“Art arrived at that point of extreme maturity that determines civilizations which have grown old; ingenious, complicated, clever, full of delicate hints and refinements, gathering all the delicacies of speech, borrowing from technical vocabularies, taking color from every palette, tones from all musical instruments, contours vague and fleeting, listening to translate subtle confidences, confessions of depraved passions, and the odd hallucinations of a fixed idea turning to madness.... 

"... language already veined with the greenness of decomposition, savoring of the Lower Roman Empire and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine School and the last form of Greek Art fallen into deliquescence; but such is the necessary and fatal idiom of peoples and civilizations where an artificial life has replaced a natural one and developed in a person who does not know his own needs. Contrary to classical style, it admits of backgrounds where the specters of superstition, the haggard phantoms of dreams, the terrors of night, remorse which leaps out and falls back noiselessly, obscure fantasies that astonish the day, and all the soul in its deepest depths and innermost caverns conceals the darkness, deformity, and horror, move together nervously”

                        - Théophile Gautier on decadence, from Constantinople. 

 "Art is domination. It's making people think that for that precise moment in time there is only one way, one voice. Yours" 

- Maria Callas

 

Green Gartside, speaking to Smash Hits, in 1982

 “You must be regular and natural in your habits, like a bourgeois, that you may be violent and original in your work.”

- Flaubert

Phoebephobia

 "I wonder what Mark Fisher would have thought about the spread across all the end-of-year lists of what is effectively (regardless of genre or sonic specifics) a new singer-songwriter ethos...  recordings approached and analysed and felt largely as literary expressions... narratives of self, social comment, political stances and statements, representations of identity, thematic links  ....  the criticism surrounding it somewhat more attentive to sound and rhythm than Paul Nelson's purely literary appreciation of  Jackson Browne's The Pretender in Stranded, but fundamentally it's coming from the same place, the same understanding of how popular music works and what it's for.  

"Today, listening to and reading about this kind of album ... it feels like what's going on between artist and critics is a performance of  Importance and Seriousness - Masterpiece Theater you could call it - one that harks back achingly to a time when such major statements could be presumed to be of universal significance. In that sense, true retro rather than surface retro... "

Wheeling out these 2020 thoughts once again in honour of the new Phoebe Bridgers record....

I am not really a Phoebephobe. I saw her play a fundraiser for a Democratic candidate in 2018 in someone's back garden in Los Angeles. She was playing support to  - or sharing a stage with - Conor Oberst.  And she was fine. A pleasant sound. 

Just an up-and-comer then:  I had no sense she would become such a figure, taken oh-so-seriously by the bigwig critics. 

(Boygenius is about as milquey sounding a group as imaginable, though)

It does kind of amaze me that folks have gone back to this way of treating popular music: as literary effusions set to sound .... 

So in one of the current pieces on Bridgers there's a reference to "the line-after-line sense of surprise".

Another talks about her "filmmaker’s eye for a cold open. Sometimes her songs disorient from the jump, dropping you into an alien landscape or the middle of an argument. Other times she draws you in with a dreamy establishing shot—and then snaps it into sharp, unsparing focus.... seemingly effortless lines, lines that take a small shard of experience and hold it up to the light, .... has honed one of the most distinctive songwriting voices in indie rock today—wryly observational, ruthlessly introspective, downcast but never wallowing." 

There are parts of these pieces that deal with sound in itself - the use of vocoder, the fact that she's been listening to ambient music and it shows.... but in the end, the sonic is always in service to the literary-poetic. 

Bruce Springsteen, 1974

It threatens to make me even more Jankelevitchian in my stance

But then I remember I too enjoy the "words" part of  "words and music"

In fact, it was the words that originally pulled me into rock music - Johnny Rotten's and Ian Dury's.

As a bookworm, already writing constantly, this was my entry point, the thing that hooked me.  The clever, funny, provocative or thought provoking lyrics. The frolic of language, the wordplay, the mischief with meaning. 

The most recent example of that kind of enjoyment would be the first Dry Cleaning album, where it's the words above all, the cadence of delivery, and the tonal affect, that get me - and I do really treat the music as a pleasing and apt support, a literal vehicle for what's being said. 

So I don't dismiss the idea of the singer-writer as a poet, or a story teller

I just think it's not the whole story.

You shouldn't - couldn't - reduce In a Silent Way, or Music for 18 Musicians, or Tago Mago, or Another Green World, or Solid Air to a meaning. 

(Or Led Zeppelin or AC/DC for that matter. Or Chic. Or "It Takes Two"). 

(But nor should you do that even with text-forward works like The Hissing of Summer Lawns that seemingly invite the record to be read.) 

