Lead Igloo

The writer’s voice

TF — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 01:35:42 +0000

I have of late come across a number of recordings of authors reading their work and thought it prudent to gather the ones that interest me in one spot – for myself as much as anybody else.

Discussions of how an author sounds are inevitable. But I would encourage listeners to take the time to think beyond this and listen to the way these writers move through their work and to how they tell the story. The literaray culture we have inherited grew from an oral tradition – storytelling came from being told, in speech, a story.

It is now such a personal thing – when I read Crime and Punishment on a full morning train, it’s only me and Dostoyevsky. I suppose it is why things like the voice of Joyce or Wilde are such a novelty. But I do wonder what impact this has had on the way the modern writer tells stories.

Don Delillo reads from Point Omega

I haven’t yet read PO as I can’t get myself to spend 30 beans on something I’ll finish in an afternoon. However, Don has said in a number of interviews how important words are to him…

David Foster Wallace Audio Project

DFW is something of a god round these parts. I’ve listened to quite a few of these recordings, and others on YT, so I now have DFW narrating in my head when I read his writing.

Joyce reading Finnegan’s Wake

If you’ve heard Joyce read anything, it’s probably this piece: Anna Livia Plurabelle. Worth another listen anyway.

Is this Oscar?

Possibly a recording of Oscar Wilde reading from The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1900. Eerie, whoever it is.

Faulkner at Virginia

The sound and the fury… William Faulkner’s sessions from when he was writer in residence at the University of Virginia in 1957 and 1958.

T.S. Eliot reads The Waste Land, Journey of the Magi & Four Quartest

I love Eliot’s poetry and I love hearing him read it.

Hemingway reads In Harry’s Bar in Venice

The interesting thing about this reading is that Ernest reads the piece almost as if it’s his first time seeing it.

Pound’s Collected Poetry Recordings

Like the DFW link, I’ve featured this in an old Public Library post. But no post on voice and the music of writing would be complete without adding Pound. This is a link to PennSound’s complete collection of Ezra Pound recordings. It includes an in-depth interview with Richard Sieburth, editor of the page.

Materials of art

Laugh tracks

TF — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:29:03 +0000

I watched an episode of Top Cat the other day and was amused by the fact it had a laugh track. The logic of it made me think back to when I was a kid. Though it was already old by the time I watched it, I remember enjoying Top Cat a lot. But had the laugh track made the show funnier? Did it make me think it was not a cartoon but something that could be filmed in front of a live audience? Or, as is most likely, did I think absolutely nothing of it?

I’m sure it’s not the only cartoon to have a laugh track – I’m confident in my guess that most Hanna Barbera cartoons do. But it also made me think about the use of laugh tracks today, and why some shows still need to signpost humour (or attempts at it).

As such, I was pleasantly surprised to see a post at The Paris Review blog on the ‘art of canned laughter’. It is an interview with TV Historian Ben Glenn II on the genesis of the craft and reasons for adding laughs.

Interestingly, Glenn makes the point that “some 1960s sitcoms were so poorly written that I can’t help but think that canned laughter only improved them.” But he goes on to say that “the laugh track only adds to the fun of these shows, whether they are well written or not. I mean, Mister Ed, which I think is quite well written, would be so much less fun to watch if it had no laugh track.”

Read Canned Laughter: Ben Glenn II, Television Historian

Having a laugh – Timing in writing & comedy

Public Library 15.7

TF — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 05:19:55 +0000

The Decisive Ones. The thing that interests me about the Middle East (a term I am far from comfortable with) so much is the fact that what is happening there is so far removed from my life and everyday experiences that it is almost unbelievable. I fear my interet is no more than the equivalent of gawking. The difference is I do have a strong opinion of what is happening there. But the problems are so profound that it makes the opinions of people living comfortable lives on the other side of our planet, with the leisure time and peace to blog about them, utterly irrelevant. This is a detailed piece of immersion journalism about the days after the Shock and Awe campaign in Iraq. By Thanassis Cambanis, via at Length

