It was going to be about the Booker longlist, but let's have something more celebratory:
Yorkshire free to fly own flag
When Jenny and I went travelling in Spain, which is now a shocking four years ago, we went to an all-night feria in Malaga. There were literally hundreds of different beer tents, most of which had their own theme as they were sponsored by different organisations. We wanted to hear some rock music, and the only place we could hear it playing from was the Malaga Young Communists beer tent. We went in there and got a drink and were invited to write the name of our local organisation on the wall as many other visitors to the tent had; there was lots of things like 'Hamburg Communists' and 'Palermo Communists'. Anyway, we used our space to make a claim for the 'Yorkshire Liberation Front'. I like to think that somewhere in Andalusia a socialist meeting-place has a set of 'Free Compo' stickers in solidarity with us.
And, just to celebrate our new-found autonomy once again:
Thursday, 31 July 2008
Horizons of Assent
Finally pleased with myself...been sitting in the flat all afternoon with Ride's Nowhere on loop digging into the Party Going chapter to explain what I mean by 'disjunctive irony' and 'parabasis' and I think, I think, that I've managed it, meaning that all the stuff about Tzvetan Todorov that comes after it sounds less insane.
Weird to be writing about philosophy-based stuff - I tend to see myself as pretty crap at the theory business.
Weird to be writing about philosophy-based stuff - I tend to see myself as pretty crap at the theory business.
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
English Surrealism
Pictures I used in my paper on English surrealist painting and 30s allegory at Sheffield Hallam: ideas currently being recycled in desperate thesis finale.
Paul Nash, Dymchurch Wall
Paul Nash, Dymchurch Wall 
Paul Nash, Harbour and Room
Tristram Hillier, Surrealist Landscape- Man and Boat
Tristram Hillier, Surrealist Landscape
Monday, 28 July 2008
Of Batman
You'll notice I haven't reviewed The Dark Knight yet. This is because I don't yet know quite what to make of it. I have a feeling that many of the professional reviewers are misreading the allegory, whereas I think the film is probably about the insufficiency of allegory as a historically revealing mode in what I'll reluctantly call the post-9/11 world.
Topics the film immediately prompted me to think about...
- Mike Nelson installations: the flash facades of a globalisation riddled with, and founded upon, vast and undecorated secret rooms whose presence is unacknowledged. This is nothing new - see Slavoj Zizek's Pervert's Guide to Cinema - but I was surprised by how close some of the set design was to resembling Nelson's work. Deliberate?
- Commerical injunctions to levity: The Joker's 'Why so serious?' catchphrase seemed to me a hypertrophied recital of the anti-serious, hence anti-analytical, hence anti-critical, tendency in contemporary advertising.
- The almost parodic proliferation of themes of doubling and symbiosis in the narrative. No-one is without their uncanny counterpart. Bruce Wayne, of course, functions as the nexus of multiple personalities. I feel that Christopher Nolan intended this as a form of resistance against the exegetical reductio the idea of the double in, for example, Confessions of a Justified Sinner might offer. In their immediate interruptions and abruptions of an expected narrative spacing, Nolan's films to date have displayed an acute awareness of the ways in which 'uncanny' readings of texts can themselves become too seduced by the promise of ossified truth-content.
Obviously, then, the task of reviewing The Dark Knight will also be the task of not getting sent to Pseuds Corner...
Topics the film immediately prompted me to think about...
- Mike Nelson installations: the flash facades of a globalisation riddled with, and founded upon, vast and undecorated secret rooms whose presence is unacknowledged. This is nothing new - see Slavoj Zizek's Pervert's Guide to Cinema - but I was surprised by how close some of the set design was to resembling Nelson's work. Deliberate?
- Commerical injunctions to levity: The Joker's 'Why so serious?' catchphrase seemed to me a hypertrophied recital of the anti-serious, hence anti-analytical, hence anti-critical, tendency in contemporary advertising.
- The almost parodic proliferation of themes of doubling and symbiosis in the narrative. No-one is without their uncanny counterpart. Bruce Wayne, of course, functions as the nexus of multiple personalities. I feel that Christopher Nolan intended this as a form of resistance against the exegetical reductio the idea of the double in, for example, Confessions of a Justified Sinner might offer. In their immediate interruptions and abruptions of an expected narrative spacing, Nolan's films to date have displayed an acute awareness of the ways in which 'uncanny' readings of texts can themselves become too seduced by the promise of ossified truth-content.