The instrumental or near-instrumental forms of music cannot be boiled down to semantic-expressive content....  this kind of music works as motion, as space, as immersive medium, as abstract passion play of intangibles and impressions... something to be experienced not interpreted 

The experience of time within a piece of music is not analogous to narrative (this is something the lyrics adapt themselves to....  most pop songs are not story-songs, the lyrics work through repetitions and loops that would seem like you'd lost the plot - literally - if you uttered them in conversation rather than song).

Critical formulations involving verbs like "says" when used in reference to an album or a song create the mistaken sense that a piece of music is trying to communicate something - when it might be more the case that it's trying to make you go through something.  An experience.

The experience itself is what it's about, rather than an alleged "fruit of experience"

Not a gleaned meaning, something you come away with. 

RIP Raoul Vaneigem

Raoul Vaneigem is one of those thinkers whose thinkige had a massive effect on me for a while - and then dropped away almost completely as other influences came along and my thinking grew more complicated. 

Having initially believed The Situationists were a rock band, the ultimate subversive rock band (I first came across their name in a Melody Maker profile of Malcolm McLaren), I found Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist Internationale in  Blackwells, the Oxford book shop, when I was up for interviews at colleges. I think I stumbled upon it in their huge cavernous basement. This must have been the same day that John Lennon's murder was all over the news. As one symbol of the Sixties dream died,  I started an infatuation with another set of Sixties dreaming. 

Over the next few months I read and reread the slim green large-size volume (that's my well-worn copy above). It's wonderfully illustrated with photographs of Situationist graffiti and Situationist comic strips and collages. And the selection of texts is well chosen and helpfully contextualized by Christopher Gray. I found myself gravitating towards the pieces written by Vaneigem, whose vision was more vitalist and desire-driven than the severe Guy Debord.  In my copy, the Vaneigem essays like "Self-Realisation, Communication and Participation" (a deceptively mild and neutral title: it could be some Pelican volume about education policy or modernized management structures!) and "The Totality for Kids" (much more adrenalizing in tone!) are heavily marked up with pencil - in places almost every sentence struck me as profound and revelatory. 

"A Permament Rag Week" - what a horrific idea!

In this flush of enthusiasm, I also bought Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life - from Compendium in Camden, I think. But somehow I never got around to reading it. Other theory totems had entered my life, different Frenchmen.  And I was already having doubts about the Situationist vision. 

I had come across the John Berger quote about how the Situationists had no concept of tragedy - and I found myself nodding. Their critique of the poverty of everyday life remains acute, albeit with some provisos and adjustments needed. But their ideas of how that would translate into politics are pure fantasy. "Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp it!" - mouthed by one of the revolutionaries in a Situationist comic strip that I photocopied and stuck to my student bedsit wall - is actually Viking philosophy, something Mafiosos and Trumpers and libertarian tech-bros would cosign. Anarchy conceived of as a chaos of wills and desires ends up as tyranny of the strongest and most ruthless.

(Ah, it turns out Vaneigem actually created this comic strip - didn't know that! It first appeared in an American underground paper, Helix, in late '68 and then in a 1969 issue of  Internationale Situationniste)

As for this panel, it's something a psychopath could agree with:

It's reminiscent of the famous Blake maxim

"Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." 

Which is generally taken as a libertine's rallying cry (Jeff Nuttall refers to it in his Sixties counterculture text Bomb Culture and mordantly notes that Ian Brady lived it out literally). But I have seen it interpreted to mean the absolute opposite of what it apparently says. 

Then there's the problem with the idea of a life of perpetual play. It ignores the fact that much of life necessarily involves doing things you don't want to be doing. Childhood-as-idyll is supported by the invisible labour of parents and other responsible adults, who do the work of maintaining the protective space that enable it to exist. 

There's three main problems with the utopia envisaged.

One is the question of production - what supports all this plenty, this infinite leisure. The Situationists get round this by talking of a fully automated economy. It's like a narrative short-cut, a cheat - like fantasy fiction where characters have a superpower or magical ability. 

Another question is care. In any society, there are dependents - young children, the elderly, the sick, the mentally distressed. The physical and emotional labour of looking after them means that somebody has to dutifully do things they might rather not be doing, if they were leading the kind of radically selfish, pleasure-principled, impulsive, routine-free life that Vaneigem extolled.  Doing things on behalf of others, sacrificing your own wants, is not only a socially necessary function but part of your growth as a human being.  It is a higher fulfillment than simply pleasing yourself all the time. 

Then there is the question of work itself. Life without meaningful work is empty - a permanent vacation would be a prison sentence.  Any number of examples from literature or history show that decadence - a life of pure self-indulgence and caprice - is a dead end.  If Vaneigem actually lived out his principles, he'd never have written those brilliant essays, or indeed the great number of books he did, including some that must have involved substantial research, like the one about the Free Spirits, those Christian mystical anarchist heretics of the Middle Ages. 

