Ophelia's Nun

coleen

*lays pen and paper at finsbury's feet*

FinsburyParkCarrots

Originally posted by coleen
*lays pen and paper at finsbury's feet*

Holy shit. That's the last thing I'd ever want. Eddie Vedder said in an interview that "Music should be faceless, really." Well, I agree to an extent with Ed's idea, and might even transpose it onto the question of literature. Still, I argue with everyone, and I'd even argue with myself and with Ed (if he'd let me!) here, against my own point, that literature, faceless or not, and even if written about another historical period or geographical locale, can never be TOO anonymous because it can't help but betray the ideological conflicts of its precise moment of production, even as unwitting gaps and silences in the world-view of the narrative.

Oh, as an aside: What do I mean by gaps and silences? How does one read for ideological (rather than narrative) fissures? Well, a Marxist critic called Pierre Macherey coined this idea. You can study a book that purports to offer one world view and start picking it apart for the hidden ideological assumptions - its social unconscious, if you like - that actually show an opposite view. I love taking supposedly liberal texts and finding hidden conservative discourses in them that have somehow been naturalised in the background of a text. Take Forster's "A Passage To India." An articulate and compassionate indictment via the novel form of British colonial brutality and corruption, in the depiction of the fictive Chandrapore Raj, with its old-boys' network of complicity in setting up Dr Aziz on a charge of raping Adela Quested purely on the basis of prejudice? A liberal Englishman's call for reform of colonial administrative communities in India? That's the novel on the surface. But what about the Orientalist significance of the symbolism of the Marabar caves with their amorphous echo and their maddening occult powers? What about all that heat that sets demonstrating "natives" off like "savages"? And Professor Godbole? Nahh. Look hard enough and the racist structures are not merely intact but implicitly promoted.

Er, what were my points? Yes. I remember. I'd like to write anonymously but some critic will be able to pinpoint my ideological and historical moment, in time. All our writings are inevitably prone to the kind of scrutiny that presents oppositional readings to those which we intended. A Republicans' statement on A Moving Train may read in a few years time as fascinating for its self-interrogating anxieties about nationalist self-definition (thus, 'liberal' contexts intervene); a self proclaimed communist might say something that in hindsight reads like the ideological product of the Bush years.

FinsburyParkCarrots

On a completely unrelated note, I was in the bath today, thinking about tropes. Doubletalk, especially. The type I read not just on message boards but hear presenters like Conan O'Brien or that Tom Green attempt.
I was thinking how redundant and counter-productive it can become when it gets over-allusive, a bit too haughty and wears a big badge saying "This is an ironic comment." I think that on this side of the pond we have the monopoly on irony - sorry, I do (well, we had Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen) - we've developed a kind of doubletalk that reads like singletalk: clean, straightforward, and apparently sincere. The sheer skill in registering irony here is in knowing how to manipulate lexis and sytnax ever so slightly so as to splinter meaning into the possibility of a subversive reading. The most ironic speeches have been delivered as addresses to monarchs and leaders, and rewarded with golden chattels and flash titles!

DopeBeastie

Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots
...I think that on this side of the pond we have the monopoly on irony - sorry, I do (well, we had Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen) - we've developed a kind of doubletalk that reads like singletalk: clean, straightforward, and apparently sincere.

das some evil shit, man
certainly ego bolstering
and no doubt i've preyed on the linguistically challenged WAY back in the day

and more recently, to walk away snickering when some asswipe corrects me incorrectly

(i've actually been chastised for using the word "rich" to describe an experience instead of someone's wallet or financial accomplishment... bizzzzzarrre!)


still... the impression might be gathered that brits are a rather cold lot... maybe cold, maybe scared to show weakness?

not YOU of course
everybody loves mr.carrots

FinsburyParkCarrots

Originally posted by PastaNazi



still... the impression might be gathered that brits are a rather cold lot... maybe cold, maybe scared to show weakness?

