel. You’ve probably read a hundred books like it. It is a methodical, hagiographic piece of fiction about a college professor, a man who plods passively through his life and takes joy only in literature.

William Stoner is born on a farm. He goes to college, becomes a professor at that college, takes a wife, has a child, undergoes professional difficulties, and dies. This is a terrific way to write a novel—to do a character study of a small, mediocre life. But Williams’s mediocrity blurs with Stoner’s until they both lose the reader’s interest. And one or both of them has a frightening carelessness toward women. Stoner repeatedly indulges in marital rape, saying that when his wife shifts against him in her sleep, “he moved upon her.” His wife, in response, “turn[s] her head sideways in a familiar gesture and bur[ies] it in her pillow, enduring violation,” so there is no mistaking these encounters as consensual. Dickstein’s review didn’t mention that. But then, Stoner is aimed toward Dickstein, and not toward me.

There’s a reason a book like Stoner was re-issued, and a biography like The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel was published. The most elevated cultural conversations favor writing that is traditionally male, subjectively male, overtly male. This may be occurring almost involuntarily on the part of the editors and critics. In Stoner, a male critic might not notice that Stoner’s wife is relegated to the stereotypes of frigid bitch, and later, crazy bitch. A critic without a disability might not notice that the central villains of the book are both disabled, and that the motives for their villainy are otherwise unexplained. A white critic might not notice that there are no educated people of color in the book at all. He might perceive only that Williams’s quiet, scholarly hero does his duty and loves his literature, despite the schemers who endeavor to ruin him—never noticing the common thread among those schemers.

So, of course Stoner is not a perfect novel. There’s no such thing, but if there were, it definitely wouldn’t sympathize with marital rape or demonize characters who are not cisgendered, fully abled white men. To state the obvious, no novel can be all-inclusive. Committee art is rarely of good quality. But a novel that actively shuts out readers because of their gender or skin color? The time for celebrating a novel like that, for glorifying it to the point of biographizing its author, should be long over.

As a scholar, Williams’s work was backward-looking (despite writing in the fertile 1960s, he had no interest in poetry beyond the time of William Carlos Williams), derivative, and inadequate; a rejecting editor wrote to Williams, “You are overstepping your evidence by about ten thousand miles.” In 1963 Williams caused a minor scandal by plagiarizing Yvor Winters. Shields treats it as delicately as possible. “Williams’ students did know of their professor’s proclivity for borrowing…He had taken shortcuts since the beginning of his teaching career…piggybacking on Alan Swallow’s Wyatt dissertation for his own…compiling a poetry anthology incorporating Winters’ scholarship.”

In the critical segment of his writer’s life, Williams is so unimaginative that he must plagiarize. Meanwhile, as a poet and fiction author, he struggles to find an agent, to find publication, to find a job, to find funding. He often expresses frustration that he can’t seem to get ahead as a writer. Shields tiptoes around it, but the fact is, Williams’s books just aren’t that good. On his first novel, a rejection letter reads, “To us it seems a shame that a writer of Mr. William’s [sic] obvious capabilities and potentialities should have spent so much time delineating a character who is basically not worth it.” Dutton’s feedback: “Unfortunately, we think that…this manuscript is just too long and too pretentious.”

In sum, Stoner is a minor novel by a minor writer. I don’t begrudge its wide readership (people can enjoy whatever they want); I begrudge its elevation, when it is so plainly and seriously flawed, to the point that a single review by a male critic has titled Williams’s biography. The preposterous, rapturous praise, leveled unequally toward mediocre men like Williams, is the problem.

A scan of the NYRB Classics list shows that male names outstrip female names; the same editors who chose to put two editions of Stoner into print within ten years choose mostly men from the annals of out-of-print literature to reissue and promote. Yet the poet Ai, who won a National Book Award, a Guggenheim, and an NEA grant, requires a Kickstarter to come back into print. The Second Shelf, a quarterly publication and online bookstore devoted to out-of-print women’s writing, also needed a Kickstarter to fill the gap NYRB Classics perpetuates. Passing, by Nella Larsen, is obscure (ranked at 10,000 in Amazon sales at this writing), while Invisible Man flourishes (ranked at 1,000).

