Saturday, December 29, 2007
Life in different mirrors - The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Out of a vacuum
The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud (Picador, £14.99)
“It’s surreal. The kind of thing you can’t really believe happened to someone you know. You can’t believe he lived through that. I mean, it was early Saturday morning. Where were we, you know, while that was going on? At suppertime on Friday, it hadn’t happened, and now he’s scarred for life. It makes you think, doesn’t it?”
As much as such passages grate, they highlight the emptiness of hyperbole and, if they grate, they do so for a reason consistent with the idea that the historical event is incongruous. These people talk, I talk, as if anything out of the day-to-day is of historical significance. Life is lived from one day to another, and most of them are pretty much the same; a friend being disfigured is significant; language rises to the occasion. Having said this about the relatively ordinary, what language is there for the truly extraordinary? The point does not seem to me that language has been debased, rather that it was never sufficient. As a consequence though the extraordinary can only be described in the language of the ordinary and of earlier vacuities. The problem not only for Messud but any form with a sense of aesthetic decorum is that
Despite these grating passages, it is just this everyday vacuity and its relationship to the historical event that Messud’s book explores and where its success lies. The difficulties her characters face in being extraordinary, of making a mark in what they perceive “are almost criminally uninteresting” times, are frequently given an almost Jamesian complexity.:
She, who had felt she saw so clearly that it hurt, had felt that the truth, crystalline, was, with Murray, granted her (though not through his help, or anything he did: but just by his presence; as though, indeed, he were but a part of her that had been lost, a magnificent Platonic epiphany repeated, and daily repeated: this, surely, was love!), felt, now, that the weight of emotion lay like a veil, a fine mist. No exchange, however simple, was untainted.
Here vacuity is given weight and depth. This is of no historical consequence, however grand or powerful the feeling, but in giving weight and depth to the historically inconsequential, Messud reveals the patterns and textures of her character’s consciousness, not as they are during the extraordinary, but as they usually are, as we usually are, among the day-to-day and ordinary.
Friday, September 14, 2007
What is wrong with this picture?
Friday, July 13, 2007
Il tempo del postino, or all that bull
The show opens with music from a mechanical piano, followed by a ventriloquist compere, and then dancing red velvet curtains - a quite beautiful piece of wit from Phillipe Parreno. From this point and for the most of the remainder of the show we are presented with conceptions of some seriously clever artists, all of which one might wish had been developed further.
Anri Sala gives us an aria from Madame Butterfly, but there are four butterflies and two Pinkertons. Placed on stage and in the audience, they share the singing part of any given moment, lip syncing when not voicing. The effect is one of great disorientation for the audience as sound bounces from stage to upper circle.
Perception is also at the heart of Carsten Holler's "Upside Down People 2007" in which three (willing) volunteers have their vision inverted, or, as our retina naturally gives an inverted image which the brain corrects, set right side up. For the volunteers this is not a instantaneous process, as they have viewed the world as it "is" for eight days and have special visors removed on stage. There is very real thrill in watching their reaction to the removal of these visors. Do the subjects reject their status as entertaining guinea pigs? Will they collapse in fits of vomiting? If perception is the theme of this exhibition, this piece works in terms of forcing the audience to question its relationship to what's on stage, as access to any inverted world is limited to the volunteers' minds.
Tino Seghal uses the patter of auctioneers to call attention to the sheer musicality of language even when spoken at speed (this musicality may have had much to do the with the repetition of the word "dollars", the only one I could recognize). Finally from the first "act" there was the sage advise of triplets directed by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Arto Lindsay: "I own no more than is necessary, So I work no more than necessary".
Following an interval there followed the most covered event of the show and the arrival of Ross the Highland bull on stage. Ross is a reasonably docile animal from what I have seen of him, and was probably more than happy to help Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler with their particular artistic vision.
This involved a crashed car on the stage, on this would lie a woman, apparently with prosthetic legs. In front of the car stands a woman fisting herself. Men in combatwear melt plastic to drape over the auto-fister. She remains in the black hood for the remainder of the scene. This is presided over by a small dog, mounted atop a man in a lighter shade of combats. You must understand, the whole thing is all very Egyptian afterlife while I suppose recalling a more recnt Abu Ghrahib.