Of course, there could be vastly less drudgery in the world, less exploitation and meaningless, repetitive, soul-deadening labour.  But the satisfaction of a job well done, a task completed is undeniable. After all many of the things we consider play involve effort, discipline, teamwork etc - from children's games to sports. "Play" often mimes aspects of work: it's liberated work, maybe. The idea of "work" infuses dance culture - "work that body". Blake said exuberance is beauty; perhaps exertion is bliss, or can be. 

Below are some passages that were edited out from my epic piece on Malcolm McLaren in the London Review of Books that wrestle with Vaneigem and Situationism from an all-grown-up perspective:

Severe in style and stern in tone, Guy Debord accentuated the negative and was ultimately destined for suicide. Raoul Vaneigem, whose writing pulsed with vivid vitalism and who’s still alive at age 87, was the “fun” Situationist. Like many others, I was particularly drawn to the Vaneigem texts in Leaving the 20th Century. Rather than conjuring a sense of the Spectacle’s multi-tentacled omnipotence, Vaneigem would write about the resistant power of desire. His assertion that a Mallarmé poem should be reason enough for revolution appealed to my teenage Romanticism, even though I’d never heard of Mallarmé and didn’t care much for poetry at the best of times. 

“The Totality for Kids,” one of the Vaneigem essays reprinted in Leaving, originally appeared in  Internationale Situationiste with the title  “Basic Banalities.”  Vaneigem’s drift here is similar to Max Weber’s line about disenchantment and modernity. Once, humans existed in a primordial state of sacred unity with Nature, and with other members of the tribe. But then, in grim succession, came the invention of class, market capitalism, the modern state, industrialism, bureaucracy, technocracy, and the mass media. Community and immediacy gave way to exchange-based economics, the specialization of roles, and the commodification and reification of all experience. “Totality” refers to how things once were, in the lost idyll, and how they’ll be again, after the revolution, when automation has eliminated all drudgery and we’ll live as Peter Pans in a future-paradise of nonstop play and pleasure.  McLaren would turn this idea into a song, Bow Wow Wow’s 1981 single “W.O.R.K.”, which imagined microchips putting patriarchy out of business: “T.E.K. technology / is demolition of daddy.” 

That’s why it’s “the totality for kids”. Totality means non-alienation: life without boredom, constraints, separation. Kids live there already, some of the time at least, mostly when they’re playing, rather than detained in school. Johan Huizinga’s 1938 classic Homo Ludens would have been an influence, and the Situationist emphasis on play chimed with currents in the counterculture, like agit-prop pranksters the Yippies. Rivaled by “take your desires for reality” and “it is forbidden to forbid”, probably the most famous Situationist graffiti slogan is “under the pavement lies the beach”. “Pavement” signifies the pedestrian surfaces of the city, escorting citizens to workplaces or shops, sites of entertainment or education, and, once every few years, to the voting booth. “Beach” means paradise – utopia as permanent vacation – another way of living that lurks latent, inches beneath the deadened skin of workaday routine. 

“We are only concerned with the moments when life shatters the glaciation of survival,” Vaneigem wrote, describing the Situationists as an “almost alchemical, experimental group within which the realization of the total man can be started.” Another exhilarating Vaneigem essay in Leaving the 20th Century bears the deceptively dull and sensible-sounding title  “Self-Realisation, Communication and Participation”  and is taken from his first book, titled in English The Revolution of Everyday Life.  Riffing about unshackled desire and radical honesty, calling for the end of hierarchy, roleplay and the concept of self-sacrifice, Vaneigem climaxes with the clarion call: “There are no limits to creativity. There is no end to subversion.” 

That electrified 17-year-old me, but today I find neither assertion wholly convincing, or alluring for that matter.  “No end to subversion” sounds a bit exhausting. The limits of creativity seem obvious: on the individual level, it can just dry up, for no apparent reason. The idea that each of us teems with inexhaustible inner riches and that it’s only our current social arrangements holding us back seems naive. Insufficiency might be baked into the human condition. John Berger identified the lack of a sense of, well, lack as the big flaw in Situationist thought. “They ignored the everyday fact of tragedy, both on a world and personal scale….,” he wrote in  New Society in 1975, thereby missing “the need to find meaning in tragedy”. 

Other holes can be poked. The equation of spectating with passivity and isolation would need some rethinking.  For sure, watching TV can be vegetative and junkie-like. But anyone who’s lived in a couple, a family, or shared house knows how viewers make fun of –  and fun out of – the shared experience of watching. The popular Channel 4 program Gogglebox turns this into entertainment, capturing the mocking wisecracks but also the emotional responses of families and friends as they watch that week’s notable programs. Debord no doubt would scorn Gogglebox as the Meta-Spectacle.  But the Situationist belief that mass entertainments are necessarily lonely, soul-less affairs is belied by many of our experiences seeing films in packed cinemas, going to rock concerts, clubs or raves, attending large sports events.  It’s here that their pronouncements have the tell-tale whiff of high-culture snobbery, redolent of those literary types who used to speak proudly of not owning a TV. 