Twice as many male authors get translated as women; only two houses that commonly publish translated books published more women authors than men in 2017. And just one publisher, AmazonCrossing (!), accounts for 20% of the women published in translation. VIDA continues to shout across the gender gap in publishing for short stories, essays, and particularly criticism—check out the stats for the London Review of Books and, surprise!, the NYRB. As those statistics demonstrate, women writers are reviewed less, and women critics are offered fewer opportunities to review.

Stoner is perfect in one respect: as an example of the heights to which a mediocre white male writer can soar when given proper cheerleading. Williams has netted a biography and lasting fame because of the men in publishing and criticism clustered around him, rooting for him. Compare him to Clarice Lispector, a contemporary, who was exponentially more prolific and acclaimed during her lifetime. It took a 2009 biography to push her work into wider acknowledgment in the US, instead of the acknowledgment engendering the biography. Or compare him to Anaïs Nin, whose work is remembered as supplemental to Henry Miller’s, whose extraordinary diary has been published by smaller and smaller presses as interest in her has waned, whose objectively fascinating life has been biographized only once. Or compare him to Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place. She wrote bestselling, salacious melodramas that tapped the repressive sexuality of her era and is barely critically studied at all.

Stoner is also excellent as a standard against which every female writer should push. Per Shields, “Williams could build his fiction around thought warring with feeling, which creates tension, and to suggest that emotions are ineffable, beyond characters’ reach.” This sense pervades Stoner, that emotions are foreign and impossible. I think this struggle was Williams’s, that he found it difficult to enter the weak and confusing realm of emotion and nurture (his own children barely appear in Shields’s biography), the realm in which women stereotypically belong. I imagine that Williams would have found a book like My Brilliant Friend as intolerable as I find Stoner, as there is no place for him in it.

Women are half (or more) of the reading public, and yet books like Stoner are what’s thrust upon us—books in which we will never find ourselves, books whose authors were rightly buried under the weight of their own mediocrity. Books and authors whose obsolescence, whose extinction, are overdue.

#writing #sexism #racism #ableism #heterosexism #cissexism #mediocrity #privilege

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tartantombraider · 6 years

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Living with Buildings, Walking with Ghosts: A Diarist's Response to Iain Sinclair, 2nd October 2018.'

Tuesday 2 October 2018.

Another excellent day after a night of which I remember little. I had been up until about eleven thirty after listening to another stimulating episode of the new 'Book at Bedtime' series on Radio 4.

A few days previously I had asked my friends and followers on social media if any of them thought that 2027 would be a rerun of 1177 BC all over again. And, if so, who would be the Peoples of the Sea?

The relevance of these questions to the latest offering from the pen of Booker Prize-winning author of 'Regeneration', Pat Barker, is that the principal subject matter with which her novel 'The Silence of the Girls' is itself primarily concerned is the fate of the Women of Troy . A theme of major literary interest since the time of the Greek playwright Euripides.

The Siege of Troy appears to have been among the last great historical events that took place prior to the great societal collapse of the twelfth century BC, after which the civilization of Ancient Egypt appears to have been the only real survivor. A chain of events that would form part of the narrative of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'History of the Kings of Britain', of which the supposed foundation of Ancient London, or 'New Troy', is itself a key element within the overall historical chronology.

So, are we headed for a major societal collapse? Some think we are. The common denominator, between events in the Eastern Mediterranean in 1177 BC and now, is that great controversy of all controversies, Climate Change. Interesting then that the day's events would draw me back to the location of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'New Troy' and many of the related social and environmental issues dredged up by some of the historical theories associated with the events of 1177 BC.

