"All these novels in which the authors try desperately to dramatize their own histories, their experiences, to recount their own psychological dramas - this is not literature. It is secretion, just like bile, sweat or tears - and, sometimes, even excretion. It is the literary transcription of 'reality television'. It is all the product of a vulgar unconscious, not unlike a small intestine, around which roam the phantasms and affects of those who, now they've been persuaded they have an inner life, don't know what to do with it."
- Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories
I think you'd already be able to guess my opinion, but I'll say it anyway: the problem is not the author deriving autobiographical inspiration, it's the critic thinking that autobiographical detail is important.
ReplyDeleteMind, I am exasperated with the current assumption that each novel requires a 10-page bibliography revealing the research in order to be of merit. Is the novel just a means for the author to show their workings? Have people forgotten that "fiction" means "lying"?
Not really what Baudrillard is getting at here with this polemical barb. Although entirely taking the form of negation and derision, implicitly he is echoing Oscar Wilde, who called for writers to be fabulists - creating things that don't already exist in the world, that don't have any relation to reality or real life (especially not the writer's own life and experience).
DeleteHow is your significant person, who's been unwell, doing?
Oh, and what do you think of this unofficial comp of Happy Monday bits-and-bobs? http://itslostitsfound.blogspot.com/2023/08/happy-mondays-rendering-that.html
I have read that a common complaint voiced by teachers of creative writing is that too many of their students treat writing as a mere avenue of therapy, rather than as a craft and a discipline. That said, such complaints tend to occur in clickbaity articles, and in any case don't most people view participants in creative writing courses with the same disdain as recent Oxbridge graduates immediately pursuing a career in politics with the expectation of joining the cabinet before the age of 30?
DeleteWe're still waiting to hear news.
Thanks for the Mondays link. Nice to have it all in one place, though it's really only the remixes I've not heard.
By the by, a mate of mine has been pestering me as to whether there's any connection between progressive rock and progressive house. I keep telling him no, but I'm not quite sure what progressive house is, so he feels I haven't answered him properly. Can you illuminate the issue?
Yeah there is a sort of counter-view to the "write what you know" advice typically given to creative writing students.
ReplyDeleteBaudrillard and Wilde would be saying "write what you don't know... write visions drawn whole cloth from your imagination"
Mark Fisher had this riff that was quite clever, that whenever he saw the words "based on a true story" at the start of a film, his heart sank
it's clever but I don't actually agree, there's so many books and films that are based on either true history or personal biography but are brilliant imaginings - the David Peace books about the Miner's Strike and Brian Clough's brief, ill-starred reign at Leeds United. Or on the disguised memoir front recently I read Geoff Dyer's wonderful The Colour of Memory which is about dossing around in Brixton in the mid-80s.
But something that is entirely from the fevered imagings of a brain - like Nabokov with Ada, or with Pale Fire. Fantastic. (Contra your death-of-author, it's something that only he with his particular Russian exile history and obsessions could have come up with).
sorry to hear the health worries ongoing
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure where the term 'progressive house' came from - i think the word, like the similarly used 'intelligent' in 'intelligent techno' or 'intelligent jungle' is designed to say this is stuff is cleverer and more cerebral than your bog-standard house. Which is largely achieved, as an effect, by removing the songs and the divas element, and making the tracks loooooong. And they would a bit of very clinical 'dubbiness' into the mix. It's a sound that has almost zero attraction to me.
The turning something songy and poppy into purely instrumental music is a longstanding 'progressive' move. Crops up over and over again.
I don't know whether Spooky or Leftfield etc were fans of progressive rock. The Orb were, but that's really a different sub-scene of the '90s dance and electronic spectrum.
I was round my aforementioned mate's house tonight, just sharing a few cans whilst watching Taskmaster, and I told him your response. He then discovered this on the Wikipedia entry for progressive house:
ReplyDelete"In the late 1980s, UK music journalist Simon Reynolds introduced the term "progressive dance" to describe acts such as 808 State, The Orb, Bomb the Bass and The Shamen. Between 1990 and 1992, the term "progressive" referred to the short-form buzz word for the house music subgenre "progressive house"."
Are you completely sure you're not sure where the term progressive house might have sprung from?
Anyway, I later challenged him as to how many EDM genres (he despises the term EDM) he could recognise from this link; he managed approximately 75%: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTUDKu3BL7c
I plan on getting him a shiny copy of Energy Flash over the weekend.
Yes I did use the term "progressive dance" in a review of a Bomb the Bass album, this would have been 1990 I think, or 1991 - at any rate I was saying a term was needed for this album-oriented dance music. But I doubt very much if anyone in the dance scene was reading Melody Maker and even if some had been they wouldn't remember me briefly bandying around that phrase. Progressive house was a good two years later on. Same time that the term "intelligent dance music" was getting wheeled out.
ReplyDeleteBy the time I got involved in the rave scene properly I completely reversed on this earlier viewpoint (i.e. that home listening album oriented stuff was more advanced). I was of the contrary view that the hardcore drug-monster stuff - oriented around tracks and DJs mixing it up chaotically on pirate radio or in the rave - that this was the leading edge.
To be fair, I suppose progressive house just as much pillhead music in its own way as ardkore. But just a bit controlled and serene for my tastes. Long, long tracks... seamless mixing, transitions barely distinguishable ... Sasha and Digweed...