What’s wrong with passivity anyway? Independently of McLaren’s particular use of their ideas, Situationist ideas filtered into punk and postpunk through the do-it-yourself ethos. Groups like the Desperate Bicycles cried out that this was “no time for spectating” and urged young people to throw aside apathy, form their own bands, and self-release their own music. Making your own record or fanzine was an ethical imperative, an egalitarian counterblow to the hierarchy of professionalism and centralized media. But most of us, most of the time, are better off as “passive” recipients of superior work made by more creative others, rather than straining to assemble our own efforts. Immersive surrender to a great work of art is not subjugation;  it’s liberation, an escape from the confines and limitations of your own self.  

The Situationist critique would also need adjustment for the age of the internet, social media, and game culture. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube (slogan: “Broadcast Yourself”) require the conceptualization of The Spectacle 2.0.  Disengagement, nonproductivity, the refusal to interact or generate content might actually be the subversive responses here. Even the ever-changing forms of “talking back” to mass-media – parodies, meme collages, fanfic, and other forms of punk-redolent iconoclasm, which conceivably fall under the Situationist category of détournement-  might just be a whole new frontier of distraction: insubordinate and ludic impulses captured and converted into profit (“recuperated”, to use the Situationist term). The ever-flexible Spectacle triumphing again, enough to drive Debord to a second suicide.  

Although the Situationists disdained popular culture, there is something “rock’n’roll” about their ideas and turns of phrase, like the slogan “La vie VITE”. They exalted youth and admired juvenile delinquency. The original French title of Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life is Traite de savoir-vivre a l’usage de jeunes generations – which roughly translates as Guide on How To Live for the Use of the Young Generation.  That seems like a big nod to the widely felt sense of youth as a transnational class that had emerged to consciousness of its own power in the 1960s, turning the instinctive insurrection of the 1950s into ideology. 

Compare Vaneigem’s “We demand everything” with Jim Morrison’s “We want the world and we want it now”. The Doors singer drank deeply from the same sort of philosophers and poets as the Situationists, which helps explain the claims he made in the group’s Elektra Records press release: “I like ideas about breaking away or overthrowing of established order — I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning.” Morrison’s successor Iggy Pop frenziedly strove to turn a spectacle (the rock band performing onstage) into a situation, through self-abasement and breaching the barrier between artist and audience: a Dionysian impulse expressed on the Stooges song “Fun House” in the lines “We been separated / A little too long… Livin’ in division.”  

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

So long Raoul and thanks for all the thinkige 

He lived to a ripe old 92 - wrote over 20 books (hardly a life of leisure, of slacker-ing off) 

His big body of work can be found here.

Edith edicts

"At the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery, and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.

"Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch."

"The violence of an epoch is responsible for the technical experiments of painters and poets of today. How to attain speed is the problem. And, as far as poets are concerned, to do this we must study the effect of texture on rhythm. These experiments are, for the most part, of a violent order. And if you ask why rhythms have become more violent, the answer is: this is an age of machinery, a wild race for time, confined within limits that are at once mad and circumscribed. Try to get out, and you will knock your head against the walls of materialism. This state of things is mirrored in modern syncopated dance-music, which removes music from the world of inspiration (which evolves itself organically from the inner need of the artist and brings it into the world of machinery where form is superimposed as a local idea). There is no time or space in which to dream. It is because of this that in those poems which deal with the world crumbling into dust, or with materialism building monstrous shapes out of the deadened dust, I, for one, use the most complicated dance-rhythms which could be found, or else syncopated rhythms which are not dance-rhythms."

Edith Sitwell, from Taken Care Of: An Autobiography

(via Andrew Parker)

Her ideas about what she was trying to do might be more interesting than the poems themselves

"The poems in Façade are in many cases, virtuoso exercises in technique of an extreme difficulty, in the same sense as that in which certain studies by Liszt are studies in transcendental technique in music."

"The technical experiments in these poems consist, for the most part, of enquiries into the effect on rhythm and on speed of the use of rhymes, assonances and dissonances placed not only at the end of lines, but at the beginning, and in different and most elaborate patterns throughout the verse, and, too, there are enquiries into the effect on speed of equivalent syllables. By this I mean that if you use one three-syllabled word, it has a greater speed than the three one-syllabled words which might have been used as its equivalent. The use of two rhymes placed immediately together at the end of each of two lines, sound like leaps in the air.