After getting up slightly later than planned, due to the fact that I had woken during the middle of the night and had been unable to get back to sleep again, thanks largely to a rather generous helping of cheese, spinach and basil omelette; made with the final remnant of this year's third crop of spinach from the garden, I set about the day’s tasks as usual. After performing all of my customary ablutions, and getting most of my obligatory chores out of the way, I had been greeted, around lunchtime, with a link to the latest offering from John Rogers, which arrived via direct message on social media.

It was his 'Living with Buildings, Walking with Ghosts'; another of his video profiles of the writer and perambulator Iain Sinclair. As is so often the case with Sinclair, the perambulation started within a veritable maze of contradictions. After the subject had put in a plug for the new 'Living with Buildings' exhibition, which is being hosted at the Wellcome Collection Museum and Library in Euston, it moved into a hasty quickstep in the general direction of Andrew Kötting's old flat on the nearby Pepys Estate; with interjected references to ancestral waterfalls, illustrative of the disconnection between contemporary urban societies and the subconscious pull so many of their members feel towards their own ancient tribal Mesolithic roots.

An appropriate stopping off point at Harmsworth Quays, for a man more at home in the authoritarian world of industrially printed books and newspapers than the democratized electronic media of the post industrial Internet Age, soon followed. Next, a conversational move to Scotland and a misleading diatribe on the subject of abandoned homes on the Outer Hebrides, which, since a 2016 photographic exhibition by former 'Buzzcocks' drummer John Maher, stand a very good chance, in at least once instance at any rate, of becoming family homes once again.

Although by no means personally affronted by this, I was at least able to view Sinclair's statements as the nephew of one who has recently passed away near Portree on the Isle of Skye. The death of a Maiden Aunt whose house, far from suffering the same fate as those referred to in Sinclair's mercurial exposition, was lived in almost until her passing; and was itself perhaps illustrative of the fact, in a bricks and mortar sort of a way as it were, that the complexities of land ownership, land use and Crofters' Rights in Scotland are considerably more complex than what is usually referred to by Urban Planners, and others in the contemporary fleshpots of London, as 'Sick Building Syndrome'.

The next location, a pub called 'The Moby Dick', was perhaps more representative of the problems of many of the Macleods of Skye in the first instance, and the plight of Indigenous Peoples generally in the second. At least of those who lived contemporaneously with Herman Melville, whose novel provided the original inspiration for the naming of this less than traditional ale house.

In Melville's time, the era which was to become known to social historians as 'The Highland Clearances', which had begun with the so called 'Pacification of the Highlands' after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, was at its height. Melville's novel, appropriately enough, concerns itself in part with the fate of Indigenous Peoples, not least the tattooed Polynesian Queequeg , who is himself a key player in the high seas drama that unfolds aboard 'The Pequod', the ship at the centre of this nautical tale.

Interestingly enough, this albeit fictional boat was likewise named after the first tribe of American Indians to be exterminated by the seventeenth century New England colonists. Thus, aquatic mammal and indigenous North American tribe are compared one with the other as the victims of nineteenth century industrial development. Again there is a personal angle too, in that like many Highland Scots caught up in the great social upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my own Grandfather's Grandfather's Grandfather, Captain Robert Ferguson (1719-1797), the older brother of the great Scottish Philosopher Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), took ship to New England, like so many others.

In his case it was to Newport, Rhode Island, a location just a few short miles West of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the opening chapters of this novel are set. Interestingly enough, in view of the venue for Sinclair's Wellcome Collection exhibition, the Captain's Grandson, Robert Ferguson MD (1799-1865), himself a physician of note who contributed to the scientific publications of John Murray of Albany Street, would eventually return to London via India; where his Father had been Keeper of the French Salt at Ishera on behalf of the British East India Company.

The latter Ferguson, also a Robert, referred to in various biographical records of his illustrious son and heir as 'of the Indian Civil Service', was later to reside at what was formerly Judd Place. This long vanished street, which once stood just a stone's throw from where the Wellcome Collection and Library are presently housed, was just a little bit further along the Euston Road from where October's exhibition is due to take place; and stood on the site of what is now the British Library, but which at that time was mostly open fields on the very edge of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia.