In black and in white spangles arrive two stilettoed models, who parade around the stage at dramatically slow pace, before bending over backwards in front of the car, showing off their Brazilians and urinating. They will remain in these damp poses for the next fifteen minutes.
By this point in time the audience is getting tetchy for non- terrorist, non-urinary contact. Did I forget the on-stage and in-audience wind militia? Well, they were there too, apart from those playing diminutive ukeles, who strummed their all behind balaclavas. To keep interest alive, Ross is brought in, very prettily tethered by a beribboned rope. After a tour around the car, hooded fister, and model vaginas, he is invited to smell a she-bull skin laid on the bonnet of crashed car.
You can see where this is going, yet to the presumed relief of the lady with the prosthetic legs atop the vehicle, Ross is no exhibitionist and fails to add to the bodily fluids on stage by fucking the car as was intended.
He is led away, possibly in some disgrace, while the fist is at last removed allowing the shit to land on the stage, joining the pile which had fallen some twenty minutes earlier with the start of Barney's conception.
Many will find all this offensive, either through the sexuality of the piece or its use of animals. Barney and Bepler's real offense, both to their audience and the other artists they share the stage with, is simply using sensation to mask the elaborate tedium they ask us to indulge them in.
My advice: leave at the interval.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
The Saffron Kitchen, by Yasmin Crowther
Friday, June 29, 2007
Book Review - Donne: The Reformed Soul, by John Stubbs
John Donne is, after Shakespeare, perhaps our most familiar poet of the English Renaissance. Yet his best known insight – “that no man is an island” – comes not from his poems, nor even from his sermons, but from his private meditations.
The portrait that emerges from this detailed research is one from which our multitasking, Ritalin-deficient age has much to learn, and Donne is presented much as we might wish to see ourselves: tolerant, socially responsible, progressive even, hardworking, while also possessed of the meditative resources to see beyond momentary personal circumstance.
But however apt Stubbs’ approach may be to telling a life’s story, it leaves him at a disadvantage when placing the poetry in that story. As much as his reading of “Love’s Exchanges” as a subtle protest against the torture practiced by the government Donne served fits with his general portrait, a lot depends on the suggestion that “it was possibly written during his [Donne’s] time as apparatchik”. While Stubbs acknowledges the difficulties of dating Donne’s poetry, with no argument to tie specific poems to specific times, significant aspects of his portrait, however attractive, are confined to possibility.
The question is do you buy the picture knowing that it may not be entirely accurate. For me the answer is yes. After rejecting the “Satirique thornes” of his earlier days, Donne urges that we “seek ourselves in ourselves”. Significantly this urging takes place in a verse-letter, and above all Stubbs’ biography is a profound commitment to writing as a process of knowing one’s self and knowing that we are not so many islands.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Deliver me from Spinning Plates - Monkey: The Journey to the West
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Managing the post PhD come down
After my viva I sat down to do some marking. (The fact that I was out before the pubs opened might have had something to do with this.) After that I suffered, and still do suffer, paralyzing bouts of anxiety about how I'm going to pay the rent; whether a career in data entry is preferable; wonder if I am capable of writing a novel; wonder what my supervisor meant when, after being asked if he had any advice for the aspiring academic, he said "Don't"; tried working on some publications, gave up because it was pointless, told myself not give up what I'd worked so hard for; tried to stop smoking, failed, resigned myself to cancer as preferable to daily failure and reminders of my moral weakness; squandered money on a martini to cheer myself up, hated myself for squandering money with the added factor of gin induced depression; tried to control my flatmate by instigating a domestic reign of terror whose only form of control was passive-aggression, alienated my flatmate; cried. Still haven't tried pornography and the laundry's still being done, so there's quite a way to go yet.
Of course, I don't plan travel a path lined with piles of fetid laundry, but if any one has the route map, please sling it in my direction.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Book Review - The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Spilling his seed on rocky ground – The Diviners by Rick Moody
This epic tale is conceived by Griffen as he seduces and covers for his co-worker, Annabel Duffy, who has lost the script demanded by their donut-munching boss, Vanessa Meandro. Thaddeus views on the creative process in terms of pornography, and he suggests that Annabel stop working on the biopic of the wife of the Marquis de Sade and concentrate on the story that “gets you off [italics Moody’s]. The one where all the differences in the world, are obliterated in the reprise of the come shot of creation, the big grand unified come shot that made the conditions that made you and me and art and commerce and religion”.
