There is the sense that everything here, everything around me, that I own, is not mine. I have no connection with these things any more. It is as if these are the relics of another life.
In some respects they are. It is because, as the song says, everything I have is yours. These things all once belonged to her. To her and I. Ours.
Of course, reading letters is difficult. Whoever they are from they were written to me. But also, not me. To a previous me. With emotions that are long spent. Loves long burned hollow.
And the other difficulty is realising the passion with which I lived. When everything, every fibre, every dollar, every breath was for her. Notes, gifts, I have them still even though I have largely forgotten when I loved her so completely.
It is not just that the love is lost. It isn’t just that we no longer love each other the same way but that I’m not that person anymore. I don’t greet each day with the same determination or passion, filled I expect with the knowledge that I am loved and am in love.
The market basket that now holds my laundry was once a Christmas gift for her, full of food and wine. And without her now these things have lost all meaning. The glasses, the coaster, the lamp. When did I let this all go?
I’m not sure that I can live just for myself. Not that I can’t go on, just that each day is half-lived. And I don’t know when it all fell apart. I imagine that if I can determine the break then I can remedy or avoid but really, now, all I can remember is the joy lost.
So I dream of running. Hitting the road, flying somewhere far away.
With movement I can distract myself from the loss. Though at some point I have to stop and face whatever has happened.
The problem, when a relationship like this dying, is that it isn’t just the end of two people; it is the end of the two people that they would become, the dreams and plans that they shared, that they began to prepare themselves to become. And the break destroys that, destroys those futures utterly. Even reconciliation meets with different dreams. More fragile, less fanciful. Not hopes of living in Tuscany or by some beach, but dreams of just making it work.
So now, I’m living in the vacuum of those broken dreams. And I made plans. I had tried so hard to map out what I would do after the split. I knew how I was to regain my footing. But that isn’t the same thing. And I’m living a half life in the emptiness of dead dreams.
And now I wonder whether running is enough, or whether running is necessary. Perhaps silence. Remaining hidden and mute.
Altermodern and the nomads
There is an interesting video of Nicolas Bourriaud, curator of the 4th Tate Triennial, explaining his conception of Altermodern. Bourriaud is also writing a book, The Radicant. From the publisher’s site:
To be radicant: it means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them any value as origins, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing. The author extends radicant thought to modes of cultural production, consumption and use. Looking at the world through the prism of art, he sketches a “world art criticism” in which works are in dialogue with the context in which they are produced.
“And if twenty-first-century culture was invented with those works that set themselves the task of effacing their origin in favor of a multitude of simultaneous or successive enrootings? This process of obliteration is part of the condition of the wanderer, a central figure of our precarious era, who insistently is emerging at the heart of contemporary artistic creation. This figure is accompanied by a domain of forms and by an ethical mode: translation, whose modalities and cardinal role in contemporary culture this book seeks to enumerate.”
I suppose the key difference is the Radicant sounds more inclusive while the Nomad is more deliberately making decisions about what should be discarded. Both concepts appeal since they seem to work against any kind of cultural studies approach that great ouroboros and cul-de-sac of academic thought.
Another book to add to the reading pile.
Robert Drewe & Charles Meere
I was a little fuzzy on the details but after seeing a painting last week I was reminded of a story.
Robert Drewe was scouring through the Art Gallery of NSW looking for an artwork that might suit a book cover. He happened upon ‘Australian Beach Pattern’ by Charles Meere. The AGNSW describes the work as “perennially popular” but until Drewe pulled it from storage it had been “lost”.
That’s the story. Whether it is true, I’m not sure.
Looking at the AGNSW details for the painting they list exhibitions that include the work. After an initial exhibit in 1952, it wasn’t seen again until 1982. The Bodysurfers, Drewe’s collection of stories was published in 1983 using the painting for the cover. The timeline seems to match, taking into account the time involved to create the cover, print the book, etc.
Like Dupain’s ‘Sunbaker’ the painting has become an iconic representation of beach culture but more than that it seems a very nationalistic piece. The child raising a shovel from his father’s shoulders looks almost like a parody of Soviet-era posters, and the father, as well as the man holding the towel in the centre, have a military posture.
Most striking, to me, is the light. It isn’t so much that there is a problem with the direction of the sun but that each person is made up of light and darkness. The painting has depth and perspective, a layering of groups. But there is also tension on each person with the way shadow seems to curve the figures.