Although Robert Ferguson was no diarist on a level with either myself or John Evelyn, the primary subject of Sinclair's at times convoluted perambulatory testimonial, some of his writings still survive in the published Records of the Clan Fergusson Society alongside a forgotten picture of his Father.

Meanwhile, as I am momentarily distracted by news from the BBC that no fewer than seventy five deep-water whales were washed up on Scottish and Irish coasts during August and September. Sinclair lights out for the territory with a reference to Elhanan Bicknell, the great nineteenth century Whale Oil magnate. A fitting point in the narrative for an artistic perambulation through some of the more obscure works of J.M.W. Turner.

Upon his arrival on the Pepys Estate the author makes another of his characteristic references to London Gangland, reminiscent of his fascination with David Litvinoff. Once again, the filmmaker Andrew Kötting is in the frame. Next on the itinerary is a visit to John Evelyn's monument, and an attempt to invoke the drawing forth of a modern literary 'Excalibur'. In view of the encounter with an alleged member of the gang that masterminded the Brinks Mat Bullion Robbery earlier on, are we talking just King Arthur here, or is it Arthur Daley we should be looking for?

As we traverse the fine line between fact and fiction that Sinclair so often treads, is it really possible to tell? At the very centre of the narrative is John Evelyn's Mulberry Tree, which, if the anecdotes relating to the traditional song 'Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush' are in any way to be believed, may have a subliminal link to the very prison environment which the real life Arthur Daleys of this world so often find themselves incarcerated in.

In many ways the ambience of social housing projects like the Pepys Estate is akin to that of the very prison system with which so many past and present residents appear to have had a more than passing familiarity with. Was this intentional? And if so, what has society to gain? As the film drew to a close I took advantage of the Autumn sunshine for a quick perambulation of my own. A walk along the old Roman Road from Vinovium to Pons Aelius. A lost forgotten byway which, quite unlike Watling Street, still preserves sections of its original Roman paving within easy striking distance of my own present domestic abode.......The trackway beckoned........

#iain sinclair #living with buildings #walking with ghosts #wellcome collection

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angrycollectordaze-me-blog · 6 years

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作业代写：The story of michelle bhutto's novel

下面为大家整理一篇优秀的essay代写范文- The story of michelle bhutto's novel，供大家参考学习，这篇论文讨论了米歇尔·布托尔的小说叙述。米歇尔·布托尔的小说以小说与现实的“象征性”关系为立足点，以小说的艺术形式革新为核心内容，将小说从叙述结构、叙述人称和叙述视角诸方面进行创新探索，充分调动读者的参与意识，以适应当代社会纷繁复杂的现实。

Michelle bhutto's novel theory relationship between fiction and reality "symbolic" as foothold, the artistic form of the novel innovation as the core content, requires novel to from the narrative structure, narrative person, narrative Angle of view has made some research on innovation, give full play to the reader's participation, to adapt to the contemporary society the complicated reality, showing a different with the traditional novel and more objective in essence the real world, has a strong innovative experimental.

Fair to say that in traditional lashed out at the novel, strongly advocated narrative innovation of "new novel" the home, michelle bhutto's narrative theory is solid plain, the objective of. He doesn't like Natalie Mr Lott face to face with the "age of doubt," resolutely decisively to break away from the traditional, "not only against the idea of depth psychology, and opposed ideas about character inference", focusing on display "as all personality to change the basis of" no personality ", "former level" of human nature; Also don't like rob ? Gerry, under the guidance of "the doctrine" ideas, the pursuit to the simulations of fine pure object world, efforts and traditional novel ubiquitous "humanitarian" draw a line. May be about his years of study life hone, michelle bhutto's novel theory lacks both aggressive agitation abilities, in the expression in the art of fiction is about more than a lot of scholars, relieve and calm. In the relationship between fiction and reality "symbolic" overall understanding, under the domination of bhutto's narrative theory in the form of a novel innovation as the core, the content involves the fiction and reality, and traditional and skill The narrative theory system of "new novel" school has been improved and enriched in such aspects as ingenious innovation.