Obviously, then, the task of reviewing The Dark Knight will also be the task of not getting sent to Pseuds Corner...
Friday, 25 July 2008
Pseudo-literary metro-harpies: makes me feel a bit 'Plaid Cymru'
I'm feeling het-up today, as the feature below might explain. It's boiling hot, I've got lots of fiddly editing to do, and I would rather be anywhere but in a computer room with the atmosphere of a thermometer in Pompeii.
Anyway, what's sticking in my craw right now is this. Wife in the North. Yes, that's right. The address is for the blog but this entirely charmless project first came to my attention in Newcastle Waterstones a few weeks ago. I'd like to think that after I exited with a copy of Peter Gay's Modernism - The Lure of Heresy a mob of affronted Geordies descended on the place, removed all copies of this piece of vapid, Londoncentric shit and burned them under Charles Grey's austere gaze. Sorry Mum, sorry Dad, sorry friends: I'm swearing again, but...but how do I not? Right, as far as I can ascertain from Wife in the North's blog, her schtick is this:
1 - Being a 'Yummy Mummy'. Note to Haribo: could this be a new range aimed at Oedipal sweet-tooths?
2 - Being alone and afraid because the North is full of mass-murdering lorry drivers, mummies who aren't particularly yummy and compulsively smoke L&B, various clones of Michael from Alan Partidge and Peter Beardsley.
3 - Missing the bright cultural lights of London, a city whose entertainment claims to fame include avant-garde masterpieces such as Cats and The Mousetrap.
4 - Missing the sophisticated humour of the London middle classes, which - as I'm coming to understand it - generally involves making snotty jokes about writers who have never dined at Nigella Lawson's house.
5 - Missing the fabulous social opportunities afforded by good ol' London town, a city in which the only remotely useful transportation system shuts down at midnight and is replaced by a bus network apparently planned by Pingu and a fleet of hyperpriced mini cabs.
6 - Treating the locals as picturesque imbeciles to be exploited for their tasty artesan produce.
7 - Acting as if everyone in the north is a racist scumbag, despite her yearning to live in one of those effectively gated north London communities where the only people from ethnic minority backgrounds one ever meets are kept busy selling Oyster cards.
8 - Being unable to accept that rural places evolve at a different pace, and are therefore unlikely to be inundated with vintage clothes and jewellery emporiums any time soon.
9 - Being a complete and utter doyle, all of the time, and having no idea that you are doing so.
You have to question this woman's motives. If she feels so uncomfortable and cast adrift in beautiful, beautiful Northumberland why doesn't she move back to London? Is there any chance for a spiritual redemption, perhaps...maybe she could start drinking at the Free Trade Inn in Newcastle and read the collected poems of Basil Bunting and The Far Corner and go and watch the mellifluously-named Blyth Spartans play football and go to see bands at the Cluny and photo exhibitions at Side and of course the bloody Baltic and concerts at the Sage and comedy at the Live Theatre and walk in Kielder Forest and the Coquet Valley and on the sands at Bamburgh and Lindisfarne and enjoy Geordie humour and marvel at one of the most beautiful pieces of public art in the United Kingdom and even fishing in the Tyne Valley like in that episode of The Likely Lads where Terry interrupts Bob and Thelma's romantic weekend AND EVERY OTHER BLOODY THING YOU COULD DO IN THE NORTH-EAST WHICH IS MORE WONDERFUL AND LESS SOUL-DESTROYING THAN SPENDING ALL NIGHT IN GASTROPUBS ON WANDSWORTH COMMON BITCHING AND SCRATCHING WITH THE REST OF THE CYNICAL HACKS YOU FIND DOWN THERE.
I'm convinced that the London media attitude towards the north is motivated by a complete inability to understand what is, to all intents and purposes, a completely different country. It's all well and good when we're being Ross Noble-like, getting up on stage and being self-deprecating and savantish, but figures like Mark E. Smith are clearly much harder to deal with.
Another thing that has pissed me off recently, by the way, is the manner in which certain middlebrow metropolitan novels (I won't name names, I could get in trouble) have started to incorporate this very, very, very, very, very watered-down version of psychogeography as a quasi-intellectual justification for liking living in Crouch End. Look, twats: from Poe to Baudelaire to Benjamin to Debord to Sinclair, the procurement of jamon iberico and sunblushed tomatoes has never been a central component of urbanist thought. Sod off. The fact that you enjoy walking around cities does not necessarily make you into an expert into the poetics of the metropolis.