‘ “Sally, Mary, Mattie, what’s the matter, why cry?”

The huntsman and the reynard-coloured sun and I sigh;’

Other experiments were made to discover the effect on rhythm of thickening and thinning, sharpening and softening, consonants, as in certain lines of the ‘Waltz’:

‘The stars in their apiaries,

Sylphs in their aviaries,’"

And here are some Wildean wisecracks and barbed comments from Edith: 

"I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her "a beautiful little knitter"."

describing Virginia Woolf in a letter to Geoffrey Singleton (11 July 1955)

c.f Woolf's dismissive comments about James Joyce

"I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... But I am too busy thinking about myself." 

As Andrew notes, this is very Morrissey-esque, which is to say very Wildean. 

And then more of an aphorism: 

"What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear."

In the inner sleeve of Welcome To the Pleasuredome, ZTT offers a bunch of merchandise, including the Edith Sitwell Bag For Life's Little Luxuries. I wonder if anyone sent off for these and other things ? e.g. Andre Gide socks, Sophisticated Virginia Woolf vest, Jean Genet boxers shorts etc, all modelled by Paul Rutherford and Claudia Brucken

 "[The young British] see standards as inhibiting. I see them as defining. They see tradition as deadening. I see it as nourishing. It may be that, as an American, I idealize the British situation. But I hope not as absurdly as they idealize ours. In 1959 I gave a talk on mass culture at a Universities & Left Review forum in London. I expected the audience, which was much younger than I, to object to my lack of enthusiasm for socialism, though it was distressing to find them still talking about capitalism and the working class in the simplistic terms I hadn’t heard since I left the Trotskyists; the problems we thought about in the ’thirties seem to be just coming up now in England; the illusions we were forced to abandon seem still current there. But what I was not prepared for was the reaction to my attacks on our mass culture. These were resented in the name of democracy. Hollywood to me was an instance of the exploitation rather than the satisfying of popular tastes. But to some of those who took the floor after my talk, Hollywood was a genuine expression of the masses. They seemed to think it snobbish of me to criticize our movies and television from a serious viewpoint. Since I had been criticizing Hollywood for some thirty years, and always with the good conscience one has when one is attacking from the Left, this proletarian defense of our peculiar institution left me rather dazed.

- Dwight MacDonald on an early form of British poptimism

Inscape and the hard gem-like flame

Long streamers were rising from over Kemble End one large flake loop-shaped, not a streamer but belonging to the string, moving too slowly to be seen, seemed to cap and fill the zenith with a white shire of cloud. I looked long up at it till the tall height and the beauty of the scaping—regularly curled knots springing if I remember from fine stems, like foliation in wood or stone—had strongly grown on me. It changed beautiful changes, growing more into ribs and one stretch of running into branching like coral. Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins, journal entry, March 1871 

In his journals, Gerard Manley Hopkins used two terms, "inscape" and "instress," which can cause some confusion. By "inscape" he means the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things, and by "instress" he means either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder: 

There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come.

The concept of inscape shares much with Wordsworth's "spots of time," Emerson's "moments," and Joyce's "epiphanies," showing it to be a characteristically Romantic and post-Romantic idea. But Hopkins' inscape is also fundamentally religious: a glimpse of the inscape of a thing shows us why God created it. "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:/ . . myself it speaks and spells,/ Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. "

Hopkins occupies an important place in the poetic line that reaches from the major Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Keats, through Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites to Hopkins, Pater, Yeats and the symbolists, and finally to Ezra Pound and the Imagists. His insistence that inscape was the essence of poetry ("Poetry is in fact speech employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape's sake") and that consequently, what he called "Parnassian" poetry (i.e., competent verse written without inspiration) was to be avoided has much in common with the aestheticism of Walter Pater (one of his tutors at Oxford) and the Art for Art's Sake movement, and sounds very much like the theoretical pronouncements of the Imagists of the early twentieth century.

via The Victorian Web

It seems to me that ‘inscape’ is more about a kind of dwelling, of belonging—an intense, beautiful, belonging, a flaming or scintillating—rather than about ‘acting’, or ‘causing’ as with Duns Scotus’s ‘first act’. And whilst the Parmenidean balance of one and many, of unchanging Being and the apparitional world of Doxa, is of relevance to what Hopkins is doing in his verse, inscape is, surely, above all about the inward. Thinking theologically, this is surely a more Augustinianian than Scotian or Thomist thing. Inwardness is central to Augustine. Phillip Cary goes so far as to argue that Augustine invented or created inwardness, in the modern sense in which we consider there to be an inner self, that is ‘a whole dimension of being that is our very own, and roomy enough that we can in some sense turn into it and enter it, or look within and find things there … Augustine invented the concept of private inner space’ 

- Adam Roberts, Hopkins's Inwardness 

‘As kingfishers catch fire’

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

When I first read this poem it bothered me that kingfishers aren’t red-and-orange, as one might expect a bird ‘catching fire’ in flight might be—though of course, there are various kinds of flame, and it’s very possible that Hopkins is thinking of [his tutor] Pater’s ‘hard gemlike flame’, burning blue from its orange core. But the more important thing is that there is a fire at the heart of things, an inscape fire, as burns in the temple, or the hearth. 