Justine
Tonight I finished reading Justine, the first book of the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. The final section:
The cicadas are throbbing in the great planes, and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness. Somewhere out there, beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon lies Africa, lies Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous grasp on one’s affections through memories which are already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness; memory of friends, of incidents long past. The slow unreality of time begins to grip them, blurring the outlines—so that sometimes I wonder whether these pages record the actions of real human beings; or whether this is not simply the story of a few inanimate objects which precipitated drama around them—I mean a black patch, a green fingerstall, a watch-key and a couple of dispossessed wedding-rings…
Soon it will be evening and the clear night sky will be dusted thickly with summer stars. I shall be here, as always, smoking by the water. I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter unanswered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
Kind of Blue
During a recording session (later released as ”58 Miles’), American jazz musicians John Coltrane (1926 – 1967), Cannonball Adderley (1928 – 1975), Miles Davis (1926 – 1991), and Bill Evans (1929 – 1980) perform in the studio, New York, New York, May 26, 1958. (Photo by Frank Driggs Collection/Getty Images)
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the first recording session for Kind of Blue, the Miles Davis album.
The lauds and honours for the album are well known. It has been placed in the US National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress. It is the best selling jazz album, and Miles Davis album, of all time and continues to sell 5,000 copies every week.
It is also considered by many to be the best and most influential jazz album, assembling some of the greatest musicians of the era at the height of their careers. The album features John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley on alto saxophone, Paul Chambers on bass, Jimmy Cobb on drums, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on piano, and Miles Davis on trumpet.
Bill Evans, who had been a part of the Davis sextet and was replaced by Wynton Kelly, features on every track except ‘Freddie Freeloader’ and has been given credit for co-writing ‘Blue in Green’ and ‘Flamenco Sketches’. In his autobiography, Davis wrote: “I… planned that album around the piano playing of Bill Evans.” Evans also wrote the liner notes that go some way to explaining the improvisational nature of the recordings:
This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflections, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician.
Group improvisation is a further challenge. Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result. This most difficult problem, I think, is beautifully met and solved on this recording.
…
Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a “take.”
Why blog?
I’ve had a blog for several years, many more than the archives might suggest. Originally hand-rolled, then published with Movable Type, now WordPress. It has been a patchy and infrequent thing. I’ve lost content and deleted items that I felt offered too stark a characterisation or too fundamentalist political ideas.
There have never been any illusions about the process. It is entirely for me. Anything truly personal is offline, penned into books. What is written here is a collection of quotes, links, definitions, things that I have wanted to keep – like a scrapbook. And now I find myself asking my I bother keeping a blog at all.
If it is personal then perhaps it is better kept in a rolling document on my computer or, since it is mainly a collection of quotes and online ephemera poorly compiled, in any of the numerous digital offerings such as Delicious or Google Notebook, two applications that I already use.
And further to the question is why anyone would blog at all.
At a recent conference on social media the presenter distinguished between the “old” generation (above 25) and the new generation of online users by stating that the older users consider everything they do online to be private unless they make it public while the younger generation consider everything they do to be public unless they make it private. It was just the kind of pithy nugget of new media information I wanted to take back to the office.
But it offers no reason, save the ubiquity of Facebook and internet applications, why this should be the case. Blogs, Live Journals, etc are all becoming mainstream. Businesses no longer use them to present a hip, understanding front. They can offer a more personal means of communicating with the public. Which is bollocks; they are a company. The blog might be written by a person but when did we mistake meeting and speaking with somebody with reading a blog post?
I guess that can come down to some semiotic question, some communication studies theoretical argument about how we are ever able to communicate “personally”.
I read a lot of blogs. I have a vast, often interconnected, OPML list of sites and blogs served up through Google Reader. And here the process makes sense.
The inernet is huge and the amount of content, and by that I mean the stuff that I want to read, has become a gigantic rush of white noise. So I gather around various people who, for one reason, post or link, I consider worth watching and this digital collective whittles down the internet into something more manageable.
Some of these people are largely human editors in the way that Yahoo! and Looksmart used to be human editors – serving up links with brief descriptions. Others, like Jason Kottke or Merlin Mann, sometimes accompany links with the kind of insight or original idea that actually contributes to the whole endeavour.
Yet the “whole endeavour” still worries me.
Tonight I read an excellent review in the New Yorker. I really enjoy book reviews – it is one of my favourite sections in the Guardian Weekly. A good review can give an insight into the author, the subject, the historical perspective, even the basic philosophies and thinking behind the act of creating. And tonight, as fantastic James Wood’s analysis of Richard Yates and Revolutionary Road was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have spent the energy reading the actual book.
The New Yorker article was printed from the web, sourced via a blog, and it struck me how incredibly removed from actual things the internet is making me. It goes back the sheer mass of content online but is it better, for me, to have read one thousand blog posts that point to one hundred reviews of books and movies and restaurants than it is to have read a single book, seen a movie or had dinner? An utterly rhetorical and stupid question. I imagine that speaking briefly about a dozen books and films of which I am acquainted through reviews, or even just scores, makes for a wide-ranging, wine-swilling, onanistic dinner party conversation and ultimately a cipher of the individual.
Perhaps it is generous to suggest that blogging was ever anything more, but for the vast majority of people who (like me) aren’t contributing to the conversation, blogging and posting links seems to be a narcissistic urge for publication. It doesn’t even fall into the category of bad art – at least that has the potential to improve and become something greater. Posting links will always be a meta-process.