Anyway. Phew. Ow.
Anyway, what's sticking in my craw right now is this. Wife in the North. Yes, that's right. The address is for the blog but this entirely charmless project first came to my attention in Newcastle Waterstones a few weeks ago. I'd like to think that after I exited with a copy of Peter Gay's Modernism - The Lure of Heresy a mob of affronted Geordies descended on the place, removed all copies of this piece of vapid, Londoncentric shit and burned them under Charles Grey's austere gaze. Sorry Mum, sorry Dad, sorry friends: I'm swearing again, but...but how do I not? Right, as far as I can ascertain from Wife in the North's blog, her schtick is this:
1 - Being a 'Yummy Mummy'. Note to Haribo: could this be a new range aimed at Oedipal sweet-tooths?
2 - Being alone and afraid because the North is full of mass-murdering lorry drivers, mummies who aren't particularly yummy and compulsively smoke L&B, various clones of Michael from Alan Partidge and Peter Beardsley.
3 - Missing the bright cultural lights of London, a city whose entertainment claims to fame include avant-garde masterpieces such as Cats and The Mousetrap.
4 - Missing the sophisticated humour of the London middle classes, which - as I'm coming to understand it - generally involves making snotty jokes about writers who have never dined at Nigella Lawson's house.
5 - Missing the fabulous social opportunities afforded by good ol' London town, a city in which the only remotely useful transportation system shuts down at midnight and is replaced by a bus network apparently planned by Pingu and a fleet of hyperpriced mini cabs.
6 - Treating the locals as picturesque imbeciles to be exploited for their tasty artesan produce.
7 - Acting as if everyone in the north is a racist scumbag, despite her yearning to live in one of those effectively gated north London communities where the only people from ethnic minority backgrounds one ever meets are kept busy selling Oyster cards.
8 - Being unable to accept that rural places evolve at a different pace, and are therefore unlikely to be inundated with vintage clothes and jewellery emporiums any time soon.
9 - Being a complete and utter doyle, all of the time, and having no idea that you are doing so.
You have to question this woman's motives. If she feels so uncomfortable and cast adrift in beautiful, beautiful Northumberland why doesn't she move back to London? Is there any chance for a spiritual redemption, perhaps...maybe she could start drinking at the Free Trade Inn in Newcastle and read the collected poems of Basil Bunting and The Far Corner and go and watch the mellifluously-named Blyth Spartans play football and go to see bands at the Cluny and photo exhibitions at Side and of course the bloody Baltic and concerts at the Sage and comedy at the Live Theatre and walk in Kielder Forest and the Coquet Valley and on the sands at Bamburgh and Lindisfarne and enjoy Geordie humour and marvel at one of the most beautiful pieces of public art in the United Kingdom and even fishing in the Tyne Valley like in that episode of The Likely Lads where Terry interrupts Bob and Thelma's romantic weekend AND EVERY OTHER BLOODY THING YOU COULD DO IN THE NORTH-EAST WHICH IS MORE WONDERFUL AND LESS SOUL-DESTROYING THAN SPENDING ALL NIGHT IN GASTROPUBS ON WANDSWORTH COMMON BITCHING AND SCRATCHING WITH THE REST OF THE CYNICAL HACKS YOU FIND DOWN THERE.
I'm convinced that the London media attitude towards the north is motivated by a complete inability to understand what is, to all intents and purposes, a completely different country. It's all well and good when we're being Ross Noble-like, getting up on stage and being self-deprecating and savantish, but figures like Mark E. Smith are clearly much harder to deal with.
Another thing that has pissed me off recently, by the way, is the manner in which certain middlebrow metropolitan novels (I won't name names, I could get in trouble) have started to incorporate this very, very, very, very, very watered-down version of psychogeography as a quasi-intellectual justification for liking living in Crouch End. Look, twats: from Poe to Baudelaire to Benjamin to Debord to Sinclair, the procurement of jamon iberico and sunblushed tomatoes has never been a central component of urbanist thought. Sod off. The fact that you enjoy walking around cities does not necessarily make you into an expert into the poetics of the metropolis.
Anyway. Phew. Ow.
Reader's Block, AKA a Justification for Reading Grazia
I've always thought Guardian journalist Stuart Jefferies was a bit of a self-obsessed, moaning dilettante. Now I know he is.
Because I should be completing my thesis, I'm going to disagree with this article in bullet point form.