- - Adam Roberts, Hopkins's Inwardness 

“Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end…..  How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”

- Walter Pater, Conclusion to Studies in the History of The Renaissance

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-  Gerard Manley Hopkins

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-

Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark

                            Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.

                            Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:

                            In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

                            Is immortal diamond.

-  Gerard Manley Hopkins

K-punk on indie

TECH-NO 

Philip from It's all in your mind - sorry chaps, keep getting the title of your blog wrong - with the latest on the 'technique' discussion .....

Philip is absolutely right about Indie, I reckon. It has shunned experimentalism without mastering musicianship, so it remains mired in some mediocre nowheresville. Drabness : forget postpunk, even at its most brown-rice earnest, it glistened with psychedelic intensity by comparison with Turin Brakes and Doves. What confuses me about Indie is what people see - and hear - in it: I'm genuinely puzzled about what people feel they get from Indie these days.

To answer my own question: it's all about authenticity isn't it? The Indie fan rejects chartpop because it is too plastic and too manufactured; rejects house, techno, garage because they are too synthetic; he/she cleaves to Indie not because of musicianship per se, but because of what musicianship is taken to signify: authentic self-expression. In fact, and this takes us right back to Philip's original comment, this is a direct inheritance from lumpen-punk's ur-igingal error : its confusion of ham-fisted bluster with a pure expressiveness and its eschewal of all other means of expression beyond guitar-bass-drums. 

Who's interested in lumpen-punk now? It was a fundamentalist misreading: ur-punk was only significant in that it blew open a space for post-punk. And: if you want to talk about technique, well, it's astonishing how proficient some of the postpunk musicians were: Levene, McGeoch, Adamson, Wobble. But it wasn't just technical ability that made them unique: it was their (modernist?) refusal to repeat or recapitulate the past, their conviction that if you weren't getting new sounds out of your equipment, you had somehow failed.

And this is it, really: you can be a master of technique without producing any new affect . Conversely, you might have no technical ability, but a tremendous capacity for discovering new sounds, riffs, stabs... And that's what Pop - in the broadest sense - is about: new ways of feeling, new ways of perceiving. 

[date unknown - 2003 or 2004 - the very early days of K-punk blog, which don't seem to be up on the internet - I found this in an old document of cut-and-pastes from his blog I'd made, as I did with several others blogs at that time. Lucky i was a hoarder, eh? With a presentiment that so much on the internet might disappear - already some bloggers had abruptly deleted their blogs.... more from the K-punk early archive soon]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Mark is really talking about landfill indie here - the post-Britpop slop

But "Indie" is just as capable of inventing "new ways of feeling, new ways of perceiving", despite its relative lack of technique

Shoegaze is a case in point

And it's something I have riffed in the UK talks last week: starting with the idea that someone at Dissensus made, that critics are sensualists, identifying the new forms of pleasure, the new intensities

As do musicians too of course 

So for instance, hearing My Bloody Valentine with conventional ears, you might think "this is badly recorded rock music, badly played guitar, with barely-there / barely audible vocals".

And this was a common initial reaction even from people who became fans - Patti Smith heard Loveless and she told me that at first she thought there was something wrong with the CD player - others have similarly testified that they thought it was a damaged CD or a badly pressed vinyl record

But then you realise that it's deliberate and that it sounds better than conventionally well-recorded, well-mixed rock

It's the new form of sonic ecstasy

Perhaps you need to be guided by the critic-sensualist towards that understanding (cf hearing jungle as more than just a chaos of rhythm, hearing Auto-Tune trap as not a cheap, nasty, over-used effect but as a emerging field of aesthetic action)

Overall, "indie" is an entire genre that could be dismissed as badly played, badly recorded rock music, sung by people who aren't singers. 

But that becomes its own aesthetic - a set of possibilities opened up by bypassing conventional ideas of musicianship, fine playing, clean production, powerful vocalisation. 

Musicophilia

"What trifles constitute happiness! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music life would be a mistake. The German imagines even God as a songster."

"I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity."

- Friedrich Nietzsche 

Musicphobia slight return

“the things I detest, for instance: italicized passages in a novel which are meant to represent the protagonist’s cloudbursts of thought. Then background music, canned music, piped-in music, portable music, minstrel music, inflicted music. Concise dictionaries. Abridged manuals. Journalistic clichés: ‘the moment of truth, the moment of truth!’ Humility.”

- Nabokov

 

John Gardner, from On Moral Fiction  (1978)

Merdistes! Love it - I wonder if it is his own coinage? And who did he have in mind? 

Letter to a Young Music Critic

The easy answer: if you want your writing to be more passionate, write about things you feel passionate about

Otherwise it can feel a bit forced

If you feel neutral or indifferent about something to start off with it, it’s hard to not reproduce that – you can maybe get round it by finding something interesting in the larger phenomenon, or the question of why do people like this...

It’s tricky one, passion, because it’s easy to overdo it and slather on the superlatives and "lyrical" descriptions

Nothing worse than that sort of SHOUTING LOUD prose mode, or uncontrollably gushing , or overly poetic

Because gushing and superlatives can be quite vague – the praise terms are interchangeable, you could substitute a different artist or record’s name – the tricky bit is being precise in your passion

I think the goal is a sort of ‘controlled passion’ or ‘controlled power’ – it’s actually more effective if you ration it out, have a little burst where some kind of excessive feelings cut through

How you develop that, I’m not sure – you could experiment with different registers, more personal elements – do some writing that isn’t for publication, where you write about your emotional responses to films or books or music, how things have related with what’s going on in your life

Then you can see if there’s a way to ease that element into your writing that is published, without it becoming cloying or too memoirist-ic

And read some more criticism – read some of the classics, in lots of different fields, to see how they managed it

Lester Bangs is the king of the super-passionate rock critics, it reads often like a guy who is drunkenly spilling out his guts in a bar (he’s the only rock critic to have a biography written about him and it was called LET IT BLURT), but then later he gets more controlled and elegant while still passionate and moving. E.g. piece on Astral Weeks by Van Morrison (it appears in his posthumous collection of writing but also in the various writers collection Stranded). Try writers on film like Pauline Kael or David Thomson (although his stuff is cooler and calmer in tone)

There is also negative passion, where people denouncing stuff. Mark Fisher was good at that! He called it nihilation. For that to come off, though, you really have to believe in the moment of writing that there is something deplorable and pernicious about the thing you are decrying.

Nowadays that kind of outburst oriented, fiery style of criticism - positive and negative -  has gone out of a fashion a bit. Or at least the younger generation don’t do it as much.  Music writing today seems quite hung up on authoritativeness, knowing your facts, having done your research, and also positioning – where does this fit into the scheme of things, the artist's’career moves, what they are trying to signify, statements being made etc… It’s often done very well and is precisely written, but feels dry to someone of my generation.

What’s too often missing for me is that sense of music’s power to seduce and to break you down – the flooding of pleasure almost to the point of swooning –   the bliss and in a way the violence of music– whether it’s a very physical thing of the bass impacting your body or the way melody and harmony can lacerate you emotionally, because sometimes the softest music has the most powerful effect  - if a record (or a film) can make you cry that is really powerful, much more being noisy or slamming.

There are some great music writers who never go into that aspect and they produce work that is well reasoned and eloquent. But for me, for music writing to be complete, it needs to register at some point the sensual and emotional power of the music. There should be at least a little bit of rhapsodizing about the beauty – that’s what we are in it for, surely, the beauty, the intensity.

Experiment with this element -  listen to things and try to think, why do I like this so much, what is it doing to me?

"Art history has decided that 1958 and 1959 are years when the style called ‘Abstract Expressionism’ or ‘action painting’ or the ‘New York School’ grew tired of its triumph and lay down to die. Jasper Johns’s Flag – Abstract Expressionism’s ghastly patriotic shroud – had its first showing at Leo Castelli’s in January 1958. You might say, especially in retrospect, that Flag was always waiting to be draped over Suburb in Havana’s dream of freedom. Flag never grows old.

‘Lay down to die,’ I wrote. But morbidity in modernist art is a necessary condition, and very often horribly lively. Modernism is an art of endings – of art’s ending – and it goes on elaborating its death rattle. De Kooning certainly did."

 T.J. Clark, 2026

 ‘Content, if you want to say, is a glimpse of something, an encounter, you know, like a flash – it’s very tiny, very tiny, content.’ 

-  Willem De Kooning,, 1960, to David Sylvester in 1960 

"Most of [my recent pictures] are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it, you know. In other words, I’m not a pastoral character, you know, I’m not a – how do you say that? – ‘country dumpling’. I am here and I like it in New York City, but I love to go out in a car. I’m crazy about weekend drives even if I drive in the middle of the week. I’m just crazy about going over the roads and highways ... They are really not very pretty, but the big embankments and the shoulders of the roads and the curves are flawless – the lawning of it, the grass. This I don’t particularly like, or dislike, but I wholly approve of it ... I mean, I am not undertaking any social ... I’m no lover of the new – it’s a personal thing ...When I was working on this [Merritt Parkway] picture, this thing came to me: it’s just like the Merritt Parkway."