So where does that leave me? As the person writing the blog isn’t it better to have actually created something worthwhile, something wholly new than spent years compiling and cataloguing links and articles that other people wrote and that further people have already catalogued?
I suppose it comes down to finding a balance between reading and archiving the mass of information that ultimately points to books and films the majority of which go unread and unseen and then stepping away from that entire process and watching a film, working on a book (whether reading or writing) and either doing or creating something.
Which isn’t a long-winded declaration leading to closing my journal. It might mean that I have to think about ways to incorporate what I’m already doing with bookmarks and notebooks so that it keeps this whole process relevant. Or maybe it means that I write longer more thought out, original ideas, start some new fiction, perhaps, and publish something more considered, more real than links.
Oh, and the answer, is because it is easy. It is much easier to blog than it is to create something. And yet it is, it exists, published online and public as a testament to having done something even if blogging is nothing.
Joseph Conrad and the treachery of writing
— We live, as we dream – alone.
“I have never learned to trust it. I can’t trust it to this day … A dreadful doubt hangs over the whole achievement of literature.” Thus wrote Joseph Conrad, in an essay published in the Manchester Guardian Weekly on December 4 1922. Long before Auden was telling us poetry makes nothing happen, or Adorno was saying there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, Conrad was questioning – fundamentally – the political and moral utility of writing. Yet this was a writer who drew the approbation of FR Leavis, the pre-eminent British supporter of the view that literature could play a role in the maintenance of civilisation. In 1941, Leavis described Conrad as being “among the very greatest novelists in the language – or any language”.
But in the realm of twitching eyeballs, even Stewart Lee Allen can’t hold a candle to Honoré de Balzac, the model for every espresso–swilling writer who has followed in his jittery footsteps. What hashish was to Baudelaire, opium to Coleridge, cocaine to Robert Louis Stevenson, nitrous oxide to Robert Southey, mescaline to Aldous Huxley, and Benzedrine to Jack Kerouac, caffeine was to Balzac.
The habit started early. Like a preppie with an expensive connection, he ran up alarming debts with a concierge who, for a price, was willing to sneak contraband coffee beans into Balzac’s boarding school. As an adult, grinding out novels 18 hours a day while listening for the rap of creditors at the door, Balzac observed the addict’s classic regimen, boosting his doses as his tolerance mounted. First he drank one cup a day, then a few cups, then many cups, then 40 cups. Finally, by using less and less water, he increased the concentration of each fix until he was eating dry coffee grounds: “a horrible, rather brutal method,” he wrote, “that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins.” Although the recipe was hell on the stomach, it dispatched caffeine to the brain with exquisite efficiency.
And indeed I shall anchor, one day—some summer morning of sunflowers and bougainvillaea and arid wind— and smoking a black cigar, one hand on the mast, turn, and unlade my eyes of all their cargo; and the parrot will speed from my shoulder, and white yachts glide welcoming out from the shore on the turquoise tide.
And when they ask me where I have been, I shall say I do not remember.
And when they ask me what I have seen, I shall say I remember nothing.
And if they should ever tempt me to speak again, I shall smile, and refrain.
— Randolph Stow
I’ve realised lately that I’m nowhere near where I’d hoped to be. I think that this is a delayed reaction to my birthday.
This last semester at university has been a complete waste of time. Not simply in the active sense that I didn’t get anything from the course but because until recently I had the momentum to pursue certain thoughts and ideas, and now, deadened and dulled by such tedious and preliminary ideas that were presented this semester I’ve lost any sense of direction.
I had wanted to continue reading Derrida. I wanted to pursue his notion of transcending logocentrism, understand the reasoning behind his specific elevation of Ezra Pound and Stéphane Mallarmé. I wanted to read Hegel and Proust and continue taking notes on Zizek.
Instead, I’ve found myself having to read Trainspotting and being encouraged to do close reading in some imbecilic reversal.
Last weekend I re-read some essays in The Necessary Jungle by David Brooks. There are some essays that tend toward Rimbaud’s call for a “systematic and deliberate derangement of the senses” a kind of demand for a remaking of language. Of course, as Paul de Man suggests in Blindness and Insight (I think that the specific essay is called ‘Literary History’), it is impossible to be entirely ‘new’.
Jameson (and also Patricia Waugh) argue that there is a postmodern tendency toward works that retain a sensibility that can be recognised by readers while offering only a small degree of what might be considered avant-garde. This way the work is accessible while offering something of the ‘new’.
What Brooks suggests, using the terms centrifugal and centripetal (centrifugal being the ‘new’; works that fly from the centre), is that for a book to be accepted and published it must retain sufficient centripetal influences. The danger is that for most people reading and understanding a novel tends toward identifying the elements within the novel that are already present within themselves. The new, centrifugal ideas are smothered by the centripetal in the readers’ attempt to make sense of the text.
I’m off to the library to read Paul de Man’s Allegories of reading: figural language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. I may or may not return.