not YOU of course
everybody loves mr.carrots

Well, I'm Irish really, as was Sterne, and Jane Austen was suitably near to the British aristocracy not to be caught up by puritanism's coldness. I think irony comes from a generous spirit, and it means something very different over here, born of the Enlightenment era and perpetuated through Austen's work: the wish to instruct morally into the shared vulnerability of us all by deflating via subtle mockery preposterous affectation and inflated romantic "sensibility". (See "Northanger Abbey", which mocks the cult of sensibility and the Gothic tradition not coldly but affectionately.) It certainly has nothing to do with ego bolstering. Just the opposite. This is why it doesn't work Stateside. (jk)

DopeBeastie

ha yeah... not too cool to poke fun at vunerabilities in my general experience, perhaps it is WE with the ultra sensitivity???


interesting notion, yeah?

FinsburyParkCarrots

Irony's moral purpose is to elevate the humble firstly by identifying the supercilious or overdramatic aspect of our nature and secondly by interrogating vaingloriousness as self-contradictory and defeating. Perhaps you might say the treatment of Malvolio by Sir Toby, Maria, Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Feste wasn't cool: he was imprisoned as a madman and his vulnerability was exposed. Well, this is Shakespeare's dramatic rendition of such ploys taken to extremes; he says "this is how to take your schemes to send someone up too far". But there is a message to be noted: the fake and the self-serving deserve taking down a peg or two and ironised ... the greatest literature has its Oswalds, Clotens or, in Dickens, Uriah Heep ... but the MEANS of attack should be ultimately humane and to the benefit of the characters as represented and to the people reading (that is, if irony has a morally prescriptive purpose at all, which, traditionally, it has).

Irony has nothing to do with poking fun with people with vulnerabilities. Oh, I forgot. That was Denis Leary's excuse when confronted over disablist remarks. He was being "Ironic." He has no notion of the concept.
Irony has nothing to do with breaking taboos in a laconic manner, to be sophisticated. I've seen this tendency. That's not irony at all. That's something else entirely. I don't know what. it's probably just a case of being offensive and trying to get away with it by being clever and aloof: pretending to test moral conventions but really doing the shock jock routine. That's a convention that's about twenty five years old. Nothing to do with my point. I'm talking about a fully fledged literary, linguistic and philosophical concept of hundreds of years' standing, which has professors chewing their pencils because of its astonishing untranslatability into any other cultures except those of the former Soviet Union.

DopeBeastie

i see that


i think...

DopeBeastie

but then again, due to it's untranslatability... maybe i don't

maybe i don't even know what you're talking about


but, i get the dry humor so prevalent in movies like Mr. Bean...
cracks me up

FinsburyParkCarrots

If they ask me in customs
If I have anything to declare,
I'll tell them yes,
I am in love with a woman
who lives near the Puget Sound.
I'm sure they'll let me through
With such a happy parcel.

john girl

let the man go thru

FinsburyParkCarrots

You sit perfectly composed.
Your chair doesn't need a back.
You eye me, straight and clear.
Your hair is brushed free from your brow.
Your smiling teeth are serendipitous white,
Your hands are turned down on your lap, relaxed.
You talk easily. Your tongue makes no hard palattals,
your mouth rolls no unsightly gutterals.
You keep your head quite still while your eyes dance.
Your voice isn't too quiet either, nor is it strident.
You speak precisely, but not with prissy chill.
You sit perfectly composed,
your blouse is quite white under window light.
You're composed. Not posed. Calm composes you.
You sit here, and a poem just writes itself around you.
You're always welcome! How are your paintings?

You remind me of a cliche that stops being a cliche when applied to the particular.
You're that phrase "The purer the light, the more effortless the glow.... "
You're something that astonishes cliche in its rarity.
You happy artist!