"The Diviners" is Thaddeus’s come shot, though one suspects that he’s getting off on being drunk, on being charming, and generally on being Thaddeus Griffen. Other characters are only slightly less self-obsessed, but these too are propelled by Moody’s sustained exuberant prose which has the speed and punch of a pinball. Just be thankful this energy is contained within a book. So, as the rest of the world counts the chads in Dade County, we arrive in New York in the hands of a writer who can handle the PR girls, the recording artists, the dot-com bust, and a bipolar bike courier, all of whom want a piece of "The Diviners".
What follows in the 31 chapters, plus opening and closting titles, is a display of linguistic acrobatics as Moody jumps from style to style, bringing us new characters to the very end. Looking up from the somersaults, we see marriages break-up from the perspective of autistic children, childhood from the perspective of a group of dialectians who haven't quite left the schoolyard, and identity reconstituted as a patient emerges from her coma.
Meandro buys the Thadster’s story and, come the six page pitch to the networks, barely interrupted by paragraphs let alone the exec at the other end of the phone line, proclaims “The Diviners” to be “the perfect narrative representation of the thirst of the mass television audience”. There is something here for the hundreds of millions who just didn’t know how thirsty they were until those Mongol hoards tore into their living rooms, something for every group that feels disenfranchised by the media elites of the Northeast and the West Coast. This is, as Meandro puts it “a millennialist vision … a reconstituted Jesus strolling down Fifth Avenue, laying waste to readers of the New York Times”.
And herein lies the problem with Moody’s book. His book is about thirst for meaning and the vacuity of the televisual metaphor. Yet, having established that these are deliberately vacuous in order that they can be filled with anyone and everyone’s content (think terrorist soap-opera, think Lost) and so achieve the widest possible audience, he is stuck with it as his own deliberately bloated yet curiously flat metaphor.
Of course there are ironies in the divinational metaphor. In her list of parched wanderers of the deserts of meaning, Meandro omits those media elites of east and west, who see every possible spin-off and marketing scam to hustle the thirsty brethren of the American interior, but feel the thirst to be slaked themselves yet lack the struggle for survival of the metaphorical diviners and religious meaning of their religiously minded market. These media elites are the real subject of Moody’s book, but Moody refuses to explore them, and beyond abstract meaning, he cannot say what thirst possesses his Gawker-reading media bunnies. Instead, Moody borrows a technique more cinematic than televisual to offer up the cliché of his disparate and desperate characters engaged in the same activity. This is done so well you can almost here the elegiac soundtrack, and if you didn’t get the concept of redemption through shared interest, we’re talking Thanksgiving.
The interest in question is, of course, watching television, in this case the hit series The Werewolves of Fairfield County, in which the wealthy and leisured of Connecticut have mutated and breakout into lupine madness every full moon. In the midst of uncaring corpocracy they are forced to develop a moral code lest they be discovered in which the stronger look after the weak, the older look after the younger. In terms of meaning the werewolves have it all, a struggle to survive but also a dynamic sense of belonging. No pampered neurotics thirsty for a way of understanding the pain of their existence here.
Yet having felt a thirst and divined the quencher, Moody refuses to see what happens to the characters who he clearly loves and has made considerable effort to make us love after they slaked their thirst. Do they find God? Do they join the SLBC? Do they become werewolves? We never find out and they are abandoned so that we can breathlessly meet more new characters.
On the one hand, Moody is gesturing to serious issues: the divisions of the United States, the vacuity of our modern lives, and the thought that we might want something more than cars, bars, and moviestars. Yet, on the other, Moody's book is more about his exuberance and showcasing his undoubted stylistic ingenuity as are hastened towards Moody's come-shot of creation. The thing is if there is a come-shot, then it's only been a hand job.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Announcing the Vladimir Nabokov Reading Project
First up is Pnin. The rest will follow, but The Real Life of Sebastian Knight will have to wait till I get my copy back from Luke. If you want to know more about Vladimir Nabokov or buy the books, you know were Wikipedia and Amazon are to be found. Better resources may follow as the project continues.