"New novel" pie in the 1950 s boom and fame, the reason is that they lift up high the flag of novels, the credibility of the traditional novels and the art form unequivocally questioned and denied. "new novel" pie leader Robert ? Gerry "by the tone of ironic banter accused the traditional novel as a" myth "about depth, believe that the" depth "consciousness is the chief culprit of novel art in the stagnant state, asked for a perfect thing in this world phenomenology meticulous observation and depict. Natalie Mr Lott also believes that the traditional GeLang desktop is hardly enough to show typical characters in the novel Various complexity characters infinite broad mind world. As we know, literary authenticity is often closely contact with the problem of the relationship between the literature and art with the world together, also is any serious writers and critics could not avoid the fundamental problem is unable to avoid. As an important writer, "new novel" send bhutto's narrative theory and starting from the fundamental question.

From fundamental sense, bhutto's ideas about relationship between fiction and reality is not beyond the basic category of theory of reflection, which argues that literature and art and the world is the relationship between relationship is reflected and reflection. He thought that the truth of the fiction novels is a kind of imitation, is the life of an isolated, easy to grasp the fragments of description and representation. It is a kind of medium and carrier, at the same time people can by writing novels in depicting, represent the life "of a kind of psychology, sociology, moral or other theory". He called the general relationship between fiction and reality of this novel "symbolic". This kind of "symbolic" relationship "determines our general Often referred to as the subject matter or theme of a novel, the novelist's task is to try to express and clarify this "symbolic" relationship.

From the point of view, the thor, in turn, points out, "symbolic" relationship contains two levels of meaning. One is made of the novel and the objective world "external" symbolic. The characters in the novel always to the outside world and events as its subject, is a refraction of the real world situation. From this perspective, the novel can become the symbol of the outside world, in short, the world is ontology, in the novel purves acknowledges is the content of the show; 2 it is made of the novel form and content "inner" symbolic. Due to the content of the novel always through certain to be in the form of organization, form is content organization, considering and become the symbol of the content, the form or content into ontology, form become purves acknowledges. By reflecting the content to the refraction of the world, form is realized in the double relationship between the indirect symbol of reality, also is what bhutto's call "novel external symbolic tend to reflect, in symbolic". In bhutto's point of view, on the one hand, because of the novel and reflect and reflect the relationship between the objective world, and era of social change It is bound to cause the change of the novel concept and form. On the other hand, with the continuous development of novel concepts, artistic skill improvement, form is not only is the way of some kind of decoration and the performance content, but also a meaningful, can be self-sufficient, refraction of the real world of special forces. The changing process of its implied the trace of the development of the real world, is worth us to observational studies seriously.

In complicated, diversity of contemporary society, the traditional artistic skills of the novel has far couldn't keep up with the world changes the speed of development, the co-action in front of it, hard to do, "can't hold all the rapid emergence of a new relationship, the result is a persistent, don't adapt to, we can't arrange consciousness of all the information to us, because we lack of proper tools." therefore, if a writer also hopes his creation to adapt themselves to society, you must have the courage to break the bondage of both specifications, with their own understanding and determination to replace those from others indirect experience, explore new art forms , research new performance way. In other words, the contemporary novel first with the core of the problem is in the form of innovation. Reality in any way or in what way may be present in people's eyes, should be the cause of writer attaches great importance to the priority. In this way, "the novel form of innovation is far from myopic reviews often imagine, is opposed to realism, on the contrary, it is necessary to more advanced realistic conditions."

To emphasize his trumpeted the rationality of the novel form of innovation, benazir bhutto, will prove my eye from contemporary to traditional, from literature to find the theory basis for the development of the process. In the "symbolic" relationship under the guidance of overall understanding, benazir bhutto, in combination with the history of European novels, examines the evolution of the novel form and the relationship between the transformation of times. Bhutto, pointed out that the western novel of epic and romance, and the tramp novel, to mature in the 19th century development, from beginning to end is closely related with the time development of social life.

Bhutto's thought, in the feudal of the middle ages, the populace is weak, don't compete with nobility, which occupies the center of the social life. However, their authority, is the result of widespread recognition, with the aid of a bard sung's singing a colourful and deeply rooted in the hearts of the people of the family reputation. This reality determines the heroic epic plot must be single, must be centered on the nobles, sung by their heroism as the main content. So in the epic "the history of a nation is the history of the country's imperial; Narrative of a war, that is, describe the general's feats "phenomenon, it is not hard to understand. At the end of the middle ages, the bourgeois adventure race to draw profit-seeking activities to broaden the people originally narrow field of vision, also changed the traditional literature, with the inner obscurity of freemen and enterprising spirit, is increasingly attracting the attention of the public, and then replaced aristocrats as literary upstarts, then adapted to roam adventure tramp novel contribute, in a long time to become a widely adopted novel style. Since then, with the growing bourgeoisie strength, increasing stabilization of international capitalism people start to raise The socialist society tired hypocrisy of civilization and the reality and suspicion, from the mysterious and exotic things, valentine, express sad feelings is becoming a new trend of literary performance, gloomy and romantic "secret societies became the basic theme of romantic literature in the 19th century", the novelist through "to the existing communities or revelation, or recognition, and introduced a new, positive and effective groups.... Ushered in a new language, new language and new words. "the establishment of the capitalist system and the development, broke the boundary between the person and the person originally fixed identity, give a person a degree of freedom development provides opportunity, interpersonal relationship has become increasingly complex, the destiny of man also has an unprecedented uncertainty. So, that from others too outstanding personal experiences, basically the chronology of character activities for recording linear novel structure is stable and change is insufficient, stretched in front of the new reality, be replaced by the novel structure of multiple has become an inevitable history. In general, is when to adapt in the form of European novels On the other hand, the changes of the novel form clearly indicate the historical track of The Times change.

Relationship about the evolution of the novel form and times change, benazir bhutto, check it on the one hand, from the diachronic perspective analysis, on the other hand, in Balzac's "human comedy", for example, comments and discusses it from the synchronic perspective. With Gerry and Mr Lott many paper discusses Balzac, benazir thought that Balzac's "human comedy" adopted by the form is to adapt to The Times and highly fit with typical. In his view, Balzac novel forms of innovative contributions are two:

First is about image creation "character representation method". Every important figure in the "human comedy" is the representative of a class has a certain social background and life experience, their actions in the novel is not only fragments of his life experience, and show a side of social life at the same time. Will they connected, in different before and after the activity of the novel not only constitutes the complete the life line of the character, but also to show a certain historical period laid the possible broad social style and features. These representative connections to each other, hand in photograph, have taken place in the structure of the "human comedy" by point and plane, plane and solid by revolutionary change , constitute a complex system, its size and capacity is almost a par with the real world. Not only that, Balzac also interwoven, intended to make some real historical figures make it into the fictional world of a certain position, become the participants and interaction with the exchange of fictional characters. They shuttle between the fictional character and the world, better solve the imaginary world and the real world is compatible with contradictions, create a "virtual and actual" the authenticity of the results.

Followed by the "human comedy" in that kind of shift with the real social structure, the overall structure of the reflection relationship. Bhutto, pointed out that Balzac's genius, is not only using the character representation method to build a solid real effect, and which is his custom research of several scenarios as the foundation, to show the complexity of social life more and more intense, greatly strengthening the authenticity of the novel world. At the same time, he wasn't content to like later naturalistic writers, make the novel the copy and copy of life, but to actively be considerable variation in the real, through the studies of philosophy and the analysis and research Architecture away from real life, to work and maintained a certain amount of space between reality and directs the novels in the direction of the virtual world, set up a "true magic" path. However, whether it is "empty and fact" or "verisimilitude and illusions", build the effect the performance of the technique is with the French bourgeoisie strength growing, ups and downs, social life destiny of realistic situation corresponds to the bizarre.

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