FinsburyParkCarrots

My friend Effie's paintings are like visualisations of cassia's poems.

http://www.cannsdownpress.co.uk/jpg/32a.jpg

FinsburyParkCarrots

After half a bottle of Californian Merlot,
My tongue becomes a medium of experience.
invested in human lives:
not in what it says
but in how it feels.
It becomes an instrument of consciousness and all that stuff,
like a bluerinse Doris at a seance getting a message.
My tongue feels like the life of a forty eight year old video rental man called Dennis
who lives in a very small but pleasantly decorated shangri-la in a London suburb
with his wife Karen who works long hours and leaves messages on the answerphone saying
she loves him, and to pay the bleedin' gas bill!
My tongue feels like Dennis does distance learning degrees.
It reads Proust,
Ray churchy per tomps per due.
Sends poetry to the BBC,
keeps up email correspondence with post-colonial feminist professors
and has known de toke o de erb in Notting Hill in August.
The tongue feels like a life well fakkin' lived, actualalllly.

This drink is magic juice.
I'll drink more and see if I'm you.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Radio Show: "Around the English Shops With Rummy"

FX Door of old cornershop opens. Tinkle of bell. Inside shop, wipe of feet, yelp of little dog.

ELDERLY WOMAN BEHIND THE COUNTER(Gossiping with friend): Anyway, they saw him on Foxley Heath standing on a bucket, he was, with a hole cut in the apron.. looked very suspicious, calling "Here, Ermintrude"...... his wife's very religious you know... ahh, hello our new American neighbour! Mister Rumsfeld! What can I do for you?

RUMMY: Well, actually, I'd like two four packs of Carlsberg Special Brew and some king size Rizlas please.

ELDERLY WOMAN (aside): Yes, see you Mrs Halfscrote, see you at bingo on Thursday night! (To Rummy) What was that? Special Brew? 9.8% top strength? And waccy baccy papers? What's wrong? You should be buying razors, love, that beard looks awful on ye!

RUMMY (bows head): I know, I know. It... just .... hasn't been the same... since Georgie fired me..... the scorn.... the shame.... the ignominy of being ridiculed as an incompetent, penny pinching, criminally irresponsible warmonger, and an inept one at that.... reduced to drinking warm lager in a Yorkshire village farm outhouse forever... oh, the obscurity....boo hoo...boo hooo...... the horror.... the horror.....

(etc)

EvilToasterElf

Going back to the diatribe about presuppositionless poetry, or music, or even political messages, Fins, would you say that was one of the reasons the Romantics chose the natural world as their focal point, don't you think that by trying to convey as sense of their humanity by invoking the primitive instincts elicited by the "natural world" that they were in effect attempting to drain themselves of their time and place in the world? Isn't a sunset over the channel timeless, couldn't I in effect sit at the precipice of the grand canyon and be awed into that same dark wordless place as the first asians who came scraping across the alaskan bridge?

Just a thought, Descartes in his own naive way tried to do this with philosophy, he compared it to emptying a bushel of apples and putting them back in again in the order of his choosing, but isn't that what poets are always trying to do. We try to convey these universal sentiments of mankind in a way that transcends the boundary of our social climate?

Just a thought

EvilToasterElf

Autumn leaves of pale maroon
blessed by the amber thoughts of noon,
hibernating in december’s dark
before glowing at the mountain’s hearth,
while shivering in the doorway of dusk
the handle turns and the icey crust
has thawed beneath the canopies,
outlawed by some calamity
from which wild deer are left fleeing
from their quiet rippling pools.

Crunching steps through unmarked trails
over the bed of dying shells, hallmarked
browns of the soil’s shroud, left by the shadow
of September days, broken twigs from
sick old men, warding saplings in their den
waiting for the children to eat at the adult table
softly storing untold fables like trophies on the
mantelpiece

FinsburyParkCarrots

Originally posted by EvilToasterElf
Autumn leaves of pale maroon
blessed by the amber thoughts of noon,
hibernating in december’s dark
before glowing at the mountain’s hearth,
while shivering in the doorway of dusk
the handle turns and the icey crust
has thawed beneath the canopies,
outlawed by some calamity
from which wild deer are left fleeing
from their quiet rippling pools.