1 - This article is predominantly composed of references to books that its author clearly hasn't read. As I've no doubt rambled on about elsewhere, mentioning Heidegger's Being and Time in a broadsheet article does nothing but create a shared sense of superiority among people who have heard of Being and Time. This is how broadhseet newspapers work. They flatter the intelligence of their readers with clever references to texts, creating the impression that everyone concerned has studied the minutiae of Husserl or Merleau-Ponty. If you track the references to Freud in broadsheet literature articles that aren't written by dedicated practitioners and historians of psychoanalysis (Adam Phillips* et al) you'll notice that the version of Freudianism presented is, to all extents and purposes, the one you'd get in Friends.
2 - He seems to be suggesting that White Teeth is as important as Finnegans Wake. It isn't.
3 - I read modernist novels and poetry on the train. Am I trying to impress anyone? No, strangely. I just like reading modernist novels and poetry.
4 - For the last time: IF YOU KEEP ON TELLING PEOPLE THAT JOYCE IS INACCESSIBLE, THEY WILL BE PRECONDITIONED TO FIND JOYCE INACCESSIBLE. What the hell is it with the broadsheets vested interests in literary realism?
5 - If Mariella Frostrup, queen among all the metro-class, pseudo-liberated harpies, told me to read something, I'd avoid it on principle. Even if it was Kafka, or Henry Green. Why do people like her judge literary prizes? Oh, I get it. It's because people like her - mini-Mariellas - form the biggest purchasing constituencies for Borders and Waterstones. I'm surprised the Orange Prize hasn't been given to the Boden catalogue yet. Can you imagine Frostrup meeting Gertrude Stein? It's okay though, she knows everything about sex.
6 - If you can't finish Brideshead Revisited and Wuthering Heights, you should not be allowed to make analyses of a nation's literacy standards in a broadsheet newspaper.
7 - If you think Brideshead Revisited 'drops off halfway through', it's probably because you want the book to have the same emotional emphases as the (admittedly excellent) television series which you no doubt saw first. I really don't think you can accuse the 'Orphans of the Storm' sequence of lowering the pitch of the novel.
8 - This is all a dressed-up sneering exercise at those who have the temerity to enjoy 'difficult' books wholeheartedly, isn't it? A jealous assassination of people who would genuinely get more excited about reading Robbe-Grillet or Thomas Mann than Paulo Coelho?
In short: if you don't want to read books, don't read books. If you feel that you have to read books to assuage your anxiety and bulk up your oh-so-artsy image, then you'd be doing it for the wrong reasons. Having a Kandinsky print on your kitchen wall and being familiar with the works of Jim Jarmusch does not make you into Baudelaire. There are people in the world who would kill for the opportunity to read or, god forbid, study literature: I can't imagine that they'd be putting Brideshead Revisited down on the cistern 12 pages in and justifying doing so with reference to last year's most misunderstood chattering-class manual. I really don't care one iota what Pierre Bayard has to say any more, and whether his supposedly 'Lacanian' bent provides a rigorous intellectual basis for his argument. The fact is, we all discuss books we haven't read in their entirety, or at all. This is kind of inevitable. But isn't there two different ways of doing this, and one is markedly less cynical than the other? I talk about things I haven't completed to glue ideas together when I simply don't have time to comb through every last paragraph of Proust (if only!) I don't do it because I'm having a dinner party next week and I'm worried my image will suffer if I can't manifest some kind of familiarity with Anne Enright or Paul Auster.
What I'm trying to say - I think I'm starting to sound like B.S. Johnson here - is stop spoiling it for the rest of us: colonising the things we care about and tainting them with your cynical, metropolitan, insecure bullshit. You could always try listening when the people who actually care offer some kind of informed opinion instead of falling back on the same old anti-academic crap: 'Joyce is difficult'; 'Prynne is difficult'; 'Zadie Smith should win the Booker for restoring realism.' Once more: don't read if you don't want to. The future does not rest on whether an incestuous set of food photographers and deli owners have read Rilke.
Sorry, another rant. Now I must write my PhD.
* And yet the 'Phillips Paradox', the trademark of the 'shrinking woman's crumpet' (for fuck's sake), is the ultimate form of Guardianista flattery: take a simple and minor contradiction, and dress it up in the language of mournful impossibility. It makes them feel like Derrida, over their organic cereal.
Because I should be completing my thesis, I'm going to disagree with this article in bullet point form.