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
With Pnin we are introduced to Russian émigré, Timofey Pnin. Tenuously untenured at a New England college, he muddles through 1950s America with a variety of English all of his own. Mocked and loved on campus in equal measure, he has an acute sense of the ridiculous of the world and of himself. For Pnin sorrow is "the only thing in the world people really possess" and his planned courses will show that "the history of man is the history of pain". Alongside these bleak courseplans, we are treated two parties, a former wife convinced of her own glamour, the visit of her insular, wunderkind son, and Pnin's wonderful driving. As with much of Nabokov, there are dopelgangers aplenty causing Pnin (and us) to ask which is the genuine article. Anyone who knows himself to be fallible and slightly absurd will love Pnin, and will be grateful to Nabokov for making this invention a reality.
More blogs on Pnin
Read about Jim Story's encounter with a real life Pnin.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Manchester. Not original. Not modern.
Marketing terminology aside, the slogan is an odd choice. As much as Manchester might claim originality and modernity as the cradle of the industrial revolution, it has in recent decades understood itself in its representations and stories. The ecstasy of this is that as a city Manchester knows that it is caught in its stories. We know that Manchester is not Coronation Street, Shameless or Cold Feet even if we nod ironically to these stories on an almost daily basis. That Mancunians inhabit stories was precisely the point of Twenty-Four Hour Party People. " Print the legend," says Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson quoting John Huston, while telling us that the legend is not the reality. These stories, our desire to inhabit them, the way they help us understand our lives suggest that Manchester, far from being original or modern, may in fact be a mythical place. In understanding this, Manchester rejects the idea of originality and authenticity, a defining practice not of modernity but of postmodernity.
The Manchester International Festival is itself part of this myth. Billed as "The world's first international festival of original, new work," it is designed to position Manchester as a centre of creativity of international standing. But even a cursory glance at the programme suggests we pause to question the originality of the work. First up on the Festival website is Industrial Revolution, a clubnight whose very name gestures to that moment of "original modernity" in the eighteenth century and take of Factory Records in the 80s and 90s of the twentieth. The principle behind the work of the event's performers, who include DJ Shadow, the Unabombers, Fat Boy Slim, is of course quotation. The launch event, Monkey: Journey to the West, is, we learn in the detail, "based on an ancient Chinese legend," while we might ask where would Victoria Borisova-Ollas, composer of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, be without the novel of the same title by Salman Rushdie?
In this morass of quotation and allusion, we might ask in what sense is the word "original" being used. The question is not pedantic. To bill a festival of creative work featuring artists who clearly reject notions of originality as original to an audience who do the same is to risk ridicule, insult your audience, or demonstrate a philistine approach to the creative process. That is to say, artists and writers have through the ages suffered those existential crises on exiting Starbucks as they are poleaxed by their own lack or originality and mediocrity. For Horace it was the art of poetry to make the ordinary seem original, with the result that he is reputed to have also written that, "He who knows a thousand works of art knows a thousand and frauds." More recently, T.S. Eliot put it more baldly: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." In this sense the history of art is the history of theft.
Which brings us back to the claim of Manchester's later day Medici's that their Festival is "The world's first international festival of original, new work," a claim which shows a marked indifference to, for example, the Venice Biennale, now in its 57th year, or the work of the Edinburgh Festivals. It is, of course these, which Leese, Johnson and other city fathers wish the Manchester International Festival to rival. They are to be applauded for their aspiration, but it is neither an original nor modern aspiration; Edinburgh and Venice got there before them. As Coogan/Wilson points out Manchester is like Renaissance Florence, and in the intention to put an artist on every corner, Leese has created a festival of thieves and frauds which will only add to the myth that is Manchester. And for that, their "brand signifier" might be the greatest work of art of the festival.
Other takes on the MIF - [added 19 June 2007]
Yankunian at the Manchizzle tells about Not the Manchester International Festival and being MIFed on Portland Street by the New Yorker article.
Diehard Manchester media bunnies at 1 Scott Place produce this surprising result at Comment is Free: