Category Archives: culture

The modern underground

Underground : L’Histoire (2001) – Jean-François Bizot
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

“Some have stated in our written histories that Spartacus or Jesus may have been the first to define the Underground. Or Socrates drinking his mix of the poisonous hemlock, François Villon inaugurating the zazou spirit of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Galileo, Benvenuto Cellini, Giordano Bruno, each threatened by or ending up at the stakes for opening new horizons to an ancient world.
Closer to us is Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his Notes from the Underground. Or the green hair of Baudelaire, or the fulgurating irritations of Rimbaud, the grinding teeth of Lautréamont and the voluptuousness of Huysmans and René Crevel. We arrive at the 20th century, who has invented this term underground?. A young person challenges you: “A label? A brand, a sticker, a badge, a pin? In short, you were already wired in your time.” Youngsters always have the right to await you like a cretin with the turning, since we were all young. One answers him: to be wired, to connect, here what was and which will remain the true underground.” Are you a hipster? — paraphrased from Jean-François Bizot’s introduction to this book

Nobrow, taste and corpus

Dan Green of The Reading Experience does not like Stephen King. I’ve read this before, in fact, according to Google, it is the 24th time that he or one of his readers call upon Stephen to discuss the strengths of literary merit. Every time someone displays a patronizingly superior attitude towards Stephen King, my nobrow instincts rise up and I feel the snobbishness as if it was directed towards me. In his latest post Dan even goes so far to say that “film adaptations of [Stephen] King’s fiction such as Brian De Palma‘s Carrie and David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone are infinitely superior to the novels on which they’re based, which in my opinion don’t rise above the level of poorly written, sub-gothic trash. (There, I’ve said it.)”

This is probably the first time I’ve read in a highbrow literary blog that a film is superior to the novel and it is of course — at least with reference to The Dead Zone and Carrie –, pure bollocks (there, I said it.). But at the same time I can understand Dan’s position. For example, I’d love to be able to watch the 1967 film adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, rather than reading it.

But I wonder: why do I defend Stephen King? I defend him because I used to be an avid reader of King and because he writes in the tradition of the “limit experience”. The tradition of transgressive fiction. He writes about states of the human condition which transcend the everyday life. He makes you curious of what life can and can’t be about.

Now is a good time to be a bit more specific about the nobrow concept. Frank McLynn will come to my aid. He calls Kingsley Amis a phoney because he maintains that: “[it is] impossible to enjoy and appreciate Westerns, film noir or private-eye fiction of the Raymond Chandler kind and acknowledged literary heavyweights like Melville, Conrad, Dostoevsky and Zola.”

But is Kingsley Amis really a phoney because he feels that?

Being nobrow is about knowing the entire corpus of literature. If you only know two colors, let’s say green and blue, you can’t call yourself an expert on colors. Likewise, if you only know highbrow literature, you can hardly call yourself an expert on literature or literary merit. The first thing you need to know when you claim to have any taste at all, is the corpus. And this is indeed the big paradox of the nobrow position. You can only call yourself nobrow if you know the corpus of both high and low culture. And then you have to make your own choices. If you only know high culture, you are not nobrow. If you only know low culture, you are not nobrow. In practice, this means, that for being a nobrow person, you come from the highbrow position.

This, however, does not mean that I am against a canon of sorts. Being in education, I recognize the need for a canon, for a curriculum. And I suppose that we all want to define our own literary canons. And my plea is include King in the 20th century literary canon, just as we’ve included Bram Stoker from the 19th literary canon and Sade from that of the 18th century. Please do not exclude literature from the canon on grounds of its content.

I’m not saying that Dan and other Stephen King bashers despise Stephen King’s books solely on the basis of their content (otherwise critics such as Dan wouldn’t like the films based on his novels), but I do get the feeling that most of this rejection is for a large measure based on content related rather than style related criteria.

Which reminds me of Susan Sontag’s On Style:

It would be hard to find any reputable literary critic today who would care to be caught defending as an idea the old antithesis of style versus content. On this issue a pious consensus prevails. … In the practice of criticism, though, the old antithesis lives on, virtually unassailed. Most of the same critics who disclaim, in passing, the notion that style is an accessory to content maintain the duality whenever they apply themselves to particular works of literature. … Many critics appear not to realize this. They think themselves sufficiently protected by a theoretical disclaimer on the vulgar filtering-off of style from content, all the while their judgments continue to reinforce precisely what they are, in theory, eager to deny.

The Arcades Project arrived in the mail today

Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (1927 – 1940) arrived in the mail today. See my entry at Jahsonic as well as my previous blog entry.

The first thing to catch my eye was this Coetzee review on the back cover:

“[The Arcades Project] suggests a new way of writing about a civilization using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than above. And [Benjamin’s] call elsewhere for a history centered on the sufferings of the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors, is prophetic of the way in which history writing has begun to think of itself in our lifetime…”What does The Arcades Project have to offer? The briefest of lists would include: a treasure hoard of curious information about Paris, a multitude of thought-provoking questions, the harvest of an acute and idiosyncratic mind’s trawl through thousands of books, succinct observations, polished to a high aphoristic sheen, on a range of subjects…and glimpses of Benjamin toying with a new way of seeing himself: as a compiler of a ‘magic encyclopedia’…[A] magnificent opus.”
–J. M. Coetzee, The Guardian

More appraisals from Harvard University Press

Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks

Furthering my post on national stereotypes I present you a joke related to the subject:

“Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and it is all organised by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and it is all organised by the Italians”. [Nov 2006]

See also: volksgeist

Update May 25, 2011: Found the source, this joke supposedly is from record tycoon Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records, first attested in a 1982 Google Books record[1]:

Carnography

Carnography (from latin “carnis” meaning “meat” and Greek grafi “writing”) is a neologism for writing, films, images, or other material that contains gratuitous amounts of bloodshed, violence and/or weaponry. It is named by analogy to pornography (although it is often mistaken for a portmanteau of “carnage” and “pornography”, this is not strictly the case), and is sometimes referred to as “violence porn”.

The mere depiction of violent acts, or of their results, does not necessarily qualify a film as carnography, just as the mere depiction of sex acts does not necessarily qualify a film as pornography. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnography [Nov 2006]

See also: exploitative – sensationalism – violence – aestheticization of violence – representation – depiction

Baudelaire’s World (2002) – Rosemary Lloyd

Baudelaire’s World (2002) – Rosemary Lloyd
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Charles Baudelaire is often regarded as the founder of modernist poetry. Written with clarity and verve, Baudelaire’s World provides English – language readers with the biographical, historical, and cultural contexts that will lead to a fuller understanding and enjoyment of the great French poet’s work. –from the publisher

Though it is often said Charles Baudelaire published only a single volume of poetry, The Flowers of Evil, this is untrue if you count his published prose poetry such as Spleen de Paris.

See also: Charles Baudelaire – modernist poetry

Jess Franco

photo of Jess Franco, credit unidentified

Groovy Age of Horror presents I’m in a Jess Franco state of mind, a blog by Robert Monell on the films of Jess Franco. Robert Monell is a connoisseur of Jess Franco (who I like to call the European Roger Corman) and “Euro trash”  cinema in general. He is part of the vibrant internet community called Euro Trash Paradise, which can be a viewed as a continuation of the magazine Euro Trash cinema.

European Trash Cinema (magazine) issue 16

European trash cinema has als had its share of academic attention, perhaps most notably in the work of Joan Hawkins with titles such as Sleaze Mania, Euro-trash, and High Art (1999). 

Arthur Russell documentary

Arthur Russell documentary ( watch the trailer )

some more insightful Arthur Russell LINKs :

Nick The Record ( DJ Friendly Records) features
Steven Hall’s reminiscences
collaboration with Allen Ginsberg 

Tim Lawrence ( author of ” Love Saves The Day ” )
is plannin’ to publish Arthur’s biography.

WFMU Arthur Russell special ( listen )

tracklisting :

Dinosaur / Kiss Me Again
The Necessaries / More Real
Jah Wobble, Holger Czukay, The Edge / Hold On To Your Dreams
Arthur Russell / Losing My Taste For the Night Life

Nicki Siano / Move
Peter Zummo / Unisons
Jerry Harrison: Casual Gods / The Doctors Lie
Mimi / Time to Go Home Now
Indian Ocean / Treehouse/School Bell pt. 1

Arthur Russell / Wax the Van
Gary Lucas / Let’s Go Swimming
Allen Ginsberg / Voice of the Bard
Jill Kroesen / Fay Shism Blues
Loose Joints / Tell You (Today)

Via  SpiritualBolshevik

See also:  Arthur Russell

Notes on modernism

Literary Modernism and Photography: (2002) – Paul Hansom
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

See also Sara Danius book on how modernism was influenced by new media in general.

Review
“Although literary modernism is famously associated with probing interiority while photography is two dimensional , the two moved into prominence concurrently, intersecting in ways that these essays explore. The volume considers documentary uses of the image; the relation between photographers’ aesthetics and their deployment of images; photography as a literary trope; and the transition into postmodernism.”–American Literature

Book Description
The developments in narrative experimentation that marked the modernist period in Europe and the United States provide an interesting crossroads with the development of visual representation during the same time. In this collection of fourteen original essays, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the ways in which the photograph became a vital emblem of the transformative processes of modernism, offering a new aesthetic and psychological model for the new zeitgeist. The interdisciplinary methodology of Literary Modernism and Photography melds literary, cultural, and photographic theories to offer a challenging literary framework for this period. The essays address the problems surrounding the photograph’s ostensible “factuality”-its presumed ability to represent the real world-and suggest the difficulties inherent in aestheticizing the real into fictive forms, while also examining how the photograph shaped and reflected the new, modern artistic self-consciousness of figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Vanessa Bell, and Willa Cather. If literary modernism heralded a re-visioning of the world, then the photograph was the concrete rendering of this new vision.

A positive review of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses

WHEN IT IS published in the United States, John Carey’s polemic The Intellectuals and the Masses will probably startle reviewers. It certainly caused a flap when the British edition came out in the summer of 1992. Though an Oxford professor, Carey is a blunt literary populist: he argues that the fundamental motive behind the modernist movement in literature was a corrosive fear and loathing of the masses. Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, T S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Graham Greene all strove to preserve a sense of class superiority by reviling the mean suburban man. They convinced themselves that the typical clerk was subhuman, bestial, machinelike, dead inside, a consumer of rubbishy newspapers and canned food. The intellectuals had to create this caricature to maintain social distinctions in an increasingly democratic and educated society. Many of these writers ultimately disposed of the masses through fantasies of wholesale extermination, usually rationalized on eugenic grounds. –Jonathan Rose quoted in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), this copy sourced http://www.autodidactproject.org

See also: modernism – low modernism – mass culture

An article on postcards in relation to modernism:

The very definition of Modernism has always been contentious. Did it begin with the advent of photography, which liberated the visual arts from the obligations of realism, or was its starting point the experiments in the application of color by such Post-Impressionist painters as Cézanne, van Gogh and Gaugin? Did Claude Debussy’s gradual abandonment of tonality, the cornerstone of Western musical composition since J.S. Bach, lead inevitably to Arnold Schoenberg’s polytonality and the sound experiments of Webern, Stockhausen and Cage? Do the honors of introducing non-representational theatre belong to Pirandello, to the German Expressionists or to the Italian Futurists? And where do Kafka, Musil, Svevo and Joyce fit in? –Anthony Guneratne via http://www.co.broward.fl.us/library/bienes/postcard/modernism.htm [Nov 2006]

See also: modernism – low modernism – mass culture