1 - This article is predominantly composed of references to books that its author clearly hasn't read. As I've no doubt rambled on about elsewhere, mentioning Heidegger's Being and Time in a broadsheet article does nothing but create a shared sense of superiority among people who have heard of Being and Time. This is how broadhseet newspapers work. They flatter the intelligence of their readers with clever references to texts, creating the impression that everyone concerned has studied the minutiae of Husserl or Merleau-Ponty. If you track the references to Freud in broadsheet literature articles that aren't written by dedicated practitioners and historians of psychoanalysis (Adam Phillips* et al) you'll notice that the version of Freudianism presented is, to all extents and purposes, the one you'd get in Friends.
2 - He seems to be suggesting that White Teeth is as important as Finnegans Wake. It isn't.
3 - I read modernist novels and poetry on the train. Am I trying to impress anyone? No, strangely. I just like reading modernist novels and poetry.
4 - For the last time: IF YOU KEEP ON TELLING PEOPLE THAT JOYCE IS INACCESSIBLE, THEY WILL BE PRECONDITIONED TO FIND JOYCE INACCESSIBLE. What the hell is it with the broadsheets vested interests in literary realism?
5 - If Mariella Frostrup, queen among all the metro-class, pseudo-liberated harpies, told me to read something, I'd avoid it on principle. Even if it was Kafka, or Henry Green. Why do people like her judge literary prizes? Oh, I get it. It's because people like her - mini-Mariellas - form the biggest purchasing constituencies for Borders and Waterstones. I'm surprised the Orange Prize hasn't been given to the Boden catalogue yet. Can you imagine Frostrup meeting Gertrude Stein? It's okay though, she knows everything about sex.
6 - If you can't finish Brideshead Revisited and Wuthering Heights, you should not be allowed to make analyses of a nation's literacy standards in a broadsheet newspaper.
7 - If you think Brideshead Revisited 'drops off halfway through', it's probably because you want the book to have the same emotional emphases as the (admittedly excellent) television series which you no doubt saw first. I really don't think you can accuse the 'Orphans of the Storm' sequence of lowering the pitch of the novel.
8 - This is all a dressed-up sneering exercise at those who have the temerity to enjoy 'difficult' books wholeheartedly, isn't it? A jealous assassination of people who would genuinely get more excited about reading Robbe-Grillet or Thomas Mann than Paulo Coelho?
In short: if you don't want to read books, don't read books. If you feel that you have to read books to assuage your anxiety and bulk up your oh-so-artsy image, then you'd be doing it for the wrong reasons. Having a Kandinsky print on your kitchen wall and being familiar with the works of Jim Jarmusch does not make you into Baudelaire. There are people in the world who would kill for the opportunity to read or, god forbid, study literature: I can't imagine that they'd be putting Brideshead Revisited down on the cistern 12 pages in and justifying doing so with reference to last year's most misunderstood chattering-class manual. I really don't care one iota what Pierre Bayard has to say any more, and whether his supposedly 'Lacanian' bent provides a rigorous intellectual basis for his argument. The fact is, we all discuss books we haven't read in their entirety, or at all. This is kind of inevitable. But isn't there two different ways of doing this, and one is markedly less cynical than the other? I talk about things I haven't completed to glue ideas together when I simply don't have time to comb through every last paragraph of Proust (if only!) I don't do it because I'm having a dinner party next week and I'm worried my image will suffer if I can't manifest some kind of familiarity with Anne Enright or Paul Auster.
What I'm trying to say - I think I'm starting to sound like B.S. Johnson here - is stop spoiling it for the rest of us: colonising the things we care about and tainting them with your cynical, metropolitan, insecure bullshit. You could always try listening when the people who actually care offer some kind of informed opinion instead of falling back on the same old anti-academic crap: 'Joyce is difficult'; 'Prynne is difficult'; 'Zadie Smith should win the Booker for restoring realism.' Once more: don't read if you don't want to. The future does not rest on whether an incestuous set of food photographers and deli owners have read Rilke.
Sorry, another rant. Now I must write my PhD.
* And yet the 'Phillips Paradox', the trademark of the 'shrinking woman's crumpet' (for fuck's sake), is the ultimate form of Guardianista flattery: take a simple and minor contradiction, and dress it up in the language of mournful impossibility. It makes them feel like Derrida, over their organic cereal.
Thursday, 24 July 2008
I've just remembered: today is...
...Batman day!
When I pull my finger out and go and see it, I'll write a review. The last film I went to see at the cinema is probably too embarassing to discuss in public.
Sorry about the picture. I'm excited.
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