Crunching steps through unmarked trails
over the bed of dying shells, hallmarked
browns of the soil’s shroud, left by the shadow
of September days, broken twigs from
sick old men, warding saplings in their den
waiting for the children to eat at the adult table
softly storing untold fables like trophies on the
mantelpiece

I feel honoured to have this on my thread! Thank you.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Originally posted by EvilToasterElf
Going back to the diatribe about presuppositionless poetry, or music, or even political messages, Fins, would you say that was one of the reasons the Romantics chose the natural world as their focal point, don't you think that by trying to convey as sense of their humanity by invoking the primitive instincts elicited by the "natural world" that they were in effect attempting to drain themselves of their time and place in the world? Isn't a sunset over the channel timeless, couldn't I in effect sit at the precipice of the grand canyon and be awed into that same dark wordless place as the first asians who came scraping across the alaskan bridge?

Just a thought, Descartes in his own naive way tried to do this with philosophy, he compared it to emptying a bushel of apples and putting them back in again in the order of his choosing, but isn't that what poets are always trying to do. We try to convey these universal sentiments of mankind in a way that transcends the boundary of our social climate?


Just a thought

Very, very good thought, EvilToasterElf, and quite exciting for me to consider because I love to discuss Literature, or, if you like, literatures.

I think it would be somewhat anachronistic to say of the British Romantics of 1780-1830 that their transcendent individualism or communing with a higher 'Nature' was wilfully solipsistic, politically disengaged or constitutive of a flight from history. Perhaps many who decades later adhered to the transcendentalist ideas of the American philosopher and poet Emerson (1803-82) sought this flight, but they were in part reacting to the rise of bourgeois capitalist ideology that was filtering through the epistemological world-view of the Victorian socio-realist novel, for example. The British Romantics were reacting to an earlier period of crisis, characterised by a collapse in moral, social and religious 'order' in the late Englightenment period of international Revolutions and uprisings, and Godbusting science: their focus was on the privilege of the individual imagination as countering rationalist epistemes which they had come to suspect as different from truth as the residual philosophies of the past, but this itself was a political act and not an escape from politics. The Romantic poetic speaker often gets an attack of doubt about the dangers of flying off from history or embracing fully the Sublime in dream-analysis, the irrational, drugs, or occult preoccupations, but, to nod to you here, his or her advocacy of sympathy with Nature is not wholly "worldly" either. The romantic poetic speaker 'bled' metaphorically and his or her tone was characterised by much of the stuff of the old Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s, but the register, lexis and syntax of Romantic verse is direct and ultimately communicative rather than alienative. Thus ultimately it acknowledges a social role and a political end to communicate another sense of truth that can be shared simply by narrator and narratee, writer and reader. This is in sharp contrast to the kind of depersonalised, fragmentary, allusive and multi-voiced narrative of "High" Modernism in 1922, that reacted in its time to another sense of philosophical and social crisis of world view and belief (and even that poetry maintained, perhaps because of its political and philosophical conservativism, an astute historical sense in a period of postwar change).

Thanks again. I love these sorts of discussions.

DopeBeastie

Originally posted by john girl
let the man go thru

oh, holy crow I love this song!

Move aside
and let the man go through
let the man go through
If I stole
Somebody else's wave
To fly up.
If I rose
Up with the avenue
Behind me.
Some kind of verb.
Some kind of moving thing.
Something unseen.
Some hand is motioning
to rise, to rise, to rise.

Too fat, fat you must cut lean.
You got to take the elevator to the mezzanine,
Chump, change, and it's on, Super bon bon
Super bon bon, Super bon bon.

And by
The phone
I live
In fear
Sheer Chance
Will draw
You in
To here.

Too fat, fat you must cut lean.
You got to take the elevator to the mezzanine,
Chump, change, and it's on, Super bon bon
Super bon bon, Super bon bon.