 - De Kooning, ibid

:There is this strange desire which you can’t explain. Why should you do that? I think I like it because of the ordinariness ... The landscapes I made in the 1950s, such as Parc Rosenberg, were the result of associations. But I had a vast area of nature – a highway and the metamorphosis of passing things. A highway, when you sit in a car – removed ..."

De Kooning, to Harold Rosenberg, 1972

 

from T.J. Clark's critique of Clement Greenberg

asignifying craft

… a new millennium style of pop writing / rock criticism that is cautious about reaching for significance and concentrates instead on a kind of inventory of pleasures, which in turn involves a breakdown of a track into its components and constituent sources, where the song/album/artist is positioned within the genrescape, etc. (A generational sensiblity perhaps, shaped by the internet, mixtapes and playlists, the disintegration of larger entities into the song as unit-of-pleasure). In the case of Ariel Pink’s “Round and Round" that approach fits perfectly because as Mark Richardson notes, the song is exactly the sum of its perfect parts ("an intro, a variation, a funny little break with a sound effect, a section that pauses just before the big refrain, and then that huge chorus"), assembled with an "astonishing level of craftsmanship" and succeeding "brilliantly for the same reason great Burt Bacharach songs work-- because every chord change and turnaround and melodic leap is in exactly the right place." You could substitute "Steve Miller" for "Burt Bacharach" in the sentence and everything would still apply--indeed 70s and 80s "radio rock" is more what Ariel's aiming for. As Mark further notes, those radio artisans "were pros who knew something about intros, codas, and middle-eights, how a certain kind of chord change can cause the turnaround to the chorus to hit a little harder... there's a real sense of musical delight on Before Today; the sections sound logical but never predictable, and there are wild bridges and short bits that emerge seemingly randomly but wind up taking the song somewhere unexpected."

A huge amount of what makes rock and pop enjoyable relates to this level of asignifying craft: aspects of the songwriting and recording process that are far more technical than they are expressive or communicative--how this bit fits with that bit, the way one song section transitions into this song section, bridgework and arrangement, contrasts of texture, hooks, ear-catching gimmicks (the flurry of handclaps in Miller's "Take the Money and Run") and their timing, the swerves that still surprise even when you know they're coming because it's your umpteenth listen. It's something that music criticism generally hasn't dealt with much in the past, because it's hard to do with any specificity, and also there's been all these other levels of significance, resonance, expression, intent, to work with and make a meal of. The emergence of a criticism that attends to this stuff and is "against interpretation" (or at least guarded about it) seems like an interesting and valuable direction. What it would need itself to guard against is lapsing into a kind of culinary conception of music (all about ingredients, the harmonious balance of flavours, etc). In practise, it tends to be a little too plaisir and not enough jouissance for my taste. But then I'm a captive of my own generational sensibility in this respect, no doubt.

"To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit"

- William Blake

(in antipathy to Joshua Reynolds belief that "disposition to abstractions, to generalising and classification, is the great glory of the human mind" and his pursuit of "general truth" and "general beauty") 

Nabokov on music

“Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succes­sion of more or less irritating sounds.”

- Nabokov, Speak, Memory

"I have no ear for music [...] I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians [...] But I have found a queer substitute for music in chess—more exactly, in the composing of chess problems."

- Nabokov,  Playboy interview 1964

"Without wishing to antagonize lovers of music, I do wish to point out that taken in a general sense music, as perceived by its consumers, belongs to a more primitive, more animal form in the scale of arts than literature or painting. 

"I am taking music as a whole, not in terms of individual creation, imagination, and composition, all of which of course rival the art of literature and painting, but in terms of the impact music has on the average listener. 

"A great composer, a great writer, a great painter are brothers. But I think that the impact music in a generalized and primitive form has on the listener is of a more lowly quality than the impact of an average book or an average picture. What I especially have in mind is the soothing, lulling, dulling influence of music on some people such as of the radio or records.

"In Kafka's tale it is merely a girl pitifully scraping on a fiddle and this corresponds in the piece to the canned music or plugged-in music of today. 

"What Kafka felt about music in general is what I have just described: its stupefying, numbing, animal-like quality. 

"This attitude must be kept in mind in interpreting an important sentence that has been misunderstood by some translators. Literally, it reads “Was Gregor an animal to be so affected by music?” That is, in his human form he had cared little for it but in this scene, in his beetlehood, he succumbs: “He felt as if the way were opening before him to the unknown nourishment he craved.” 

- Nabokov, lecture on Kafka's "The Metamorphosis"

Cioran on music