David Lipsky on the Late David Foster Wallace. Audio of DFW in conversation with David Lipsky on the Infinite Jest tour. Lipsky turned the conversations into Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. Via The Takeaway

Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works. Speaking of Infinite Jest, I didn’t understand AA until I read IJ. In it, DFW explores AA as a philosophy by which to live. What makes AA remarkable is the fact it is still having success despite its somewhat odd and cultish beginnings. By Brendan I. Koerner, via Wired

Living with the Enemy. A compelling case – using the work of Holocaust writer, Jean Améry – against reconciliation, arguing that to the victims especially it can be a form of torture. By Susie Linfield, via Guernica

Demanding more to teach us we’re smart again

Trauma writing

TF — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:49:51 +0000

When I did my BA, I took a few writing subjects. The thing that struck me then, and has stayed with me since, was that many of my peers chose to write pieces that were based on or directly about their respective traumas.

I heard proposals about the struggles and tension arising from obsessive compulsive disorder, homosexuality, religion, sexual abuse and homelessness – all fertile, mulitfaceted subject matter which has every right to be explored, and should be.

But something was wrong. The thing that surprised me most about this phenomenon was that the writer-victims were mainly teens or in their early twenties, a year or two out of high school just like me, and not the so-called mature aged students.

None of my classmates seemed to be immature or particularly narcissistic, they mainly had the appearance of intelligent, articulate and well-read individuals. I’m not insinuating that their traumas weren’t serious and genuine or they should not have been ‘average looking’ because of their life experiences. But why and how did all these kids think writing about their pain was going to be useful for them?

One of the subjects I did was called The Writing Self, a class dedicated to the writing and reading of autobiography. This inevitably made the whole writing about me thing a lot more prominent in my mind, especially because each student had to read their proposal out from the front of the lecture theatre. Some students went so far as to promise their audience a, brace yourselves, tale more harrowing than any which had come before theirs and no less true. Really? Really.

Perhaps to my detriment, and while it’s not something I always achieve, I am a supporter of style over substance. At the time, I was under the impression most of my peers were of a similar belief, especially those writing literary fiction. But an emphasis on the story, one that promised to tug on heart strings and swell tear ducts to overflowing, goes some way in contradicting that.

But more importantly, why were all these kids taking the self-indulgent route? Did I miss that discussion? Was it cathartic? Did they think that’s what publishers were looking for? Did they equate autobiography with ‘everything that’s gone wrong in my life’?

Or was this, I wondered, what writers were like?

Today, I still wonder what prompted the ‘write my tragedy’ epidemic – it makes me uneasy for reasons I won’t explore here. I have learnt, however, that the ‘my life was a mess and I’m not going to bother hiding my experiences, observations and insights under the facade of fiction’ genre is real, thriving and profitable. I have also spoken to people of all ages who want me to write their life stories because, boy-oh-boy, have they been through some proverbial animal poo.

Just sending it out into the e-stratosphere.

The knights of our romances – extract from Discourse on the Method

TF — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 01:19:01 +0000

I did not cease valuing the exercises which kept people busy in the schools. I knew that the languages one learns there are necessary for an understanding of ancient books, that the gracefulness of fables awakens the intellect, that the memorable actions of history raise the mind, and if one reads with discretion, help to form one’s judgment, that reading all the good books is like a conversation with the most honourable people of past centuries, who were their authors, even a carefully prepared dialogue in which they reveal to us only the best of their thoughts, that eloquence has incomparable power and beauty, that poetry has a most ravishing delicacy and softness, that mathematics has very skillful inventions which can go a long way toward satisfying the curious as well as facilitating all the arts and lessening the work of men, that the writings which deal with morals contain several lessons and a number of exhortations to virtue which are extremely useful, that theology teaches one how to reach heaven, that philosophy provides a way of speaking plausibly on all matters and making oneself admired by those who are less scholarly, that jurisprudence, medicine, and the other sciences bring honour and riches to those who cultivate them, and finally that it is good to have examined all of them, even the most superstitious and false, in order to know their legitimate value and to guard against being wrong. But I believed I had already given enough time to languages and even to reading ancient books as well, and to their histories and stories. For talking with those from other ages is almost the same as travelling. It is good to know something about the customs of various people, so that we can judge our own more sensibly and do not think everything different from our own ways ridiculous and irrational, as those who have seen nothing are accustomed to do. But when one spends too much time travelling, one finally becomes a stranger in one’s own country, and when one is too curious about things which went on in past ages, one usually lives in considerable ignorance about what goes on in this one. In addition, fables make us imagine several totally impossible events as possible, and even the most faithful histories, if they neither change nor increase the importance of things to make them more worth reading, at the very least almost always omit the most menial and less admirable circumstances, with the result that what is left in does not depict the truth. Hence, those who regulate their habits by the examples which they derive from these histories are prone to fall into the extravagances of the knights of our romances and to dream up projects which exceed their powers.

From Discourse on the Method for Reasoning Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences by René Descartes. Translated by Ian Johnston.

Creating a sister text – Some thoughts on a hypertext

TF — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:48:05 +0000

As I was writing on the weekend I got thinking about how narratives must always be incomplete. Incomplete in the way that a narrative cannot include every aspect of a story – because then it would cease being comprehensible and lose all semblance of being a narrative, among other things.

The story I am writing at the moment – a portion of which I am in discussion to publish – relies heavily on being imperfect. A large portion of the story, in fact the other half of it, is untold. This is where a big flaming ball of dramatic tension lies. If it was closer to being complete (in the orthodox understanding of what it means for a story to be complete), my story would break.

This lead me to ideas of hypertext, where ‘completeness’ can be brought closer. Some of the poems I’ve posted in the Public Library series (Eliot’s The Waste Land and The Hollow Men) have been turned into hypertext, in so far as they have been turned into digital code rendered to look like printed text with hyperlinks inserted where appropriate. This has made the poems fuller (even if the effect it has on their completeness as a piece of literature or art is questionable). Maybe not fuller – the references have always been there – maybe being turned into hypertext has opened or freed them, their innards, innards that were always there, exposed.

Yesterday I posted a link to a hypertexted canto by Ezra Pound on Twitter. This hypertext is the perfect example of the aforementioned freeing – I found the reading expperience immensely enjoyable, more enjoyable had the references remained unknown. (The creator’s justification goes a long way in explaining the philosphy behind hypertexting Pound as well as making some interesting points about hypertext.)

The hypertext in the above cases is made possible by the hyperlinking of supplementary information that elucidates any references the author has made to other texts in the poems (perfect for modernist poetry, which is often made dense and opaque by such references). And while all defintitions of hypertext are computer-related, I’d like to posit – from a position close to utter ignorance – that hypertext is not restricted to the aptly titled ‘web’. Hyper comes from the Greek hypér, which means ‘over’ and ‘above’, usually in excess of. Taking the root literally (and continuing to act like I know what I’m talking about), this means that any text in excess of the original text is a hypertext, making footnotes, prologues, introductions, epigraphs and the like hyper-texts.

Using the example of the epigraph, it exists inside and outside the text at once. It cuts into the story, adding to it by connecting it with an existing idea or belief, even a tradition, while being apart from the text.

It links.

And if you have some prior knowledge – any knowledge – of the text the epigraph was cut from, you don’t need a hyperlink or the physical book in front of you, your brain knits the connection. If not, you can go in search of it. The speed at which you can do this has been vastly improved by technology, but these connections were still being made prior to the invention of the computer.

But an epigraph is a tiny element in an infinite list of possibly connected elements. My conclusion was that stories must be, by nature, incomplete. While this came to me as something of an epiphany – one that I hope in future will go some way in helping me understand and to allow for fiction that does not appear to end in a conventional and expected way, and is therefore classed as ‘incomplete’ – I was still left with wanting to see the other side of my story told, but in a way that is ‘over’ and above’ it.

While the relationship between hypertext and digital forms will only strengthen, I want to ignore that for a moment, ignore the possibilities that electronic fiction presents and leave my brain in analogue (he says on a blog…) for the moment.

What I’d like to write – or see written – is the other side of the story, as a separate narrative but one that constantly references the original or brother narrative. That is, where one narrative deals with the thoughts, actions, emotions and impressions of one character, an entirely separate text deals with those of another character. Would this still break the story, I wonder? Would the reader’s experience be improved?

No doubt it has been done before. I think what I’d like even more, however, is if somebody else wrote it, and the games and play that would ensue, and the authenticity of a completely separate voice and style.

This would also create the possibility of turning it into a digital hypertext, allowing the reader to switch back and forth to get thoughts, emotional responses, actions and the action from different points of view.

These are strange and marvelous times indeed.

“Kings, I think, will disappear”

A serious science – Ezra Pound on the arts

TF — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 23:14:35 +0000

“The arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science. Their subject is man, mankind and the individual.” From ‘The Serious Artist’ by Ezra Pound. Related posts:A prize-worthy force – Extract from How to Read Materials of art The law of mankind – Extract from Les Miserables Related posts:

Culture of connectivity

TF — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 03:14:53 +0000

I came across this piece earlier today (via Harper’s Magazine Links, which often has one or two gems of feature writing in every update) and thought it was important to share (ironic, given the subject of the article). It covers topics like friendship, solitude, the private vs. the public – all subjects that have been on my mind of late – and the impact technology is having on those things. Well written and with some interesting insights into a crazy future that is the present, it’s worth reading – and maybe some quiet time alone, considering.

“Isn’t [our fetishization of fame] the motivation for much of what we call oversharing, online? Ours is the age of nanocelebrity…In the age of reality TV and Paris Hilton, American Idol and YouTube (which has the power, if your video goes viral, to turn you into a global celebrity, even if you’re just some guitar geek shredding Pachelbel’s Canon), we see fame as our Warholian birthright. [...] Thus, we’re increasingly comfortable with the disappearance of privacy and the prying media eye, not only because it affords a few minutes of Warholian fame but because, like the characters in White Noise, we only feel that we truly exist when we see ourselves reflected in the media eye, because that’s where the real reality is, these days: on the other side of the screen.”

Read The Fate of Solitude in the Age of Always Connect by Mark Dery. Via True/Slant

Forms

TF — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:28:41 +0000

The return of Ulysses (detail) by John Linnell

Each holding a corner of the rug, they carry him, sleeping, ashore.

Finally, he is home.

On the dock, as the men loaded the ship to the sound of thunder, he looked to his island, invisible on the horizon, and clenched a thick fist. The smell of his land, carried on the wind, inspired memories of another life, one that seemed part of a different time – not a distant, invented past but a future yet to be lived. Aboard the ship he slept, lulled by the undulations of the sea, believing the premonitions were those whispered to him long ago by a hoary-haired oracle, and not his own.

The men leave him there then turn their ship around, holding her so steady on course that not even a falcon, swiftest of all birds, could keep pace with her.

With dawn broken, his sleeping mind imagines for him a time when he is never here at home, and a time that he is always here. He dreams that his journey is not almost at an end, but endless. Endless in the way that although he makes it home, he is always apart from it and has to find his way back. The dream takes on the appearance of a nightmare and his breathing grows fast. When he is here, he isn’t – he’s trading words with the dead, he’s bound to the mast of a ship, he’s recounting his tale to a table of drunken, watchful listeners. He longs to return home, but somehow he already is.

He wakes, the earth of what could be any land beneath him. For a moment, he worries that his dream has seeped into reality.

These thoughts are soon forgotten – Odysseus, brave and great, does not fear such things.

Demanding more to teach us we’re smart again

TF — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:04:59 +0000

I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us…that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think—and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it…is serious engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart.

David Foster Wallace to David Lipsky. From Smarter than You Think, a review of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky. By Wyatt Mason in NYRB.